Article adapted from episode content.
Maintaining composure during contentious discussions regarding the intentional killing of an innocent human being is paramount for those advocating the pro-life position. When engaging critics, often referred to as “hotheads,” the challenge is not just the strength of the arguments presented, but managing one’s demeanor under pressure. Failures in persuasiveness often stem from appearing defensive, angry, or rattled, regardless of the merit of the arguments being presented. Learning how to stay cool under fire requires implementing specific strategies for both maintaining emotional control and strategically addressing objections.
I. The Foundational Tactic: Controlling the Demeanor
The immediate response to verbal intensity must be intentional non-escalation. When faced with opponents who “ratchet up the volume” or speed up their speech, matching that intensity leads only to appearing defensive. A crucial tactic for appearing in control is to slow down, keep one’s volume at a normal level, and maintain conversation even if interrupted. This deliberate control over demeanor is so vital that, when preparing for debates, writing reminders like “slow down” and “calm” with an exclamation mark at the top of note-taking folders serves as a necessary psychological anchor.
Controlling one’s demeanor is surprisingly effective, as outsiders often look to the person who seems more in control of the environment during debates and discussions. Discussions have shown that individuals presenting very poor arguments can still appear respectable if they seem settled, calm, and unrattled. Conversely, a defensive or angry appearance can undermine even the best arguments.
II. Strategic Engagement: The Power of Clarifying Questions
A highly effective method for dialing down the temperature and gaining control of a discussion is asking clarifying questions. This tactic helps to “flip the script” and shows respect by demonstrating that the objection is being taken seriously, while simultaneously placing the burden of proof back on the critic.
If a critic attacks the pro-life advocate with aggressive language—for instance, calling the view stupid or moronic because it affords rights to a fetus lacking self-awareness or cognitive development—the advocate should respond by slowing down and gently asking for clarification. A useful prompt is: “That’s interesting. I agree that self-awareness is something we should talk about. Tell me what you mean by self-awareness“.
Forcing the critic to clarify their terms reveals potential flaws or implications in their worldview. If “self-awareness” is defined as actual self-awareness, it implies that persons could be killed while sleeping or under anesthesia during surgery. If it means the immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness, it might protect someone sleeping but not someone under anesthesia. Furthermore, if value is grounded in fully developed brain architecture, which for males doesn’t finalize until after age 26 and for females until the early 20s, that criterion raises severe complications. If temporary brain damage were to occur, value and the right to life would cease under a brain architecture standard.
The Defence of Human Nature
When pressed for clarification, the critic may assert that value is tied to being the type of being that can have self-awareness. However, this shift in focus inadvertently strengthens the pro-life case. The pro-life argument maintains that human value is not grounded in immediately exercisable functions but in human nature. Human beings are rational beings and self-aware by nature. Traits like rationality and self-awareness may fluctuate or be absent during various periods of life, yet the individual remains a valuable human being because their value is grounded in their inherent nature.
The advocate should further inquire: “Tell me, why does self-awareness matter in the first place?“. Critics who claim that self-awareness is value-giving must defend why that trait, as opposed to arbitrary characteristics like ear size or belly button position, confers the right to life. Assertion is not the same as argument; a defense of why these specific things matter is required.
Exposing the Price of Function-Based Value
Pointing out the logical implications of grounding value in function helps maintain control. If value and the right to life are based on self-awareness, human equality is impossible because no two individuals share self-awareness equally. A person fueled by caffeine, whose “synapses are firing on all cylinders,” would, under this standard, be more valuable than someone currently experiencing a cognitive lull due to fatigue or high carbohydrate intake.
Moreover, grounding value in immediate function incurs a “high price on who gets disqualified”. If the standard is the immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness, it is not just fetuses who lose their right to life, but also newborns. Latest research even suggests that toddlers do not view themselves as self-aware until roughly age two or later, meaning they, too, could be disqualified under this standard. By using good questions to point out these implications, the advocate can shift from the defensive “hot seat” to the “driver’s seat”.
A historical example underscores this strategy: a Canadian politician, who was conservative, maintained composure while aggressively grilled by a journalist seeking to “trap and frame” him. When the journalist labeled him an “extremist,” the politician calmly replied, “Tell me what you mean by an extremist”. This simple question exposed the journalist’s lack of reasoned definition, effectively making the accuser look unprepared.
III. When Prudence Dictates Disengagement
Not all encounters are opportunities for discussion; some critics are purely interested in winning through intimidation. Some individuals, described as “hotheads,” have zero interest in considering an alternative viewpoint. Engaging those who merely want to scream or “spill all their emotion out” is not mandatory.
As a matter of prudence, it can be virtuous to simply leave a discussion where there is no openness to dialogue. A tactic for determining whether a true discussion is possible is to ask the critic directly: “It seems to me like you’ve got a lot of points you want to make, but I’m not sensing you really want to hear what I have to say… Would you rather just make your points and I’ll just listen, or do you actually want to have a discussion?”. If it is clear they are only emoting and not making arguments, the advocate is not obligated to listen to “that garbage” and can leave.
IV. A Strategic Framework: Categorizing Objections
To avoid getting defensive due to a lack of confidence in responding to the sheer volume of objections, pro-life advocates should employ a strategy for slotting every objection into a manageable category. This approach prevents the need for “rote memory” of every possible counter-argument. Training seminars often teach the “five bad ways people argue about abortion”. These five poor approaches are: assuming rather than arguing, attacking rather than arguing, asserting rather than arguing, confusing preference claims with moral claims, and hiding behind the hard cases.
A. Assuming Rather Than Arguing
This category encompasses objections that assume the unborn are not human without offering any argument to support that premise. Examples include: “Why don’t you trust women?” or “Why do you want to force your moral views on someone?”. Similarly, arguments based on privacy, abortion stopping crime, or reducing child abuse all presuppose that the unborn lack human status. When a politician defends “reproductive freedom” because it is “good for everyone,” they assume that “everyone” systematically excludes the unborn, ignoring the fact that dismemberment or poisoning is certainly not good for the fetus. Recognizing the assumption allows the advocate to ignore the specifics of the objection and return to the main point: establishing the humanity of the unborn.
B. Attacking Rather Than Arguing (Ad Hominem)
This is the category where Christian advocates most frequently lose their cool. Opponents employ personal attacks, labeling the advocate as a “Christian narrow-minded misogynist” or even drawing comparisons to Hitler. The natural defensive response—denying the labels—is ineffective and causes the advocate to appear rattled.
The better approach is to let the critic finish and then calmly ask: “Suppose I am all those things… How does that refute the argument I’m making that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings?”. The fundamental principle is that arguments stand or fall on their merits, not on personalities. For instance, a pro-life argument holds its merit whether it is delivered by a man or a woman, because arguments do not have gender.
The same logic applies to claims of inconsistency, such as: “How many unwanted kids have you adopted?”. Even if the advocate has adopted none and hypothetically cares nothing for children once born (which is generally untrue), this alleged inconsistency does not justify an abortionist killing a child. The critic must refute the argument itself, not merely attack the alleged failings of the person making it.
C. Asserting Rather Than Arguing
This refers to critics who make rights claims without providing any foundation, such as asserting that “a woman has a right to choose”. The advocate is within their rights to ask: “Choose what? And where does that right to choose come from?“.
Forcing the critic to be explicit reveals they are asserting the right to intentionally kill a human fetus. If they ground this right in government actions (like Roe v. Wade), they must explain why they are angry at the Dobbs decision, as the same court that grants a right can take it away. The goal is to make people defend what they are asserting, preventing them from “plucking rights out of thin air”.
D. Confusing Preference Claims with Moral Claims
The pro-life position—”abortion is wrong because it intentionally kills an innocent human being”—is an objective moral claim, asserting that the act is wrong regardless of personal likes or dislikes. Poor arguers attempt to change this objective claim into a subjective claim, treating the discussion as if it were about a favorite flavor of ice cream. This is an attempt to change the subject, often driven by the worldview of relativism. The advocate must prevent the critic from shifting the focus from objective right and wrong to personal preferences.
E. Hiding Behind the Hard Cases
The final common argumentative error is when critics refuse to defend their true position and instead hide behind the hard cases, such as ectopic pregnancy, cases involving the mother’s life, or rape.
The pro-abortion position typically argues that abortion is a fundamental right that a woman can exercise for any reason (e.g., affordability, already having enough children). Instead of defending this radical claim, the critic attempts to “disguise how radical their own position really is” by focusing on the victim of sexual assault.
To neutralize this tactic, the advocate must call the critic’s bluff. The advocate can say: “Let’s say for the sake of argument, we grant that abortion should be legal in cases of rape. If I make that concession, will you join me now in opposing all other abortions that have nothing to do with rape?“. The answer is almost invariably “no,” proving that their real position is far more extreme and that they were merely hiding behind a tragic case. The advocate’s primary job is to keep the discussion focused on the main thing: whether abortion, in general, is the intentional killing of an innocent human being.
By practicing these strategic methods—maintaining a calm demeanor, utilizing clarifying questions, and categorizing flawed objections—the pro-life advocate can remain in charge of the discussion and successfully keep the main thing the main thing.
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.
We’re glad to have you with us. Welcome to The Case for Life program. I got asked an interesting question the other day at a pro-life event. And here was the question. How do you keep your cool when you’re talking to hotheads on the topic of abortion? We’ll take that up in this episode of The Case for Life program. Let me remind you that our primary sponsors are Life Training Institute. You can see information about them on your screen. And Summit Ministries, which does an unbelievable job equipping Christian students to defend their biblical worldview.
I hope you’ll look at both ministries. Both are doing great work helping people articulate, defend, and do it in a winsome way, a Christian worldview. All right, I’m going to just talk kind of think about this as you sitting on the beach with me and we’re just having a casual discussion about how to keep your cool when you feel like you’re being attacked for your pro-life view or people are pushing back and challenging you because you oppose the intentional killing of an innocent human being.
So, how do you do that? How do you stay cool under fire? Because sometimes we fail to be persuasive in our pro-life approach. Not because our arguments are bad, but we look defensive, we look angry, we look rattled. How do we avoid that? How do we just engage in a way that keeps the main thing the main thing? So that’s what I want to kind of go over today. So, what I try to do, in fact, whenever I do debates, I take the file folder that I’m taking notes on, and up at the top of each page, I write slow down.
Calm. I write slow down in the word calm with exclamation mark after each. That’s to remind me to not get rattled, not match the verbal intensity of my opponent. Just stay cool. Take a deep breath and slow down. I cannot stress that enough. You know what tends to happen is when people are coming at you, we tend to match their intensity. So they ratchet up the volume, we ratchet up the volume. They start speaking quickly, we speak quickly. Well, that doesn’t work.
We just look defensive. It’s much better to just slow down and keep your volume exactly where it is. And even if they’re interrupting you, just keep talking, but don’t sound rattled. Keep your volume at a normal level and just keep conversing. That’s a that’s a tactic for appearing in control. And often times outsiders look at debates and discussions on abortion and what they’re drawn to is the person who seems more in control of the environment. I’ve actually had discussions with people on the topic of abortion that were giving very bad arguments, but because they seemed settled and they seemed calm and not rattled, they didn’t look too bad.
Even though they were giving very bad arguments. So, it’s amazing what you can do just by controlling your demeanor, how you respond to those that are throwing heat at you. The other thing I would say is this. It is always good to ask clarifying questions. So, if somebody comes at me and gets real snarky and says, “You know what? You’re an idiot. You think that a fetus that doesn’t even have self-awareness yet, doesn’t even have a brain, has no cognitive development, is somehow a person with rights.
What a stupid view. What morionic school did you go to?” Or something like that. Let’s say they’re really being obnoxious. They’re throwing a lot of fire at you, a lot of heat. I would just slow down and very gently, here’s what I would respond, how I would respond to that claim. I would say, you know, that’s interesting. I do agree that self-awareness is something we should talk about. Tell me what you mean by selfawareness. Now, at that point, I’ve just flipped the script.
I’ve shown them respect by showing I’m taking their objection seriously. But now I’ve asked them to clarify it. For example, what do they mean by self-awareness? Do they mean actual self-awareness? Well, that means then we can be killed when we’re sleeping at night or when we’re having surgery and we’re put out under anesthesia. Do they mean having the immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness? Well, that would protect us while we’re sleeping, but not while we’re under anesthesia. Or do they mean that we have the brain architecture for self-awareness?
Okay, that would protect us when we have a matured brain, when we reach our final development stage, which by the way doesn’t happen until after age 26 for males and the early 20s for females. Or you know, what do they mean by that? Make them clarify because if it’s brain architecture that gives us our self-awareness value then it would follow that if we had temporary brain damage we would cease being persons with value and a right to life. So make them com you know say what they mean.
Now they could come back and say what I mean is that you have to be the particular type of being that can have self-awareness. Okay, that’s actually a good argument. But at that point, they’re making our argument, not theirs. Because the pro-life argument is that our value as human beings is not grounded in our immediately exercisable functions. It’s grounded in our nature as human beings. We are by nature rational beings. We are by nature self-aware. In other words, what gives us our value is not that we can immediately exercise those things because those traits may come and go in the course of our life.
And there will be various periods of our life where we may not have rationality the way we once did. Or we may not have the same ability to interact with our environments that we once did, but we remain a valuable human being because our value is grounded in our nature as being a human being. Not grounded in the trait that may come and go and that none of us share equally. So by pointing out the fact that the person’s borrowing from our worldview to make their case, we bring clarification.
Now you could further ask questions like this. You could say, “Tell me, why does self-awareness matter in the first place?” And I’ve stressed this before on this show, but you really can’t stress it enough. And that is make people defend their own claims. If they’re going to claim that self-awareness is what gives us value and a right to life, by golly, they better tell me why that matters in the first place. Why is that value giving and not having ears that are large rather than small or a belly button that points out rather than in?
I could just as arbitrarily say those things give us value and be no less arbitrary than they are saying it’s self-awareness. They need to make an argument for why self-awareness is what gives us our value and right to life. Now again, they may try to assert things, but that’s not the same as arguing for them. You’ve got to make an actual argument for why those things matter. And often they don’t. And you know, you can also be very gentle, but point to the implications of their view.
If you’re going to argue that self-awareness gives us value and a right to life, then it follows human equality is impossible. Why? Because none of us share self-awareness equally. At this very moment right now, you’re watching this show. And some of us are very self-aware. Perhaps we had a Coke Zero, my favorite beverage, or a cup of coffee an hour ago and we’re humming, man. We’re the synapses are firing on all cylinders and we’re right there. Others of you might have had a good dose of carbs and you’re now kind of this side of comeomaosse and you’re not going to come back until you get a good caffeine jolt, which probably won’t happen till tomorrow morning, right?
Well, it doesn’t follow that you’re less human and valuable than those who are firing on all synapses right now. Why? Because your value as a human being is grounded in your nature as being human, not the function you immediately exercise. And you can point out to the person that if they ground human value in that function that comes and goes and varies among human beings across populations, you’re going to have a real hard time explaining human equality. But you’re also going to end up paying a high price on who gets disqualified.
Because if self-awareness is the standard, having the immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness, it’s not just fetuses that lose. Newborns lose. And oh, by the way, the lead the latest research suggests that toddlers lose because we now see that toddlers do not see themselves as self-aware beings until roughly age two and maybe even a little later. Which means you can not only kill fetuses and embryos, you can kill newborns and toddlers because they’re obviously not persons yet either. So, by simply asking good questions, you can dial down the temperature and you can have hopefully a good discussion.
Now, there will be times when you’re dealing with a hotthead who has zero interest in talking to you. Many of you have seen the videos that are all over social media right now of Antifa terrorists shouting at federal agents who are enforcing federal law right now. And you will notice right away that these are not people you can reason with. I’ve come to believe they only know two words and it’s a it’s a very vulgar cuss combination. So I’m not going to repeat it here.
But these are people who are so angry they just want to scream and try to win with intimidation rather than arguments. Can I say to you as a Christian, you are not obligated to engage people like that. In fact, it can be quite virtuous and quite prudent at times to simply leave a discussion where there’s no openness to consider an alternative view. And sometimes I’ll use this tactic. I’ll say, you know, it seems to me like you’ve got a lot of points you want to make, but I’m not sensing you really want to hear what I have to say about those points.
Would you rather just make your points and I’ll just listen or do you actually want to have a discussion and make them answer that question? If it’s obvious they’re not interested in a discussion, they just want to emote or spill all their emotion out, you’re not obligated to listen to that garbage. You can leave and it’s fine to do so. So, don’t feel that your status as a Christian turns on whether or not you’ll put up with people spitting out poison.
You don’t have to put up with it. You can just decide, I’m not going to participate in a discussion that actually isn’t one. It’s just somebody emoting all their emotions. They’re not making arguments. That is absolutely fine to do. All right, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about an easy way to make sense of the objections you’ll hear that people make to the pro-life view. And it’s a way that doesn’t require you to memorize through rope memory every possible objection and every possible thing someone might say against your pro-life view.
We’ll teach you what that is on the other side of the break.
I saw an amazing clip not long ago on YouTube. A Canadian politician who was conservative was being grilled by a very aggressive journalist who really wasn’t looking for answers. He was trying to trap and frame the conservative as a hateful, awful person. And the political candidate who was conservative would have none of it. And what was interesting about the discussion is he was totally calm the whole time, never seemed to miss a beat, and just maintained his composure. And it made the journalist look like an idiot, quite frankly.
I remember one exchange. In fact, we may put the link to this clip in the show notes so you can actually go view it. But this particular journalist said, you know, does it bother you that you’re an extremist? And the and the politician just very calmly said, “Well, that’s an interesting assertion. Tell me what you mean by an extremist.” And of course, the journalist hadn’t thought this through. And he basically said, “Well, people think you’re an extremist because you’re correcting them.” Now, I think you can see what the problem is right here.
The journalist is being told it’s an extremist position to correct people. But what is the journalist doing? Correcting the politician. So just by asking that question, what do you mean by that? The journalist was able to maintain his composure and he kept doing that. Every time the journalist would throw out a label to try to frame the politician around, the politician would simply say, “Well, tell me what you mean by that and tell me why it applies to me.” And inevitably the finger that was being pointed at the politician, five fingers would come pointing back at the journalist.
Not because the politician was being aggressive, but because he simply asked clarifying questions. Again, we’ll try to find that clip and put it in the show notes if we can. Just the act of asking good questions often gets you out of the hot seat and into the driver’s seat where you belong. Now, a couple of resources to help you do that. Of course, my book, The Case for Life. We have a whole chapter in there about how to engage with questions.
But I want to also direct you to a colleague of mine, Gregory Kokal, who’s written a book called Tactics. This is the single best book out there on how to engage with questions. And I commend both of these resources to you. But for now, I want to also point your attention to a way a strategy for dealing with objections. You know, too often what happens in pro-life circles, the reason we get all ramped up and get edgy and get defensive is we lack confidence.
We think, “Man, I don’t know how to answer all this stuff that’s being thrown at me.” And we start looking defensive. We start looking like we’re kind of having a hard time. One way to deal with this is to have a strategy for slotting every objection you hear into a category that you can then make sense of. And we teach this a lot in our training seminars. We talk about the five bad ways people argue about abortion. And those five ways are they assume rather than argue.
They attack rather than argue. They assert rather than argue like we’ve been talking about today. And they confuse preference claims with moral claims. And finally, they hide behind the hard cases. I’ll take just a moment and walk through each of those so you can learn to slot their objection into one of those categories and then you can make sense of it. Okay, we mentioned that people assume rather than argue. In other words, they will start throwing out all kinds of things at you.
Why don’t you trust women? How come you don’t make let them make their own personal decisions? Why do you want to force your moral views on someone? Or how come you don’t trust women to make a personal decision? And the list goes on and on. Notice that each of these objections assumes the unborn are not human. It doesn’t argue that the unborn aren’t human. It simply assumes they’re not human. Or you might hear a politician like the former president Joe Biden say, “We should celebrate reproductive freedom.” Of course, he means abortion by that term.
Why? He said because it’s good for quote everyone unquote. Now notice what he just assumed. He just assumed that everyone does not include the unborn. Is is it good for the unborn to be systematically dismembered or poisoned in their mother’s wombs? Of course not. So he was simply assuming the unborn weren’t human. He didn’t argue for it. He just assumed it. And by recognizing that category mistake he’s making there or I should say by recognizing the assumption he’s making there which is a mistake in reasoning you slot it into that category of people assuming rather than arguing.
And now you can make sense of it. You don’t need to worry about what’s the proper word order how do I word for word refute that. You can just simply note that it assumes the unborn are not human. And again, all objections based on privacy, trusting women, abortion stopping crime, abortion reducing child abuse, all of those arguments assume the unborn aren’t human. They don’t argue that way. They just assume it. And it’s a bad way to argue. The second bad way people argue is they attack.
And this is where most Christians start to lose their cool in a conversation. Somebody will say to them, “You just hate women. You’re a Christian narrow-minded misogynist. You’re really no different than Hitler. And the Christian starts getting defensive. No, I really do love people. I just think it’s wrong to kill innocent human beings. And we start getting defensive. You can see our faces turning red. We start fidgeting. And I think there’s a better way to go here. And that is let the person finish spilling out all their vile and then very calmly look at them and say suppose I am all those things.
I hate women. Suppose further I only care about kids once they’re born. And suppose further I’m an intolerant tyrant who just wants to impose my views on others. Suppose I’m that bad. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. But suppose I am. How does that refute the argument I’m making that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings? Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. Could my argument still be good even if I’m bad? And the answer is yes, because arguments stand or fall on their merits.
A point we return to almost every show on this program because it’s so common for people to forget that arguments are not personalities. You have to deal with the actual argument and look past the person making it. Quite frankly, in fact, I do this thing when I go on college campuses. Sometimes I will actually begin my presentation roleplaying a pro-abortion activist and I will come out as Dr. Zeke diversity and I will make a defense for the so-called pro-choice position. And I stand up and say, I want to give you five reasons why the pro-life view fails the test of reason.
And I go through five points that I’ve constructed. And it all sounds very persuasive to people. And I see the pro-abortion students in the audience nodding their heads going, “Yeah, bring it, man.” And then imagine their surprise when I pull off my sunglasses, pull off my hat, and say, “By the way, everything I just told you, I don’t believe a word of it. I’m actually Scott Klusendorf, a pro-life apologist. I was simply roleplaying the arguments used by my opponents and then I walk them through why those arguments fall apart.
But what’s interesting is the pro-abortion students who were nodding don’t then stand up and say, “Oh, all of the arguments you just gave are bogus because you don’t really believe them. Maybe I don’t believe them, but could they still be a good argument?” The answer is yes because the argument stands on its merits, not the person making it. Same thing when people say, “Well, you’re a man.” “Yeah, I am.” How does that change the argument? Well, it doesn’t because arguments don’t have gender.
Pro-life women use the same arguments as pro-life men. You’ve got to refute the argument. It’s not enough to just attack the person. You could try this with Christianity. Somebody could say, “Christians are just a bunch of hypocrites. Why should I believe that Christianity is true? Now, as Christians, ought we be consistent? Yes. Should we be gracious to our unbelieving friends? Yes. But even if we weren’t, does that refute the evidence that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. To refute Christianity, what you should do is show that the resurrection didn’t happen.
That’s exactly what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. The resurrection is the acid test for the truth of Christianity, not how individual Christians believe or believe or behave. So keep the main thing the main thing. Another way people attack the person rather than refuting the argument is to try to point out that we’re not consistent. Oh, you’re against abortion? How many unwanted kids have you adopted? Now suppose I’ve adopted none. And suppose further I don’t care about kids once they’re born.
I’m that bad. It’s not true. But suppose it were. Could my pro-life argument still be a good one? Yes. Why? Because that argument stands on its merits. In other words, how does my alleged unwillingness to adopt a child justify an abortionist killing him? The answer is it doesn’t. You got to work harder than that and show that the argument itself is bad. Now, we’ve spent the early part of this show talking about people who make assertions rather than arguments. So I don’t want to spend too much time on that other than to say you are always within your rights to say to the critic who’s making an assertion like a woman has a right to choose.
I would very calmly say choose what and where does that right to choose come from? Make them ground their rights claims. Don’t let them get away with plucking rights out of thin air. Now the beauty of that is when you say what is the right that we should be allowed to choose? What do you mean a right to choose? Choose what? They now have to make it explicit. They’re talking about a right to an abortion, the right to intentionally kill a human fetus.
And you were you are within your rights to say, “Where does that right come from? And why should we have it?” Well, they’ll probably say something like, “Well, that right comes from the government.” Okay. Well, the same government that granted a right to an abortion in Roie Wade took it back with the Dobs decision. So, why are you angry at Dobs? I mean, this is amazing to me. People get so upset that Roie Wade was struck down, but their argument was that the right to an abortion came from the Supreme Court in the first place.
Well, the same court that grants that right can take it away. So, I don’t know why they’re all excised about this, but they are. So, you can always ask people to defend what they’re asserting. Now, a fourth way that people argue poorly is they confuse preference claims with moral claims. When the pro-lifer says abortion is wrong because it intentionally kills an innocent human being, we are making what’s known as a moral claim. We’re claiming that it’s not just wrong to kill an innocent human being in the womb because I happen not to like abortion.
Rather, we’re saying it’s wrong regardless of my personal likes and dislikes. But what people want to do is change the objective claim to a subjective claim as if we are talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream or coffee. But that won’t work because we’re not talking about what we like or prefer. We’re talking about what’s right or wrong regardless of preferences. And what you have there is a case of someone trying to change the subject from an objective claim to a subjective one.
Don’t let them get away with that. And on previous episodes, we’ve talked about the worldview idling behind that, namely relativism, the belief that right and wrong are up to us to choose. You can see some of our previous episodes to see some reputation of that. The final bad way people argue is they hide behind the hard cases. They will bring up, for example, ectopic pregnancy or abortion that’s needed to save the mother’s life. And they will say, “Well, if you are okay with abortion there goes your whole case against abortion in general.” But that doesn’t work.
Keep in mind, what pro-choicers are arguing is not that abortion should only be legal to save the life of the mother or that ending a pregnancy is permissible when there is a grave health risk to the mother. They’re arguing that abortion is a fundamental right that the woman can exercise for any reason she wants. Whether it’s she already feels she has enough kids or maybe she can’t afford another child. It’s not going to work to appeal to a hard case when your real position is you think abortion should be legal for any reason.
Same on the issue of rape. People will bring up rape all the time. Instead of making an argument why a civilized society ought to allow us to intentionally kill innocent human beings who remind us of something painful, the person will bring up rape to try to disguise how radical their own position really is. The pro-abortion position is that abortion is a fundamental right a woman can exercise for any reason she wants. But instead of defending that specific claim, what the critic will do is say, “Well, what about rape?
What about that woman who’s been sexually assaulted and now she’s pregnant?” You would force her to bring that child to term. And when I get people who say this, here’s what I do. I call their bluff. I know they’re hiding behind the hard case. So, I’ll say something like this. Tell me, let’s say for the sake of argument, we grant that abortion should be legal in cases of rape. If I make that concession, will you join me now in opposing all other abortions that have nothing to do with rape?
100% of the time, the answer will be no. Women have a fundamental right to an abortion. They should be free to exercise. Okay. Well, then why don’t you argue for that position rather than hiding behind the rape victim? In other words, I’m not going to let them get away with hiding behind that hard case when their real position is far more extreme than that we should be allowed to end a pregnancy that threatens a mother’s life or is the result of rape.
Very important we keep people focused on the main thing and that’s our job as pro-life apologists.