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.

Hello friends. How was your Thanksgiving holiday? Did the topic of abortion come up? If it did and it didn’t go so well for you, we might be able to help you on this edition of the Case for Life Show. Thank you for joining us. I want to talk to you today about turkey. Let’s talk turkey on abortion. Because at the holidays, what tends to happen is you get family members, if your family is anything like mine, where you get people coming to your holiday table that do not share your biblical worldview.

And the last thing you want is it to blow up into some kind of heated discussion over a point of disagreement. That really the holiday table is not the place for that. But is there a way to get some thoughtful questions out there that might help some extended family members rethink what they tend to view about abortion. And I think there are some questions you can ask. And I’ll give you some today that will help you. We’ll go over what I think are maybe the top 10 to 15 things you might hear around your table and I’ll give you some thoughts on how we might go ahead and address those.

Now, by the way, before I go further, we have a course that will equip you to handle things like your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner table, like talking to a friend about abortion, like raising your hand in a class at college and asking something thoughtful. We’ve got a course called Prolife 101 that in one week will equip you to make an intelligent defense for what you believe. Please see our sites for information on that. All right, let’s talk turkey about the holidays.

Suppose you’ve got an extended family member. I’m thinking of someone that at times comes to our holiday table who doesn’t hold my pro-life view at all. She doesn’t hold my views politically and she doesn’t hold my views theologically. But you know what? She’s welcome at our table. And by the way, can I just say you should welcome people who disagree with you to your holiday table. If they are family members, never throw up a roadblock that says, “Listen, because they don’t agree with me on politics, theology, and ethics, I’m just going to ban them from participating in normal family gatherings around the holidays.

Rather think of that as an opportunity to gracefully engage them and maybe help them rethink where they’re coming from. And you can do that without being a jerk. So, let me go over some of the things you might hear. You might hear a family member say the following. Again, I’m just going to go through this list I worked. You know, you anti-choicers just don’t trust women to make their own personal decisions. All right. There’s a lot of loaded language in that, but I’ve heard this at times, even around the holiday table.

And what I like to do at that point is ask a question rather than just respond with a statement. Because when you ask a question, you’re inviting them to think and give their view without just responding to your statement, which ratchets up the heat level. Okay. So, here’s a thoughtful question you might put to them. If parents want to rough up their toddler in the privacy of the room that they in the privacy of their bedroom, should we trust them to make their own personal choice on that question?

Now, I like this for two reasons. Number one, it diffuses the situation a little bit. You’re asking a question rather than making a statement. But secondly, it helps get us to the real issue. Look, we all know if you’ve watched this show at all, you know that the real issue on abortion has nothing to do with choice, privacy, who loves women, who hates women, or forcing one’s morality. Rather, it’s about one question. What is the unborn? Before we answer the question, can we kill the unborn?

We got to answer the question, what is the unborn? So, this gets us to that question, what is the unborn? Now, the relative raising this question is going to come back obviously and say, “Well, that’s different. The fetus isn’t human. The toddler you’re mentioning is okay, let’s talk about that.” Yes, you’re right. But then that means the issue is not what can we do in the privacy of our bedroom. Rather, the issue is what is the unborn? If the unborn are human, should they be killed in the name of trusting people or privacy or forcing one’s morality?

Of course not. Now, the relative is right to say, “Okay, wait. We got to talk about the issue. What is the unborn?” And the relative is going to say, “Not a human being.” All right. I disagree, but they’re at least at the right landing point. Now, the issue in front of us is not choice. It’s not privacy. It’s not trusting women. It’s what is the unborn. All right. And a related one you’ll hear is this. Well, why do you anti-choicers want to force poor women to bring another child into this world when they can’t afford to feed the children they already have?

Now, right away, you can notice that this assumes the unborn aren’t human because otherwise the objection is just silly. But here’s the question you can ask in response. Don’t get angry. Just say to the relative, “Hey, tell me what you think.” When human beings get expensive. Can we kill them? Is it okay for a parent to say, for example, you know, I’ve already got 10 kids and I’ve got a toddler over here that’s my 11th kid and I really can’t afford to feed them.

I’d like to balance the family checkbook. I want to eliminate my debt, my financial wos by eliminating this toddler. Well, obviously the answer is no. And again, the relative will probably protest and say, “Well, that’s different. That toddler’s a human being. The fetus we’re talking about is not okay.” Again, we’re at least now to the issue we need to talk about. What is the unborn? The issue is not choice. It’s not privacy. It’s not expense. It’s not about who we like, who we don’t, who we can feed, who we can’t.

The issue is one question. What is the unborn? So that’s going to force them now to the issue we need to talk about, which is are the unborn one of us? Are they human like you and I? If they are, should they be killed just because they’re expensive? So again, we’re bringing it back to the issue, what is the unborn? Now, you will also hear, of course, the infamous back alley argument. People will say, “Well, I was, you know, last week marching for women’s lives because, you know, you get Donald Trump in here and the Republicans and they want to restrict abortion and that’s going to drive women to the back alleys of America and they’re going to die from dangerous coat hanger abortions and that’s just not right.

We need to make sure that we’re able to have safe and legal abortion.” So when they bring up that idea of safe and legal, here’s a question you can ask and do it without snark because it is pointed but do it without snark. Say interesting you say that. Safe for whom? In other words, is abortion safe for the unborn? Obviously not. They’re being dismembered or poisoned or however we’re going to kill them in the abortion procedure whether chemically or surgically. It’s not safe for them.

So, by asking the question, safe for whom? Then you’ll see that they’re assuming the unborn aren’t human. I mean, think about this for a moment. Why should the law be faulted for making it more risky for one human to intentionally kill another completely innocent human being? I mean, we don’t try to make theft safer for felons so they can do it safely and legally. In the same way, if the unborn are human, should we allow them to be intentionally killed so that those that want to do the killing can do it safely?

I mean, this is absurd. It only works if you assume the unborn aren’t human. So, by gently saying, safe for whom, you bring the issue back to the question, what is the unborn? Now, a related cousin question to this goes like this. If we restrict abortion, rich women will still be able to get abortions because they can travel to other states or other countries where abortion is allowed. But poor women can’t afford travel expenses. Therefore, in order to have equity, to have it be fair to all women, abortion needs to be legal in all 50 states so that poor women and rich women can both have equal access to abortion.

All right. Again, notice this assumes the unborn aren’t human. And here’s the question you can ask, and do it gently, but here it is. Since when is equal opportunity to intentionally kill an innocent human being morally good? I mean, think about it. Rich people can afford to hire assassins to knock off their enemies and their competitors. Poor people can’t afford that. Does that mean we ought to make the legalization of hitmen available to both rich and poor people so that you can have equal access to hitmen?

Well, this is obviously silly. The objection only works if you assume the unborn aren’t human. My buddy Frank Beckwith puts this real well. The vices of the wealthy do not become virtues simply because the poor are denied them. And that’s spoton. Just because the rich can do things the poor can’t does not mean what the rich are doing is morally permissible. The answer is not to make it available to the poor. The answer is to protect all unborn humans so that neither rich nor poor women are killing them.

All right. Another qu objection you’ll get. We need abortion to control overpopulation. In other words, if we don’t have abortion, we’re going to have too many fetuses running around and you know, we’re going to have scarce resources. Now, I always find this one, of course, very puzzling. Why are we threatened by children who aren’t even eating our resources yet? I mean, no fetus is sitting at your Thanksgiving table consuming a turkey leg. All right? It’s getting food from the mother, nourishment from the mother, yes, but the body’s designed to do that.

That’s not a threat to the mother’s well-being. What do we think here about the best way to respond? And here’s the question I like to ask. If it’s about consuming scarce resources, should we kill those who eat more or those who eat less? Now, this is again rather pointed, so make sure you’re not asking it with snark. Try to dial back the snark. I mean, think about it. Why not? If the goal here is to preserve scarce resources, you know who we ought to kill?

Teenage males. Because they eat more than anybody else. If you have ever had a teenage son in your house, you know very well they are capable of consuming boatloads of food. And if we really want to preserve scarce resources, why not kill the teenagers? Well, of course, the relative will say, “Well, that’s different. The teenager is a human being. The fetus is not. Now we’re back to the question we need to talk about. If the unborn are human like that teenager, should they be killed for consuming resources any more than we’d kill that teenager?

That’s different. The relative may say you’re assuming the unborn are human and I don’t accept that. Well, they’re assuming they’re not human and I don’t accept that. But again, be gentle here, but bring it back to the question, what is the unborn? All right. You’ll also hear, “Well, we need abortion to prevent child abuse.” that if we let these kids be born into families where they’re unwanted, we’re going to end up with kids that are going to get abused and battered, and that’s a bad thing.

Abortion prevents that. Again, very gently ask this question. Would it be okay to kill a 2-year-old abuse victim to prevent his abuse at age five? In other words, can we kill two-year-olds to prevent 5-year-olds from being abused? Well, the answer, of course, is silly. Just because a child is being abused does not mean he has earned a death sentence. This argument only works if you assume the unborn are not human. Nobody would suggest we can kill a toddler who’s being abused in order to prevent him being abused later in life as an older child or perhaps even a teenager.

A related objection goes, “Well, abortion prevents unwanted children and we don’t want unwanted children running around.” And the question I would put is this. Hey, the homeless are unwanted. Can we kill them? In other words, this whole objection of unwantedness falls on its face unless once again, you’re assuming the unborn aren’t human. And I’ll give you a little heads up here. Virtually everything you’ll hear around your holiday table about abortion is going to assume the unborn aren’t human. And the way you’ll know that is just ask yourself this question as you’re listening to what the person saying.

Would this argument work as a good argument for killing a toddler? If the answer is no, your relative is assuming the unborn are not human. All right. Another objection you may hear around the dinner table. Well, you know, laws against abortion impose morality on people who might disagree. Well, there are people I know who think spousal abuse is perfectly acceptable. Would we say that we should not have laws against spousal abuse because it’s forcing a moral perspective on those who might think it’s okay to treat your spouse that way?

This is absurd. Again, we’re assuming the unborn aren’t human. Nobody would say that laws against killing toddlers wrongly impose a moral perspective on those who might want to abuse or kill toddlers. They only say that about fetuses because they assume the unborn aren’t human. All right, here’s the next one your family member may bring up. Well, I support health care for all human beings. Rich, poor, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, citizens, non-citizens. Health care is a universal right and abortion is part of health care.

Here’s the question I like to ask. Health care is about healing. Would you agree? And they ought to. Then the next question is this. Who is healed by abortion? Are the embryos and fetuses that are destroyed healed by abortion? Are they healed by this procedure? The point here is this. Abortion being healthcare is just nonsensical. Health care is about who are we healing, not who we get to destroy. This is simply trying to co-op language to help the pro-abortion side out.

All right. You’ll you’re also going to get things that are a little more personal aimed at you. And this is where you’re going to have to work really hard to dial down the rhetoric. We’re going to take a break though before we get to that. When we come back, I want to talk about those personal attacks that you’re going to have to navigate very carefully, but you want to do so in a pointed way that helps your family member think. Again, I want to remind you, don’t shun family members who don’t agree with you on all your theology, your politics, and morality.

Holidays should be a time by and large to diffuse what are normal tensions in families. However, if there’s an opportunity to help people think clearly on the issue of pro-life, you should take advantage of it, but do so in a way that helps them think more than antagonizes them. All right, we’ll take a break and we’ll take up the personal attacks when we come back.

Hello friends, welcome back. I want to remind you also about our primary sponsor, Life Training Institute. If you’d like to have one of our speakers address your group or your pregnancy center banquet and help equip your listeners to defend life, we can help you with that. See our sites for information on that. All right. You may be sitting around the table enjoying a very peaceful and sublime turkey dinner when all of a sudden your aunt Betty says to you, “Why is it that you as a man think you have a right to speak on abortion?” Now, okay, notice something here.

We have shifted from somebody assuming the unborn aren’t human to somebody launching a personal attack against you. This is where you want to try to diffuse the situation but still give them something to think about. So I might look at it this way. I might say to Aunt Betty, “Aunt Betty, I want to make sure I understand you here. I’m trying to understand you here. Could you help maybe clarify a couple of things? Do you think that arguments have gender?” In other words, if somebody argues Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Where does that argument have a sex organ? Because obviously arguments do not have genders. People do. And what Aunt Betty is subtly doing here is shifting the focus away from the soundness or validity of a particular argument, in this case the pro-life one, and making it about you personally. And this is a huge mistake. As we’ve told you on this show before, arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the person making them. I mean, if Aunt Betty were listening to Aunt Sally, her sister make the same pro-life argument you are, would she be able to dismiss it with, “Oh, you’re just a man.” Well, obviously not.

So, the argument is what matters, not the gender of the person making it. But you could also point out this. If no man should speak on abortion, would Aunt Betty agree that Ro v. Wade was wrongly decided? Because after all, in 1973, it was nine male justices who decided women have a constitutional right to an abortion. They invented that out of thin air. But the point here is that there were no women on the court at that time. If no man should speak on abortion, shouldn’t that decision be overturned?

Because after all, there were no men speaking. I should say there were no women on the court speaking at that time. It was only men. This should help Aunt Betty understand that arguments stand on their merits, not the person making them. Now, a related one, she might come back and say, “Well, I just don’t understand why you anti-choicers hate women.” Again, I want to invite you not to respond with heat and anger, but try to give her something to think about and maybe say this.

You know, Aunt Betty, suppose you’re right. There could be some pro-lifers out there who do hate women, and obviously there are. Do you think that an argument can still be a good one even if a bad person makes that argument? Let that question just sit for a moment. I mean, think about this for a moment. If Joseph Stalin argues that starving peasants to death is wrong, but he goes on to starve peasants to death with his policies, as he did in the Soviet Union when he was their dictator, could his argument that it’s wrong to starve peasants to death still be a good one, even if he’s a bad dude?

In other words, what you’re basically saying to Aunt Betty, though you probably won’t say this out loud, but the quiet part you’re thinking is this. Hey, maybe I do, maybe I don’t hate women. How does that have any bearing at all on the actual case I’m making that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings? Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. That argument stands or falls apart from my motives. And you get the same thing when people say, “Well, you know, if you really want to get down to it, the only reason the Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelical denominations became anti-abortion is because they were committed to racial segregationist.” And the racial segregationist basically told them, “We’ll carry your water politically for you as long as you support us getting elected to government.” And the claim is that in the early 1980s the only the only motivation for pro-life had to do with an alignment with segregationist.

Now this is utterly false. You can trace Christian history all the way back to the dedicay to the early Jewish and Christian literature at the time of the first century and you will see that even the first century Christians opposed abortion. And we’re not going to go through that exercise now, but the point is you can trace that all the way through the church fathers, through the reformation, through our current day theological spokespeople who have knowledge on these things. And the voice is uniformly the same.

Abortion wrongly takes the life of a fellow image bearer. Okay, we’ll go through that exercise perhaps another time, but not today. Here’s the point. Suppose pro-lifers were motivated by segregationists. You know, maybe we are, maybe we’re not segregationists. We’re not, but just play along. How would that refute our argument that it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being? And the answer, of course, is it would not. Now, again, Christians are not segregationists. That’s not why they aligned with the Republican party in the early 1980s.

Evangelicals in large measure aligned with the GOP for one reason. They believed correctly so that the GOP would limit some of the evil of abortion while the Democrats would promote it wholesale. All right, you could say, “All right, I’m not sure that’s worked out the way they wanted.” Maybe so, maybe not. I think it’s worked out better. But their motivation was not segregation. But again, I think with the relative that brings this up, you don’t even need to go there. Just say, look, suppose it’s true that pro-lifers are segregationists in their motivation for promoting a pro-life legislative agenda.

Suppose that were true, could they still be right about the humanity of the unborn, even if they’re segregationists? And let that question just be there. What you’re always trying to do is get back to the question, what is the unborn? All of these personal attacks, all of these things they say about you that they try to make you look like a bad person, even if they’re true, they don’t refute the pro-lifer’s argument. So, just bring it back. The way you talk turkey to a family member is not let them distract you with these personal attacks.

All right. Now, let’s say you’ve got an another relative at your table. We’ll call him Uncle Phil. Uncle Phil is more academically oriented. He’s smart enough to recognize the things the other family members are saying are really dumb arguments in favor of abortion. And make no mistake, everything we’ve looked at so far, these are some of the dumbest arguments you’ll hear on abortion. And anybody that’s had a logic class, a critical thinking class, or has studied a little bit of philosophy will recognize the facious way that these arguments present themselves.

Okay. But Uncle Phil’s different. He actually is a graduate, we’ll say, of UCLA, and he’s studied philosophy, and he’s going to be a little more sophisticated. He’s going to come along and say, you know, I think really here what we ought to be looking at is this question. Are the unborn conscious? Are they self-consciously aware of their existence over time? Do they value their existence over time? And if not, why should we believe that they have a right to life? So, what I would do there is expose the hidden and undefended premise in Uncle Phil’s comment.

Notice what the hidden and undefended premise is. That self-awareness or self-consciousness is what gives us value. Here’s the thing. Uncle Phil needs to argue for that. It’s not enough for him to simply assert it. So, I might say to him, “Tell me what you mean, Uncle Phil, by self-awareness. Do you mean actual self-awareness? That means we can be killed when we’re sleeping. Do you 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 during surgery.

Or do you mean having a basic natural capacity for self-awareness?” Well, if that’s the case, it would protect us while we sleep. It would protect us while we’re having surgery. But it would also protect the embryo or fetus because although they can’t immediately exercise self-awareness, they have a natural capacity for it in virtue of what they are. Now, here’s a question from my friend Stephanie Gray that you could also put to Uncle Phil. Uncle Phil, tell me, what’s the difference between an amoeba and the embryo or fetus?

Neither is self-aware. Why do we think of the amoeba as being different than the fetus or embryo that’s not yet self-aware or conscious? Neither one is self-aware. Neither one is conscience conscious. But are they different? And of course, he’s going to have to say yes. But why are they different? Well, the reason the amieba is not self-aware is it’s not in its nature to be self-aware. The embryo or fetus is simply not self-aware because of its age, its maturity. It is in the category of not yet being self-aware, but it will one day because of its nature.

That’s a question that will help a thoughtful guy like Uncle Phil process his thoughts about his assertion that self-awareness is what gives us value. All right, folks. I do you I do hope you will talk turkey about abortion over the holidays. Do it graciously. Love on your family members, but give them something to think about.