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. What are the top five or six arguments that pro-lifers are going to be confronted with in this new year of 2026? I was asked that question recently and I’ll give you my answer in just a minute. Welcome to The Case for Life program. We are delighted to have you. Again, if you have not visited our sites, I encourage you to do so. There you will find our course pro-life 101 which if you want to get started in the new year making that case for life that’s where you start that’s your starting point step one so I encourage you to look at our sites for information on that all right I got asked this question on a radio interview not long ago and I gave an answer and I’m going to tell you what I said the question was this how are things changing in 2026 in terms of what pro-lifers are going to have to confront.

And I walk through a list of about five or six, maybe it was seven answers, but here are the things I think we’re going to hear more and more of from our critics. The first one will be one we’ve talked about before on this show. It’s not new, but it’s coming back with an extreme level of hatred directed at pro-lifers. And it goes like this. You hate women and want them to die. And that attitude or that I should say that accusation is coming up every time there’s a debate over abortion.

Whether it’s a ballot initiative that seeks to write abortion rights into a state constitution or it’s a pro-life state passing a pro-life bill. Either way, we are hearing this more and more and it’s way beyond the early edition of this. The early edition of this went like this. Well, if you really cared about women, you wouldn’t want them to die in the back alleys of America from dangerous, illegal abortions. You must not love women, you must hate them. All right, that was a bad argument.

We’ve talked about it here on this show many times. We won’t rehash it here, but notice the tone of that is very different than what we’re hearing today. What we’re hearing today is that you are intrinsically evil if you oppose abortion. And the reason you’re intrinsically evil, the only reason you would oppose abortion, so their argument goes, is that you hate women. So let’s look at that for just a moment and unpack it. First, the logic in play is utterly facious and does nothing to refute the pro-life argument.

Maybe I do and maybe I don’t hate women. How does that refute the pro-life argument that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings? Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. How does the claim that I hate women refute the undisputed science in the empirical community that from the earliest stages of development you have a distinct living and whole human being? And how does that argument in any way refute the pro-life philosophic case that there’s no essential difference between you the embryo and you the adult that would justify killing you at that earlier stage of development?

Differences of size, level of development, your environment, where you’re located, in other words, and your degree of dependency do nothing to show that you had less value as a human being then than you do now. Notice the accusation, you hate women, refutes nothing of the evidence for the pro-life position. It’s just an accusation or what we call a personal attack. Now, what often drives this is a similar argument that is idling beneath it that goes like this. These laws that are being passed in pro-life states, so their argument goes, are actually killing women because it’s denying women the health care they need for ectopic pregnancy.

It denies women the ability to get help for miscarriage. In fact, if women misaryry or have surgery to correct an ectopic pregnancy, they’re going to get prosecuted for murder. That’s the argument. Now, of course, the right response to that is to look the critic in the eye and say, “I want you to cite for me the state statute. Any state. Pick any state that’s passed a pro-life bill. And I want you to show me where it says women cannot get life saving surgery for ectopic pregnancy because of a pro-life law or that they’re going to be prosecuted if they suffer miscarriage.

Please show me the exact statute where that is stated in a pro-life state. And of course, they will just accuse you of changing the subject. Don’t let them off the hook. Make them show you the actual text of the legislation that does what they say it does. And the answer is there’s not any place in any 50 states that says women have to die if they need ectopic pregnancy because we’re a pro-life state. Women can get the surgeries they need because these states have been very careful to define the need to correct an ectopic pregnancy to even end the pregnancy that that is ectopic in nature.

They’ve been very careful to define that as not being abortion and they have correctly defined abortion as the intentional killing of an innocent human being, not surgery to save the one life you can save. In many of these cases, that being the mother. So, don’t fall for this idea that pro-life bills kill women or will result in them being prosecuted for murder. This is just propaganda. It’s what the left does. And I’ll say more about why they’re doing that in just a minute when we look at some of the other objections we’re going to face.

Okay. Another one we’re going to hear more of, and it’s not new, is that we’re just trying to cruy force our morality on others. Now, I always find this claim interesting that we’re forcing our morality or I’m forcing my morality. None of us have morality. Moral principles exist independent of us. They are objective in nature. Let’s take a moral claim. It is wrong to lynch homosexuals for fun. Okay, I’m not here debating the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality. I just want you to notice the kind of claim that’s being advanced here.

It is a moral claim that is stating that there’s an objective standard outside of me that says we shouldn’t lynch homosexuals for fun. Now, what’s interesting is that the truth of that claim exists independent of me. In other words, it’s wrong to lynch homosexuals for fun. Whether I believe it, whether I see it that way, whether I feel it that way. In other words, that principle is external to me. Morality is not internal to where I look at the outside world and project my view on it and try to shape it through my feelings and words.

Rather, morality exists independent of me. It’s objective. In other words, it doesn’t hinge on how many people agree with it, how many people decide to live by it, how many people like it. It is an objective principle, a reality that is there independent of me. So this idea that I’m forcing my morality is always weird to me. But notice also the claim is literally self-refuting. When you tell someone you shouldn’t force your morals on me, what in fact did you just do?

You imposed a moral principle on them. You’re telling them they should not do what they’re doing, namely allegedly imposing morality on others. Well, isn’t that a moral view they’re seeking to impose on you and on me? Well, of course it is. I always find it interesting that people who claim we should never judge and correct other people are correcting me by making that claim. Why are they objecting to me if we should never judge and never correct others? It’s like those in Christian circles that say, “Well, it’s wrong for us to evangelize because we’re imposing our Christian views on others who might disagree.

Therefore, we should just live out our faith in a loving way and let that be the thing that draws people to Christ. We shouldn’t tell them that what they believe is wrong. We shouldn’t tell them Jesus is the only way to salvation. We shouldn’t tell them that if they don’t repent and believe the gospel, they will perish. Rather, we should just live good lives and set a good example. Well, obviously the problem with that is none of us lives well enough to be a good example.

We’re all going to blow it. Hang around anybody long enough and you’re going to see a lot of flare, a lot of flaws rather in their life. That’s just human nature. We are prone to do bad stuff, not good stuff. And it seeps out no matter how bad we try to live a good life. So, we can’t be the focus of the gospel. The gospel needs to exist as something that’s objectively true outside of us. But what I always find interesting here is this.

The very people who say we shouldn’t evangelize and change how people think about theology are doing what? They are trying to change how I think about theology. So, if they really believe the claim, we shouldn’t try to change how people think, why are they talking to me? This is a problem you see again and again with all these arguments that say we shouldn’t impose our morals on others. Look, I got news for you. Every law on the books imposes a moral perspective on others.

It tells those who want to do X, they can’t do X. Whether ex is spousal abuse or rape or murder, theft, whatever, the law always takes a moral position. What’s really going on here is whose morality is going to prevail, not should there be a moral code that we expect people to live up to. All right, another one we’re going to hear big time this year, and u if you haven’t heard it already, you’ll hear it, and that is abortion is health care.

We need to make sure that women get the health care they need. Now, this is just a euphemism to try to cover up the reality of abortion. When anybody says to you, “Women have a right to health care,” when what they really mean is abortion, or they say women have a right to choose, but they won’t identify what the object of the choice is, you need to ask a couple of questions. Here’s the first one. You say women have a right to choose.

Choose what? Make them identify the choice. The choice to intentionally kill their own offspring. Make them spell that out. Don’t let them hide behind a word choice. That’s nonsense. With health care, same thing. I would look at the person and say, “Since when does health care involve killing them?” Health care is about saving people, not intentionally killing them. Don’t let people get away with calling abortion health care when in reality what’s actually happening is the intentional killing of a human being.

Now you could also expose the hidden and undefended premise in the claim and that’s that the unborn are not human beings because abortion is certainly not health care for them. The whole claim only works if you assume the unborn are not human. But that’s the very question in the abortion debate. All right. Fourth thing we’re going to hear, and this one is perhaps the most troubling to me, and that is the use of logic and reason and evidence are really just tools of oppression.

Now, this comes out of the whole woke revolution that we all went through starting in about 2017 and moving forward to our current day. And that work, that woke worldview views reason as an enemy. And there’s I can see why they do that because reason is the antithesis of the woke worldview. And the way they get around the silliness and just the stupidity really and foolishness of the woke worldview is to say, well, reason itself is a tool of oppression used by oppressors to oppress those who are victims of oppression.

That’s their argument. And what they’re trying to do is replace objective knowledge and reason and evidence with something called standpoint epistemology or what some call lived experience. And that that idea goes like this. Standpoint epistemology says you have no right to make a moral judgment or a moral claim for that matter unless you have standpoint. And to have standpoint, you must have experienced oppression. And to experience oppression, you have to be part of a victim group that is legitimately being oppressed.

So for example, a female has more standpoint to talk about abortion than a male because we all know men are oppressors of women. Women are not oppressors. They are the ones being oppressed. Therefore, they alone have authority to talk about the moral claims surrounding the abortion debate. But it actually gets even weirder because that same woman could lose standpoint if she’s talking to a lesbian woman. Why? Because the lesbian woman has more standpoint, more moral authority, so the argument goes, than the straight woman.

Because after all, the lesbian woman is one who is not only a woman, therefore oppressed, but she’s also a lesbian and therefore further oppressed by a heterosexual culture. So, she would have more standpoint, more moral authority to speak to an issue than the straight woman would be. Now, it gets even crazier. We have not a white lesbian woman, but a black lesbian woman. Now, the white straight woman and the white lesbian women must line up behind the black lesbian woman. Why?

Because that black woman actually has three intersections of oppression. She’s oppressed for being a woman. She’s oppressed for being a lesbian. She’s oppressed for being black. Therefore, she has more authority than the straight woman to talk about an issue than the lesbian woman. And of course, definitely more authority than a man. But it gets even crazier. Let’s say we have a transsexual person, somebody who thinks they literally are a woman, when in fact they’re a man, but he identifies as a woman.

Now all of a sudden, the white woman, the lesbian woman, and the black woman take a backseat to him because he is the most oppressed of all. And what this worldview does, this whole lived experience or standpoint epistemology is it tries to rule out rational inquiry and evidence and factf finding as being tools of oppression so that the Marxist woke worldview can be imposed on the culture without opposition. And I view that as very dangerous. And we see this in the abortion debate all the time when people try to shut down pro-lifers based on their not having standpoint.

So a guy is told, “Well, you don’t have a uterus. You have no opinion.” Or, “You know what? You’re just a white American who doesn’t understand oppression, therefore you don’t have any right to speak on this issue as it applies to those who are oppressed.” Again, we’re throwing reason and argument out the door in hopes of kind of just snatching these issues away from rational inquiry so that those that want to impose a Marxist woke worldview can have their way with us without any opposition.

And we’re going to hear more of that in 2026. All right. Another one we’re going to hear, and this one is very, very strange to me. People will say things like, “Well, your pro-life view that the unborn or human from conception cannot be right, and here’s why. If it were right, it would rule out IVF. In other words, destroying leftover embryos that aren’t wanted after in vitro fertilization procedures, and would rule out embryionic stem cell research. In other words, experimenting on embryos so that we can allegedly find cures through the use of their stem cells.

Now, the fallacy here is, I think, pretty evident to anybody who’s watched this show for any length of time. You cannot argue that X is okay because a moral principle would rule it out. That doesn’t work. You first have to argue that X is okay, morally permissible before you can say this other principle here that mitigates against X is wrong because it would rule it out. You got to do better than that. So what you got to do is say look let’s first look at whether or not the alleged or proposed principle is right or wrong on the face of it before we make a decision about whether we ought to be able to do it.

Okay. So for example, one could argue that Acts 4:es 12-13 are not flexible for people who are religious pluralists. And therefore, Acts 12, Acts 4:12-13 does not teach Jesus is the only way to salvation. Because if it did, it would mean religious pluralists who think there’s many ways to heaven would be ruled out of the kingdom of God. Okay, that’s a facious way to argue. You can’t start with something is not flexible and then say the moral principle or theological principle in play here can’t be right because it doesn’t allow for this other position here to exist with a fair amount of flexibility.

All right, here’s the question. Theologically the answer is very easy or the question is very straightforward. Does Acts 4 teach that Jesus is the only way to salvation? And the answer is an unequivocal yes. There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. The apostles tell their hearers. So this is not nuance. This doesn’t require nuance. This doesn’t require, you know, being flexible. No. All it requires is us saying, what does the text say?

If you want to judge the pro-life position for its credibility, here’s what you got to do. You got to look at the argument pro-lifers make and then you got to look at the evidence they give to support it. It doesn’t do any good to say the pro-life view is unreasonable because it rules out IVF and embryionic stem cell research. You first have to argue that those behaviors are okay, that it’s okay to use embryos for research and the moral arguments will support that practice, that it’s okay to destroy IVF embryos that are left over and that good moral reasoning would support that.

You first have to make a case that those behaviors or practices are morally permissible before you argue the pro-life view rules them out. But yet again, we get people trying to avoid the actual work of arguing. All right, another one we’re going to hear more of, and that is this. If you’re really pro-life, how come you’re not supporting the Somali refugees and immigrants up in Minnesota? Why are you in favor of them being deported if you were really pro-life? This one really makes me want to hit the floor and burst out laughing.

I’ll tell you why. You may remember a few shows ago we did an inter or did a reaction to a statement made by Virginia Senator Tim Kaine and Tim Kaine argued as follows. Natural rights are a tool of oppression. That’s what the Mullins do in Iran. They decide who gets rights rather than the legislative body deciding or rule of law deciding who has rights. And Tim Kaine was trying to argue against this idea that human beings have certain rights in virtue of being human.

Now natural rights are those rights, you know, that we have simply because we’re human. You don’t get them from government. This is what our Declaration of Independence talked about. And Tim Kaine was trying to make the point that only legislation or court decrees could give you rights. They don’t come from your nature as being a human being. Well, then what’s interesting to me is notice what these same immigrant right peoples do when it comes to the deportation of people who are in our country illegally.

So, let’s take the Somalian population in Minnesota that we’ve been seeing a lot on the news about lately. The argument from the left is this. It doesn’t matter what our laws are. It doesn’t matter that a legislative body passed immigration laws. It passed Congress was signed in into law, duly signed into law by a president. It doesn’t matter that a dulyeleed Congress and a dulyeleed president pass laws saying only citizens can be here legally and if you’re here illegally, you’ll be deported.

The argument from the left is we don’t care what the Congress says. We don’t care what the president says. These humans deserve to be here in virtue of their humanity. Period. Now, notice what they’re appealing to here. They’re appealing to the very natural rights that Tim Kaine decrieded only a few weeks ago. They’re now trying to argue that these refugees, even if they are illegal, still have a right to be here. Well, this is odd. Now, we’re going to flip the coin and actually try to argue the way proiffers do about the unborn.

So, on one hand, the left wants us to believe the unborn don’t have rights because they haven’t seen them written into the constitution through an amendment process. On the other hand, they want to argue that illegal Somalians and others have a right to be here based on their natural rights as human beings. A bit of a conundrum there, wouldn’t you say? Yeah, I think so. But we’re going to hear more of that in 2025. We’re going to take a break or 26.

Let me get my years straight. We’re going to take a break. When we come back, I’ll talk about the last one, I think, that we’re going to hear a lot on. We’ve talked about it here before, but we’re going to hear it even more forcefully in the days ahead. Stay tuned. I’ll tell you what that is.

Welcome back everyone. The last thing I think we’re going to hear in 2026 to a greater degree is this whole idea that the Bible or Christian tradition is silent on abortion or maybe even more forcefully that abortionists function as good Samaritans to their clients. Now, I have to tell you something. This line of reasoning is working. It’s gaining traction and I’ve got proof of it here. Here’s an F FRC report, Family Research Council report showing that churchgoers are increasingly ambivalent about abortion.

And the study goes on to show that their knowledge of it is nearly non-existent. And when they do have knowledge, it’s now trending more toward the pro-abortion way of thinking. So, this is something we need to take seriously. Of course, the idea that the Bible is silent on abortion is a silly argument. The Bible is silent on, you know, using heroin as a day daily vitamin. It’s silent on gay bashing. It’s silent on child abuse. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t biblical principles we can put in play.

And you can see some of our previous shows where we have done that to show why the Bible is indeed pro-life, even if the word abortion is never mentioned. But there’s a new twist on this. It’s not really new, but I’ve heard I’m hearing it more and more, and that is that we should celebrate abortion doctors as good Samaritans. This is silly. As my late friend Mike Adams pointed out, the good Samaritan certainly did not get off his own horse, kneel down beside the beating victim on the road, slit his throat, and dismember him and watch him bleed out on the side of the road.

That’s not what the good Samaritan did. And yet what we’re hearing is that these women need a good Samaritan abortionist. Of course, the whole objection assumes the unborn aren’t human. It assumes only the women are the victims, not the children that they are carrying. So, it’s a facious way to argue, but I just find it absurd the extent to which people will go trying to use the Bible to justify the evil they want to perpetrate. And I’m sorry, but this falls at the threshold of our churches.

What are we doing to train students and adults how to think biblically on issues like life, marriage, definition of man, woman, truth, morality, until our churches take seriously the need to equip our people to work in the real culture we have to live in, we’re going to see more of these arguments that I just went through. Let’s hope we can do better in 2026 defending a biblical view.