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Is Abortion Just Refusing to Donate Your Organs?

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Imagine that you wake up tomorrow in a hospital bed. You have no idea how you got there. Scary, right? You look around and see that there is a tube coming out of your side and going into the side of a mysterious person lying in the bed next to you.

Suddenly, the doctor comes running in and says, “You’re finally awake! I’m so sorry, let me explain what’s going on. The man in the bed next to you is a world famous violinist with a rare kidney disease that requires him to be hooked up to someone else’s kidney for nine months. You were kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, who figured out somehow that you’re a kidney match. These superfans kidnapped you and hooked you up, and then left you here so you can be hooked up to him for nine months. This is incredibly unjust and I’m so sorry! But here’s the problem: now you’re kind of stuck. If you disconnect from him, he will immediately die. And he’s a person, with the same equal right to life as you!”

Even though the violinist will literally die if you disconnect, most people would agree that you still have the legal right to do so. Maybe you’re a worse person if you choose to unplug, but almost everyone believes that the government just shouldn’t force people to donate their time and bodily resources to other people. That seems pretty obviously wrong.

Let me connect that to pregnancy for you. This pro-choice argument says that even if human fetuses are people, even if they have the same equal right to life as everybody else, even though they are literally going to die if a pregnant woman refuses…the government just shouldn’t force a woman to donate her body to an unborn person. We don’t force organ donation, so we certainly shouldn’t force pregnancy. Women have a right to refuse the use of their bodies by other people, period.

This Right to Refuse argument originated with Judith Jarvis Thomson in her paper, “A Defense of Abortion.” She wrote that analogy about you being kidnapped and connected to a violinist who needs your kidneys to survive, and now this argument makes the rounds of the abortion conversation all the time. People will simply refer to it as “the violinist” or they’ll bring up the same concepts by talking about blood donation or not forcing people to donate their organs.

Check your reaction…

When I first introduce pro-life people to the Violinist argument, I usually see one of two reactions: panic or eye-rolling.  

Let me address the eye-rolling first. They’ll say something like “Pregnancy is nothing like organ donation! Pregnancy is a gift! It’s beautiful!”

Now, as a woman currently 33 weeks pregnant, I don’t disagree that pregnancy is a wonderful gift. But pregnancy is also a lot like organ donation.

There is quite literally another human using my organs—in this case temporarily—because their organs aren’t at this time capable of functioning as they’d need to to sustain separate living. A zygote, embryo, or fetus requires constant use of her mother’s organs, blood supply, and nutrients. In many ways, pregnancy is weirder than normal organ donation. Normal organ donation is a one-time major medical event with side effects and recovery time. But in pregnancy, I’m literally feeling the human who is using my organs for many, many months, and likely feeling very sick for several of those months—and then I still have to go through a major medical event with side effects and recovery time. 

I was bedridden for 10 weeks at the beginning of my pregnancy. And as I type this, my tiny human has apparently decided to run a marathon. Not gonna lie, it’s more than a little distracting to be repeatedly kicked in your ribcage. 

Pregnancy is a lot like organ donation. And the violinist is a lot like the tiny human inside me. The whole point of the violinist analogy is to argue that even if pro-lifers are right and a fetus is morally equivalent to an adult, you still have the right to an abortion because you have the right to refuse to donate your organs to other people. Judith Jarvis Thomson is assuming, at least for the sake of argument, that fetuses are people. And that’s where the panic comes in.

I panicked the first time I heard the violinist analogy my freshman year of college. I was literally stumped. Up until that conversation, I had assumed everyone was pro-choice because they didn’t understand biology, or because they thought what gave humans value was some trait they acquired later on in development.  I had never heard of a pro-choice argument that granted that fetuses are equal in value to you and me.  And I had no idea how to answer it. 

I seriously questioned whether I had an obligation to become pro-choice now—since I couldn’t explain why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be able to refuse to donate her organs to an unborn person but should be able to refuse to donate her organs to a born person. After all, my right to bodily autonomy is incredibly important! It’s why I have to sign 7,000 consent forms every time I’m at the doctor’s office. It’s one of the reasons that sexual assault is so deeply wrong and harmful. Everyone’s bodily autonomy is extremely important and deserves to be respected. So shouldn’t pregnant women have the same bodily autonomy everyone else has?

Now, panic isn’t the reaction I want my audience to have when I first explain the violinist argument, but I do want you to stand, just for a moment, in healthy awe of how smart it is. Of just how well it appeals to what we already believe about the realities of pregnancy, the personhood of the unborn, and the importance of bodily autonomy. It shouldn’t be shocking why this argument is so persuasive to so many college freshmen reading Thomson’s paper in Philosophy 101, or why my TikTok feed is full of pro-choice people bringing up organ donation. It’s not an argument to roll your eyes at.

But no, we don’t all have an obligation to become pro-choice either. 

You see, the question isn’t “Is pregnancy analogous to donating an organ?” Because I think the answer is, in many ways, yes. The question is “Is abortion analogous to refusing to donate an organ?” 

That’s where the violinist argument breaks down.

After you’ve recovered from that initial reaction…

…you’re probably shifting into the “responding phase.” And the gut response I usually hear from pro-lifers is something about an obligation to help.

“The violinist is a stranger, but the fetus is your own child! You have an obligation to help your own child.”

“Your kidney was designed for you, but your uterus was designed for a baby. You have an obligation to let them use the thing that was designed for them.”

“In the Violinist story, you were kidnapped! This whole situation isn’t your fault! But in 99% of pregnancies…you are the reason the fetus is in this situation. This isn’t some big surprise. You willingly engaged in an action which you knew might result in the creation of an inherently needy child, so you have an obligation to help them.”

The third—often called the Responsibility Objection—is a solid argument, and we’ve taught it here at ERI before. The problem is, our team just doesn’t find it that persuasive to the vast majority of pro-choice people. And the first two responses? I actually think they’re bad arguments; they don’t work when you follow them through to their natural conclusions. 

Convincing you of that isn’t my purpose today though. Even if I thought that all three of them were solid responses to the violinist, I still wouldn’t use them. 

I don’t want to spend my time arguing about when we have an obligation to help other people; in today’s society, that’s honestly just a hard sell. I’m dramatically more persuasive when I spend my time arguing for the modest claim that we have an obligation to not literally kill people.

The Obligation to Not Kill

When you find yourself plugged into that violinist, you hypothetically have three options. You could help the violinist by staying hooked up for nine months, which would be super nice and arguably the right thing to do, but I don’t think that should be legally required of you. You could choose to not help the violinist, which would be you refusing to stay plugged in to the violinist for nine months.

Or, hypothetically, you could kill the violinist. After all, if they are dead, they definitely don’t need your help anymore! You could just shoot the violinist, right now, and they’d be dead. Problem solved. It would save you the embarrassment of saying no to them!

So three options: help, not help, or kill the violinist. But we all know that you shouldn’t do the killing one. In situations where you have all three options, helping and not helping should both be legal, and killing should be illegal.

Here’s the problem though: you don’t always have all three of those options. 

Let’s imagine another story: what if I get super rich and buy a yacht. Huge boat, all the fun stuff on it you can imagine, GIANT yacht. So, obviously, I’m going to take my amazing yacht out into the ocean. I’m hours from shore in shark-infested waters when I discover that there is a preschooler on my boat. 

This little girl was playing hide-and-seek on the docks with her siblings, she found a fantastic hiding spot in the closet on my yacht, and she fell asleep waiting for her siblings to find her. Now that I’ve found her hours later in shark-infested waters, I am kind of stuck. I really only have two options! One, I can help the preschooler by sheltering her peacefully on my boat until I take the boat back to shore and hand the girl over to the police or her parents, and after that I don’t think I should have to do anything else to help her. 

Or…hypothetically, I could kill her. I could say, “This is my boat, and I have the right to refuse the use of my boat to this tiny person who is trying to use it” and then toss the preschooler overboard.

Those are my only two options: help or kill. The only way to stop helping her with my boat would be to throw her overboard, which wouldn’t just be not helping—it would be killing her. So there is no way to just not help—it doesn’t exist! If there was a way to Star Trek beam the preschooler off the boat and onto shore next to her parents so I wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore, that might be a “not help option,” but we all know that doesn’t exist. So if help and kill are my only options, and I think killing is always wrong except in cases like self-defense, then I think I’m obligated to help. 

I’m not interested in forcing people to help other people in general, but I am going to put my foot down and say that you don’t get to kill other people. So I can’t throw the preschooler overboard. When the only way to avoid helping is to kill, I legally have to help—not because I generally have an obligation to help people, but because I have an obligation to not kill people.

(Note: While our team uses The Obligation to Not Kill and the killing versus letting die distinction in the majority of our conversations with everyday pro-choice people, it can be helpful for some more philosophically-minded people to pivot to the distinction between making someone better off, worse off, or keeping them in their original state. You can find our more advanced article on that here.)

Of course, giving a preschooler a boat ride is not comparable to the demands of pregnancy. I’m pregnant; I very much understand that. In no way do I want to diminish what a pregnant woman goes through. But there’s one important similarity between the two cases: in both, there is no way to just “not help.” There’s no way to “unplug” from the fetus to stop being pregnant. 

In pregnancy, the woman only has two options. She can help the fetus by allowing him or her to exist in her womb for nine months and giving birth, at which point she doesn’t have to have any further legal obligation to the child. Or she can kill the child by having an abortion. 

There is no “just don’t help” option. If we could Star Trek beam the fetus out of the mother’s womb into an artificial womb where she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore and the fetus would live, that would be a way to just not help. But we don’t have that technology, so there is no “I just refuse to help you” option. Since help and kill are a pregnant woman’s only options, killing via abortion should still be illegal. 

I wouldn’t normally ask someone to tolerate a strange preschooler on their boat. I’ll ask for it only for as long as it takes to get them to shore safely, because there’s no other non-violent option. I wouldn’t normally ask someone to tolerate a prenatal human in their body (and the physical symptoms that come with it!). I’ll ask for it only for as long as it takes to get them to a place where they can live without your help, because there’s no other non-violent option. 

You absolutely have a right to your bodily autonomy, and to refuse the use of your body to someone trying to use it. But those rights have a limit. None of us have the right to kill innocent people, period. And elective abortion always involves lethal violence targeted at the unborn human. 

For examples of how we use this analogy in conversation with pro-choice people and responses to common objections, check out our comprehensive course.

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NEW PODCAST: Creative Pro-Life Apologetics: Reaching Out Without Burning Out

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In this podcast, join me and Rebecca Carlson as we share some of the most creative forms of outreach that we’ve heard from the ERI Affiliate Groups program and also share some insights on how to manage proper self-care when participating in outreach.

Chapters:

  • 00:00 Intro and outlining creative outreach ideas
  • 11:06 The most intense forms of outreach!
  • 16:37 The hardest part of outreach for Emily and Rebecca
  • 22:19 How to care for yourself when doing outreach Equal Rights Institute

Related Links:

Website

Equal Rights Institute Blog

Equipped for Life Academy

Equipped for Life Course

Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass

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What To Do When It’s So Dumb You Don’t Know What To Say

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At a speaking gig last week, someone asked me a really good question: “What do you do when a pro-choice person says something, and it’s so dumb you don’t even know how to respond?” Sometimes an argument can be hard to rebut because it’s so smart. But sometimes an argument can be hard to figure out how to respond to because it feels so obviously bad to you that you’re not even sure how to explain why it’s bad other than to just say “Duh!”

8–12 minutes

Some of you might be thinking at this point, “That’s every conversation with pro-choice people! Their whole argument is that dumb!” If that’s you, I think you’re wrong on that. But if that’s your view, it also means this topic is even more relevant to you than to everybody else— it applies to literally every conversation you have with a pro-choice person.

But that’s not where the person who asked me the question last week was coming from. She knew a lot of the strongest pro-choice arguments, and she had a bunch of experience having smart, mutual, respectful conversations with pro-choice people. But occasionally, someone would say something that just left her speechless, like “I know it’s a human being, I just don’t care,” “A fetus isn’t biologically alive,” or “Yeah, it should be legal to kill toddlers too.”

If you’ve ever talked with a pro-choice person about abortion, you may have run into something similar—something that makes you want to say, “That feels so obviously wrong that I don’t know what to do to help you see it—it’s just obvious!”

I have two different responses in situations like that, but the first step is the same either way.

Step 1: Clarify

Clarifying what you’re hearing your interlocutor say is pretty much never a bad idea, but it’s particularly important when you’re thinking what you heard is crazy.

This could sound like: “I want to make sure I understand where you’re coming from. Is it ok if I repeat back what I’m hearing you say and then ask you to tell me if I’m right or not?” 

Or, depending on how far into the conversation you are and how much rapport you’ve built, it could sound like: “Wait, just to be super clear—you’re saying that to help curb overpopulation we should make it legal for parents to kill their toddlers if they want?”

If you can think of two possible things they might mean and you’re not sure which one they’re going for, it can also be really helpful to offer them both options. For instance, “I want to make sure I understand where you’re coming from, and I can think of two different things you might mean by that. Do you mean you know the fetus is a human being biologically, like that it’s a living human organism, or do you mean something more philosophical—like you know it’s a person with equal rights, you just don’t care?”

Sometimes clarifying will be enough—either because you’ll find out that you were misunderstanding them and they didn’t actually mean the crazy thing to begin with, or because the process of clarifying gave them a chance to reconsider and adjust.

But if you go through the clarification step and what they’re saying still sounds beyond-the-pale crazy to you, the next step depends on the answer to this question: Would almost all pro-choice people agree with you that what the person is saying is crazy? Is it obvious to everyone, or just obvious to you (or people on your side)?

The rest of this post will talk about the really extreme cases where it’s so obviously wrong that the vast majority of pro-choice people would agree that it’s crazy. My next post will talk about the cases where it feels extremely obvious to you, but you know a bunch of pro-choice people wouldn’t see it that way.

Step 2: When most pro-choice people would agree with you

If you trot out a toddler and the pro-choice person you’re talking with says that yes, it should be legal to kill toddlers, let me assure you that the vast, vast (vast!) majority of pro-choice people agree with you that that’s obviously bad. In fact, even the person you’re talking with might agree with you that that’s obviously bad. Sometimes, without realizing it, people say things they don’t actually think because they feel trapped. 

This happened to me once at a high school debate tournament. I don’t remember what the debate topic was (it wasn’t abortion), but my opponent based her argument on consequentialism, which (roughly) says that the end justifies the means. So during cross-examination, when it was my turn to ask her questions to try to poke holes in her argument, I brought up things like the torturous and often deadly medical experiments that Nazis performed on prisoners, without consent or anesthesia. The Nazis were (in part) trying to accomplish some genuinely good goals, like learning how to more effectively save people’s lives. There could even have been some particular experiments where mathematically, more lives were saved as a result of what was learned in the experiment than were killed in the experiment. So I asked her whether the consequentialist view she was defending meant that what the Nazis did was okay. And…she said yes.

I got a sweet, soft-spoken fifteen-year-old girl to say that the Nazis medically experimenting on prisoners was morally permissible. I spent most of my rebuttal pointing out exactly how horribly and obviously false that was, and then when it came time for my opponent’s rebuttal she stood up, started to cry, forfeited the debate, and said “I just want to be really clear that I don’t actually think what the Nazis did was okay.” She hadn’t said yes to my question because that was what she actually thought; she said yes because she felt trapped. I had backed her into a corner, she didn’t know how to get out, and she froze.

In a competitive debate setting, that was a kind of victory (though I definitely felt conflicted about it). In a setting where your goal is to win the argument, getting your opponent flustered so that they say something stupid and then feel like they have to stand by it can help you do that. But outside of very specific settings like competitive debate tournaments, winning debates is a terrible goal. It might help you feel intellectually and morally superior, but it won’t change minds or save lives, and it’s also just not a loving or intellectually virtuous thing to be trying to do. 

People can’t change their minds while they’re feeling defensive and unsafe. If you want a chance to change someone’s mind, you need them to feel safe in the conversation with you. That means you need them not to feel like you’re trying to trick them into saying something stupid so you can pounce on it. You need them to feel like they can reconsider and edit what they said without you making them feel stupid. For that to happen, obviously you need to not actually be trying to trap them or win the debate or make them feel stupid. But often, it takes more than that: often, you also need to go out of your way to be super clear that you’re not trying to do those things.

So: if the pro-choice person you’re talking with says something that’s really obviously wrong, even to most pro-choice people, one good step is to check whether they’re feeling trapped. You can check for that by saying something like: 

“There’s a thing that can sometimes happen in abortion conversations like this, and I wonder if it might be happening here—sometimes people can end up feeling trapped, feeling like they have to stick to something they said not because it’s what they actually think but because they feel like they don’t know what to say or how their argument could go if they take it back. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening, but in case it is, I just want to be super clear that I won’t think any less of you if you ever want to edit anything you’ve said—we’re both talking off the cuff here. And also just to be super clear, I don’t at all think you have to be pro-life if you say it’s not ok to kill toddlers. I know some really strong pro-choice arguments that are absolutely consistent with saying it’s not ok to kill toddlers, and I’m happy to give them to you.”

If you notice a pattern of people feeling trapped, or feeling like they’re not sure where you’re leading them in your abortion conversations, one good thing to try adjusting is to ask fewer questions. If you’re genuinely trying to make sure you’re understanding something they just said, definitely still ask those clarifying questions (offer them multiple options if you can!). But when it’s your turn to make your own argument, put periods at the ends of your sentences instead of question marks. That can help people avoid feeling like they’re being asked to agree to something without knowing where it’s going.

If you’ve clarified what they said and gently asked whether they’re feeling trapped and they still stand by it, one last move you can try is to point out that most pro-choice people are on your side on this one. If even that doesn’t shift anything, it might be time to end the conversation. I might say something like, “Okay, to be honest I’m not really sure where to go from here. I think we might not have enough common ground in some other areas to be able to have a conversation about abortion. I guess I’d just want to invite you to reconsider your view that killing toddlers is okay—I think the vast majority of pro-choice people would agree with me that it’s obviously wrong to kill toddlers.” I repeat what they said back to them a couple times to let it linger with them and give them as much chance as possible to reconsider later, and then send them on their way.

In my experience, at least in in-person conversations, it’s pretty rare that a pro-choice person says something that egregious and stands by it even after I clarify what they said and check whether they’re feeling trapped. It happens, just not in most conversations. What does happen in most conversations is that pro-choice people say something that sounds so obviously false to a lot of pro-life people that it can be hard to figure out how to respond. Next post, I’ll talk about what to do with things pro-choice people say all the time that feel so crazy to you you’re not sure where to start.

The post “What To Do When It’s So Dumb You Don’t Know What To Say” originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”   

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How to Talk to Teens about Abortion

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“The youth.” How do we reach them? What are they thinking? Who is influencing them? How do we get them off their phones and actually doing something? 

Maybe it’s because I’m barely 5’1” and look a lot younger than I am, but the number of times I’ve been asked some variation of “How do we reach the youth?” is…literally every time I do a Q&A with an audience over the age of 50. To a lot of adults, it feels like a big impossible mystery.

6–8 minutes

I just got home from speaking at the Michigan District of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church High School gathering. That audience was not over the age of 50—about 800 high school students descended upon Mackinac Island (a gorgeous place for a speaking trip, by the way!) for four days of talks, fellowship, prayer, and growing in their faith. I spent four days “reaching” the exact demographic I’m most frequently asked about, and I’m going to be honest with you: it’s actually not that mysterious. 

I am a firm believer that high school students want nothing more than to be treated like adults. There are definitely parts of being an adult they don’t want; they don’t want to deal with taxes or insurance companies any more than actual adults do.  But high school students want to be respected, in a way that adults often respect other adults—and often don’t respect them.

Adults are taken seriously. 

Adults have a say in how the world works. 

Adults get to have their own thoughts and opinions and run their own lives. 

Adults are valued for their knowledge and experience; nobody writes them off because they’re “too young and naive” to know anything about the real world.

I believe that when high school students are treated like they have valuable experience, like their thoughts matter, and like they can handle challenging concepts and controversial conversations, they rise to the occasion. 

I gave that exact invitation on stage to 800 high school students last Sunday night—to come talk about abortion with me in a real way. I invited them to dive headlong with me into the smartest pro-choice arguments and the smartest pro-life arguments that exist and assured them that we wouldn’t be avoiding the tough questions. I told them that I believe our society can have real, deep conversations about abortion without the sky falling and everyone hating each other, and that I would show them how. Because I believe they can do it—not just that society in general can, but that they personally can. 

Monday morning, my speech was standing room only. 

Tuesday morning, my speech was full too.

Tuesday night, my Q&A session lasted from 9:00pm to 11:00pm—a full hour and 15 minutes longer than it was supposed to—because so many students came with honest questions and an open mind. 

And this isn’t an anomaly. Every single time I’m in front of a room of high school students and I invite them to talk about something real and serious with me, they rise to the occasion. 

The pre-course survey for our high school curriculum, Equipped for Life Academy, has found the same thing. Most students haven’t had the chance to engage with the issue of abortion in any meaningful way, especially not with an adult there to guide the discussion. The media, adults, and organizations in their lives have told them what to believe, sure, but actually engaging with the topic? 41% of students say they’ve “never really engaged with the issue of abortion before” going through our curriculum in their school or church. For the rest of them, their “engagement” mostly involved “hearing about abortion in the news sometimes” and “discussing it with friends sometimes.”

And when they’re given the opportunity to actually engage head on, they love it. They packed my speech until it was standing room only. In that same Equipped for Life Academy pre-survey, 79% of students expressed they are “positive” or “fine with” learning about abortion in class. Only 5% are actively reluctant or opposed. 

I think a huge reason why teachers, pastors, and youth leaders are reluctant to invite students into deep conversations about controversial topics is because they’re afraid that that “actively reluctant or opposed” group is the majority—when it’s actually just 5%. They don’t realize that students are not only willing, but itching to talk about something real. 

Were you ever that high school student asking “when am I ever going to use calculus in real life?!” You didn’t necessarily hate school; you just craved the real world. Today’s high schoolers are the same, and there are few topics that feel more real-world relevant to them than abortion.

Take the Catholic Diocese of Lansing, Michigan.

The Diocese purchased our Equipped for Life Academy curriculum for two Catholic high schools thanks to a generous grant from a local right to life chapter—Plymouth County Right to Life. The plan was to teach the entire 15-lesson sequence over the course of four years, covering three or four lessons with each grade level. Originally, the schools planned to phase it in gradually: just freshmen the first year, freshmen and sophomores the second year, etc, until all four grade levels were learning their respective lessons four years from now. But when the teachers got their hands on the lesson plans, one school’s staff decided it was so important that they redid their curriculum planning for the whole year to make time for every single student to use Equipped for Life Academy. Letting the next three graduating classes go by without discussing abortion with them just wasn’t an acceptable option anymore—not once they’d seen the impact this could have. 

And their students were thrilled.

“I’m excited because I know I don’t know everything about [abortion], so if I can learn more I would feel a lot better in my opinion.” ~17 year old in Mr. I’s class

“I think it is a good thing for students to discuss controversial topics so that they can form their views of it in a controlled environment before they go into the real world.” ~ 18 year old in Mrs. L’s class

“I am glad that we get to learn in a space where my views are not judged or held against me. I am also glad we get to be educated in this matter that will help the world be a better place as we grow and mature into adults and leaders of society.” ~ 15 year old in Ms. M’s class

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to be able to go to a school that does this. It is very good to learn about [controversial] topics.” ~ 18 year old in Mr. I’s class

And that wasn’t just the sentiment from students who were already pro-life. When students begin using our curriculum, 39.1% do not identify as pro-life—including 24.4% who are unsure and 14.7% who identify as pro-choice. Let me say that again: 39.1% do not identify as pro-life, but only 5% are actively reluctant or opposed to learning about abortion in class.

So how do we reach the youth about abortion?

Actually invite them in. Trust me, they’re craving it. Invite them to think in a real, deep way. Don’t tell them what to believe, and don’t shy away from the hardest questions and emotional moments. Give them space to share their honest opinions and process complex feelings alongside you. Walk together as you explore the smartest arguments on all sides and see how they stack up. If the pro-life position is true, and I’m awfully sure that it is, then that’s what students will come to see too.

That’s what our curriculum is designed to do, and I firmly believe that you can do it with your youth too. 

The post “How to Talk to Teens About Abortion” originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”

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Is Empathy Toxic?

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It was 2020 (that dumpster fire of a year!) and I was extolling the importance of empathy in a conversation with a friend. I was shocked when he pushed back, calling the term “woke” and “politically correct.” It was the first time I learned that some people view empathy as a dirty word. When I asked what word he’d prefer, he said, “sympathy,” and then he tried to make the case that this was a more “biblical” word.

Confused, I also couldn’t suppress an internal eyeroll, but I decided to get curious. It helped that my friend and I had a lot of respect for each other. 

And so, although it took some effort, we both decided to pause, check our reactions, and listen. Good questions followed that helped us unpack how we were defining our terms, as well as the experiences that were fueling our perspectives. In the end, because we both chose to be curious rather than dismissive, we learned a few things. For one thing, we discovered that we were using two completely different definitions of the word “empathy.”

7–10 minutes

Two Different Definitions

For me, defining “empathy” was simple and essential. Empathy is feeling another person’s pain, walking a mile in their shoes. I spent a good bit of my career with National Fatherhood Initiative writing curricula that held up self-awareness and empathy as two of the most foundational qualities for being a healthy human. Without them, it was impossible to grow. For example, here’s some of the content and questions we used to communicate the concept of empathy to incarcerated fathers:

Empathy is being able to feel and understand another’s situation and feelings. A key mark of maturity is being able to take responsibility for ways you have hurt your family. You must understand how your behavior affected, affects, or will affect each family member. The following exercise is difficult but will help you do this. Don’t be tempted to rush through it. Feeling your family’s pain [empathy] will help you change from the inside out. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of each family member and write out answers to the following questions.

Be as honest as you can:

  • How did my behavior prior to incarceration affect my spouse, children, and/or extended family?
  • What would they remember about how I behaved?
  • How could my past behavior still be affecting them today?
  • How did my arrest and trial affect my family?
  • How do they explain my absence?
  • What has changed in my family since I went to prison?
  • What is it like for them to visit me (e.g. waiting in line, getting searched, etc.)?
  • What do they sacrifice in order to visit me?1

My friend resonated with this definition and the examples, and we discovered he was coming from a totally different reference point. He saw empathy in the current cultural climate being used to say something like, “If you haven’t experienced exactly what someone else has, you have nothing valuable to offer.” For example, someone might say, “Unless you’ve shared in the black experience, you have no part in the conversation.” I acknowledged his point, and we both realized our definitions of empathy were radically different. I fully agreed that you don’t have to have gone through the same experience as another person to help them. Or, said differently, you don’t have to have shared the same life experience as someone to offer wisdom or valuable expertise. For example, must an oncologist have gone through cancer herself to treat cancer patients effectively? Of course not. She just needs to be a good doctor.

Six years after that conversation with my friend, many of us are still talking past each other—me included. For example, when I heard that Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy was a national bestseller, my first instinct was the familiar eye roll.

My definitions and experiences kicked in and I quickly judged her book by its cover. Disgusted, I began to rehearse my mantra: Viewing a basic virtue like empathy as toxic produces a distorted humanity. It contributes to a system that cranks out arrogant culture warriors who don’t listen or give thought to other people’s stories. It shoves aside love and compassion to make room for dehumanization and “owning the libs.” Except…

This is not what Stuckey is saying. I don’t agree with her on everything, but as I found out when I tried to be an honest broker and actually listen to her audiobook on a recent trip, she clearly states that “this book isn’t about killing empathy; it’s about submitting our empathy to God’s definitions of love, goodness, and justice.”

In acknowledging that I misjudged Stuckey, I remain undeterred in showing all who will listen that empathy is not a dirty word. But, again, my journey has taught me that empathy needs nuance, because it can be distorted and misunderstood. 

Empathy Needs Honesty

And this brings me to one more important insight. Although empathy is an essential starting place, it is not a final destination. In other words, empathy by itself is not the be-all and end-all; it is just one vital step on the way to courageous, just, and loving action.

This is something Arthur Brooks articulated well in a recent leadership podcast with Andy Stanley. He asked, “What does it mean to be compassionate?” and gave four steps:

  • Understanding the problem at hand.
  • Feeling the pain of the affected people enough to know why you have to act. [Brooks defines this step as empathy—notice how it’s just step two out of a four-step process.
  • Having the capacity and intellect to know what needs to be done.
  • Having the courage to get it done.

He then offered this brilliant insight:

Empathy [by itself] will hamstring you… if all you have is the pain of somebody who’s going to be affected, you won’t be able to fire anybody if you need to. You won’t be able to give somebody a hard truth. You won’t be able to say to your spouse, “I don’t like how this is working here. We need to change this.” Honesty is a form of love, and the problem is that if all you have is empathy, then honesty very often falls to the wayside.

Two Opposite Errors

When it comes to talking about abortion, I think we’re all swimming in cultural waters that pull us toward one extreme or another: viewing empathy as toxic or viewing empathy as the end game.

Wrongly seeing empathy as toxic can look like not caring about or trying to understand the perspectives of people we disagree with. It can also look like misrepresenting and dehumanizing them with memes on social media. And the opposite error—viewing empathy as the endgame—can hamstring us from expressing our true thoughts and feelings or make us so concerned with listening well that we don’t speak up on behalf of the voiceless and most vulnerable.

You can probably guess from what I’ve said already, but of those two errors I’m more prone to the second one—I can listen and empathize so much that I don’t make a pro-life argument often enough. I hate cancel culture, and it’s not hard for me to humanize people I disagree with, even about really important things. But I’m still growing in, as Albert Brooks says, “having the courage to get it done.” I don’t want my silence to unwittingly contribute to continued massive human rights violations against those in the abortion conversation with the least agency—unborn babies. And so I’m continuing to learn to speak out in classy ways on behalf of those whose lives hang in the balance and who also deserve our empathy. 

We need to avoid both honesty that’s missing empathy and empathy that’s missing honesty. We need to watch out for both errors, but most people lean more toward one than the other, and it can be helpful to know which one you personally are more prone to. I tend toward the second one—how about you?

  1. Inside Out Dad Christian Fathering Handbook (National Fatherhood Initiative, 2008). ↩︎

The post Is Empathy Toxic? originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”  

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