Josh sits outside the ERI office to share our May 2021 update on what has been going on behind the scenes at ERI, including a recent speaking trip featuring two new seminars and an expansion to the Equipped for Life Course.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization by granting a writ of certiorari. When the Court hears oral arguments in October, they will be answering this question: are all pre-viability abortion bans unconstitutional?
The Mississippi law at issue bans abortions after 15 weeks, except in life-of-the-mother cases and cases of poor fetal diagnosis. While not as direct an assault on the abortion-access framework of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey as the recent heartbeat bills, this law provides a good test case against them.
Does induced abortion affect future fertility and pregnancy complications? This question often cannot be answered without individuals, perhaps even inadvertently, wading into political commentary on abortion. Answers are often clouded by political agendas and funding sources, and co-opted and spun by either side of the abortion debate to push their own narrative.
On the pro-life side, I’ve sometimes seen the affects of abortion on fertility talked about like a horror story, showcasing a uterine perforation or the need for a hysterectomy because of a botched abortion, with nary a citation to help understand how often these outcomes happen. I’ve also experienced pro-life people unable to explain how, exactly, abortion can effect fertility. Talking about how bad abortion is for women can come across as a fear-mongering tactic in these kinds of situations and can make pro-life people seem ignorant.
On the other side, you have pro-choice people who will outright deny abortion does any harm at all to women’s fertility or that it can affect future pregnancies. You’ll see them hail how safe abortion is and how rare complications are, often with a decontextualized citation, or claim that it’s irrelevant because abortion is safer than childbirth (which isn’t true, by the way). They can come across as blasé in their total denial, making abortion sound too good to be true.
So…should we care about the answer to this question? What is the answer, and what should be done about it?
Jonathon Van Maren joins the podcast to discuss what is going on with a hostile anti-abortion group called Abolish Human Abortion (AHA). This is the first of a two-part series. In this episode, Jonathon discusses AHA’s origin, their slander of the pro-life movement, how they are not William Wilberforce-style abolitionists, and how they’re attempting to rewrite their history now.
Related Links:
Josh Brahm: AHA Attacks Justice For All for “Not Treating Abortion Like Sin”
Jonathon Van Maren: How “Abolish Human Abortion” Gets History Wrong – Part 1:
Jonathon Van Maren: How “Abolish Human Abortion” Gets History Wrong Again – Part 2:
Debate: Pro-Life Incrementalism vs Abolitionist Immediatism (Gregg Cunningham vs. T. Russell Hunter) https://youtu.be/5oi4vVTae30
We referenced Dr. Michael New’s research on the effects of pro-life legislation. While much of his work is behind various paywalls, he helpfully sent a link to a 2018 policy analysis he wrote for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where he summarized the academic research on the impact of pro-life laws:
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:40 Josh on the pro-life unity happening in this episode
02:22 Why we’re talking about AHA
08:16 AHA’s origin
27:00 The difference between critiquing in good faith and bad faith
31:21 Problems with AHA-supported legislation
32:49 Pro-life victories and AHA’s slander
37:48 Why are abortion rates down?
39:23 Straw-manning or unintelligent?
40:38 “And then what?”
42:08 They’re not Wilberforce-style abolitionists
Jonathon Van Maren is the Communications Director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. His writings have been translated into more than six languages, and published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The European Conservative, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, among others. His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Charges of “pro-life hypocrisy” abound on the internet. Unfortunately, they also exist in professional philosophy journals in the form of “inconsistency arguments.” These take the following form:
P1: Were pro-life people consistent, they would X.
P2: Pro-life people fail to X.
C: Therefore, pro-life people are inconsistent.
Accompanying such arguments is an implicit understanding or explicit assertion that if the pro-life person does not change her beliefs or behaviors in order to be consistent, then her continued inconsistency counts as hypocrisy.
