 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating the ethics of abortion and we are starting right now with Kay's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us Kay, the floor is all yours. Thank you for having me. I am Kay Fellows. I am an ethical life activist, I've been an ethical life activist for almost nine years now and as an ethical life activist, I believe that all human life is inherently valuable and that we should all, as humans should all be treated with equal value and equal dignity. And so with that, of course, I am 100% opposed to abortion for all reasons and so with the new cycle currently out as it is right now with the possible potential to overturning a Roe v. Wade, honestly, I am 100% in support of overturning Roe v. Wade and I do absolutely look forward to having a discussion about the ethics of abortion and the ethics of Roe v. Wade with Richard tonight. You got it and want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics and we welcome everybody from all walks of life and hey, if you haven't yet hit that subscribe button as we have many more juicy debates coming up. For example, infrared and JF will be squaring off on communism versus capitalism in the next week. You don't want to miss it. So hit subscribe. And with that, thanks Richard for being with us as well. The floor is all yours. Right. You welcome anyone and everyone from all walks of life, even Richard. Yeah. I am deeply grateful to be here. I mean, I mean that seriously actually. So thank you. This should be a good debate. Before I make an opening statement, I wanted to ask Kaye just a couple of questions just to kind of get some things. So are you a Christian? I am not. No, I am. I am a pagan. I'm also an omnist. So, so no, I am not a Christian. Is he frozen? Oh no. I think the screen did freeze. Let me, I think Richard, you might have to just if you check your video feed, if you click out of it and then click back in, it looks, there we go. It's ready. It's frozen again though. Technical difficulties. There it is. All right. It's updated. There we go. Okay. Great. All right. I'm going to ask a couple of questions. It froze. Yes. The censor's muscle. I learned that I was about to defend abortion rights. Okay. Could I ask you just a couple of questions? So Kaye, are you a Christian? I am not. I am. I am a pagan and I am also an omnist. So I believe that all religion has some form of truth behind it. I do not observe any higher power in my belief system. Okay. Well, I would, I kind of want to learn about all of that. What kind of pagan in just one word or two? I don't identify strictly with any specific branch of paganism. I mean, you have, you know, Norse pagans and so on and so forth. But because I do not recognize or work with a specific deity, I just identify as strictly pagan. Okay. Very interesting. That kind of threw me a curve ball a bit. Okay. Now, also just a real quick question about Roe v. Wade, do you, because I think we should talk a little bit about it. Do you disagree with that from a legal standpoint? Or is this more, I mean, I'm asking you to be honest, or is it more kind of an ethical standpoint of like, you know, who cares exactly what the legal unicities are. Let's, let's make sure we get this done as an ethical activist. I've always more focused on the ethics behind the idea of abortion, more on less than on the legal aspect, because I don't think that the legal aspect is a huge, a huge part of the abortion debate. I would argue that, you know, Roe v. Wade, like there is no rights to abortion in the Constitution. I do believe that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision, but I don't really focus much on the legal aspect and talking in legal terms whenever discussing abortion. Okay. Fair enough. I think that it's very difficult to talk about abortion as an ethical issue because both sides are in effect right. So I, there are many, there are millions of books on abortion and articles and blog posts and tweets. But I would say that you could essentialize the arguments as such. From the pro-life side, the argument seems to be some variation on the child, even if it is a fetus or a zygote, it is, it is life, it is potential life. It might not be a citizen with rights in that sense, but it is a human being. And as such, it has rights. And making arguments like, you know, if a woman were raped, she might not want to carry the baby to term or child abuse or something like that. Even though those are compelling arguments, those affect the woman and the perpetrator of these criminal acts. They don't affect the child. Even if the child were the product of a terrible rape scenario, he has rights. You don't lose rights because you're the victim of a crime. So it is a kind of human rights-based argument. It is logical, coherent, and absolutely compelling. On the other side, there is a pro-choice argument that it can also be compelling. And I'm not here talking about, you know, Sarah Silverman bragging about getting an abortion or something. You know, that's kind of on the edges. But basically, the statement is this. I am an individual. I have rights. I have kind of atom-braided right to privacy that is given to us in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Now, maybe a little bit dubious, but there's something there in those notions of everyone's due due process and so on. What I do with my body is my own concern. And yes, no one would deny that there's a life form within my body, but I can ultimately make this choice for myself. And an extreme libertarian version of that that I've heard by Murray Rothbard is basically I am the owner of my body. My body is my property. And I am the landlord of my being, as it were. And I can kick out a tenant. And if that tenant dies in the process of being expelled, that is on him effectively, and it is not on me. Now that argument, too, is compelling. And both of those arguments are consistent, rational, and they can't really ever win out. They are, they both, we've reached a kind of moral impasse with abortion where both sides will effectively make those two arguments because we live in a liberal society and a liberal system. You have to make arguments based on rights and harm, avoidance, and so on. So this is how we make arguments. And we can't, and I don't think this will ever be resolved at the end of the day. And so I would suggest that because this issue is so terrible, you know, even someone like Kay, who is passionately pro-life, I don't think wants to throw women who have abortions into prison needless to say, you know, put the death penalty on them or something like that. She seems like a very sympathetic person. We ultimately, even if we acknowledge the humanity of a fetus, we don't treat it in the same way of, we don't treat it like murder. And people who really want to treat it like murder are on the fringes of the pro-life movement. So there's this distinction there that we kind of can't express in the terms that are given to us in our society, which is based on liberal norms. And so there's a, just a moral impasse. We could argue this all day, and I don't think we would really get anywhere. So I do think that it is reasonable and rational to look at the consequences of abortion and what abortion kind of means for us as a society moving forward. Abortion is very old. It has been going on since the ancient world. The Bible discusses abortion rather briefly. And to be honest, the Bible does not treat a, there's one episode in Leviticus where two men get in a fight. And if you get in a fight and the pregnant woman loses her child, you have to pay more or something. We don't have to worry about the details of it. The fact is it was not treated as a, in the way that a lot of Christian pro-lifers treated now. Again, abortion is an ancient practice. It has been with us for some time. There are many aspects of an abortion that I think people don't like to talk about, but I think we probably should talk about. One of them is that I actually have the number, yes, 15% of women who have abortions are actually married. So there's a notion that, you know, that I hear from, you know, pro-lifers or maybe right-wingers of other kinds of, you know, abortion is for these shrill, feminist career gals and they just can't, they don't have the time to take care of a baby and they just want to go make money and have sex or whatever. Well, that's not really what we see. 30% of abortions are to people who are married or cohabitating. So actually a large percentage of abortions take place when a couple recognizes that their child is going to have serious problems and Down syndrome is probably the most notable of these, but there are other issues. So we make very hard moral decisions all the time that we don't really want to talk about. And I'll just say two more things and then I'll go from there. Most women who have a large percentage of women who have abortions are actually at or below the poverty level. Now that leads me to a couple of different conclusions. First off, those children probably are going to have a very difficult time growing up because they're going to lack support. Now a good pro-life argument is to say, we need more support, we need tax credits, we need welfare and that's morally consistent and perfectly reasonable. But let's also kind of be honest about this. There is a intelligence negative correlation with women who have abortions. And it's not something we like to talk about, but the fact is lower income people, it is associated with a lower intelligence, lower aspects of sympathy and empathy and understanding and open-mindedness. Maybe it's not really the worst thing in the world for that population to be controlled and to be controlled in a way that's humane, that they can make that choice and that it is open to them. I would also suggest this. I think many reasonable people have abortions even as couples and they make a very tough decision that they probably don't want to talk about. There are a lot of women out there who will post their abortion on Instagram or some horrible thing like that. They will go out into the streets basically making fun of children and childhood itself and just thinking this makes me who I am, my ability just to get rid of a child at a bandit. Now, I think that's a minority, a very vocal minority, but it is a minority. And I would ask people who are confronting this issue and who are pro-life, do you really think that that type of person is going to settle down and be a happy housewife if you just made abortion illegal? I think she will probably find a way for one thing. But secondly, I'm not sure. I want those people reproducing themselves in the world and bringing children who are going to hear it so much from them environmentally and genetically to have great numbers in society. Now, these are kind of tough things. I'm willing to say them, but I think we need to at least contemplate them because if we make it an abstract legal issue or an abstract moral issue, we're just going to hit an impasse. You got it. And thank you very much for that opening as well, Richard. Want to let you know, folks, as we mentioned, Modern Day Debate is a neutral platform hosting debates on all sorts of topics. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already for more juicy debates. And we're going to jump into the open conversation now. Thanks so much. Kay and Richard, the floor is all yours for that open dialogue. OK, so I'm going to kind of back up and address everything that you said a little bit one by one. I want to go back to kind of talking about the moral issue. And I think that you brought up a lot of really, really good points. I mean, there is validity to each argument. And I think that you laid out the main pro-life argument and the main pro-choice argument pretty well, because regardless of how many arguments abortion supporters go through, it really does circle back to the bodily autonomy argument. Like it's my body. I get to decide what to do with it. And the pro-life argument is inherently, you know, from the moment of fertilization, this is a human being that has rights and needs to be recognized as an equal human being by society and needs to be protected. And it is it is an incredibly difficult thing. And you did mention, you know, the people that are on the fringe of the pro-life movement that want to see women be put in prison or even be given the death penalty, depending on what state they're in. They are the very, very vocal minority. We do in pro-life activism, we do separate ourselves between them. We are pro-life and they are abolitionists. And but the reality is, is that, you know, Roe v. Wade was announced that it might be overturned. And then within like 24 hours, Louisiana was proposing bills that would give women the death sentence if they were to seek abortion. So this isn't something that is unknown in pro-life activism. And it is something that needs to be talked about and addressed because that's that's not what pro-life activists stand for. And they need to be incredibly vocal in combating that. The reality is, is that there is nothing on planet Earth that is like the relationship that is pregnancy. There is nothing, there is no comparison that can adequately be made. Like in this situation, we wouldn't have somebody do this. So why should we expect them to do it in the situation of pregnancy? Pregnancy is an entirely unique relationship between an unborn human and the pregnant person that is carrying them. And there is somewhat a conflict of rights here. And I think that pro-life people overwhelmingly do not do a good job in addressing the fact that, yes, women absolutely should have autonomy over their bodies. But in the case of pregnancy, unfortunately, there are two equally valid, equally valuable human beings in this situation. And we need to address the situation as such that there are two human beings. We want both of them to have the rights to their own body, their rights to not die. And it's incredibly complex. So let's come at this with actual comprehensive solutions. Unfortunately, we live in a country where there are two very, very combative political parties that use abortion to score political points. And so we're not able to have those conversations on an actual legislative level in order to actually find those solutions that are going to help women in these situations. The reality is that the majority of abortions take place under some level of coercion. And whenever I say that, people assume that I mean that somebody is pressuring women to have abortions. So like a spouse, a romantic partner, a family member. And that does happen. And it is a pretty significant portion of abortions that happen under that level of coercion. But there's also other levels. There's also other kinds of coercion that lead women to having abortions. Financial, instability, instability in that romantic relationship where they do fear that their partner is going to leave them and they're going to be a single parent. Fearing that they're not going to be able to finish school, fear that they're going to lose their job, so on and so forth. And so whenever you look at abortion from that standpoint, coming from it as a pro-life activist and somebody not just see abortion be illegal. Like we can make abortion illegal tomorrow and it's still going to happen. Abortion bans only bring down the abortion stat somewhere between 14 and 21%. But there are other things that bring the abortion rate down. And pro-life people, I think that there is a significant portion of us that do support this. But unfortunately, we do run into the issue of the politicization of it. I am personally a progressive. I'm a leftist. I vote very progressive. I do not vote Republican because I'd only agree with Republicans whenever it comes to abortion. And then most of the time, not even then. But because abortion has become so incredibly politicized, you have majority of abortion-minded people voting Democrat in hopes that they're going to keep abortion legal. And they don't really factor in whether or not these people that are saying that they support these systematic issues like universal healthcare, paid paternity leave, things that Democrats have been saying for years that they're going to give to us but still haven't. And then you have pro-life people over here voting for legislators that are openly fighting against this. These are proven to bring abortion rates down, but these pro-life politicians are openly fighting us in trying to get these enacted to actually bring abortion rates down. And so you have a lot of pro-life people like me who are sitting here in the middle saying, we want to actually have comprehensive solutions to helping people so that they don't feel the need to get an abortion. I mean, if you talk to post-abortive people that have had abortions for these reasons, an overwhelming amount of them will tell you, like if I had had the support that I felt like I needed, if I had this financial support, if I didn't feel like, my corporate job was going to fire me, if I didn't feel like I wasn't going to be able to finish school unless I had an abortion, if I had that support, I wouldn't have had my abortion. And so for me, the issue is not just, I mean, I prefer to argue on the ethics of it, like regardless of what's happening in legislator, legislation, abortion is still wrong. It is still taking the life of a human being. But as far as the conversation around the legal aspect goes, we need to get, we need to get pro-life people fired up and we need to meet on common ground with people who support abortion and be like, I know that we disagree on this issue, but let's come together and unite together to push paid paternity leave. Let's let people be home with their kids, you know, universal healthcare so that people are not worried about, I've had conversations with women, especially women below the poverty line, immigrant women that, you know, I'll wrap up, I'll wrap up, Jayce, that they haven't even had access to maternity care from a doctor, they're eight months pregnant, they haven't seen a doctor throughout their entire pregnancy because they don't have health insurance and they can't afford it. That's a big problem. You know, there are so many things that we can address on a legislative issue and in our communities and in society that you're going to see abortion levels plummet if we can actually accomplish any of these things. Okay, I have some hopefully interesting things to say about this. I mean, first up, abortion levels have been plummeting. They've actually been plummeting since 1980 and they've plummeted, I believe, 12% since 2011 or something like that. So, which is interesting, I think there is a kind of sex crisis going on. Hold on. Okay, yes. Yeah, you can rent the Lorax, yes. Okay. Such a good movie. I've never seen the Lorax. Okay. Where was I? Abortion rates have actually been plummeting. Since 1980, they've been plummeting significantly in 2011. I think there's actually a sex crisis in America in many ways. Teen pregnancy is also down. But what are the causes of that? Are we becoming more moral or are we becoming more obsessed with pornography and isolated and lonely? I think the latter is actually the cause of that. Now, when you said compulsion, you made a statement that most abortions are compelled in some way. Now, you seem to be using a very broad stroke, saying compelled that it could be, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm gonna lose my job and if I take leave, I might get fired or that could be a compulsion or my boyfriend is terrible and he's run out of me. I get all that. But I mean, I'm not trying to say this to make excuses for like not having paid parental leave or socialized medicine, which I support, but there's always going to be some exigent or some necessity in society. And the notion that we could ever really get away from some kind of outside force compelling you or not supporting you, just seems utopian. And maybe having abortion as some kind of outlet, not the first one, is a proper method in this. Remember, if we go back not too long ago, abortion was looked down, it was not spoken about, but it was looked down upon much less so than illegitimacy. So a woman was terrified not so much of having an abortion, which not something she would brag about, but she was terrified of having a bastard or being seen as a loose, fallen, La Traviata type woman. So there's always going to be some kind of social force that is affecting this. And the notion that we could, again, I support the policies you mentioned, but even with those or even with more of that or even with just full blown utopian socialism, there's always going to be this kind of crisis in life or a tragedy about life that will lead to this kind of thing. And so I don't know that what you're saying seems, it seems kind of utopian on one hand and wishy-washy on the other. The other thing I wanted to mention was the politicization. Now, I don't know you very well, but I've a very strong sense of you that you are very open-minded and sympathetic and genuine. I don't get any sinister vibes from you whatsoever. I think you are absolutely genuine and it's kind of remarkable. I think you're in a very small minority, but a good minority being of progressives who are pro-life. It's very interesting and you're authentic. However, the abortion cause has benefited tremendously from politicization. And let's go back to 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. The Southern Baptist Convention, the most conservative Southern fried organization there is supported Roe v. Wade publicly. Major evangelicals like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham were pro-choice in the seventies. They were actually kind of talked into it by this burgeoning pro-life movement with, I guess, Francis Schaefer being most famous. By the, once the eighties started to roll around, you had the Jerry Falwell types into the scene and they were just full guns going, blazing here on the pro-life cause. You had the creation of the religious right through a number of figures. I'm forgetting their names at the moment, but they were political figures. They were Christians. They were political figures. They Catholics mostly and they picked up on this. And sooner or later by the 1980s, the Protestant Republican Southern voting base, the red states were pro-life. George Herbert Walker Bush, his father, Prescott Bush was actually like on the board of Planned Parenthood or something like this. George Herbert Walker Bush was pro-choice for a long time. He reluctantly flipped in the 1980s as vice president because he just had to bow to political consensus. Very much like politicians now, Lindsey Graham is claiming, I'm a Trumpian populist or whatever. It's just because he has to. And so what I would say is that the abortion cause, the reason why it is so salient and powerful and divisive and poisonous in many ways is actually because of politicization, because it's been used as this wedge issue or litmus test issue. We actually wouldn't be talking about it as much without that politicization. So you might need to, I guess, give the devil his due here on some level in the sense as a genuine pro-life activist, which surely you are, that the politicization has actually made this a more salient cause. So to address what you said at the beginning, yes, it does seem almost utopian in a sense to believe that we as a society, especially if you look at American society today, that we're ever going to be able to get to a point where we have all of the necessary safety nets in place to where a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, she sees that positive pregnancy test and it's like, no big deal. My life is not going to change in any way. A child is always going to be a monumental change to your life, no matter how well off you are, no matter how bad off you are, no matter what you have going on in your life. I am very much not a person that makes the argument like if you don't want to have a baby, then you need to keep your legs closed. But statistics do show that whenever they do, the society does not have the safety net of abortion, unplanned pregnancies do go down. So people are less likely to take that risk if they do not believe that they have a safety net to catch them, which abortion is unfortunately seen as a safety net for a lot of people. We have, you know, this is, I mean, Roe v. Wade is, you know, if only 50 years old, but this is something that has happened, you can trace it back all the way to the 60s in the sexual revolution. You're looking at decades upon decades of the normalization and just ingraining abortion as part of our society. And so there's no like one fast trick solution. We could outlaw abortion and have all of these safety nets in place tomorrow just with a flip up a switch. And you're still going to have women that are genuinely terrified for themselves, for their health, for their safety, for their futures, because this is something that has been ingrained in their brains since elementary school. The abortion industry has worked incredibly hard and paid a lot of money and put a lot of time into garnering the support that they have. So whenever we talk about ridding our society of abortion, first of all, it doesn't even begin to start with the legal aspect of it because the legal aspect is such a small portion of the abortion that we need to be out in our communities actually creating a culture that values life. And that doesn't even end with a start or end with abortion. There's so many things that we do as a society that are negligent to other human beings. Look at our homeless population. You know, we do, we live, American society does not value the human being as an individual. And so like in having discussions about how we are to move away from a culture that is so centered around abortion, it is, it's a very, very long and uphill battle because not only do you have to undo legislation, you have to undo the level of indoctrination and how deeply ingrained abortion is in our society. Now, as far as the legal, like the politicization of abortion. Let me jump in before we talk about politicization. So why do you think abortion is declining so significantly? I do believe that you do have a valid argument in the reality that, you know, we have become a very, very closed off society. Most of our interactions happen through a screen nowadays. And that's only gotten 10 times worse with COVID. And so we are not having day-to-day interactions with people. People are less engaged with each other. And, but I also do think that, you know, as we look at the progression of society, you know, birth control is more easily accessible. More women are having access to permanent sterilization. We are normalizing physical activities for men. You know, these policies that we're talking about, they are slowly being implemented. My argument on that aspect would be that they're just not being implemented fast enough. And it really doesn't make sense for politicians that claim to want to bring abortion rates down to be actively fighting against them. So you're not one of these Catholics who's against contraception? No, I am all for contraception. Let's have more contraception, better contraception. Let's be handing out conversations for free, like at your local clinic. I want as many people to have access to contraception, and I want it to be as safe as possible. I want to normalize men having vasectomies. I want to normalize doctors giving women sterilization because a lot of the time women go in for sterilization and a doctor won't do it unless their husband signs off on it. You know, there are a lot of things that we need to be doing as a society to help in that aspect as well. But back to what you were saying about the politicization, it is kind of a double-edged sword because yes, we probably would not be having the conversations that are happening right now without it being so politicized. The problem is, is that now we have a very, very clear cut divide. If you're pro-life, you're Republican. If you're pro-choice, you're a Democrat. And there is somebody that is both a progressive and pro-life, you know, people find out about that and they're just like, that's not a thing that exists. You can't do that. And the reality is that, yeah, you can because this isn't a political issue. It's been politicized to the point where if you want to run as a, we solved this with Donald Trump. If you want to run as a Republican, all you got to do is get a few key talking points from pro-life activism, spew them out on the debate stage and you have the pro-life movement for the most part, eating out of the palm of your hand. The Democrats have done the exact same thing with abortion access for pro-choice voters. And at the end of the day, you know, the elections happen, everybody is in their elected office. And then here we are sitting with absolutely nothing being accomplished for either side in regards to the abortion debate until the next election cycle comes around. And then all of a sudden abortion is a hot talking point and people want to run on that hot talking point and do absolutely nothing. And it's not just about creating policy. You know, we see it whenever we see these, these anti-abortion bills that do not represent at all what pro-life activists are trying to do. Take Louisiana for example, you know, they're talking about giving women the death penalty and pro-lifers are like, no, like you're not, you're saying that you're pro-life, but you're not even putting in the legwork to understand what that actually means and what it is that your voting base is fighting for. So there are good aspects to it being politicized, but it's gotten so politicized to a point where it's actually become a detriment to both sides. Okay, those are good responses. I have some new topics I could go into unless you want to moderate. Okay, I'll jump. So this is very curious because you're a pagan leftist omnidivine kind of person. Yeah, okay. So I guess I'm more used to talking about this with maybe someone who's a traditionalist. What kind of world do you want to see? Do you have kind of a maybe a hidden traditionalist bug in you that you actually kind of do want like motherhood and childhood and things like that? Or are you kind of just like all life is, you know, all life has value and do what you want. Just, you know, which one are you? Give me a sense of- I am very much like if I could flip a switch tomorrow and have like my ideal society, it would just be like, I don't care how you live your life. Do whatever it is that you want to do as long as you are not harming other people. And I just want to have a world where we value all human beings as equal members of society. It doesn't matter what your political opinions are. It doesn't matter what your religion is. It doesn't matter what your sexual orientation is. It doesn't matter what your gender identity is. Treat all human beings the way that you want to be treated. And if you are doing that, I do not care how you are living your life. Okay. Do you think that a- Let's say that Roe v. Wade gets overturned, which that seems very likely after seeing that draft. And do you think that this will bring about a kind of trad revival in some way? Or do you think- What do you think will happen? I think that whenever you're looking at the states that already have trigger laws in place, like as soon as that motion is handed down to abortion is outright banned in these states, I think that you're going to see a lot of people trying. They're going to try to push back into that very, very 1950s bubble. And that's why, whatever this news broke, I was very, very vocal about, okay, this is what we've been working towards for 50 years. It's about to happen. Now pro-lifers, put your money where your mouth is, get out in your local community, get out in your states, and make sure that you are actually presenting yourself as pro-life, giving people support. This isn't about shoving your religious or your social ideology on other people. This is about saving lives. Now get out there and emulate that in your communities, in your states. The majority of the pro-life movement is right-wing traditional conservative. But there are many, many smaller factions within that. And I do believe that there is an ever-growing portion of even the Christian evangelical right-wing Republican pro-life movement that is, okay, we shouldn't be trying to outlaw contraceptions. People need to have access to that. This isn't about what my personal ideology is. At the end of the day, it is about saving lives, and this is how we more ethically do so. But you are going to- But aren't those people gonna win? Because they outnumber people like you. In the sense of there are many Catholics and even Protestants who do want to outlaw conception. And I mean, don't you think, because that is what the pro-life movement is, don't you think we might actually kind of be headed towards those kinds of scenarios, at least in red states? I think that officially, and I will be perfectly honest, I think that initially, whenever, this is right off the bat, like Roe v. Wade's been overturned, these trigger laws are going into place. The tribes are going to hop on this, like this is what we've been looking for, like we need to take advantage of this moment. Unfortunately, as somebody that's been in this movement for almost nine years, I can say that the vast majority of pro-lifers are moving away from that. And thankfully it's because of the more further right wing, what we call abolitionist people that wanna put women in prison, have become so incredibly vocal in their radicalization that it's causing people that were literally more here in the middle, like I personally don't like contraception, so I'm just not gonna talk about it. They're like, no, we need to move away from this because it is actively hurting people. It's going to cause a net harm in society. And I am hopeful that once pro-lifers are seeing this in real time, like Roe v. Wade has been overturned, this is, people are trying to take advantage of that. Okay, you need to respond to it. This is no longer a national fight. We don't have to worry about the national fight right now. We've been doing that for 50 years. Now we need to move more locally and be in our communities and in our states actually emulating what the pro-life message is, which is at the end of the day, abortion is wrong because it kills a human being, and that is the end of it. It's not about religion. It's not about your personal ideology. It's about saving lives. And what saves lives and brings abortion rates down is actually being a support and a help in your state and in your community. Okay, but still, I've gotta push on this a little bit. They outnumber you by a lot. And these are people, even if abolitionists might be on the fringe, which I meant, although I don't know if they're on the fringe. I tweeted out a couple of days ago that the pro-lifers are kind of incoherent because they say that it's murder, but they don't wanna treat it as murder. They don't want to actually put a woman in prison or even to the chair or something like that with abortion. And then like a day later, Louisiana was like, we're calling your bluff. And yeah, so I don't know if they're on the fringe. To be honest, but I would say the majority of say Republican voters don't want to do that. Nevertheless, the majority of Republican voters also think that COVID relief stimulus checks are socialism. The majority of Republican voters were animated by overturning Obamacare. And whatever you wanna say about Trump, I mean, I hate the guy at this point, but in 2015, he was basically talking about national healthcare. I mean, he was saying things like, we're not gonna leave people out in the street. We're gonna take care of y'all, vague stuff like that. The moment he's in office, he's, they're high-fiving after they get rid of Obamacare, which was in itself kind of insufficient socialism, in my opinion. So these people, they seem to kind of, they don't see it like you do. The majority, not just abolitionists, but the majority of pro-lifers see it as, yeah, welfare checks are socialism, COVID checks are socialism. Don't even talk to me about yang, gang, monthly stimulus checks. No way, not here, we're not the USSR. And no, if you open your legs, you've made your choice. So it just seems like I think you are genuine. Like if a pro-life cause was gonna win, I wish your cause would win. Well, thankfully, because like the aspect, yeah, the aspect of secular pro-life activism is something that is, I mean, it is relatively new. Secular pro-life activists have always existed, but as far as being an established group, like we purely argue from a purely secular standpoint, you know, our leaders, our membership are not associated with religion in any way is a vastly growing sector of the pro-life movement. I mean, you have two million registered pro-life Democrats as was the last poll in like 2017. I mean, whenever, I know that the super-trad people that are like, you know, birth control is an abortifation and we need to be, you know, monitoring, we need to get rid of IVF, we need to get rid of all of these things, they are consistently and steadily year after year after year getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And that is a regular trend that has been increasing just one year after another. It was kind of revived a little bit under Trump. You know, there was a sector of the pro-life movement that really, really got engaged in the political side of pro-life activism under Donald Trump, but now that that is even kind of fading out, you did see, we did see a lot of more moderate Republicans being like, there is an argument to be made here about universal healthcare or at least having a better healthcare system that's more accessible. Obviously we should not be outright banning contraceptives. Maybe we talk about having better options of contraceptives or normalizing more research into contraceptives because, you know, female birth control is not something that is regularly enhanced on even though it has horrible side effects for women. These are things that we are actively seeing people abandon. Now, granted, the abolitionist movement is gaining traction. Unfortunately, they are becoming more vocal as they become more radicalized and it's something like overturning Roe v. Wade is going to cause them to become more vocal and more radicalized because they have their own agenda to push, but thankfully, the more moderate pro-life movement, the people that are genuinely out here, they wanna save lives, they wanna protect women is an ever-growing faction and they are more than ever prepared to fight back against these policies. They are becoming more vocal about even politicians that they like being like, this is not what we stand for and you need to stop pushing this because you are actually going to get women killed. We had a video that was going around on social media the other day. I believe it was out of Oklahoma whenever they were talking about the pro-life bill that they just passed in Oklahoma. It has protections very, very specifically laid out in cases that women have ectopic pregnancies and this is something that pro-life activists were very, very active in whenever pro-life bills were coming out of all separate states, like you need to make sure that you are outlining this very, very clearly so that women can get access to this care. But you had a sitting congressman talking about like, I don't understand why this is in here. Ectopic pregnancies, they're still human beings. Why are we not protecting them? And it's like, this is what you need to understand. Like you need to have the understanding about what it is that you are legislating because you're going to get women killed. And we are seeing a very, very significant pushback from pro-lifers across the political spectrum, across all religions being like, no, this is very, very cut and dry, clear. People need access to contraceptives because it brings the unplanned pregnancy rate down which brings the abortion rate down. People need access to better healthcare. And we are seeing a political shift in pro-life activism, specifically towards a more progressive ideology surrounding these issues specifically because it brings abortion rates down. Okay. Let me ask a couple of other questions. So I want to probe a little bit on the religious angle. So the, we now associate Christians with the pro-life movement, but if you do go back to the 1970s, it was actually a little more complicated than that. Protestants were generally pro-choice, but didn't want to talk about it. Due to a lot of Catholic leadership of the religious right, they got these Protestant voting base hot and bothered about the abortion issue and ready to vote Republican no matter what and no matter who. And including Donald Trump, who's probably caused hundreds of abortions personally and paid for them. Just an allegation, but I think I'm right. So it's a weird thing, but it is a deeply, it's a deeply Catholic issue specifically, but it does seem to me a kind of Christian issue, maybe even a Jewish issue as well. Because do you think, and I would like you to flesh out a little bit of your own religious commitments and so on, but the ancient pagans did not have any problem, any moral issue whatsoever with exposure. That was basically, if a child was sickly or deformed, it was thrown out to the wild and it was seen as a kind of public health measure of sorts. I mean, it's extremely cruel when we talk about it now, but it was a reality, certainly in Roman times. There were actually were early Christians that were denouncing the practice. By the 15th century, you had popes almost becoming pro-life or kind of proto-pro-life in certain ways. But do you think it does, that notion of everyone's a human being and thus, regardless, this human being deserves to live, don't you think that does, would we think like this without Genesis one? God goes something to the effect that God created man and woman in his image and his image, he created them. In the sense that the human being is a kind of icon of Elohim and thus has a, I wouldn't say divine status, but is a kind of image of God, a child of God in that sense. And that, you know, that was actually a moral revolution, a kind of egalitarian moral revolution promoted by the Pentateuch. And that we, it kind of, I guess what I'm getting at is, if you follow me, do you think this actually is a deeply Jewish and Christian cause at its heart and that an actual pagan would, you know, an actual pagan, at least in the ancient world, he's not bloodthirsty or sadistic, but he wouldn't have a problem with exposing a deformed or mentally retarded child. I wouldn't argue that the pro-life cause is rooted in any particular region. If you go back to the, you know, the 1960s, whenever the pro-life movement was actually established, you had people from all walks of religion and the most radical, more progressive leaning ones were actually the Catholic factor of the very, very early pro-life cause. And you also had atheists and secularists that were, were tagging onto this. And as who, I wasn't Christopher Hitchens, a bit of a pro-life progressive. Little bit, I mean, like you have, you know, you have so many different factors of pro-life activism and so many people that want to take credit. Like we started, you know, we started the pro-life movement, but in reality, whenever abortion was, the conversation was starting in the United States of normalizing abortion and making it legal on a national level, there were people from all walks of life, all religion belief systems that were like, no, this cannot happen, this is not right. I've got to press you, I've got to press you on this. Is that true? Because like Francis Shaper and he was evangelical. I mean, a major evangelical Christian. So I mean, is that true that secular atheist were pro-life? Yes, yes, even back as early as the 1960s, I can actually send you a link. I can't because I'm streaming from my phone right now because my computer is broken, but I will send it in, I will send it to you on Twitter once we've concluded. Because yes, even back at the very, very beginning in the late 1950s into early 1960s, whenever we started having these conversations in the United States of like the very, very severe and sincere push to not just make it legal and make it legal on a national level, but to normalize it as just being a normal part of life. People from Catholic Christian, and there are several different factors of Christianity as well from all different factors of Christianity, secularists, atheists, coming together on the common ground that abortion is wrong because it takes the life of a human being. Now, as we moved into the 60s and 70s with the sexual revolution, you did see somewhat of a divide there because obviously more evangelical Christian people were pushing back into traditionalism. They fought actively against the sexual revolution, not just because of abortion, but because they didn't believe in sexual promiscuity. And then into the 1970s, you had extremely radical pro-lifers coming onto the scene with things like operation rescue, random tarry, clinic invasions, mass arrests, mass protests that really turned a lot of more progressive and secular people away from pro-life activism. And then whenever it started to become a little bit more deradicalized into the late 90s and into the 2000s, you did see small sectors of more secular people coming back, but throughout the 2000s all the way up into the Obama era, it was largely a Christian Catholic religious right-wing ideology. Like I said, pro-life secularism, pro-life atheist groups, more progressive left-leaning pro-life organizations are relatively a new thing. And it had been so long since we saw characters like this in pro-life activism that people were kind of like, what is this? Like you're pro-life, but you're an atheist, you're pro-life, but you're left-leaning. Like they didn't really understand it. And it took a while for these groups to become incredibly established in pro-life activism, but now they're just another large factor of the anti-abortion movement. We have entire organizations dedicated to being pro-life and being a Democrat, being pro-life and being an atheist, being pro-life and being left-leaning. And so there's this ever-growing faction of people and whenever people learn this is a thing that exists and are more educated on it, I think that there are a lot of people that are more moderate, a little more left-leaning. They are to the left of center, like that they have no place in pro-life activism because it had been so polarized for so long, but we are actively trying to break that down. And you also have to keep in mind that within religion itself, you are seeing a shift and a divide between like even with Christians and Catholics. You have right-wing Christians and Catholics, but you also have an ever-growing movement of progressive Christians and Catholics that are even pro-choice and they support very, very left-leaning policy, but they are still members of these religions. Okay. Oh, now as a pagan, are you made in the image of God? No. Okay, good. So don't you feel a little bit of a conflict there? Because you do need, I mean, granted, I'm kind of a Schmittian. I think that all politics is secularized religion on some level. So do you, what is the theological basis for human rights? Yeah, I get that question a lot. I kind of come at it from, I think that there are flaws in humanist ideology. As a pagan, there is no clear-cut set idea in paganism, like this is how the world started and this is what happens to you after death. But, you know, none of us are really... Oh, the kind of is actually, I mean... A little bit. I mean, it depends, but it also depends, like there are different factors of paganism in different deities with paganism. So there are so many different routes that you can take. If I'm being completely upfront, I am actually a survivor of extreme religious trauma in the Evangelical Christian Church and I actually am a huge advocate for other survivors of religious trauma. So I went through a very, very long spiritual journey myself before I found paganism. I studied a lot of different religions. And mainly I come to my ideology. I found a lot of comfort in pagan ideas. And I'm also a practicing witch. So they kind of go hand in hand with each other a lot. But for me, it's somebody that harshly rejects that idea for myself personally. I really come to the conclusion of, you know, if all, if human life is valuable, then all human life is valuable. And if it's not valuable and if we do not have the inalienable right to life, then everything becomes subjective. And society falls apart and our communication with each other as other human beings falls apart. I very much strive to live out a very consistent ethical life ideology with that. It doesn't just end or start with abortion. And I do believe that people can have a very consistent ideology in regards to rejecting the idea that we can draw lines and barriers of this. It's okay to kill a human being at this stage, but it's not okay to kill a human being at this stage. But do you think the Roman Empire suffered from like chaos, you know, in this sense? Or even, I mean, I could put it, I mean, I could put it another way. I mean, child mortality used to be very high. One of the reasons why, one of the things I think the pro-life movement has going for it are one ultrasounds. And the second actually is the just amazing decline of child mortality. So child mortality up to the industrial revolution, say the mid 19th century or so was something like 50%. And it actually really affected the way that we interacted with children because you might not be with him or her very long. And so there wasn't actually as much of the intense bonding that we now were kind of obsessed about childhood. We got to get people into preschool, like, you know, waiting lists. That was not on the radar when your child very well might die before it reaches teenage years due to all sorts of causes. But those societies kind of lived with that tragedy and were not chaotic. And certainly Roman societies would expose children, you know, of all the criticisms you can make of Rome, them being, you know, libertine or, you know, out of control or whatever, it's not one of them. It is a extremely regimented martial society. So what do you think about that? Well, I'm by no means an expert on, you know, the Roman Empire, but, you know, if just from history as somebody that grew up, you know, learning about the Roman Empire from a, you know, evangelical Christian standpoint, I mean, it was far for perfect. You did see, you know, mass genocide, you know, the Roman Empire was responsible for killing, killing pagans, the pagans killed the Christians. The, you know, under- They didn't kill pagans. What are you, these slanderous accusations? They don't take good Christians. And, you know, like, you know, under, under Evernero, you know, you have the, the Colosseum and what happened to Christians in, in that arena. You know, it's, it's definitely far from perfect. And I think that if, if we're going to compare, you know, ancient civilizations to current civilizations, I would like to think that as human beings, we have evolved more than where we were back during the Roman Empire. We do have more clear-cut ideas of how we engage as a society. I mean, we do have laws against murdering people. We draw these very, very arbitrary lines. You're like, oh, well, I guess it's okay to kill a person here, but not here. And for me, it's just like, for me, I guess because I try to be as consistent as possible in my ideology, for me, it all stems from human beings or human beings. From the moment they become human beings, which is fertilization, and they are human beings all the way up until their natural death and their, their life should be their own and protected from other people taking it. Okay. Let me just throw out the demographic question. And it is kind of a eugenic question to be brutally frank. So Margaret Sanger was an interesting American. Now, she was promoting contraception and not abortion, but she is a founding mother of the pro-choice movement of Planned Parenthood, et cetera. She made it very clear in correspondence and in some public pronouncements that there was a kind of demographic or eugenic quality to the pro-choice movement. I'm sure you know about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who's a major Supreme Court justice who justified, wrote the opinion on a matter that gave us the phrase, what it was at three generations of morons is enough and so on. So there was a sense in the first half of the 20th century that abortion had a kind of eugenic quality to it in the sense that it were contraception in that matter, were sterilization, that it was, you know, a lot of people, you know, again, since I've been talking with you for an hour or 15 or so, you strike me as a very thoughtful person, someone who's thinks through things. I think that you would absolutely care for a child in the best way possible. But let's just be honest here. There are a lot of people who aren't as sympathetic as you are and that they don't care about their children and they're on drugs and getting their kids on drugs and teaching their children really terrible things. And part of that kind of lack of intelligence and lack of foresight is a kind of libertine attitude towards sex and reproduction. It's just kind of like, well, it happened, whatever. And I could also talk about the nastiness. I think, you know, again, this is a small percentage of women who have abortion, but there is a kind of almost nasty quality that, you know, like much like you feel a certain revulsion towards abolitionists, you know, when I see some of women bragging about abortion on Instagram, it's just like, you know, this is really not good. This makes you seem like a stereotypical witch, not the fair-minded witch that you surely are. But so do you want those children, do you want someone who just, you know, doesn't give a shit to be frank or someone who's really nasty? Is an abortion, you know, to quote Hamlet, it's to be cruel only to be kind. It probably does help out society in kind of limiting the reproduction of people like that. And I know it's tough to talk about it, but maybe we should. And even the liberals who, like Elizabeth Warren, I saw she had this viral video where she was just, you know, hot and bothered. And she was saying, you know, most of the women who seek abortion are, you know, impoverished or in need. And we have all these, you know, people of color and immigrants that, you know, wasn't that an almost kind of like flip side of Margaret Sanger? I mean, if you just rearrange the words but use the same words, you could see Margaret Sanger saying that and saying, basically, we want to limit the reproductive capacity of people who have lower intelligence to be brutally frank. So I know it's tough to talk about and I don't want to get this into some kind of, you know, acrimonious argument, but what do you think about that? Okay, I think you've made like, I could pick out like three different arguments here. First, I wanted to address the nastiness because this is something that I argue with other pro-life people about a lot. As someone who has had very, very intimate and emotional conversations with women who have been like this, I am always strongly urging pro-life people to be extremely cautious in how they combat those conversations, that rhetoric and how they respond to like these viral videos of women, you know, shout your abortion and so on and so forth. Whenever you talk to post-aborded women and there are a lot of post-aborded women who are actually pro-life activists and they are incredible activists because they have a deep understanding of specifically this issue. This is a very, very common trauma response that women will exude whenever they are post-aborded. For a lot, like, I'm not gonna say that it's for every single one of them, but there's no way of knowing which ones are and which ones aren't. So I always approach these women with every ounce of empathy and compassion that I can under the assumption that she is lashing out at me as someone who is pro-life because she is dealing with the emotions that often come with being post-aborded. I have a great friend, her name is Albany Rose, she is an incredible pro-life activist and she is post-aborded and she's like, I was like this for years. I said these horrible things to pro-life people to invoke an emotional response and get them angry because it placated the feelings that I was having inside. And so I don't look at these women and think of like, I'm glad that they're at least not reproducing because what a horrible person. I see these women as being incredibly hurt and beat down by a society that has essentially lied to them and told them that this is what you need in order to be equal instead of actually stepping up as a society and being there for her and being in aid for her and giving her the support that she needs. In regards to limiting people from reproducing that treat their kids terribly as somebody that has worked with trying to reform the foster care system that is incredibly broken and has worked with abused children is something that is so incredibly, it's hard. It's hard to say that, to turn around and say that I want to overturn a ruling that is going to cause more children to be abused, more children to go into the foster care system. But I'm also not gonna be a person that sits here and says that because you were born into less than ideal circumstances or you would have been born into less than ideal circumstances because you were going to be abused because you were going to have a hard life, I have deemed that your life is not worth living and therefore I support the idea of aborting you before you have the chance to live that life and grow and move away from that abuse and array from that poverty and make a better life for yourself. I was somebody that was born into an abusive household that was born into an impoverished household. I would not have one in my mother to make the decision for me because here I am at 27, I am happily married, I have two kids of my own and I am firmly of the belief that my life was always mine to have that it was never somebody else's to take from me. So in regards to, let's limit the population so that these people aren't going to have these hard and trying times, I will always circle back to, yes, it is horrible that children are put in these situations and we need to be doing so much more to, and here comes mine, we need to be doing so much more to support that we need to reform the foster care system, we need to be giving parents assistance that they need in order to combat the hardships that they're facing and give them the support that they need to go on and make a better life. But I think in talking about this specific argument, I think that it is an argument about breaking the cycle that we have seen in society for so long. Okay. Oh, that's right. Two seconds. Yeah, why don't you... We might have a good opportunity here to jump into the Q and A if you guys are ready. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. You betcha. Wanna say, folks, our guests are linked in the description and also wanna say that includes the podcast. We do have a podcast which is growing quickly and we're excited to see that as a lot of people have found that useful. So if you like listening to debates like these, you can find us on every major podcast app. And as I mentioned, our guests are linked in the description there as well. This one coming in from, do appreciate this first question from Sunflower says, Richard, as a pro-choice, let's see. Nationalist, doesn't that make you a eugenicist? Isn't eugenics bad? Well, yeah, I don't think eugenics is bad in itself. I think it's been stereotyped as something that is completely inhumane when we all practice eugenics in our life all the time. Every parent wants their child to meet a good-looking intelligent, well-to-do husband or wife. And we like, we resonate with people who are beautiful and intelligent and healthy and so on. We're all eugenicists at heart. So I don't think eugenics in that sense is a bad thing. Now, I would say that I kind of, I guess I agree with Bill Clinton of abortion should be safe, legal and rare. I don't think that abortion is some kind of ideal form of a prophylactic or contraception or eugenics or anything like that. I mean, I recognize what it is and I think there are just much better ways of engaging in an overall eugenic agenda than abortion. It should be a kind of last resort, but I absolutely don't want to make it illegal. And I think there's a kind of tragedy to it. In some cases, I think in some cases it's not as tragic so much as it is a rational decision. As I said, I think the statistic, I can go check on it is 14% of abortions are performed by married women and then 30 are performed by women who are cohabitating. So this strikes me as a large percentage of abortions are engaged as a cruel to be kind measure about a child that is defective and deformed, et cetera. And that just is what it is. It's not something I really want to talk about, but it's something that most Americans are okay with. And if you judge them by their actions and not by their rhetoric, even people who might identify with being pro-life might be okay with it. And it's a little bit rarer in the United States, but in Europe, in Northern Europe, it is all but universal. So yeah, so I do think that abortion, yeah, it's a terrible, but necessity. I would describe it kind of as a tragedy. It's probably the best way. You got it, Anne. This one coming in from Joe Schwartz. Says for both, do you think a compromise can ever be made from both sides on abortion in America? And if not, what's the single biggest factor that prevents that? No, I don't think that there's going to be any compromising being made. And I think that the biggest issue with that is the politicization of it. It's always going to be a political talking point because people have realized that they can run and win elections on that issue. Yeah, I don't think it is even gonna be over at this point because there was, in Samuel Alito's dismissive, he said, because this was decided by the courts, that's why we're all up in arms about abortion and we're debating it endlessly. I think that's very euphemistic. I do think that this draft does mean that the Roe v. Wade will be overturned. This has been a long-term project of the conservative movement at large. I mean, they've had the patience of a James Bond villain in accomplishing overturning Roe v. Wade. I mean, they've taken half a century and they've done it and they've even effectively lied to the Senate in confirmation hearings. Judge Bork famously was just open about wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade. No other Supreme Court justice after him, including Thomas, Alito, Roberts, et cetera, they would always just kind of beat around the bush or tap dance a bit and they got through their nomination process. So they were engaging in like platonic lying, so to speak, in order to do this. They have done it, but I don't think it's gonna be over. I think they're gonna be extreme, acrimonious debates ongoing for the rest of our lives. I think because of the politicization, I absolutely agree with that. But also just because of the ethical impasse that you reached, it's kind of interesting. I think of myself as a rational person, but studying German idealism and philosophy, I think reason needs to be put into its limits. Reason does have contradictions. And philosophy understood this actually from the very beginning of philosophy, from Zeno on. We've understood that using pure rationality leads to paradoxes. So this issue, if you are a liberal and you're making an ethical, rational argument for your cause, you will ultimately reach this impasse. You cannot resolve it. So yeah, I think this is going to be a massively disputed argument for the rest of my life. You got it. And this one from Duchess of Clutchess says, for Kay, if we are aware that a baby has down syndrome, I do not see the point of bringing it into the world. Don't you see or they say, don't you think it is the case that not all human life is worthwhile? I would urge this person to go and actually have a meaningful interaction with a person with down syndrome. Their life is absolutely worth living. They are some of the most beautiful and wonderful people to ever walk this planet. And no, I harshly reject the idea that they are less human or less worthy of life simply because they have down syndrome. Down syndrome people live incredibly full and happy lives. You got this one from Mango Tea says, Richard, is there any truth to the idea that you prefer abortion being accessible because it happens at disproportionate rates among different people groups? Well, abortion is to a large extent a class issue. I think the statistic here, there's an interesting article from the New York Times published in 2021 on just these stats that they're getting from Planned Parenthood and the CDC. Yes, I believe 27% of abortions are to black mothers and actually, so they are strongly overrepresented. 10% are to white mothers. So whites are underrepresented in this. But I have also, I've laid my cards on the table in terms of the, I would say it's more of an issue of intelligence and personality profile, more than anything, more than say race. But to the degree that those crossover, yes, you could say that that's a factor, but it's more about, again, I really do appreciate Kay's perspective because there is no question in my mind that she's absolutely authentic. But the idea that we're really going to solve these problems, even if we had a much more active welfare state or socialism or things like that, that we're going to solve just the problems of human nastiness, which is largely genetic and low intelligence. We just have to be honest about these things. And sometimes it is best to be cruel only to be kind. This one coming in from Yehuda Finkelstein says, Richard, ah. Now he's a long time, he's my biggest fan, yes. Even though he disagrees with me all the time, he remains my biggest man, remarkable. They say, Richard, do you want natal policies like Iceland, where genetic counseling is widespread and Down syndrome has been basically eliminated? Yes. And I would want pro-natal qualities. I've joked about this, that we should outlaw contraception, but not abortion. And my reasoning is that, if you are intelligent enough to use contraception, that means that you should be having children. And abortion is, it is, it's a post facto last resort for anyone, no one. I don't think outside of a very, very few, no one really wants to have an abortion, you just have to do it by necessity. Whereas using contraception involves foresight and intelligence and planning and seriousness. So those are exactly the type of people who should be having children. So yes, I would promote widespread genetic counseling. And also I would go up to promoting, subsidizing highly intelligent people, subsidizing physically attractive people. Your physical attractiveness correlates with intelligence and all sorts of good personality traits. I would absolutely be totally in favor of that. You got it. And this one coming in from Dan Scheyer says, are governments obligated to legislate out of society things it deems unethical? If yes, is that universally true? If no, what makes abortion worthy of legislation versus other unethical activities? I think that's probably for UK. For me, yeah. I identified as a libertarian for a really, really long time and even then I was still of the opinion that if the government has any purpose whatsoever, it should be to protect humans from being systemically killed. So whatever, we're discussing the issue of abortion and whether or not it's worth the government stepping in on. I mean, human beings are being killed on massive levels. 2,363 humans every single day to be exact. So yes, I do support the idea that a government should be stepping in to at least regulate this to some measure. You got it, Anne-Lisey. Anne, thanks for your super sticker support as well as Quani Upstate says to both people, at what point do you think a baby becomes a baby with rights as opposed to a collection of cells without rights? Well, I'm pro-life from the moment of fertilization. So at the moment of fertilization, whether or not they become a baby is subjective because baby is not a scientific term, but whether or not they are a human being that I believe is alive and worthy of life starts for me at the moment of fertilization. You got it. I really get the notion of life begins a conception. I mean, I think that is the most kind of rational thing when this firm hits the egg. There is some kind of life form. I really do understand that. But at the end of the day, your rights do, and this is where I would really kind of strongly disagree with Kay from a philosophical, you could say religious perspective. You have rights due to the fact that you are part of a community. You don't have rights due to the fact that you are merely a human being. So I ultimately don't have rights if I went to the Congo just on my own and said, oh, well, you know, you've got to respect this and that, I went due process here. I don't have the right to do that. I only have the right to do that in my country because I'd be citizen. And so rights are political, they are not moral. So I would strongly, I think that's just a place where we have a just foundational disagreement. That's of course, okay. So no, you have a right once in a way, you have a birth certificate once you are acknowledged by the state. So I'm sure I'm just, this is driving former libertarian Kay crazy saying this, but yes. You got it. And Mr. Monster says three questions. Should a woman be allowed to get an abortion if she is at risk of losing her life? Also, what trimester does life begin? That was basically what was just asked. And can a fetus suffer? Well, so we'll go with the first one. Namely, should a woman be allowed to get an abortion if she's at risk of losing her life? This is something that is widely contested across pro-lifers as far as personal opinion goes. But what is important to note is if you look at every pro-life legislation that has passed into law thus far in the United States, there are very, very specific drawn out legal protections for women to have these procedures whenever it is necessary. Now, there was a statement released by a large group of pro-life OBGYNs a number of years ago to say that there is no, at no point, there is no issue that takes place during pregnancy to where abortion is absolutely medically necessary to save a woman's life. But for the safety of women in these situations, pro-life legislation is drafted in a very specific way to allow for procedures to happen so that in these situations, if a doctor deemed it necessary to terminate the pregnancy, they could. Gotcha, and then they ask, can a fetus suffer? Oh, yeah. That is also something that is widely contested. As of right now, I believe that the scientific consensus on whether or not a fetus can feel pain is in the 20 to 21 week mark. There have been new studies to come out to suggest that they can feel pain as early as 12 weeks, and more research does need to be done into that. But yes, a fetus can absolutely suffer. It's just a matter of scientific debate and learning more about fetal and embryonic development to determine exactly whenever that begins. I would say this, I don't dispute those scientific studies about feeling pain. I would say that I would make a distinction between pain and suffering. I do think that suffering implies a kind of self-consciousness and awareness in the sense that an animal can feel pain, I mean, even a multi-cellular or single-cell organism can kind of learn and kind of adjust and so on. But it's really we humans who have language and consciousness that who can suffer. So again, these are some of these fine distinctions that I think are actually important. You got it, and this one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Ms. Mortician 1986 says to Richard, while I vehemently disagree with most of your views, you didn't deserve to be sucker punched, and I'm glad to see you expressing some rational, sensible ideas, more recently on various debate platforms. Okay, thank you. I also agree that I should not have been attacked by anti-faw radicals, yes. This one from... But, you know. Ray Cossack. Would I be the man I am if I didn't suffer a little bit? This one's from Ray Cosby who says, Kay, if most people would save a woman over an embryo and a moral dilemma, doesn't that mean they are not equally valuable? No, not in any way, shape or form. It just, this really comes down to human interaction, human emotion, everybody, each human is going to respond differently. This is essentially the whole burning IVF clinic. You know, there's a burning IVF clinic on fire, you've got a tube full of fertilized eggs and you've got a five-year-old, which one are you saving? The 20,000 embryos or the one five-year-old? Well, it's just going to be human nature and human instinct because you can make an emotional connection with that five-year-old that you're going to choose the five-year-old. Does it mean that the 20,000 lives that were sitting in that container didn't matter? It's just that you as a human being because you have human emotion made the emotional connection with the five-year-old and made a split-second decision to save them. You got it, Dan. Should we dismiss human nature? I'll just jump in on these. They're kind of philosophical questions, but I think your audience will appreciate it. Should we just dismiss that as human nature or should we actually say that that reveals something? Because I guess from my perspective, you can really get lost in just pure rationality. I mean, for instance, like Kant thought that morality did have to be just purely rational and you had to do on to others as you would like them to do on to you. To do an action that could be universally universalized. Let's just put it that way. And so thus, if you are hiding a political prisoner in your basement and the police come to talk to you, you cannot lie about him. So when you see that kind of, that injunction that you find in pure rationality, doesn't that lead you to believe that rationality should kind of be put into its place? That actually human nature reveals more? Like the fact that as you admit it, and I don't think anyone would disagree if there were a burning clinic of cells and a five year old kid, and you could only save one, every single person's gonna save them. Now you could just dismiss that as human nature impulse, but isn't our impulse and human nature deeply intelligent? It's evolved over millions of years to think this way. We would not have survived without that evolution. So can't we learn something from that, in fact? I don't disagree with you that there is, I think that the complete dismissal of human nature for rationale and saying that rationale always has to win out. It harshly rejects the fact that we are human beings. We have emotions. We have irrational thoughts and feelings. But like this scenario could be turned around and be like you have a five year old and you have an 80 year old, which one are you saving? That's going to come down to more, yeah, that's going to come down to more subjective, people are going to make split second decisions based on their own rationale. And rationale personally is a level of subjectivity. And so I don't think that we should be like, oh, it's irrational and therefore, it's automatically wrong or we need to harshly reject it. Like we are humans, we're not robots. And that's where more nuance into this conversation needs to happen. And unfortunately, we don't have it currently in the abortion debate. You got it. This one coming in from, do appreciate your questioner. Question Jupiter Darman says, as a pro-choicer, Kay's pro-life argument is the only one worth listening to. Might disagree with the conclusion, but I love the consistent reasoning. Got a fan out there Kay. Yeah, I agree. Yay. This one coming in from Joel Schwartz says, for both, do each of you have a favorite video game? I'm not much of a gamer. I wasn't really allowed to play video games growing up, but I do play Minecraft every once in a while with my husband, and I very thoroughly enjoy it. It helps my ADHD brain. I really like playing on chess.com. So my favorite video game is just chess I'm addicted. I have been for years. All right. And then Peter Taft, and yeah, we do have just a few more questions. And then so folks, please don't know more questions. We've got to wrap up pretty quick here. This one coming in from Peter Taft. So should a secular pro-life view take race into account? Not taking race into account seems like a de-radicalizing tactic. The pro-white movement has revitalized pro-life movement currently, in my opinion, thoughts? I'm not sure if I fully understand the question of whether or not secular pro-lifers should take race into account. I don't believe that race is really a factor in arguing against abortion. I don't believe that anybody of any race should be having abortions. So I don't know how the idea of race factors into being anti-abortion in any way, much less being a secular anti-abortionist. Gotcha. Thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from, do appreciate it. Mango T says, let's see. Richard, do you just want to reignite the Roman Empire? And let's see. Yep. Gotcha. This one coming in from the crawdaddy029 says, let's see. They say, pro-lifers sound immoral to me. They say, quote, I don't care about your consent as long as that person gets to use your body for their benefit, unquote. Kay, is there any truth to this? No, I mean, I think that there are people that claim to be pro-life that would argue this, but it is not a rejection of, I don't care that you don't want this. You're going to do it because I want you to. It is definitely not a place that I argue from. It's not a place that majority of pro-lifers argue from. Like I said, at the very, very beginning of this, it is somewhat a conflicting of rights. You have a woman that does not want to be pregnant and they feed us that has the right to not be killed. It is very, very, very important coming from a pro-life perspective that you take into account and have as much compassionate empathy for the fact that there is a living, breathing woman that is in this situation and does not want to be. And it is a very, very complex situation and she needs to have compassionate empathy and she needs to have support. You got it. And Ben Jamin, thanks for your question. Your question, there was a duplicate question of it asked maybe about 10 minutes ago. So I'm going to jump over that one and I promise it was asked though, if you want to scroll back. And this one coming in from M says, ask Spencer if he thinks political party factioneering hurt the discussion on abortion and other issues. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a double-edged sword though because as I said about an hour ago, I don't think the abortion cause would be as salient without the politicization. And so it's a difficult thing. But yeah, I do think the politicization and polarization like the world we live in now. I mean, I'm actually very happy that this was such a fruitful and friendly discussion. But if you look at other lifestreams between the left and right or something, people don't, they think the leftist are demons, evil pedophile Satan worshipers and they think the right are clansmen and bigots and animals or what. There's no ability to have common ground where there was even in my lifetime. But the polarization is just so extreme that you can't take the other side seriously. And thus you can't think about an issue like abortion seriously because I do think abortion is a tragic issue. It's an issue we don't really like to talk about at least on a real level. We kind of like to talk about it on a vague or political level. So it's about, you know, we got a strong pro-life advocate running for office or, you know, all lives matter. Like we don't want to really talk about the nitty gritty because it is unpleasant to be honest. So yeah, it's kind of a double edged sword in that way. We're not able to have just an honest, real, maybe even raw discussion about abortion, but I think we've done something to remedy that tonight. You got it, Ann. Folks, just want to let you know, we for sure can't take any more questions. This one coming in from the crowd at E029 says, there already is a compromise. If you don't like a bore, shuns you, abortions, you don't get one. This topic makes it difficult to make a question, but that's what they say is a compromise. See, I kind of disagree with that because we live in a society. I mean, we do politics is about making decisions for other people on some level. It's about living with other people. So I don't really kind of buy that. You know, if you don't want an abortion, you don't have one. At the end of the day, what politics is, is making a decision for a group of people. Yeah, and I'll just, I'll kind of echo that. You know, I'm kind of piggybacking off of that. If as a pro-life activist, I believe that abortion takes the life of the human being. So just sitting back and being like, well, I personally believe that abortion is killing a human being, but I'm going to sit back and do nothing about it. I think that would make me a pretty terrible and apathetic person coming from the perspective that I do. You got it. And thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from Joel Schwarz says, for both, what country has the best abortion laws? Honestly, I think that Ireland had a decent system in place. I think that they fundamentally lacked education and that there were very obviously holes in it. You can see that with the Savita Halepetavar case back in, I believe it was 2016, 2017, where doctors were just ignorant as to what the law stated, and unfortunately a woman died. I think that they had a good idea going before they repealed that, but I think overall the idea behind it, they had safety in place for women that were having ectopic pregnancies. There was protection in place for women that were needing life-saving care. It just needed to be more clearly defined. You got it, Dan. I would say Northern Europe. You bet, and this one coming in from Spaces of Lies says, if people with Down syndrome should not be born, what argument can be given to say that they shouldn't be euthanized when they are already born? I think they were technically responding to a past super chat, but if either of you want to respond, you can. I agree. I mean, because we do make this decision, I mean, you know, rationally speaking, life begins at conception, I get that, but we do make distinctions as human. And in some ways, so much of our moral life is pre-rational or irrational, I would say. And yeah. You bet, and this one coming in from Tioga. Last one of the night, she snuck it in late. She says, are IVF discarded embryos throwing away human life? I love this question because I am a pro-life activist who has actually donated eggs to IVF and people cut on my case about it a lot. I am of the opinion that even in a society where abortion is no longer a legal aspect, it is no longer accessible, that there are ways that we can do IVF ethically. Fertilized eggs do not have to be discarded in the way that they are. IVF is an industry meant to make money and so they do this to the most efficient and practical way of making as much money as they possibly can. I personally donated to a clinic that actually had a kind of adoption type system where all of the unused embryos that were not implanted in the person actually receiving IVF care were then donated to a program for women that could not afford to have IVF care. They were able to adopt their children as embryos and have the opportunity to actually get pregnant through IVF. So I harshly reject the idea of IVF, don't destroy embryos. I am against that obviously as a pro-life activist but I also harshly reject the idea that if we were to get rid of abortion we would have to get rid of IVF too. You got it. I am very much against IVF. Look, even the, and I'm channeling Ed Dudden here, my friend who brought, who opened my eyes to this. But I mean, when a sperm makes its way to an egg it is a Darwinian environment. Only the strongest survive and thus the best sperm is going to survive and thus reproduce. And most 99.9% of them don't. And I think, creating this kind of synthetic birth you are allowing kind of weaker sperm to reproduce and there's going to be a greater percentage of all of these problems that we've already discussed. They're also, I mean, if you can't have children, I'm sorry but that's nature's way of telling you that you shouldn't. And you can contribute to society in all sorts of ways. You can help out with children and who need care. You can engage with society in all sorts of ways but it is really nature's way of telling you no. So I mean, again, I'm sorry. I mean, maybe I could sum up my entire position as cruel only to be kind but I am opposed to a synthetic birth in that way. I think we should always be striving not just for near human life but really the best life. You got it. And that is all we have for questions folks. I want to say thanks so much folks for your questions and thanks to our guests, Richard and Kay. It has been a true pleasure to have you. This has been, I think, a really fruitful, genuine conversation. So we really do appreciate that. I agree. Me too. I very much enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, it was very nice meeting you Kay and hopefully we could do it again on witchcraft maybe. Absolutely. For paganism. I would like to talk to you about paganism, that's interesting. Interesting to say the least. And so folks, stick around. I'll be back in just a moment giving you updates about upcoming debates. And so one last thank you to our guests. We'll be back in just a moment with that post credit show. All right. Hey folks, glad to have you here and give me one moment. I'm just adjusting the screen here. Very embarrassing. You guys, I am pumped to have you here. I want to say thanks so much for hanging out with us. If this is your first time here. If you're kind of like, hey, what's this whole modern day debate thing? Gotta tell you, we are a neutral channel hosting debates on science, religion and politics. And I'm squeezing this down just a little bit more. Almost there. All right, thanks for your patience. Here we go. I want to say thanks for your support you guys for a number of reasons. One is thank you guys for your support of modern day debate. As you guys have always supported us big time so much. And thank you guys for your support of me personally as you guys, some of you guys have heard the news that my mom passed away. So I just appreciate your guys support so much. And thank you for your support of the guest mods as I've been home in Wisconsin for the last seven weeks or so. So thank you guys for your support of CAS, Amy, Converse Contender. I just appreciate your support of them as I've obviously put family first the last seven weeks especially just to be sure that I had as much time with my mom and that I have as much time with my family. And so I want to say thanks for your support of the moderators as CAS and Amy, sometimes on short notice we're jumping in and but just at all for their help, we appreciate them. And so thank you guys for your support. But yeah, I really do. I love you guys. You guys have just been so positive and so just supportive of me personally and that means more than you know. And but yeah, thank you forward tribe. I see you there in the old live chat. Thanks for your kind words. Thanks DT for your kind words. I really do appreciate that. And thanks Rick Menelis for your kind words. Thanks James and MBD. This is a good conversation. And I'm sorry for your lost names. I appreciate that. Seriously, that really does mean more than you know. And perpetually annoyed. Thanks for your heart. And left plurome. Thanks for your heart as well. I appreciate you guys. And let's see. Let's see, Lacey and thanks for all the kisses there. Appreciate your support. And so really do you guys, it means a lot. And so you know, you guys in a way it is like a family. And as I've mentioned before, I highly encourage you. I've always said this and you know, there are some things we're all kind of like in addition to our philosophy in terms of who we platform as we really, we're very real about the fact that we wanna platform everybody every idea in you know, that people are interested in hearing both sides on. And that's something that you know, we've said that the channel takes a stance in that way. I would say the channel also takes a stance because I've been pushing this so hard, not just recently, but also since the channel began to exist. Namely that I think it's important to be, you know, not let yourself be divided by, oh, well we disagree on religion or lack of religion or politics. You know, they're politically left and politically right. I would encourage you to not let that stop you from being friends because I've just been so encouraged that not only the support in the chat and things like that and the community posts that I've made just giving some updates on my life, but also the support I've had from friends on the phone. Friends that are, they're Christian, they're atheists, they're agnostic. I've had so many people that I've talked to about this as it's obviously been a hard time and so I just appreciate everybody's support, you guys. And I wanna say that, yeah, I'm grateful that I have friends that are Christians, atheists, Muslims like and that they've been supportive and so I really do appreciate that. And let's see, I see you there in the old live chat. Good to see you at SciShow Navs as we are all with your brother, appreciate that. And then good to see a Spring Hill Jack as well as Rock E. Shepard and Tioga Arts, the most rebellious little chatter out there. Brandon Ardeline, thanks for your support. Says love you, James, and my heart breaks for you. I appreciate that, Brandon, it really do. Coffee Mom, thanks for your support. Says really glad you got to spend time with her seriously. Yeah, I am, you know, I have to be thankful for the things that I do have and look for the things that I've been thankful for and that time of being able to come home the last seven weeks when we found out about her diagnosis was, I'm grateful for that. So, social slacker, thank you for your kind words. I do appreciate that, says Jesus God bless, James Coons, I appreciate that. Mr. Anderson, thanks for your support. So sorry to hear that, James. My dad passed away this month as well. I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Anderson. I, my heart goes out to you. That it's honestly, it's been the hardest seven weeks of my life and Roxy Nas, thanks for your support, says I give you my kind words. I appreciate that, Roxy Nas. And then, thank you for your, thanks for your support, Stephen Michael. I see you there in the old chat bud. And then Joe Schwartz, thanks for your kind words. Means a lot. Leslie Flemmons, thanks for your support. Says praying for you, James. God's got you, I appreciate that, Leslie. Means more than you know. I love you too. And Brooks Sparrow says we love you. Thanks for that, I love you too. And Perfect One, our hearts go out to you. I appreciate that, Perfect One. And Sergio Miguel, says see you all. Welcome back, James. Thank you, Sergio. And yeah, I really do. I love getting to, you know, be here. It's a fun time for me. Like I enjoy modern day to day. I always have and I'm just thankful to do it. So let's see, Sal Sasp, thanks for your kind words. Says this kind of content is valuable for modern discourse. I appreciate that. That was a civil conversation, I agree. It was great. Lacey Ann says we love you, James. Truly you're a really great guy. I appreciate that. That means so much, seriously. And let's see. Rocky Shepherd, it sounds like your mom has passed away too. And I'm so sorry to hear that. And my heart goes out to you. And Springheal Jack, thanks for staying true to your vision, James. I appreciate that. I've been thinking about that, namely, there's a phrase I heard recently that I like, namely that someone said, I would rather be remembered as a person who, you know, did what they thought was right and not be known as the person who, like, didn't do things because they were afraid of what people would think. And because it's true, it's like we've hosted some controversial topics, we've hosted controversial people. But you know, like we said, it's like, if we're going to be truly fair, we're going to go the whole way with that. Like, we're going to be authentic about it. And people can say, like, they can criticize us for a lot, but like, we're the real deal when it comes to, you know, I think this is a fruitful conversation. I think that it was like, you know, it was genuine between K and Richard. And so, hello says, what an amazing conversation. I agree. Hello, thanks for backing me on that. And let's see, let's tornado. Good to see you. Appreciate you being here. And John Smith, appreciate you being with us as well as Richard S and Lin Yen. Chin, good to see you again. And let's see here. Let's farm, good to see you. Thanks for your kind words as my deepest sympathies, my friend lost my mom when I was your age, still miss her. That means more than you know, thank you, let's farm. And then let's see, Steven Michael, thanks for your support says love you, modern day debate, James, you look beat brother. I am, you know, it's obviously, it's been a hard seven weeks. So it's like, if you notice that I'm not quite, I don't have quite the same Vim or energy or smile, you know, it's probably, I imagine it's going to be another hard, you know, six weeks in the future. And so, you know, it's, but we're going to make it friends. And so I appreciate you guys' support. And I really do. And let's see, Rocky Shepherd, appreciate you being with us. Thanks for hanging out with us. American populist, thanks for coming by. And, but yeah, thanks for your kind words, Steven Michael, appreciate that. As a, it's a lot of fun to be here at modern day debate. And thanks for your guys' support though. Seriously, I love you guys. Thanks Slaying, I see you there in the live chat. And then perpetually Noyce has lost my stepfather to stage four. I'm so sorry to hear. I'm so sorry to hear about that. And that absolutely is hard. But yeah, I just thank you guys for all your support. I love you guys. It's good to be able to catch up with you again and just say hello and say thank you guys for your support of both me and the guest mods. As I think they've done a fantastic job. I'm grateful for them. So, but yeah, let's see. I think I just closed the chat. Let me, I'm gonna run in just a moment. Let's see, Brooke says, you just lost a family member a few days ago and saying goodbye was so hard. I'm thinking of you. Thank you for that, Brooke. That seriously means more than you know. And I'm with you in spirit. Like I understand where you're coming from right now, especially to some extent. I know it's not exactly the same, but I just thank you. And then thanks, Craw Daddy, for your support. And thanks, Coffee Mom. I appreciate you sympathizing. And my pleasure to have the debate, Rock E. Shepard. And thanks, Joe Schwartz. What's your favorite debate topic, James? That's a good question. Man, I gotta be honest. I love the recent debates on Islam. Those are a lot of fun. I don't know if it's just the energy that they bring, but those are always juicy. I gotta say like my favorite of all time is probably like, does God exist? I think the resurrection debates are fun if they're, you know, well-read people. I love the Bigfoot debates too. So for real, I'm not joking. I actually think, I think that's fun. This is fun stuff. But yeah, I wanna say, I love you guys. Thanks so much. And I'm gonna run, but I will be seeing you. I'm planning on, I'm not sure if it's gonna be me or someone else hosting on Wednesday. That debate might get bumped to Thursday. We're working that out, but yeah. So I wanna say thanks guys for all your love and support. And I will see you in the future. As I know all for sure be debating or hosting in the next week. So I will see you shortly. It won't be quite as long as it's, you know, it's gonna be good to see you. And I love you guys. So thanks for your support. And I'll see you next time. I hope you have a great rest of your night. If you haven't hit that subscribe button is we have many more debates coming up. Jab slant, thanks for coming by. And yeah, thanks for your guys' support. And so thanks for everything. Love you guys and I will see you at the next one.