“Understanding a Pro-Life Atheist”: Ideas Digest Podcast Interview
[Special thanks to volunteer Milena Popp for her transcription work. If you’d like to volunteer to transcribe or translate, please fill out our volunteer survey.]
(INTRODUCTORY DISCUSSION BETWEEN KONRAD AND MATT OF IDEAS DIGEST)
KONRAD: Once again for the algorithm Gods, I’m going to TLDR it for tick tock and then we’re going to get into the long form, okay? Here’s the TLDR: Meet Monica, she’s an atheist and is the head of the Secular Pro-life movement. She lives in California and went to college there. She grew up in a pro-choice Catholic household but is now an atheist. She was radicalized on Facebook, and now argues that personhood begins at conception.
MATT: Wow! Radicalized!
KONRAD: Radicalized in the sense of now she’s pro-life. Strong word, but…
MATT: Yeah, yeah.
KONRAD: It’s Tik Tok; Let’s get those gen-Zeds in!
So this means she’s fighting for human rights, because personhood begins at conception, so she’s fighting a human rights issue. She believes it should be illegal but recognizes the moral complexities of the issue and she engages robustly in the arguments. So if you want to challenge yourself with the most logical and coherent arguments against abortion you need to listen to this episode.
MATT: I’m super curious.
KONRAD: And, she changed my mind.
MATT: Whoa! that’s difficult guys!
KONRAD: And if you want to find out why, Super Friends will. How’s that the plug to the Super Friends? Am I doing this algorithm thing or what! Oh wait, before we go I should read the warning label on this one? The warning label is: contains American-centric attitudes. It’s a very American-centric problem. As an Aussie, your friend in Australia might be listening and ‘who cares mate, I’m an Aussie’. And I get ya, I feel ya. But it does filter over and so I think it’s still interesting. And another warning ….
MATT: Super curious. Now how is she going to…?. I guess she’s just breaking my brain a bit because I’ve got all this bias towards…
KONRAD: How is someone secular gonna be pro-life? Is that the one?
MATT: Yeah.
KONRAD: Interesting.
Some facts in this episode may need to be checked. Konrad doesn’t check them. It’s up to you guys to see she’s on the straight and narrow. She wears some compelling arguments and you might need a fact check.
MATT: But I believe in the meta brain of Ideas Digest.
KONRAD: I do too, yeah they’ll correct us.
So I just hold them loosely. If that’s true, that could be game changer. I haven’t fact checked yet. And the final warning is some of these challenging ideas may change your mind. So if you’re not ready to have your mind changed…
MATT: You don’t often frame interviews like this.
KONRAD: I enjoyed it.
MATT: Yeah I know you enjoy every interview, but changing your mind is not an easy feat, you know. For the many conversations we’ve had over coffee shops and dinners and arguments where both our wives look at us and say “guys keep the level down, like relax”.
KONRAD: That’s why we’re in a room all by ourselves right now! So friends of the show, Super Friends of the show and new friends of the show, enjoy the interview with new friend of the show Monica from Secular Pro-life.
(TRANSITION TO INTERVIEW WITH MONICA SNYDER)
KONRAD: We are back today for another episode on the front lines of the political and culture war that I don’t think will ever truly end. But joining me here on the front lines to provide a bit more insight into this very, very contentious issue that I’m unsure whether I should explore or not, but fear no idea so onward we go, is new friend of the show Monica from Secular Pro-life. Monica, thank you so much for joining the Ideas Digest podcast.
MONICA: Thank you so much for inviting me.
KONRAD: It’s great to have you here. We’ve just kind of met; we don’t know too much about each other. I hear an accent. I’m making some guesses. But if we were to just meet you know somewhere in your local town, maybe it’s at an American diner. I don’t know if you’re in America; I’m guessing, that’s an assumption -introduce yourself to me. Who are you and what do you do? We just bump into each other like, oh hey Monica! Yeah my name’s Konrad. Nice to meet you. Tell me a tiny bit about yourself.
MONICA: Well, Hi Konrad! – I think we’re probably at a Starbucks. I am the executive director of a non-profit called Secular Pro-life because I am an atheist and I am against abortion. It’s run by myself and two other women, also atheists against abortion, and then a small group of volunteers that help us in the background. And our goal in the United States is to make space in this discussion for people who are not religious and who do oppose abortion because they are often overlooked. In fact, they are so overlooked that a lot of times they come to us and say that they thought they were the only one until they found our group and realize there’s more of us. That’s one of our goals and then our goal is to advance non-religious secular arguments opposing abortion.
KONRAD: Very good synopsis of what you’re doing. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do outside of this?
MONICA: Uh, I’m a mom. I spend a lot of time at this job. I actually really love this job and to be frank, if I wasn’t a mom, I would probably be doing this like 60-70 hours a week.
KONRAD: Even more….
MONICA: Oh yeah. I love this job. I volunteered for this group for over 10 years and I was getting to the point where… So I started doing it in my early 20s; I didn’t have kids. I was in college, but I had more flexible time. And then as time and life goes on I started to realize that I literally couldn’t afford to volunteer for this group anymore because I was taking too much time away from my day job and my family. And so I started scaling way back and then, through a whole bunch of different events, I ended up being able to switch to doing this as my job, which gives me a little bit more freedom for my passion for it, while still having time to take care of my kids and occasionally see friends and do other things.
KONRAD: Well Monica, it’s really nice to meet you. But I must confess and I must be honest with you here. I’ve just met you, and you seem like a very nice person, but I’ve got some judgments and some assumptions and some biases that I’ve just been thinking this whole time. But I thought, rather than just think them, can I confess them to you and get them off my chest and give you a bit of a right of reply so you can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and see if I’m on the mark or if I’m off the money? How does that sound?
MONICA: That sounds entertaining.
KONRAD: Good, yes it definitely is. So, we’re talking about abortion and I’m assuming you’re in America. And abortion in America – Monica, you must be some Texas woman.
MONICA: Haha! That’s great. No, I’m not from Texas. I spent most of my life in California actually.
KONRAD: I thought the accent was off .
MONICA: I went to UC Berkeley for my undergrad and UC Davis – so University of California Berkeley and Davis for my undergrad and my Master’s Degree – and I spent all my adulthood there. And I actually only moved out of California a year ago.
KONRAD: Californian, okay, so you could be some liberal-work lefty then. That’s what you must be, from California.
MONICA: I could be. I’m not. I lean politically conservative. Our group tries very hard to be nonpartisan, so our board president is a moderate and our board vice president is a “liberal/woke” leftist. We’re quite good friends actually. We all share the same passion for this specific issue. Everything else kind of is in the background. But, no I went to Berkeley even as a conservative. That was an interesting college experience.
KONRAD: So were you bullied there then?
MONICA: No. The nice thing about politics is nobody knows what they are unless you choose to tell them. And so people just assumed I was a liberal/woke leftist unless I said otherwise. And what you do with these issues is you get to know people. When you’re at Starbucks you don’t start off saying I am against abortion or I’m a republican…
KONRAD: That’s my opener!
MONICA: You become friends with people. You get to know them over weeks or months. And then, in my experience in these environments, you sort of let them know gently over time and they can acclimate to the fact that they actually know, in real life, in person, someone who opposes abortion. And they can slowly get comfortable with it, or not sometimes. But usually yes.
KONRAD: You ease them into it?
MONICA: Yeah pretty much.
KONRAD: I like that. Well, I’ve still got some more judgments. Monica, once again you’ve said you’re pro-life. So you’ve got to be a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian. That’s it. I know you said you’re an atheist, but I don’t believe you.
MONICA: Well yeah, I know I’m an atheist. I’ve definitely never been an Evangelical Christian. I don’t know how to prove that I’m an atheist besides to tell people that I am one. I mean no judgment on people who aren’t. You know, I’m not trying to convince people to be atheists. But I just am one.
KONRAD: That’s you, okay. And just to be really certain – and I did steal this from you so I can’t take credit – let’s just be really clear that you are not secretly a Christian pretending to be an atheist so that you can stay relevant in this discussion?
MONICA: No, that would be the longest con. In fact, my seven-year-old daughter, actually, has recently started learning more about Christianity for the first time because it doesn’t come up in our house. And I’ve had to explain to her that’s not what I think and different people think different things. So I’m having these conversations with my child very carefully and casually. And then on Twitter people are telling me that I’m lying. So I’m, I guess in all respects of my life, pretending to be an atheist so thoroughly that one might think that I actually am one.
KONRAD: Hmm, yeah. That’s the true con. Monica, you’re in a space that’s highly contentious, you know. I’m dipping in my toe here. This keeps popping up. America keeps popping up. Australians try and import the same discussion with limited success, which is why it’s an interesting one to go to America to have a look at it. Because I think the earthquakes in America send little shock waves into Australia. We copy America in many different ways.
But you’ve been in this contention space – I can see some of the comments rolling on the Instagram live right now. It’s like firing already ‘abortion should be legal; abortion …. Everyone’s firing their opinions. What judgments have you faced in this space? Well ones that come to mind about people just judging you personally?
MONICA: Oh, there’s quite a long list. In particular, as a woman, who is vocally against abortion, I have been judged for being a traitor to my gender. I’ve many times been accused of being an internalized misogynist; I secretly hate myself and all other women. People say that I resent that I have kids and I don’t think other people should have the choice. Or, alternatively, I think everyone must have kids because I like having kids. Or I’m a narcissist and think that the way I do things is the way everyone must. And, of course, there’s the religion thing. People accuse me of pushing religion basically every time we talk until they realize who we are and then sometimes they’ll back off. Other times they’ll say we’re secret Christians. And they definitely say that we don’t care about, everybody – we don’t care about women, we don’t care about children after they’re born, we don’t care about children in foster care or anybody in poverty. We are apparently against all forms of social support. We’re against the government helping with paid parental leave or with health care. Of course, these are the most extreme voices. This is not everybody. But we basically just hate everyone and we are doing this because we just want to have power and control and also bring women down because we hate women, again.
KONRAD: And yet you love your job, so square that circle.
MONICA: Yeah!
KONRAD: So we’re kind of coming to the controversial issues as we move through. Sorry to hear about all that judgment you’re getting. I’m sure you could give a master class on how to function within that but we’ll sign up for that later on. Can you convince me from the outset so people listening, maybe some Australian friends of the show, maybe some American friends of the show, why should I care? I’m a guy. Why should I care about this issue? I’m from Australia. We don’t have Roe v Wade. We don’t have a Supreme Court that seems to be highly political. As an Australian looking in, your systems – we’re like ‘okay, that’s an interesting democratic system; I think I’ll stick to ours’ But that’s okay. Why should I care about this issue at all?
MONICA: Well, from the secular perspective, we assume as a baseline premise that almost everybody we talk to – there might be a few small exceptions – on either side of this issue believes that human beings are valuable and should have human rights. The question is not should humans have human rights. The question is – well, there’s a couple different questions – but one of the questions is ‘where do embryos and fetuses fit into that, if at all’? So it’s not – ‘oh, do we need to reinvent the universe and morality and space and time’. We already agree, generally, that humans have human rights. I argue that we should care about this issue because, from our perspective, the embryo, the fetus – they are certainly biologically human. That is just a scientific fact. And we argue philosophically that they are members of our species. They have moral weight. They have moral value and they deserve, at the bare minimum, to not be unjustly killed. Now it’s not as simple as that and I’m not pretending that it is because there are still the issues of the right to control your own body, the issues of how reproduction disproportionately affects women compared to men and many other important things. I’m not just saying,’well the fetus is a biological human, end of discussion’. However, I do think it brings a very strong interest into the discussion.
I also reject the idea that sometimes is put forth by the opposite side – that it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person or not. Nobody can use your body against your will, end of discussion. I don’t think that that’s fair either. And so we argue that all people, men included, women, atheists, Christians, whatever – I don’t care – if you are a human being who believes human beings have basic human rights, at least to not be killed, then you should at least, if not be anti-abortion, recognize that this is a difficult issue, at minimum.
KONRAD: So you’re saying that this is an issue – that it’s a decision humanity has to make. And you’re saying we should care about it because you’re part of the human species. And we should engage in this conversation seriously because it has real impacts from your perspective on, I suppose, us as humans and on the fetus humans.
MONICA: Yes, I – we – view it as a human rights issue. And therefore there’s no such thing as it not being anyone’s business. So we hear all the time: ‘don’t like abortion, don’t get one’. But ‘mind your own business’. That doesn’t make any sense to us because we view it as it’s a human rights issue.
And at the same time, I understand that activists on the other side feel the same way. You would never see a a strong pro-choice activist agree to disagree, because from their perspective it is the human rights issue. But the human rights they’re referring to are bodily autonomy and inequality. But that’s one of the reasons this debate is so difficult, because both sides are filled with people who don’t see how they could possibly let it go.
KONRAD: Convince me on the inverse then, if you can, why shouldn’t I care about this issue?
MONICA: Why shouldn’t you care? I don’t think…..
KONRAD: If you were to make a case off the top of your head, and you’re like, ‘listen, here’s some reasons why you probably shouldn’t care’.
MONICA: Like if I was moonlighting as a pro-choice or as an indifferent? If it was my job to tell you not to care about this issue then I would tell you – I could pick a couple different lines – one would probably be that the fetus is not a human life yet, for a variety of different reasons, and so it’s not really relevant. Another might be, the fetus is a relevant human life. But there are so many other considerations. And do we really want to be bringing children into this world whose parents aren’t ready for them and all the suffering that entails? And that doesn’t mean you don’t care. It just means maybe leave it to each individual/person to decide if that’s going to work for them or not. I think, if that was my job, I would say, ‘they know what’s best if they can handle this. It’s not going to make things net better for humanity if we decide to make everyone that is pregnant have children’. I don’t actually think that. But that’s the case I would make.
KONRAD: Okay, that’s an interesting case. I was just thinking some people might say – and maybe you’ve gotten this before – there are so many issues that if you’ve only got X amount of emotional energy to spend on, maybe don’t care about this one. It’s not saying it’s not important. But maybe they’d hold up another issue going, you know, ‘war in Ukraine’ or things that are travesties going on all over the world. I suppose they might bring up something like that.
MONICA: Yes, I really like the way you said ‘if you only have X amount of emotional energy’, because that’s the reality isn’t it. I mean, even
if you care passionately about 25 different things, what human can deal with all of them, and you have to prioritize. So, yeah, I think that is
something we come up against a lot, especially with something so unpopular and emotional. I think for that reason alone people might prefer to work on issues where there’s more common ground and it’s not so unpleasant.
KONRAD: Yeah, I think you’ve honestly hit on it. Like a lot of the conversations friends of the show have with me about Ideas Digest is that it’s interesting stuff. You can explore challenging ideas, you can see a perspective of somebody else that you might not have engaged with and that’s interesting. But this kind of work, these kinds of conversations take a certain amount of energy and sometimes, out of necessity, you kind of have to go ‘listen, I’m not in the headspace for this; I need to you know look after daily functioning of some things’. But then other people – you only have a certain set of emotional capacity sometimes to engage in these issues and I suppose that’s the wall people come up against and you specifically for this abortion topic. You’re going to people saying ‘hey, I think you should care about this issue’.
So if that’s where you’re headed with this and I’m in the car yard and I’m looking around at causes. I’m at a charity fair and everyone’s trying to sell me their charity or their human rights issue that I should care about. It’s like – ‘listen, I think it’s all important’. I’m looking around, ‘oh it’s overwhelming, what should I support? Child poverty over here, abortion over here, animal rights over there. These are very serious things. You’re the salesperson. What are you trying to sell as the pro-life product that you have? You’ve mentioned that there are various different versions of this pro-life movement. There’s the Christian pro-life. You’re coming from a secular pro-life – I think we’ll get into that in a little bit But if you had to package it up and say ‘here is really my main point that I want to sell to you, what would that be?
MONICA: I believe that abortion has enormously detrimental effects, not only because of the embryos and fetuses that are killed, which is obviously from my perspective pretty serious. But also in many other ways for society. And if I have time to tell you more I will. But basically, I
think that the need is greater in a lot of ways. I also think there’s a lot of other issues where the need is very great, but people more universally recognize it. There’s not as much debate about it, and so there’s more access to help for it. So, for example – what is a good example – I think the war is a good example, where it seems like almost anybody I would talk to would agree this is a big problem and ‘what can we do’. I’m not saying there are no voices on the other side, but I personally don’t experience many voices that are like ‘no, this is completely fine’. That doesn’t happen a lot. And I think this is one of the most intractable issues, at least in the United States.
The polling has been very consistent for decades even as we swing hard on other social issues especially, LGBT issues, drug legalization, all those things. We’re seeing more and more movements towards being more liberalized with those things and then abortion hasn’t moved much. It’s moved a little bit now because of Dobbs, but that’s only in the last few months. It’s been very, very tight. I don’t know the right word I’m looking for – very intractable – so I would say it’s very destructive. It’s extremely destructive and there’s not as many people prepared to really fight for it because of the social costs and so that’s why we need more help.
KONRAD: With your pro-life product, right, if we make it a product – we’re all trying to sell an idea. With this pro-life idea – there’s many different versions of it. What, I suppose, are the specific ingredients to to your secular pro-life brand that you have? There’s the religious side of it; they’re coming down going ‘we’re made in the image of God, the Bible says don’t murder’ and you’ve got the religious emphasis on it. Whereas you’re coming from a very different space and that might even lead to different pragmatic implications of your position. Because I think what happens in this discussion is that people say I’m pro-life and then people go, ‘ah, so you’re pro this law in Texas that resulted in this horrific situation for this person, and it kind of all gets lumped in without passing out the different laws that could be implemented if we were to accept the position. And so to parse all those things out, how would you – kind of be specific – about what you’re arguing for. So you’re arguing for, at least what I’m getting so far, some kind of ethical framework that says, ‘well biologically a human life begins at conception and that is the marker point of this embryo being part of the human species’. What else would you accompany with that and where would it lead if I was to accept this premise that you’re offering?
MONICA: Sure. So, we argue that the zygote, the embryo, and the fetus are biologically members of the species, just like you said, and we think that it should be, at minimum, illegal to unjustly kill them. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of the problems we’ve been seeing and talking about since Dobbs – so you have situations like if the woman’s life is threatened. You have situations like ectopic pregnancies. You have situations like miscarriage management and a lot of difficult situations like that. And most of the pro-life people I know, and by the way Christians and secular alike, recognize that there are a lot of situations where this is necessary. The frustration comes in where, at least in the United States, the vast, vast majority – like 95 percent or more – of the abortions that happen have nothing to do with those cases. And we want to be able to craft legislation that focuses on the situation of ‘ you have a healthy fetus carried by a healthy woman and there’s no medical emergency’. We want to at least focus on that without necessarily making all these other more difficult situations more difficult.
Now in the United States there’s a lot of debate about how representative these cases are. So for example – Texas is the example, right – they did the heartbeat law first almost like nine months before Dobbs. And there’s been a lot of discussion since Dobbs about what their law entails. And so if you look up the actual legislative text of Texas law and abortion, they’ll say “legally an abortion means… blah blah blah blah” and “legally an abortion is NOT….”, and they lay out specific circumstances – one of the things they say is any treatment of ectopic pregnancy. And I don’t mean they use some sort of convoluted medical language that technically means that. I mean it literally says if it’s a treatment of ectopic pregnancy it’s not an abortion. Similarly they say the same thing about if you’re removing the remains of an embryo or fetus through a miscarriage, that’s not an abortion. And so then we hear these stories where people are saying “well, I’m in Texas and I don’t think I can treat ectopic pregnancy”. And we’re saying the law specifically says you can. And there’s a lot of suspicion going around on both sides. They think that our side doesn’t care if this is happening. Our side wonders why it says it so clearly and you’re still having problems and there’s a lot of CHAOS in the wake of Dobbs. But all that is to say that’s not necessarily what people who are against abortion want to happen. When people talk about being against abortion and I’m not trying to speak for everybody – like I said, there’s a lot of factions in the overarching pro-life movement – but generally speaking, at a minimum, when people say they’re against abortion, they are talking about the purposeful destruction of embryos and fetuses that are healthy carried by healthy women and not a lot of these other situations. That’s usually what they’re talking about.
And we’ve learned too since Dobbs has happened, there’s no one unifying definition of abortion – legally, medically, socially. It’s so many conversations with people just talking past each other and then accusing each other of bad faith when they’re not using the same definition. Talk about spontaneous abortion, which is miscarriage, and does that count or not? And people think that if you even bring it up you’re trying to trick them and it’s just, it’s a mess.
KONRAD: You’ve highlighted the fact that there are a lot of different operating definitions that people are using in discussion that have not yet first been clarified – what do you mean by a legal abortion? Obviously, when you write a law, people like the lawmaker have a list of definitions of ‘when this word is used, it means these scenarios’. And I think it shows just how complicated this whole outflow of certain ideas around when life begins or when a human is considered a human being, I suppose. And then the other half of it – so we’ve got the ethics half of it, at least of what I’m picking out of this discussion – we’ve got the ethics half of it. Then you’ve got the pragmatic law-half of it on going, ‘okay ,what’s the best approach forward if we could agree on some kind of ethical common ground?’ Before we get to those two splits, which I want to explore, talk to me about your journey to the position you currently hold. What, I suppose, led you into caring about this as an issue and then becoming quite spearheading this version of the movement?
MONICA: Sure. Well, I I’ve been pro-life my entire life and it’s something that I’ve always felt very passionately about almost before I could even articulate it. My parents raised me that way. And there are other things my parents raised me with that I didn’t keep. But, this one, I always felt was very obvious. In fact, I felt it was so obvious that in high school I was afraid to find out if any of my friends were pro-choice. I thought that would mean that I couldn’t be friends with them anymore because it was too serious of an issue, which is amusing now because I have a lot of friends who are pro-choice.
But I’ve always been pro-life. I originally didn’t speak of it hardly at all because I cared so much and I thought it would just be too heated and too upsetting. And what actually got me out of my shell and eventually to here was arguing online. I joined Facebook in, I don’t know, 2006. Sometime not long after Facebook had started being a thing they used to have these discussion boards. They don’t have them anymore, which I think is unfortunate. But they used to have these discussion boards designed to raise a topic and have this long discussion. And I basically stumbled into one that had to do with being pro-life and I found it very interesting. I started talking to pro-choice people and getting a much better understanding of where they were coming from, where previously I had thought ‘how could anyone disagree with me on this’. And then I start to talk to them and realize some of the more nuanced positions, some of the stronger arguments. And very importantly I started to get to know them personally and just become friends with them. And so for probably the better part of a year I was arguing about abortion on Facebook almost daily with like the same three dozen people, some of whom ended up coming to my wedding, and it just really shotgunned me into the issue. It helped me better understand my position. It helped me improve my arguments a lot. It helped me understand theirs.
And then from there, this woman Kelsey Hazard – she was one of the three or so dozen people that I talked to – she decided she wanted to create a group for secular people. She knew that at the time I was an agnostic, and she asked me if I wanted to help her. I said ‘sure’, because I figured it would be just arguing on Facebook, which I was already doing. I had no idea when I agreed to join her how big it would get for us. I mean, we are a small group compared to a lot of American pro-life groups but for us it’s become a full-time thing. And so we created this group – I think it started off as just a Facebook group and then we eventually made a website eventually a blog and all these things – and we found especially, early on, that a lot of people would contact us and say ‘I thought I was the only non-religious pro-lifer; I thought I was the only atheist pro-lifer’, ‘I’m so excited to see you guys!’. And we started tabling at conferences and things. People come up to us really excited to see us. And it was very moving for us because we feel very strongly about this. It helps to know that you aren’t alone. You don’t have to be a fundamentalist or an Evangelical Christian to feel the way that you feel. And it has snowballed from there.
KONRAD: You’ve said that you were always pro-life and it just made a lot of sense from a young age. Was that glean from your parents? What does that environment look like? Was it a religious environment or what does the environment look like? if it’s not a religious environment with a strong pro-life I would say, political stance – because if it’s an issue at the forefront, I think that makes it political as opposed to some people might be pro-life or pro-choice without thinking about it. But if from the onset it’s a front-of-mind issue, I think that makes a political kind of position.
MONICA: I think that’s fair. If you’re taking it to the level where you’re not just talking about it but you feel compelled to do something. But yes, my parents raised my siblings and me Catholic originally. And both of them were pro-life. My dad in particular was involved. He used to be an engineer and he would engineer signs for pregnancy centers that you couldn’t graffiti. We had a pregnancy center where the people would cut down their sign or graffiti their sign and so he engineered a type of sign where they couldn’t do that. And then, at some point, he ended up curious about…. – are you familiar with operation rescue in the 80s and 90s? They would block clinics and not let people in and it was a very controversial thing. But, anyway, he heard about it and he was curious. He never got involved in blocking clinics. But one time he went to a clinic to see what was going on. And a woman was there who was going to get an abortion because she had nowhere to live and so he called my mom and asked if she could stay with us. And I’m the oldest of five children – not wealthy. They just moved us into two bedrooms and made an extra room for her. So she stayed with us for the rest of her pregnancy and for some time after. And by then she had gotten a job; she’s able to get an apartment and things. And so these are the kinds of things I was witnessing at the time.
I mean, I had no awareness of politics as a child. I didn’t know who Democrats or Republicans or anything like that was. But I saw that my parents felt very, very strongly about this – enough to do anything about it. And I couldn’t point you to a time when I didn’t know about it, and then learned about it; I don’t recall. But it was always a thing for me. And now when I tell people this – this goes back to the secret Christian thing because, if you’re not a secret Christian, maybe you’re just like a remnant Christian. Like, you think you’re atheist but it’s steeped in you and it can’t get out. And it sounds to me like a non-falsifiable theory because there were other things about Catholicism that they raised me with that I have rejected – quite a few things, some things that at one point were very fundamental to my life and now are not a part of it at all. But this has not moved and I don’t think you need religion to care about this. I think it just depends on how you view the nature of life before birth, and other issues too. I’m not trying to downgrade other issues, but I think that’s what it really comes down to for a lot of people.
KONRAD: I can imagine some people drawing the connection between a religious worldview, whether one is religious or not. So bring me to the ethical framework that you would build up to make the argument that an embryo is not only just part of the human species and should be cared for, but is more along the lines of a person with rights that we should protect with legal status. Because, I suppose,in opposition to this secular framework that you’re operating within, some people might say to you, ‘well, the arguments you may be drawing on come from a religious framework that you know humans are more special and more unique because we are made in the image of God and therefore that’s what makes humans so valuable.’ And even if someone isn’t a Christian or religious in the sense they may say, “ Monica, you’ve adopted this framework”
MONICA: They do say.
KONRAD: Oh, they do say so?
MONICA: Oh yeah, all the time.
KONRAD: So you’ve adopted this framework of human life being valuable, but it comes from a tradition where that comes directly from the divine or from God. So what would you put up in opposition to this to set your own ethical framework for the human species being valuable enough to impart human rights from such an early biological stage?
MONICA: Well, there’s sort of two points I want to hit. First, I find it to be hypocritical when people say that I’m coming from this tradition
because pro-choice people also believe that humans are very valuable and they argue for human rights on the assumption that humans deserve things like bodily autonomy and equality and nobody asks them if they’re secretly religious. It’s just assumed that humans are valuable. The question isn’t, “are humans valuable’. It’s “when does that value start and why?” And, to that extent, I find that pro-choice people – and I’m not trying to say everybody, but a lot of people I talk to – they assume that their position is just neutral and any deviation from it must be explained. And I question that because the idea that – and this might be an important point to explain to an international audience – in the United States prior to a few months ago, it was almost impossible to pass any kind of reasonable legislation in the first six months of pregnancy. That’s not the case in most developed nations. We still, to this day, have multiple locations where you can abort for any reason, a healthy fetus at any stage of pregnancy – in fact NPR just did an article last week about a Maryland Clinic that’s going to do up to 34 weeks. So I bring this up, not because it’s common – it’s not common, it’s unusual; it happens – but because people wanted me to explain why I should be able to impose the view that we have a valuable human being from zygote onward, but they never feel like they need to explain why they can impose the view that there’s nothing of value worth protecting the entire time. Those are both views; those are both moral views based on some kind of moral premise, and I think both require justification not just mine. And when I push for justification from the other side they usually just don’t want to answer the question. So people say, “nobody has the right to use your body against your will’. Then I say, “so do you apply that to all nine months of pregnancy” – because few people do; not many people support all nine months of pregnancy abortion. And then they say, “well it doesn’t matter because it never happens”. Well, it does matter. ‘Do you believe in the bodily rights argument unilaterally or not, and if not where you draw the line and why, and where are you getting your justification from? How come only I have to explain it. That is the first point. I think there’s a hypocrisy there.
But the second point, to actually answer the question – so we start with the point where almost everyone agrees that when you have a born child, a newborn, they have the right to not be killed, right? That’s not even something that we feel like we need to debate or discuss. It’s like an axiom that we start with. And so then we say, ‘well, we think that prior to their birth, they still had value and we want to know where you draw the line and why’. How do you decide when a human organism becomes a morally-valuable person? And people have all sorts of ideas of how they would do that. Some people say viability. Some people say heartbeat. A very, very, popular one is cognition or consciousness. So you have these different frameworks for – you have the set of all human organisms – which ones are morally valuable people that merit some kind of rights. Maybe not every single right, but some kind of consideration. And people give you these different frameworks for what they think. We find, and by we I mean the people who are in this group and the people who follow us, that those frameworks usually end up being ad hoc and arbitrarily applied and the people who apply those frameworks usually don’t want to apply them post-birth, just pre-birth. And we find them to be very problematic. They often end up dehumanizing not only fetuses, but also a lot of times newborns, a lot of times people with cognitive impairments, a lot of times people with disabilities.
KONRAD: So you’re saying that discussion about what makes a human being valuable and worth saving, people are going to say, ‘oh, well, if they have a heartbeat or if their brain waves are firing’ or something. And you go ‘okay, if you’re going to apply that whilst the baby is inside the woman, then post birth – well, the child isn’t fully conscious, it’s still the baby out there crying because I still doesn’t know, it’s still working out what the hell’s going on – you’re saying that game, if we apply it to humanity, we actually find it very abhorrent. We go, ‘oh well, I mean this person isn’t as cognitively, as capable as me so are they less valuable than me? That seems to be what you’re saying.
MONICA: That is exactly what I’m saying. And I’m saying that we believe that the most consistent and ethical and, frankly, safe approach is to say if you’re a human you’re a human and you merit some kind of consideration. Now it’s not the same thing as saying a zygote is equivalent to a newborn baby is equivalent to a two-year-old. There’s other considerations. But at a baseline level, you at least merit enough consideration that we think you shouldn’t be purposefully killed. That’s exactly what we’re saying. We outline it on our website – and if people want to go to our website it’s at secularforlife.com/ abortion or something like that – basically the premises are 1) the zygote embryo and fetus are biologically human organisms. Now a lot of people concede that, a lot of people don’t. And then we have to have this whole conversation about biology. But for the people who concede that we say too, we believe they are morally valuable humans – because we recognize that there’s a huge personhood debate – we’re not saying there isn’t. We’re just saying we have found all the personhood arguments thus far uncompelling and inconsistent. They seem to us to be created to justify abortion. It’s not like,’ oh we thought about what makes people valuable and then as a repercussion of that abortion is justified’. Iit’s more like ‘how can we make abortion make sense’? ‘Um, cortex! Let’s say cortex!’ That’s what it’s like. And then when you actually try to extrapolate, people just get irritated, but they don’t actually know.
Now, the horrifying thing is some people will extrapolate. Maybe you’re already familiar with this but, in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012, there was a number one most viewed paper of all time that they’ve ever published. It’s called “After Birth Abortion. Why should the baby Live?”. And these philosophers, they were not saying ‘go kill babies, we’re fine with it’. It was just as a philosophical exercise, that’s all. I’m not trying to bring hate on these guys. But they were saying ‘listen, if abortion is justified because of consciousness/cognition/these things that is what makes you a person, then we all know that the newborn also doesn’t have these things. And so to the extent abortion is justified because you’re worried about being trapped in poverty or because of these various issues we are arguing, that would still also be justified right at birth or very shortly after’. (Not like for a year out or something, but just like right at that moment) And they said ‘we use the phrase “after birth abortion” and not “infanticide”, because they wanted to emphasize the difference between infanticide, which has to do with killing infants further out and for other reasons versus if you’re doing it for the same reasons you would get an abortion. And it was a reviled paper. I’m not saying pro-choice people think this they don’t. Pro-choice people and pro-life people alike hated that paper. What I am saying is, it’s not only pro-life people who have noticed this, what they call, the infanticide problem. Some pro-choice philosophers have noticed it too. And I don’t think we’re in any great danger of suddenly having infanticide be this accepted, normal thing, because I think most people recognize that that’s horrific and they reject it out of hand. I’m saying it makes inconsistent, the personhood arguments.
KONRAD: I like the complexity that you admit with these arguments. And I’m not getting a lot of dogma like I have as I’ve gone into the front lines and played with the minefield that is this topic.
MONICA: Did you have fun? Was it fun?
KONRAD: Yeah, it was great! It was actually, yes, very, very fun time. I’m not on the front lines, but I’m watching the front lines. I’m like ‘oh, look, that person just exploded; that looks horrific’.
Yeah, and so I like the way you’re nuancing and avoiding the slippery slope arguments that people might use. They’ll say, ‘well, if you do this, then everyone’s going to do it’. It’s interesting to hear you say ‘Okay, I understand that most people don’t do it, but…. It sounds like, in a complex issue with so many different variables, you’re hunting for some kind of ideological or moral consistency that can then be applied as a standard in as many scenarios as possible. That’s the gist of what I’m understanding from you when engaging on this topic.
MONICA: Yes, that’s right. So to recap again, we recognize the biological humanity that begins before birth and we find that the personhood arguments to justify ‘human non-persons versus human-persons’ fraught and historically horrific, and currently horrific. So we reject them.
KONRAD: So what I want to do as we move through this discussion, friends of the show listening – it’s like we’re on a train and we’re moving through different stations that almost have railroads that fork at each single one. So as we move through, I think the interesting thought experiment is to go – and this is what I try and do with the podcast in general – ‘Okay, Monica’s set up this framework for biological life. Are you still on the train at this point?’ Are you like, ‘all right yep biology, that sounds about right. Let’s keep going.’
MONICA: Or did we lose you? Are you gone?
KONRAD: Yeah, yeah. And then you can go, ‘okay, I’ll hop off the train here for these reasons and obviously I’m kind of doing a flyover. It’s like a bullet train; she’s going quick. So as we move through these different stages, just see where you kind of hop off, and then I think it will at least narrow down the discussion that people might want to have further, going, ‘oh, I took issue with Monica’s assumption on this and that’s why I can’t go as far.’ I think that’s the interesting experiment as, I think you’re someone great to talk to about this because you’re like you’re laying out your foundations that people can follow along with. And I suppose, moving from that position where you take the most simple scenario from this complex idea and reality and go ‘okay, if I’m going to operate as a human from this framework of “humans are valuable” – we’ve kind of accepted that – there’s the argument of ‘well, if human life is valuable because (the argument I heard a lot. You’re not really asserting it but I have heard it a lot) human life begins at conception biologically, because one plus one equals two and therefore onward it goes. And, therefore, it is a human being the same value as Konrad sitting in front of you right now. And then as people follow on, it goes, ‘okay, but human life isn’t necessarily…. We have, as humans, a different value for life in general, so the argument I think is too simplistic and it says, ‘well life is life’. But as we move through life, are these people vegans? Are they vegetarian? Are we okay with killing plants?
MONICA: Even other issues with humans. You know, you say ‘life is life’, but there are situations where we find killing people legally justified. We could argue about it, things like war…. but it is too simple to say under every possible comprehensive circumstance nobody should ever kill anybody ever. Almost nobody thinks that literally. Oops. Some people do and I’m not trying to generalize but…
I think the pro-life movement has a problem. I’ve seen our side do it a lot where…. I actually have a presentation called Deconstructing Three Pro-choice Myths and before I start on the first myth I have a whole section where I explain the actual premises are in my opinion: we have a biological human, that human is morally valuable for XYZ arguments – what we were just talking about with personhood – and then third premise, it’s generally wrong to kill morally valuable humans and then, fourth premise is abortion is immoral. But what I find that pro-lifers do all the time is they take the second and third premise out. So they just say we have a biological human, so abortion is immoral and they don’t step through that. Or they won’t even say biological human. They’ll just say, ‘it’s a human, so abortion is immoral. What more do you need? And then they’ll have people push back and ask, ‘well, is it a human?’ and they’ll say ‘of course it’s a human. That’s biology’. But maybe the people pushing back are not arguing biology. They’re arguing philosophy, like, ‘Is it a morally valuable human? Is it a person? How do we define personhood?’ And so you have this really bad communication. I don’t think the pro-lifers are doing it on purpose. And I think sometimes, even when they do try to clarify, the other side doesn’t want to hear it. There’s all sorts of layers.
KONRAD: Yeah these discussions have people standing on different ground. And one wants to argue, ‘well, this biological point makes it really simple and makes my point’. And then the other people are going, “yes, but we’re going to the philosophical here because it’s not so simple’. And neither wants to enter the ground of the other to then progress to the next level.
MONICA: Most of them I don’t think, a lot of times, realize they are standing on different grounds. I think a lot of times they don’t have the vocabulary to engage and there’s so much hostility and bad faith assumptions. It’s very, very difficult. I have found the conversation is night and day when I’m talking to someone in person who I know and I’m not trying to convince them. I’m not trying to change their mind. I’m just saying, ‘this is where I’m coming from, I get where you’re coming’, compared to talking to almost anybody online at all.
KONRAD: Which is the interesting thing as I’ve engaged in this topic – you get the, ‘if we are to pull out the political weapon that this issue is’. Because if someone is to concede the pro-life position if they are pro-choice, I think the reason why you won’t get concession from either way is because it’s inherently attached to a political tribe, a political agenda. So what I am finding, as it may be for friends of the show as you’re listening as this conversation goes, with the conversations I’ve had recently about this topic – it is very different with people willing to engage the biological discussion, the moral and ethical discussion, the philosophical discussion, around these layers than when you merely have the political posturing of people going ‘ I’m a Republican, so I’m pro-life and I appointed five judges, and here we go, and this is this is great for X reasons’.
MONICA: I think there actually is common ground on this issue, not enough to fully resolve it but, for example, I think most people
don’t agree with a post-viability abortion without medical emergency. But they might not vote against it because they’re afraid if they give an inch, they give a mile. And on our side, same thing. I think there’s a lot of people who would be comfortable with certain kinds of exceptions or with laws that had more exceptions than currently do. But it’s like people think that if they acknowledge common ground, their whole position will fall apart.
KONRAD: Yes, their political tribe will ultimately suffer.
MONICA: And to be frank, are they wrong? I’m not sure.
KONRAD: To circle back to what we’re talking about – when a human being begins, when human life begins. I heard it put that it sounds like this sandpile theory where you’ve got one grain of sand and then another and then another and you keep dropping one grain of sand. Eventually, those sand grains you drop become a pile. At which point did it become a pile, is the complex idea that seems to be happening with “from conception to developing”. And it happens throughout life from when the baby’s born to developing, like cognition to separateness, a separate sense of self and all these sorts of high level thinking skills. Eventually we do become a full human. But at which grain of sand
did we become it? That’s the difficult discussion we’re having. And I suppose what happens – maybe this is or is not your position – when people go, ‘okay, human life begins at birth and therefore should be imparted the same moral standing as a human being’, and then you hear the extreme version of the point of your position, which could be ‘well, it’s the same as murder’ and then that has a whole bunch of other implications. Where do you place that? If a human life is valuable, is it unreasonable for these people to be saying, ‘if you kill an embryo that’s two days old, that is murder’. What’s your take on that position?
MONICA: I avoid – and again this is another thing that not everyone agrees on on our side – even using the word murder because it’s filled with connotations for different people that are imprecise and have that same – how did you phrase it before – coming from different positions. That’s why we just say something more literal like killing or destruction, or inducing demise, whatever. Because I find that the whole concept of murder has legal and social connotations that even the pro-life movement doesn’t fully agree with. So you’ll find, at least in the circles I run in and, from everything I can tell, the vast majority of American anti-abortion activists do not support laws that would prosecute women for seeking abortions. And that would seem inconsistent with saying, ‘oh, it’s just straight murder’. A lot of times the activists call it the second victim, where they believe that abortion victimizes first the embryo or fetus that is killed, but secondly the woman who may not have, given infinite resources, necessarily wanted to get an abortion in the first place. They view it as coercive in a lot of situations – I’m not going to pretend every situation. And so they don’t see it as simple as, ‘oh, you have a two-year-old and you hire a hitman, right’. That would be a very different situation. So no, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, ‘oh, anything to do with this – if you cause the death at any point then that is murder’.
I think there are cases that could qualify. I think there are cases where, especially like I’ve mentioned before, if it’s post viability and non-medical emergency, I think that it’s hard to argue otherwise. But no, from the very beginning I think it’s more complicated than that. Even if you take my perspective that from zygote on you have a valuable human who deserves to not be killed, you also have to imagine growing up in a society where huge cultural institutions insist to you, not only that it’s not a baby but, that it’s nothing of any consideration whatsoever and that all of pluralism and secularism and feminism and all modern thinking would recognize that this is trivial, basically, except for on a personal private level. And you’ve been told that from everybody all around you your whole life. That’s not the same thing as killing a two-year-old. Nobody says that about two-year-olds. There’s just not the same kind of campaign. So, no, I don’t think – murder is
not just about if you have a valuable human who is killed. It’s also about motivation. It’s also about Menis Rea and I think that it’s oversimplifying to call abortion murder in all contexts.
KONRAD: So if, to take your premise that a human life is valuable and worth not killing from conception, how does that play out in these – I forget what it’s called; you’ve probably heard of it, the embryo conundrum or something where there’s a burning building?
MONICA: The IVF lab? Or some people call it the embryo rescue case. It’s like the trolley problem but with an IVF lab.
KONRAD: That’s right. I think it lays out that there’s five embryos that people say would have an equal weight and there’s one baby. You can only save one in a burning building. Which one do you save and why?
MONICA: Now almost everybody says, “the baby”, including pro-life people and then they’re like ‘well? five to one!’
KONRAD: So how do you navigate that?
MONICA: Well, basically there’s all sorts of other issues pro-life people bring up with that. So one of the alternative examples is if you let’s say, you have a baby and then you have your baby, somebody else’s baby and your baby. And if you save your baby does that mean their baby is not really a valuable human being?’ No, it doesn’t. It means you were thinking about other things besides just that you have two babies.
And so with the IVF lab case, usually what pro-lifers will say is first of all, you have possibility of survival. The baby can survive. Embryos, maybe, maybe not. Especially very early embryos – forget the thought experiment for a second – when you have failed implantation or you know something like 25 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage – people think of embryos as less likely to survive in the first place, all else being equal. There’s also the potential to suffer and an embryo cannot suffer, like a zygote or whatever, and a child can. So then some people will try to get it weirder and they’ll say, ‘what if you had a child who was in a coma and anesthetized and wouldn’t feel anything and the embryos were also high probability viable’…. And I find the weirder you make the thought experiments the harder it is for people to even use their intuition because they’re trying to even imagine that this is happening. And so, generally speaking, their response is this is a terrible analogy because abortion is not about which life to save in almost any case. It’s about which life to take when nobody is in danger. And so you’re bringing up – not you personally Konrad – but the IVF lab scenario is about ‘oh, if you had to let a toddler die or five embryos die’ and that has nothing to do with abortion because in most abortion it’s, ‘do you let an embryo die or not do that?’ And nobody else dies.
KONRAD: I think the implication I thought of straight away with that scenario is, what do we do with IVF as a treatment that results in the death of a lot of embryos to get one viable embryo. And I saw a lot of groups that were formed with people who were, they would say, survivors of abortion, being like ‘their parents wanted one, but then didn’t get one’ or something. And they’re like stoked to be alive. And they want to get their story out there. I guess you could conceive of a similar group of people who are going, ‘ I’m an IVF child. I would not exist if my parents didn’t go through this, and there were a lot of embryos that didn’t make it and I’m the one that made it. So I exist because of that’. How do you navigate that?
MONICA: So I will preface this by saying that from what I can tell, pro-lifers generally – not necessarily activists but people who if you just ask and they say, ‘well, I guess I’m pro-life’ – have not thought about the IVF thing at all or even necessarily are aware of how IVF works. That’s more specific to activist circles. And in activist circles I find you’ll find a lot of activists on the pro-life side who are like, ‘yeah, IVF is a problem’ for the same reason. I don’t think there’s anything immoral about using technology to help people who are struggling with infertility. I don’t think there’s anything morally superior about fertilizing an egg the traditional way versus not. And so if there was a theoretical way that IVF could work where you create an embryo, see if it can implant, if it doesn’t, do the next one, personally I don’t really see an issue. But the fact of making a whole bunch of embryos, putting a bunch in to increase your odds, knowing a lot of them won’t make it, or even more controversially maybe several of them make it and then you abort a couple to increase the odds of one making it, or leave them all frozen for long…..You see stories about: there was an embryo that was frozen for 40 years and then implanted and you know was successful and now you have this baby who’s like 41 years old, you know? I mean, I’m being hyperbolic. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but for a very long time. That said, if you talk among, when I talk to activists… And there’s another group you might want to check out if you’re looking for unconventional American pro-lifers. There’s this group called Rehumanize International and they talk a lot about this – they see IVF as the commodification of children basically.
And then there’s also the issue of pre-testing embryos for certain genetic traits and selecting only the ones that have the traits you want, and there’s only so many traits you can test for now but it’s always increasing. And then you started to get into disability activism and, if you have a child who has some kind of disability, do you abort them and start over? What does that mean? You can talk about bodily autonomy, but that’s not really about bodily autonomy because you were prepared to go through a pregnancy and have a kid, just not that kid. And so it brings up all kinds of issues.
KONRAD: You’ve sufficiently further complicated an already complicated ethical quagmire that we find ourselves in. This is, I suppose, the point what I’m calling out is you say, ‘I want to sell you this position that says life begins here and I think it’s still complicated but it’s the most simple and applicable in most range of scenarios that I can come to’. Moving beyond that ethical… because I think you can kind of keep going down all these different hypotheticals and what does it lead to and what are the implications, I think the main thing that’s interesting to draw out is the fact that the decisions at this end will have implications that you may or may not foresee in all those spaces that you reference: disability, ethics of IVF, science and progress, studying disease and how we get cures. Because obviously things can be unethical here but then result in saving lives over here. It seems this very complex area.
MONICA: Yeah, but I have a little push back there, because we’re looking at all the complications from my world view and we don’t spend any time looking at the complications from the other side. So the disability issue is a good example where Down Syndrome abortions are done at an astronomical rate in the United States and in Europe. I don’t know about Australia. And they’re done after 20 weeks often. It’s starting to be pushed earlier, but for a long time you couldn’t detect down syndrome until after 20 weeks and so you have this issue of aborting children flirting with viability because of a disability and defending it on the grounds of equality. It’s very controversial. If you look up Heidi Crowder in the UK, there are people with Down syndrome and their families suing the British government because the British government limits abortion to 24 weeks unless you have a disability like down syndrome and then you can do it all the way up until birth. And there are other issues – we talked about the problems of dehumanization at the other end. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Kermit Gosnell case. It’s older now. I think it’s like 2013 or something, in the United States, where there was this abortion practitioner who was doing illegal abortions late term and in an illegal method, where he called them abortions but he would deliver infants and then kill them. He was tried for murder and everybody agrees on that. I’m not saying that people are like ‘oh, don’t worry about that’. But he did have people on the pro-choice side that were saying ‘well, this is kind of iffy because if you say that this is murder then what’s the difference between this and doing the abortion a little bit earlier?’ And you’re like ‘that’s a great question’, but I’m coming to different ends of view. My point being that we spent a lot of time looking at the ethical quandaries of the early end, and we have to and we should. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. But we don’t spend a lot of time looking at the other end. People just throw up their hands and say, ‘ it’s her body; it’s her choice’, and then don’t want to talk about what the implications are on the later end either.
KONRAD: I think what I’m getting from your point is you’re pitching a world view, that obviously in this conversation I’m then stretching going ‘oh, where does it apply here. where does it apply there’. But you’re kind of pitching it and offering us to remember – here is this world view; I think it’s the best one I can come up with and I think it’s worth selling to you, but let’s remember the context in which it’s pitched’. So in a longer form conversation with multiple participants you’d move from one world view and you’d say ‘hey, I think my worldview has some ethical dilemmas and I’ve got to wrestle with it and see where it leads, but let’s contrast it to the alternatives’, which sounds like you’re saying ‘also have their own set of ethical difficulties’.
MONICA: Thank you, yes! We have a responsibility to defend the hard edges of our cases, like IVF and issues like that. But I find the other
side won’t even acknowledge the existence of the hard edges of their case, like late term elective abortion. They won’t even acknowledge the existence and I just want an even playing field.
KONRAD: Yeah. So from that ethical world, as we said, has different world views with different implications – and this is what I think a few podcasts I listen to that have ethicists that literally are at universities philosophically exploring exactly these things. And in the episode I listened to, this woman was like, ‘yep, these are the scenarios and that’s what they are and we all have to grapple with it, I suppose’. And that leads us to the pragmatic because we go ‘this is very complicated ground. A win over here for one group might be a lose over here for another subsection of society’. How do we weigh the needs of other people based on the decisions we’ve made?’.
So if we move to the pragmatic ground of what if, let’s say, we take your position and go, ‘a embryo must be saved for as much as possible and abortions should be illegal’. Can you unpack that position for me? Because I think this is actually the second half of the conversation. I think there’s two conversations happening. One conversation is ‘hey, a life is a life’. Here are the ethics, end of story, and therefore abortion should be illegal. But then the pro-choice conversation seems to be operating on the grounds of ‘let’s get to the pragmatic realities of implementing such a law and what does abortions being illegal look like’. Because, like you said, if someone has the moral weight that it’s murder, well it should be illegal. And not only illegal, you should prosecute the mother. And if they go out of state and in your state it is illegal, get whatever data you can and prosecute her because she’s a murderer. You’ve mentioned it should be illegal – what’s your position as you give a better understanding of what you think should be illegal and what that looks like on a legislative level?
MONICA: We definitely think that, if it’s illegal, then penalties should focus on providers and not seekers, and what those penalties should be is also an open question. But we definitely do not agree with prosecuting women seeking abortion. We think that a lot of times they don’t share the same information or premises that we do, and maybe someday down the road that would be different, but right now with the conversation the way it is, it’s not so clear. We also think a lot of women seek abortion because they feel like they don’t have a choice, because they feel like they don’t have the resources. And so we look for laws that will make it illegal to provide abortions, specifically elective abortions, so not anything to do with if her life is in danger, not anything to do with managing miscarriage or treating ectopic pregnancies – nothing like that. We also think, and this gets into additional issues, that this all needs to coincide with sufficient support for people carrying pregnancy, sufficient support for people who want to avoid pregnancy, sufficient education.
That’s another thing. My particular group Secular Pro-life is very pro-conterception. And we like to point out that there’s a lot of data to show, especially in the United States, that when you restrict abortion people use contraception more and they use more effective contraception and they use contraception more often. And so paradoxically, when you restrict abortion in the longer term a lot of times you see unintended pregnancy rates go down because people are being more careful to avoid unintended pregnancy. Now I’m not saying they disappear. They never disappear, but they do decrease and we think that’s an important part of the puzzle too.
I don’t know if you’ve seen, but there there’s been a rash of stories talking from men’s perspective, talking about how, ‘once I found out Roe v Wade would be overturned or once Roe v Wade was overturned, I said, you know, I’ve got to get a vasectomy because it’s too risky’. And they’re kind of controversial because, on the one hand, ‘good, thank you if you’re not putting it all on her to avoid pregnancy, to deal with contraception’. You’re like, ‘I can do something here too’. But also, ‘why did you wait till now? If you knew you didn’t want kids before, you could have just – that was always allowed, you know?’ But in any case it’s an anecdotal example of a phenomenon where it’s not simply that you had, hypothetically, 700,000 abortions last year and this year you will have nationally 700,000 births. It’s not like that. A lot of times people are more careful. In fact, there’s data to show that when Roe v Wade was originally decided, unintended pregnancy rates skyrocketed. And there’s actually data to show that STD rates increased after Roe was decided because – I don’t think it’s as simple as people saying. ‘oh, whatever, I could just get an abortion’. I don’t think that’s how most people think of it. But it is something like, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna get pregnant now, I really don’t, but worst case scenario if I did, it’s not like I wouldn’t have any options’. It’s more like that, you know. Anyway sorry. I got off on a tangent there.
We think you need to have good access to contraception, especially highly effective contraception, good education about women’s fertility, about men’s fertility, about how to avoid these things in the first place. That’s the frustrating thing is there should be a ton of common ground between both sides about education access, resources for people who, even if they didn’t intend to get pregnant, would be fine with it if
they had the resources to take care of it. All of those things should be easy common ground. But it feels, again, like people don’t want to partner with each other if it means crossing ideological lines.
KONRAD: I suppose the the problem I see with the pragmatic argument is that the stereotype of the pro-life side is that ‘we are pro-life and therefore making it illegal is the number one priority and we will do so’. I don’t see any nuanced debate – obviously from the outside, in this political stereotype – or anyone speaking up saying, ‘yo, this Texas one that has implemented the law like this and disincentivized – because the argument would be for some of these laws disincentivize providers to, even on those edge cases that are legally allowed to be done, the abortion provider says. ‘you know what? In this highly litigious American society where someone is going to prosecute me for something, it’s safer for me to not touch this ectopic pregnancy.’
MONICA: But that doesn’t make much sense because you can sue someone for not treating and putting you in danger too. It’s that litigious.
KONRAD: That’s right, yeah, I suppose.
MONICA: It’s hard to be a doctor. My sister is a doctor and the amount they have to pay just in insurance for lawsuits, even apart from this issue – it’s a tricky thing.
KONRAD: I suppose that’s where the different State will have a different litigious emphasis, so in the more progressive State they could say, “you didn’t provide this in these circumstances. You will be sued”. And then in Texas or something, they’ll be like, ‘well you did provide this and you thought the loss….
MONICA: And they’re like, ‘oh, this is fun; I’m gonna go. I’m just gonna go….”
KONRAD: There we go. That’s well, I suppose, by this being such a contentious issue, is the point – that people end up tapping out and ultimately people suffer because of the non-engagement, like I guess you’ve said from the beginning. It’s easier to just not engage with this
unless I desperately have to and most people don’t desperately have to. So we’ll just kind of leave it on the fringes and allow fringe cases of people to suffer. So I guess when it comes to the laws of it, and you’re saying you think it should be illegal but you also believe there should be lots of support involved in this, the stereotype of the pro-life side says, ‘I’m fighting for Roe v Wade to be overturned and then I’m fighting for it to be illegal, and that’s my pathway’. Some people might critique that and say, ‘okay, is this the first thing you should be fighting for’. So you’re on the record saying it should be illegal. In what stages do you think, as you’re pragmatically politically moving this agenda forward, is making it illegal the number one thing you like you would like to see? Or would you like to see other pieces of legislation that might provide more contraceptive support and more counseling services like adoption care or more of these peripherals, and then move to using legislation
to make it illegal? Because the perception is, it’s the inverse. It’s ‘yeah, we should do all those things, but the number one issue I’m fighting for is that piece of legislation and then we’ve won.’
MONICA: So our group definitely does fight for legislation. Let me back up for a second….there are a lot of people within the pro-life movement who are not actually focused on the law at all or even particularly interested in it, and they’re much more interested in social support. So you’ve got groups to definitely check out, by the way. New Wave Feminists, which is based in Texas – they are particularly much more interested in everything you just talked about and have been the whole time, even way before Dobbs or anything like that. And they’re not the only ones; it’s just an example. But there are a lot of people within the pro-life movement who actually are not interested in politics, not interested in the law. You’re not going to hear from them because they’re not politically active that way. They’re spending a lot of their time on the ground/grassroots/other things – so just as an aside. But our group definitely does think that the law is a key component. We think that, not only is there a lot of research to show that when you regulate abortion it decreases – and I don’t just mean legal abortion
decreases and people get illegal abortions instead – I mean the overall rate decreases substantially.
KONRAD: Yes, because that’s also one of the arguments people will put to you. They’ll say, ‘well, if you make it illegal, it doesn’t work’. But you
assert the opposite.
MONICA: Now to be clear I’m not saying it eliminates it, it will never happen again. To be frank, no laws do that. There aren’t any laws that have outlawed something and now nobody ever does it anymore. But yeah, it absolutely does decrease abortion instances. This is something my group has focused on discussing a lot. Because even within the pro-life movement, not even arguing with the other side, there are a lot of
pro-life people who are like, ‘we shouldn’t even be dealing with this because it doesn’t make any difference anyway’. And that’s not true. It doesn’t even have to be a ban. It can be things like parental notification or limits on taxpayer funding is a big one, or waiting periods – more iffy – but my point is a lot of regulations have been shown to substantially decrease abortion. It does make a big difference.
KONRAD: And so what are people pointing at when they say, ‘no, we looked at this study and this study showed that in countries where abortions were illegal, the abortion number was the same?’
MONICA: That is the perfect question. I’m really glad that you asked it because, what they’re looking at is, say you divide the world, roughly speaking, into countries where abortion is broadly legal in countries where it largely isn’t and they have similar abortion rates. So you say, ‘ okay, well, the law didn’t really make a difference.’ Right? That’s the argument. And there are studies that say exactly what I just said. But then when you further divide those and you control for unintended pregnancy rates, you’ll see that in many cases the same places where abortion is broadly legal also are more developed Nations, they have better access to health care, they have better access to contraceptives and they have lower unintended pregnancy rates. And the reverse is true for places where it’s largely illegal. And so what you have is a whole bunch of places with higher unintended pregnancy rates and more restrictions and then a bunch of places with lower unintended pregnancy rates and few restrictions and you have this canceling effect where their rates are similar. And you can see this for sure; you don’t take my word for it. All you’ve got to do is, instead of looking at the abortion rate which is the number of abortions per certain amount of the population, look at the percent of intended pregnancy rates aborted. When you look at the percentage of unintended pregnancy rates aborted in countries where abortion is broadly legal, more unintended pregnancies are aborted. And in countries where it’s mostly illegal, it’s fewer. So what I’m saying to you is those studies are only giving you part of the picture and when you account for unintended pregnancy rates and other factors you start to see that the law again, doesn’t eliminate abortion, but it definitely decreases.
In fact, there was a great article by a prominent and really renowned pro-choice researcher, Diana Green Foster, and she wrote this article saying, ‘please stop saying that making abortion illegal won’t stop it, because it will’. And she basically made the same argument I’m making,but from the lens of, ‘this is a horrible thing because people need access to abortion’. But she said, ‘if you look at the unintended pregnancy rates you can see that when you make it restricted a lot more people…. and they won’t say, ‘oh, it prevents abortion and these lives are saved’, but they’ll say people have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term’. And there are studies like that, I mostly focus on the United States, where they don’t just say, ‘oh, it looks like the abortion rate got lower’. They’ll say, ‘women were unable to get an abortion at all’, or, ‘women had unintended births’ – they’ll call it, the unintended births went up when we restricted abortion. Anyway, the law definitely has an effect for sure.
KONRAD: So you would, and obviously I’m not a fact checker so if people can go…. you’re pretty much saying that there’s this study that a lot of people are saying says that making illegal doesn’t change abortion rates. And you’re saying they’re reading the study wrong; if you look at these certain variables and factors it’s actually right. You’re saying they’re reading it wrong.
MONICA: The study doesn’t even say, ‘oh, this makes no difference’. They say it doesn’t appear to be correlated. In the abstract they’ll say, ‘there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the legal context and the rate’. But then if you read the whole study, like 11 paragraphs down they’ll say, ‘part of this is probably unintended pregnancy rates are very different between these two groups’. That’s what they’ll say. They’re not hiding it. It’s just not the top line point.
KONRAD: Move from that and let’s say that study read correctly says that making it illegal does have an impact. Moving to the next layer of that, a lot of people will say – and I mean these are the news headlines and the stories coming up of the one percent or two percent, I don’t know what percentage of cases this is – where laws implemented/the government is a pretty heavy-handed instrument to do a complex, nuanced set of things. And when you implement something so broad sweeping and say, ‘okay, it’s going to be illegal’, it’s often how the law is implemented that makes all the difference. So, what do you say to the the person that might say, ‘okay, you can make it illegal and it may in fact decrease the abortion rate’. But then the question would be, ‘at what cost?’. So they might say, ‘now you’ve got increased childhood poverty, increased child abuse, increased fringe cases of women in life-threatening scenarios where they can’t get the care they need because the law is scaring the doctor out of doing whatever it is’, which I suppose happens in every law if it’s a broad scale law. And they would say, ‘I’m unsure that the cost to society is worth this law’. Simply decreasing the number of abortions – because pain pops up for other people, even if it is a small minority of people on the edge going, ‘this made my life entirely hell because of these fringe reasons’, that even pro-life activists would say, ‘no I totally agree that you should be able to have done that.’ But the law, being such a blunt instrument, can cause a lot of this difficulty in these fringe cases and the on-flow effects to society as a whole. And this is where I suppose it may or may not link to political philosophy as wel,l because people then introduce, ‘well and then you’re opposed to having a decent welfare state, and Medicare for all and all these sorts of things’. So it very quickly rushes into political philosophy. So feel free to go back to the imperfect law argument being like, ‘laws have a lot of externalities which means impacts that hurt other people, unintended, and I’m not sure that it’s worth that cost’.
MONICA: So, several points here. First of all the assumption that outlawing abortion will have some of those costs, that’s a whole debate in of itself. So when you talk about the link between abortion and child abuse, or a lot of people will talk about this assumed link between abortion and the foster care system and they hear it a million times or, I don’t know, they just say it as if it’s fact, and want me to defend against it. And I don’t even agree that it’s true. And so then you have to back up and have those discussions. And then there’s also the premise of when you talk about, ‘ is the cost worth it or not?’, there’s a couple things here. First of all, you could debate, ‘well, I think that the fetus’s life is worth this much, but then if the woman is suffering it’s worth that much’. And how do you weigh those things? And that’s a very fair discussion, but you also have to talk about what are the costs when you don’t regulate it, not just for the fetus. And this is kind of getting back to what I was saying before.
Everything in the way you frame that question is coming from the pro-choice perspective, which is it’s not just that we have different values. It’s that we’re focusing on different elements of the situation even if we share some values. And so when you talk about the suffering, for example, I find that – and this is all anecdotal. Before, when I was talking about the law, that’s not anecdotal. I could send you the studies, okay. This is more anecdotal. But there is a lot of controversy within our side of the movement about how abortion affects women and how not being able to have children or being pressured not to….. So one of the one of the ideas is, when you have not just legal abortion but destigmatized abortion, where instead of saying, ‘oh abortion is a horrible thing but we must have it for these reasons’, you sort of move to ‘abortion is a morally neutral thing; whoever wants to do it whatever, I’m not going to judge’, that’s not actually a neutral position. That increases the pressure on women to abort any time that they have conceived in a difficult situation because, “it’s your choice; it’s your problem”. And I’m not saying that as a glib thought. I’m saying that having talked to many women who’ve been pressured and either have agreed to or not agreed to abort under circumstances because it’s supposed to be this neutral or empowering thing.
My point is, if you want to talk about costs I want to talk about them on both sides. You have another example where you talk about, ‘how does it affect women’, right, to be able to get or not get an abortion, not just in terms of the actual pregnancy and childbirth – which a lot of times in the near future that’s what we’re talking about – but also in terms of if you have a child, you might not have been prepared for, what does that mean in the long run, right? And so frequently – very, very frequently at least here – people cite the Turnaway Study. If you’re not familiar already, they interviewed a whole bunch of women who went to abortion clinics to get abortions and a bunch of them got abortions and a bunch of them were turned away because they were past the 12-week limit or whatever the limit was for the clinic. So all these women show up at a clinic to get abortions and some get them and some don’t and then this study followed those two groups over the course of five years and measured all these outcomes. The turnaway study found that, at least of the groups that they followed – and there’s a bunch of controversy about this, women dropped out of the study, whatever, but just leaving all that aside, just assume everything about the study is fair and valid – 99 percent of women who got abortions did not regret it when they asked them, ‘do you regret this’? ‘Has it made your life…. whatever the wording was. Ninety-nine percent said, ‘ no, I don’t regret it.’ They might have complex emotions, maybe there’s some sadness or something, but they’re not like, ‘oh, why did I get an abortion’. And people talk about that a lot.
But this is a great example of what I’m talking about, where we only focus on some elements, not others. The same study also asked the women who couldn’t get abortions five years later if they regretted it, and they all said they didn’t regret it either. Ninety six percent of them said they no longer wish they’d gotten an abortion. And people are like, ‘oh, well, of course because now they have a four and a half year old kid standing in front of them and they’re not gonna …. that they have a relationship with that kid and not be like ‘I wish I’d aborted that kid’.
KONRAD: Timmy, I’m sorry…..
MONICA: Yeah, exactly.
KONRAD: I wish you weren’t here….
MONICA: That’s not a full explanation either because, even a week after these women sought abortions, already one week later a third of them said they no longer wish they’d gotten one. I feel like that’s the more interesting statistic. So, if you’ll humor me – you have these women who physically show up at a clinic expecting and hoping to get an abortion that day. These aren’t women who are just Googling about abortion and thinking about. They showed up at a clinic to get an abortion. Then a week later they still don’t have a child sitting in front of them that they’ve bonded with. And presumably whatever was going on in their lives that made them feel they needed to go to a clinic to get an abortion probably it’s still going on a week later, right? It’s not like there’s been a dramatic change in circumstances. It’s not like they’re holding a baby. And a third of them already said, ‘you know, I don’t regret not getting it’. And they just went on. And then by the time you get to five years there’s 96 percent.
Why do I bring this up? I don’t bring this up to say, “if nobody’s allowed to get abortion, everyone will be really happy about it”. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s a great example of how we talk a lot about how all these women didn’t regret getting their abortions and nothing about all these women who didn’t regret not being able to get abortions. And I don’t mean women who had an unintended pregnancy and they decided on their own, ‘I’m gonna do this’ and they didn’t regret it. I mean women who wanted an abortion, didn’t get it and didn’t regret it. You could literally look up the Turnaway Study right now and find half a dozen articles talking about how women didn’t regret it and also articles talking about how women who couldn’t get abortions did worse socioeconomically than women who could. But then they never mentioned that they said they didn’t regret it. I find it to be very disingenuous. If you want to know about how not getting an abortion affects women’s lives, how the women themselves say they feel about it should matter. And the study found how they felt about it and nobody talks about it. The only reason I noticed is because I literally bought the book that the study was in and found the page where it says that…. sorry I’m so long-winded. My point is that we do have to talk about costs. It’s not an unfair question; it’s just unfair when it’s only applied to one end, is what I’m saying.
And so if we’re going to talk about cost, I want to talk about everything. I’m not saying there aren’t costs. There are costs. There are people who having an unintended pregnancy, having a child is going to dramatically alter their lives in difficult ways. I have been pregnant when I wanted to be pregnant and pregnancy sucks, frankly. So I’m not trying to belittle that. I’m just saying, ‘if you want to talk about costs, it’s begging the question to only talk about them framed the way that – not that you were trying to beg the question, but that’s how it sounds to me.
KONRAD: I think the thing that people don’t discuss in this whole topic is – we’ve come through the ethics of it we’ve come through some of the implications of what that means morally and ethically, and how we personally navigate those things and have a discussion as a society of what we value and when that value begins and when it ends, and these are difficult conversations to have. But when they hit the practical arena, which is legislation in a democracy, I think it is unavoidable – and maybe this is the issue that political ideology is battled on and I actually find it very interesting – I think we tell ourselves we have a political ideology, and what I mean by that is that is a view of how humans should operate together as a community. This is why we vote for different policies and different politicians that have different ideas on ‘can we trust humans to make these decisions, can we not trust humans to make these decisions, should a free market be set up with a strong regulator or should corporations be allowed to regulate themselves’. These are political ideas. And what I find interesting is that the Republican side, the conservative side, would generally self-identify as more libertarian, especially in America. You guys have this ideology of government – evil. It’s like. ‘I want small government, get out of my business’…
MONICA: Well, so they say. If you actually look at how the politicians vote, I’m not sure….
KONRAD: Well yeah, you’ve essentially pointed out, ‘this is this is the ideology we espouse’ and I guess exactly my point was the libertarian argument for this, which the progressives are probably more arguing for it seems, is, ‘listen this is complex; it’s difficult. We’ve discussed how hard it is. And I believe that a woman going in for a late term abortion isn’t like, ‘oh well, it’s a Tuesday. I guess I just feel like I’m heavily pregnant…’.
MONICA: Abortion Tuesday!!
KONRAD: You know what, I’m not in the mood for pregnancy today. Can you just get this thing out of me? This is how I suppose it’s painted, whereas the libertarian argument is, ‘I believe the individual and the woman is best to assess this highly complicated scenario. And the government being involved and in-between in that decision can actually further complicate an already complicated thing’. And so the argument would be that it’s complicated by default. The libertarian says, “government, stay out of my business”. And it’s interesting that the conservative side is actually arguing for what the progressive side argues for like corporations – ‘hey, we need to monitor pollution because corporations won’t do it themselves and it’s hurting lots of people, so we need a government to step in’.
MONICA: Yeah.
KONRAD: So it seems like everything’s kind of flipped and so….
MONICA: Yes! And then the progressive side too because normally progressives are known for sticking up for marginalized communities and trying to make sure that you can’t just run over people who don’t have the resources you do. And the progressive pro-lifers I know, kind of the reverse of exactly what you’re saying they’re like, ‘you know, normally the conservatives are the ones that say government out of my business and the progressives are the ones that are, ‘well, actually the government can be a very vital tool to protecting people’. And now suddenly (makes switching sides sign). And I mean it’s not too great of a mystery because, generally speaking – and I don’t like to talk about it in terms of left versus right because I don’t want to erase the leftists who are opposing abortion, just like I don’t like being erased as an atheist, but we know there’s a correlation – it comes down to, I think, how they view the fetus. Because if you’re talking about a morally valuable human being who has the right to not be killed, then I think even most Libertarians – forget abortion for a second – agree that there is some minimal role of government, and maybe one of the few roles they would see that government is allowed to do is make sure we don’t kill each other. And so they would think that would apply here. If you don’t think the fetus rises to that level or if you think that maybe it does but then there’s the bodily rights issue…..
KONRAD: I would pull out the idea of it’s more the political belief in how effective government is. So regardless of whether you would say it’s a life/it’s not a life, I think the other element is how effective and useful the government is in this scenario, might depend on if you’re a Libertarian that believes that governments are great at protecting things….
MONICA: Maybe….
KONRAD: Then you might go, ‘that’s great”. But if you’re distrust in government is so high, it could be like, ‘listen, I believe this is the case. But I just think they’re going to stuff it up, so you know what, let’s just….
MONICA: There are people who are very opposed to abortion who take the position you’re describing, where it’s like they really do feel the same way that I do, which is you’re talking about a valuable child basically, but they also are deeply suspicious of the government to be able to do this effectively. But I think it’s less common because, while Libertarians are not going to want the government to regulate all kinds of things, I don’t know that I’ve heard a Libertarian say that murder shouldn’t be illegal because the government will screw it up. And to be fair there’s kind of an argument for saying that they do. If you look at our justice system, it is imperfect. Incorrect people get arrested, incorrect people go to prison or even they’re the right person but they suffer abuses while they’re in the system. So it’s sort of like saying to people, ‘ even if we all agree that homicide – and I’m not talking about abortion; I’m talking about just born human beings – is a problem, there’s also a problem of the justice system and it’s many flaws and its imperfections causing innocent people to suffer, letting guilty people go free. So should we really make homicide illegal? And to be fair, there are people who think we should just come together as a community and try to take care of each other without anything being illegal. But that’s a pretty minority view.
KONRAD: Yeah, yeah. I think what has been highlighted throughout this discussion and I want to thank you for taking so much time. We could continue because it’s obviously so complex. Everything links to something else. And I think what comes across is that we are in this scenario of competing interests. You’ve got one camp that highly emphasizes the things that I brought up before like, ‘well, we don’t want to put any child into an abusive home and if that increases the likelihood then that’s a cost I’m not willing to bear – or inequality or domestic violence or the unique case of horror stories that come out because of certain laws. And you’ve got your side saying, ‘yes, but there is a whole class of human, I suppose, that has no rights, that has no perspective, that can’t defend itself and that I need to stand up for to bring into the world’. They can’t even get started. And it turns into this conversation that maybe it does come back to ‘what are we spending our emotional energy on to make the world a better place’, I suppose. Because I think a lot of people want to do that. And I’ve spoken with people on both sides of the polarizing debate and people just bring up different things saying, ‘ yes, but if I Implement that law, I’m not okay with the child abuse that would happen. Because to bring a child from non-existence into existence to have that level of trauma inflicted and then the onflow into society is a pretty rough way to go’. It just seems like people like are navigating from their experience, emphasis of levels of suffering that
different people have.
MONICA: Sure. And then you talk to people who’ve gone through child abuse, and I’m not going to pretend to speak for all of them, but I definitely have friends in this movement who’ve come from abusive homes and they’re like, ‘so you think it would be better if I was never born? Because that’s not how I feel’. You know?
KONRAD: Yeah, and then the other side points to people who have said that.
MONICA: Yeah, and some people have.
KONRAD: Yeah that’s right. So it’s obviously infinitely complicated. I hope it’s been an interesting journey through how complex it actually is.
A few final questions for you on this topic. Can you remember the last time you changed your mind about something on this topic and what that might have been?
MONICA: Oh, the most recent – I can remember times I’ve changed my mind but if I’m trying to specifically the most recent – hmm, I don’t know, to be frank, I think a lot of my views were pretty solidified when I debated it a lot. I changed a lot in that year and since then I’ve kind of had slightly evolving views on nuanced things like – people talk about do you want to use graphic photos or not, people talk about how do sidewalk counselors handle things – it’s all kind of peripheral. But in terms of the core issues, I changed a lot at the beginning and I would say that was when I started debating pro-choice people for the first time and they pointed out all that stuff. So I definitely came to have a lot more respect for the bodily rights argument. I used to kind of dismiss it. But, to be frank, it’s because I only heard it out of my side’s mouths and if you want to understand someone else’s position, don’t take your side’s word for it. You’ve got to talk to the originals. So I think it’s been a long time. But if I do change my mind it’s usually in the context of the people I’m friends with who don’t agree with me. And we have these sort of – not trying to change each other’s minds – but just explanatory conversations.
KONRAD: Yeah, yeah. It sounds like those discussions happen far more effectively when you have that relationship and you’re okay with
landing at different points, whilst also wanting to engage in conversation to go, ‘I still think I’m right and I think it’s important enough to talk about’.
MONICA: Yeah, it’s nice to be able to enter the conversation assuming you’re not going to change each other’s minds and not really worrying about it and just talking to understand, which I feel is kind of your whole thing.
KONRAD: That is a self plug for the show! That’s the point. I don’t believe you can change someone’s mind so might as well understand them.
Last question – what do you think that the people on the other side just don’t understand. If there was one little package that you could go, ‘if you understood this or accepted this premise’, what would that be that could kind of shift everything.
MONICA: That’s actually a very easy one. You need to understand that most of the activists on this side genuinely believe, with all of their hearts that abortion kills a valuable human being. Almost, I would say, 85 percent of pro-choice arguments assume we don’t really think that and that is a mistake. I know there’s a lot of cynicism. I know there’s a lot of assignment of bad motives and, if you’re just looking at politicians, I get where you’re coming from. But if you’re talking about the roots, the everyday people that are in this, even if you don’t – I’m not asking you to agree, I’m just asking you to understand. That is what they think and it will affect how they talk about everything.
So I try to tell my side – if you want to, in vaguely, broad strokes, rough idea, understand why people are saying what they’re saying, pretend that we’re not talking about fetuses. Pretend we’re talking about a newborn child. I know that’s not what you think. And for our side, I say, if you want to try to understand a lot of what pro-choice people are saying, pretend we’re talking about contraception. Forget abortion. Imagine if you were talking about, ‘do I want to wear a condom or not’. I’m not saying pro-choice people think those are equivalent. I’m just saying it as a rough idea – like you just now, when you say, ‘bringing children into this world’ – in my perspective they’re already in this world and abortion takes them out. But from the pro-choice perspective, I think a lot of pro-choice people – I’m not trying to talk for everybody – view this as preventing a life from starting, not ending a life that has started. And if you can just make that switch in your mind when you’re listening to them – that’s what I say to my side – it really helps you understand and it helps you not get so angry. Because our side does the same thing, where we just assume the other side secretly agrees and knows that this is killing a child and they just don’t care because of blah, blah selfish reasons., But if you assume their premise, then a lot of what they’re saying makes sense. I think a lot of pro-choice arguments make perfect sense if you’re looking at it from the perspective of preventing a life. It makes perfect sense and so that’s the crossover I want people to understand. If you’re trying to understand the pro-life perspective, try to understand we are looking at this as ending a life that’s valuable, that already exists. And if you’re trying to understand the pro-choice perspective, try to understand that they’re looking at it as deciding whether to have that life start existing. And, again, I’m not trying to say everybody, but that’s the translator that in my mind I try to use when I’m talking to people.
KONRAD: Yes. And I think that’s hard for people to remember when the lens through which they engage in this specific conversation often does come from what I’ll define as bad faith actors. I do find it interesting that I’ll talk to anyone and I think Friends of the Show listening, people, can tell in a long enough form conversation the bad faith of somebody. And I think the political conversation around this is so infused with an agenda and if we can keep you, Monica, away from the person that disagrees with you, and if we can just get you to throw tweet bullets at them and in 244 characters or less, or whatever the character count is, then we as the politicians get to angle the Evangelical Christian base or the progressive Californian base. We get to kind of push them towards the agendas we would like.
MONICA: And in activist circles, it’s hard to resist that, even when you’re thinking about it. I agree with you. There’s so much about this that very much makes it versus them. That’s why they always talk about left versus right, even though it’s something like a fourth of Democrats are pro-life and like a third of Republicans are pro-choice. And same thing with men versus women and certainly pro-life versus pro-choice. So actually, partly because of my conversation with you leading up to this discussion – I was thinking about it – I sent a tweet on our platform earlier saying, ‘hey, list for me every point where you agree with your opposing side. Just list for me those things,’ and people loved it. I think people are actually craving better understanding and more common ground. I think a lot of times they feel like the other side is going to hate them before they even start; it makes them defensive. I don’t mean pro-lifers; I mean both sides. Or they feel like they can’t even talk about it. And maybe if they talk to you long enough to realize you’re not going to jump down their throat – it won’t solve the whole problem – but it might not be so toxic.
KONRAD: Monica, thank you so much for taking so much time to just unpack and explore all these things. I think you’re someone who engages with this in a really good faith way, and takes the best of someone else’s argument and responds to it in a way that can bring people along in explaining your position. So thanks so much for taking so much time.
MONICA: Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I really do appreciate it.
KONRAD: Oh, you’re so welcome. And people in the live chat joining us here on Instagram – a few people asked for some of the notes and studies that you were mentioning. If people want to see some of the studies and analysis on the data you were mentioning and follow you and your work, where can they do all that stuff?
MONICA: So our website is Secularprolife.org and if you want to look at – all of our stuff is United States based – research talking about abortion regulations and abortion law we have it there. If you go to the website there’s a section that says Content and then a section that says Research and there’s collections of all these different studies. It’s just a landing page. You can link to the original studies talking about abortion rates, pregnancy rates, abortion law and all that stuff. You want to look at our perspectives on demographics of pro-lifers, religion and how that plays a role or doesn’t, bodily rights, we have got tons of content on the website, if you want to spend like way too much time reading about this.
(TRANSITION BACK TO DISCUSSION BETWEEN KONRAD AND MATT)
KONRAD: So Matt, you’ve just listened to the episode. Give me some hints first up before we go into the Super Friends segment. Did any ideas shift for you listening to Monica?
MATT: I mean like to be honest, you could pitch me in the boxing ring. I was getting my gloves ready coming in with my biases. Ding, ding – fights coming in and I’ve got a few right hooks that are coming in.
KONRAD: All right, here’s a good argument; here we go.
MATT: Yeah, like Matrix.
KONRAD: She dodged them.
MATT: Yeah, she dodged them. I’m like, wow okay.
KONRAD: Okay, so you found some arguments you had that may not have been up to the task.
MATT: So I was like, ‘okay she knows about the right hook, what about the jab? Or the old rope-a-dope. Alright, so coming in with a jab , coming in, got you now. Ducks it too.
KONRAD: Yeah, so right, for you she provided some pretty good arguments….
MATT: And then I’m swinging through the air and then, oh, she hit me straight – like you, I think.
KONRAD: Yeah she did; wins ya. Ok, so I think it’s fair to say you’ve had your mind shifted a little bit listening to this…
MATT: Yeah, to be honest after listening to her, I’ve had my mind scrambled a little bit. I think I’ve realized there’s that bias within me that I maybe have jumped on this pro-choice movement…
KONRAD: Without hearing the best of the other side?
MATT: No, I just always assumed there’s a religious connotation to it and super triggers me.
KONRAD: Ah, so you dismissed it before?
MATT: Yeah, right, like it’s almost a swipe away, not interested. Or this is the bias you’re there for, it’s because you really have a religious agenda at these clinics and things like that.
KONRAD: Yes, yes. Or they’re very unwaveringly extreme.
MATT: Yeah, I guess and you’re hearing some of her arguments I thought were very well thought out.
KONRAD: She really was great at engaging.
MATT: Another thing I really enjoyed in your engagement with her, it was great in the sense of how I felt like she genuinely was aware of some of those biases as well.
KONRAD: Yeah, yes, like a bit self-reflective going, ‘I understand how they would see me, but this is how I see me and I believe it. But I also understand that the other side believes it just as vehemently’. There was no vilification from her which, as an Ideas Digest host and the Friends of the show will appreciate that, I think. It’s not that vilification of the other side.
MATT: Oh man, I’m super curious to know what she changed…
KONRAD: What she changed my mind on…
So if you made it to the end of that episode and you listened to the whole interview and you disagree with the whole thing, I’d like you to jump on Instagram, send me a DM @IdeasDigest and I will send you a golden emoji to show our appreciation to you for finishing an episode that you disagree with. If you agree with the whole thing, I’ll send you a bronze one. But if you disagree and say, ‘Konrad that triggered me a lot but I made it’, golden emoji for you. Send me a DM. And if you would like to hear how Matt has shifted and maybe what she changed my mind on, Super Friends of the Show are going to hear that right now. So you can head to ideasdigest.org and sign up for the show. And remember ‘at war with the algorithm’ rages on. So if this episode might be something someone might agree with – a friend – you go, ‘hey,you’ll really like this’, send it to them, ‘hey thought of you. And then to break that algorithm echo chamber send it to, maybe, someone who might be challenged by it, you know. You don’t have to be as aggressive as Matt being like, ‘only idiots wouldn’t love this’. You could just give it the soft intro being, ‘hey, curious on your thoughts on this’. You know, really expand that because haters are just friends of the show that don’t know it yet.
MATT: And we have such, such, vision for this platform…
KONRAD: So much vision….
MATT: So much vision that we can’t do it without you guys. So thank you so much for everyone that’s supporting us, seriously.
KONRAD: Yep.
MATT: Even a review. If you haven’t got the cash that’s fine; we’ve all been there. But that’s a five-star review – five – and mention Matt. Because Konrad gets all the reviews.
KONRAD: I got some reviews!
MATT: I just get mentioned at the end like….
KONRAD: And Matt does good too…
MATT: ‘and PS Matt’s okay’. I’ll take that. And so thank you so much for everyone that sends a review or supports us. We really believe that ideas are something that causes so much destruction to relationships and families. I’ve joined part of this family, become part of the Ideas Digest family because I’ve experienced so much pain in this area. So we are very excited about all this other content we can create and hopefully make this world a better place.
KONRAD: Oh, we do want to make the world a better place, don’t we Matt? That was good.
MATT: I feel like it’s at the end of the beauty pageant of like, ‘what do you want?’ “World Peace”!
KONRAD: Thanks for tuning in and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
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