The Pro-Life Argument from the Secular Perspective

TRANSCRIPT:

[Applause]

Good morning. Thank you so much to National Right to Life, and especially Jacki Ragan for inviting me to speak today. And thank you all for joining this breakout session.

As she said, my name is Kelsey Hazard. I’m the founder of Secular Pro-Life. And Secular Pro-Life is exactly what it sounds like. We are a pro-life group that leaves religion out of it. Our leadership consists of three atheist women. Obviously myself, serving as the board president. I am a politically moderate attorney, as you said, I practice law in Florida. Our vice president is Terrisa Bukovinac. She is a left-wing activist. And our wonderful executive director, Monica Snyder, is politically conservative and was previously employed as a forensic scientist.

So we bring those backgrounds to the table and run Secular Pro-Life together as a team. The broader support base for Secular Pro-Life includes atheists, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans–pretty much any pro-life person who just doesn’t feel at home under the religious rights sort of banner, or who simply sees the value in taking a secular approach to the issue. We like to say that we are open to everyone from agnostics to Zoroastrians. So, welcome. We are very glad that you’re here.

A little bit about my personal journey. As I said, I am an atheist. I grew up in the United Methodist Church, which is officially a pro-choice denomination. Gross. But, I was always pro-life, and for a while there, I was doing pro-life advocacy–technically indirect opposition to my church. Which, in hindsight probably was not the most sustainable idea. But, gradually I wound up leaving the faith. But, since I was never pro-life for religious reasons, my pro-life beliefs have only grown stronger over the years. 

I’m going to cover as much ground as I can during our hour together, and I do plan to leave some time at the end for Q and A, but no promises. And in case I can’t get to your question, my email address is info@secularprolife.org. And you can find SPL on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram–all the usual internet places.

We also have a blog over at blog.secularprolife.org and if you go there now, you will see that the most recent article is all the citations for today’s presentation. We are big believers in citing our sources. So, please feel free to peruse that information later, and don’t feel like you have to write everything down as I’m saying it. Finally, a quick disclaimer, I happen to be a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. So, nothing I say today should be construed as legal advice. Obviously, NRLC has some fantastic legislative resources and litigation resources so I will not be reinventing that wheel today.

Okay, let’s begin with the question ‘Why is abortion treated as a religious issue, anyway?’ Right? It’s not enough to say, ‘Because religious people care about abortion,’ or ‘Because religious institutions care about abortion.’ Houses of worship have lots of concerns. Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, responding to victims of natural disasters. Faith can, and frequently does, motivate church groups to organize around all kinds of social problems.

But, you’ll notice that our mainstream media never gives them the bible-thumper treatment that it heaps on pro-life advocates. Something more has to be going on here. You might say, ‘Well, maybe it’s because hunger and homelessness and so on–churches are sharing space with government institutions, government agencies. Whereas on abortion, Christians have a larger role to play. A bigger voice.’

That is plausible. But, again I think that’s a partial answer. After all, the American Civil Rights Movement enjoyed the vocal leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and black churches continue to be a hub of racial justice organizing to this day and yet you’re going to be hard-pressed to find an atheist who rejects racial equality on the ground that it’s theocratic. That would be patently ridiculous, right?

So, something more is going on here. Understanding that “something more” requires a brief history lesson. A show of hands, who knows who Dr. Bernard Nathanson was? Quite a few of you–that’s encouraging. Good, good. So, for the few of you who don’t know, Dr. Nathanson was an abortionist. He personally destroyed over 75,000 lives, by his own estimate. He was a central figure in what was then called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in the late 60s and 70s. You may know it as NARAL. And then, in the 1980s, ultrasound technology became more widely available and prenatal development was there for all to see. And Dr. Nathanson did a courageous thing. He changed his mind.

He became a pro-life atheist before it was cool. And he started sharing the secrets. The things that he had learned from his involvement in the early pro-abortion movement. How it manipulated the media to manufacture a pseudo-consensus against allowing unborn children to live to birth. And religion, as it turns out, played a key role in that strategy.

They were leveraging anti-Catholic prejudice in support of their cause. You have to understand that anti-Catholic sentiment at that time was much more acceptable and out in the open. Only a few years earlier, JFK had become the first Catholic president of the United States. That was not without controversy.

So, in Dr. Nathanson’s words, and I’m going to recite a somewhat long quote here, I promise it’s just this once and it is important.

[Quoting Dr. Nathanson] We systematically vilified the Catholic church and its socially backward ideas, and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media’s such lies as, ‘We all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics,’ and, ‘Polls prove time and time again that most Catholics want abortion reform.’ And the media drum fired this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of Catholic hierarchy. And that Catholics in favor of abortion are enlightened and forward thinking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christians, as well as non-Christian religions were and still are monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions. [end quote]

That’s what Dr Nathanson tells us. That pro-abortion narrative still echoes in 2023. That is the missing piece of the puzzle. Abortion is treated as a religious issue because abortion profiteers want it to be. It is a deliberate strategy.

So, why is it important to make a secular case against abortion? You probably think that it is important or you would have picked some other workshop to attend. But, I do sometimes encounter an attitude that I’d like to address. Essentially, I hear an argument that in a nutshell goes, ‘We have to lead with the gospel because this is a Christian nation and if we could just get the churches on board and committed, abortion would be over yesterday.’ 

I disagree, and I’ll explain why, but there is a kernel of truth there. If you are a person of faith and your congregation is apathetic or even opposed to the right to life, you should definitely address that. Don’t let me stand in your way. And if you think a biblical argument will persuade that audience, that’s all right.

I saw concerned Methodists having an exhibit booth in the hallway. Maybe someone in this gathering will fix my childhood church. I wish you success. But, religious argumentation does not work as a national strategy, let alone a global strategy for ending abortion. There are at least five reasons for that.

One reason, we just touched upon: it’s walking into their trap. Opponents of the right to life want you to have to be making religious arguments. They’re looking for a distraction. Every minute you spend talking about the imago dei, or God’s design for sex within marriage, or how many angels can fit on the head of a pin is a minute you are not talking about the brutal reality of tiny humans being poisoned, suffocated, suctioned, or dismembered for profit.

Second of all, every society, including Christian ones, is going to have its problems. A Christian majority did not prevent the United States from endorsing slavery, or imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II, or committing any other number of atrocities. So, we shouldn’t expect a devout population to automatically stamp out abortion either.

I’m not saying that a majority atheist country would have done any better. Abortion is a worldwide scourge. My point is that people are remarkably good at twisting, compartmentalizing, or just straight ignoring their purported beliefs and values. Especially when they are scared or when they are motivated by economic gain. And both of those factors are present when it comes to abortion.

Third, demographics are changing. Christians will not be the majority for long. From 1937 to 1985, the percentage of Americans who belonged to–who were members of a church, mosque, or synagogue hovered in the low to mid 70s, right–73%, 76%, 71%–it fluctuated from year to year, but it was generally in that range consistently.

Can I guess what the percentage is as of 2020? Anyone? Forty seven percent. Church-goers are no longer the majority. And it won’t be long before believers in general cease to be the majority. This is largely because of a well-established demographic trend known as the rise of the nones. That’s n-o-n-e-s, not n-u-n-s. N-o-n-e-s, right. These are folks who, when you survey them and ask, ‘What is your religion?’ They say, ‘None.’

That would include atheists, agnostics, spiritual, but not religious, that whole umbrella is “none.” Uh-huh. Since 1998, the percentage of nones in the United States has nearly tripled. If you focus all your energy on persuading the churches against abortion, as they are shrinking, and alienate the growing secular population in the process, that is not going to take our culture in the direction that it needs to go.

Fourth, and this is particularly important in our post-Dobbs moment, the abortion industry is filing lawsuits all around the country claiming that any abortion limit violates the establishment clause. They are shouting from the top of their lungs about separation of church and state. Now, you might think this is nonsense. I mean, if there are pro-life atheists, and pro-choice Christians, how can saving lives be establishing a religion?

Are we supposed to just jettison any law that has biblical support? ‘Oh, the Bible says thou shalt not steal, so congratulations! Your conviction for Grand Larceny is overturned in the name of religious freedom.’ 

Okay, yeah. The premise of these lawsuits is indeed ridiculous. But, all it takes is one sympathetic federal judge to wreak chaos. And we all know how hard Planned Parenthood has worked to infiltrate the Judiciary. I can spend a whole hour talking just about this topic, and in fact I have–at the Rehumanized Conference back in October. So, if you want to dive deeper into this, that video is linked in the sources. I encourage you to check it out.

But, the bottom line is every legislator who thanks Jesus for the passage of a pro-life law or announces a vote with a comment about the God-given right to life is hurting the cause. Not intentionally, but that is where we find ourselves. We have to be able to defend our position on purely secular grounds as often and as loudly as possible.

Fifth, and finally–I have saved the strongest reason for last–statistically, the children of religiously unaffiliated mothers are more likely to die in an abortion. Non-religious people are disproportionately represented at the abortion centers. I’ll give you some numbers. Unfortunately, the most recent data that we have on this is almost 10 years old. It’s from Guttmacher, but back in 2014 when 22.8% of Americans were religiously unaffiliated, they made up 38% of mothers obtaining abortions in the United States. That is a 15 point disparity.

This is a crisis, and I have no reason to think that the problem has magically solved itself since 2014. Just as the pro-life movement is concerned with African-American babies or Hispanic babies are disproportionately killed and has outreaches specifically for those communities, secular people are also an abortion vulnerable group. If you’re a sidewall counselor, and all you have to say to the women walking in is, “Jesus loves you,” more than a third of those babies have virtually no chance of making it out alive. None.

We have to lead with a message that can break through. Especially on the sidewalk, but really whenever we are engaging with a diverse general public. As I was setting up and getting ready for this presentation, I met someone in the audience whose wife is involved in a pregnancy center that takes a secular approach. That’s fantastic. It’s so needed.

So, now that we understand the “why,” let’s review our current state of affairs,right. The Pew Research Center reports that 15% of religiously unaffiliated Americans–the “nones”–say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. That’s as of March of this year. That number is an outlier. It’s usually been more like 23%, and I do expect the number to regress back up to the mean, but just to be conservative, let’s say 15%.

All right, so 15% of nones are taking a pro-life position. Pew Research Center also tells us that as of 2021, 29% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated. And the U.S Census reports a national adult population of 258.3 million. Put all those numbers together and we can calculate that there are approximately 11.2 million religiously unaffiliated anti-abortion American adults. 11.2 million. That is equal to the populations of New York City and Chicago combined.

Uh, side note, can you just imagine for a second what it would be like if secular pro-lifers got the same level of media attention as New Yorkers and Chicagoans? We would be in a very different state of play. Coverage bias is a huge problem. But,you knew that.

So, back to the matter at hand. We can also do a demographic analysis from the other direction. Looking at the religious makeup of the pro-life movement. So, starting with the population of Americans who say that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, right. Taking that as a rough proxy for the pro-life movement, 12% are religious nones, 23% are Catholics. So, for every two pro-life Catholics, there’s one secular pro-lifer. Protestants are the largest group at 56%, which Pew breaks down further into Evangelical Mainline and historically black Protestants, if you’re interested. And then the rest is a mish-mash of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, other minority faiths.

Anecdotally, we are seeing more atheist-led pro-life organizations in addition to Secular Pro-Life. Those include Rehumanized International, Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. There’s an agnostic at the head of New Wave Feminists, so that’s a positive trend allowing the pro-life message to reach people that it might not otherwise reach.

But, I want to be clear that we have a long way to go. Religiously unaffiliated Americans are 40% less likely to take a pro-life position compared to the general population.

So we have to do better. How do we do better? We make the pro-life argument from the secular perspective. Finally, we arrive at the title of this presentation. I’ve been told that I ramble.

There are many secular pro-life arguments and I’m willing to bet that you already know how to make at least one of them. In fact, most pro-life arguments are inherently secular, even those commonly used by religious people. I have yet to meet the person who says a fetus is a clump of cells and abortion never hurts women and frankly I hate babies, but I’m pro-life because the pope says I have to be. Get out of here. That would be a pure religious argument.

Since, today, we are celebrating the first anniversary of Dobbs, let’s start there. Yay! The majority opinion is a perfect example. The constitutional argument for overturning Roe v Wade is 100% secular. Roe and Casey were the decisions relying on supernatural assertions: ‘Oh, we can’t know when life begins. Human life is a mystery.’

Dobbs broke free of that and returned our abortion law to a place of sanity. It didn’t go as far as it could have. It didn’t outright acknowledge that unborn human beings are living people. But it allowed American citizens to enact laws that are consistent with that reality. And it did so without any reference to God, Jesus, the Bible, Souls, any other religious concept.

I could take it a step further and argue that permissive abortion laws deprive unborn children of their right to life without due process of law in violation of the 14th Amendment. The court is not ready for that argument, but it is a secular argument. Probably the best known, most popular secular argument against abortion is the argument from biology and human rights. When egg-sperm fusion occurs, a new human organism comes into existence.

This is when human life begins. The scientific consensus is overwhelming. So, the question then becomes, ‘Does the right to life apply to all humans, or only some? And if it’s only some, what are the criteria?’ Often, the pro-choice response is simply to deny science. Which is why prenatal development education is a key part of our advocacy.

I saw some fantastic resources on this in the hallway. You should check them out. I actually had a recent change of mind on this point. For a few years, I had been observing what appeared to be a trend of pro-choicers conceding the science. Conceding that, yes, there is life before birth and abortion destroyed that life. And so, the debate was moving more in the direction of, ‘When is it acceptable to kill,’ and I was adjusting, not by abandoning the prenatal development piece wholesale, but just focusing more on other things. And then The Guardian published an article that went viral for all the wrong reasons.

 I see some of you nodding. Some of you might know exactly what argument–what article I am talking about. They shared photos of feathery white strands in a petri dish, claiming that that’s what an abortion looks like at nine weeks. The fact checks poured in. Way too many people had gotten ultrasounds at nine weeks, or had miscarriages at nine weeks and seen the remains for The Guardian to just get away with that without any pushback. However, they refused to correct the article, and abortion propagandists continue to cite it and share it as widely as they can.

So, you know what this disinformation campaign tells me? It tells me they’re still scared of the science. It does still matter. Biology still matters. Keep hammering prenatal development. My favorite resource for this is the Endowment for Human Development, ehd.org. Their collection of photos and videos is just outstanding.

I also highly recommend Contend Projects. Its mission is to educate children about prenatal development. They have published two excellent picture books. If you give your kids the truth early, they’ll be inoculated against pro-abortion lies later. 

If you’re in a debate and you don’t have those resources handy, the simple method is to work backwards. Right, today you are an adult, before that you were a teenager, before that you were a child before that, you were a toddler, before that you were an infant, before that you were a fetus, before that you were an embryo, before that you were a zygote, before that you were one cell big. And that’s as far back as you can go. A sperm cell has only half a DNA set and can’t grow. An egg cell has only half a DNA set and can’t grow. Identity is traced back to fertilization.

Not insolvent, not knitting together, but the beginning of human life. So is it enough to be human and alive? Are some human beings not deserving of protection? This can get uncomfortable. Most people, secular or religious,  like the idea of human rights. But, if they aren’t broadly applicable, what good are they? 

Pro-choicers at some level, conscious or not, understand this. Because they try desperately to find a way to exclude the unborn and not anyone else. The unborn and only the unborn. And yet, every criterion they propose winds up catching some vulnerable born population in its trap.

‘Oh, you have to be self-aware?’ Hello, infanticide. ‘You have to be independent and not rely on anyone else to survive?’ Guess it’s open season on people with disabilities. Pro-life feminism also has a rich tradition of secular arguments against abortion. If you are unfamiliar, Feminists for Life of America and Feminists Choosing LIfe of New York are both excellent starting points to learn about pro-life feminism.

Secular Pro-Life and several other pro-women, pro-life groups also submitted a coalition amicus brief in the Dobbs case, which I would love for you to check out. But, in a nutshell, when abortion supporters argue that legal abortion is necessary to achieve gender equality in the workplace, they are saying that we have to sacrifice our children to make it in a man’s world. That is what they’re saying. I don’t know what you call that, but I sure as hell don’t call it feminism. 

It’s also just factually wrong, by the way, because women’s participation in the workplace has increased even as the abortion rate has steeply declined. As a professional woman myself, I really don’t appreciate the abortion industry claiming credit for my success. That is incredibly insulting.

Another approach that we often take at Secular Pro-Life is to highlight abortions after viability. After 21 weeks. And this is not because we think it’s okay to kill younger babies. Obviously it is not, but because late abortion is an opportunity for some common ground, right. If you look at the polling, even as the abortion industry grows with all the Dobbs backlash, strong majorities oppose abortion in the second and third trimesters, and they always have.

Pro-choicers know this, and they really can’t defend later abortion on its merits, so they lie about what’s going on. Here is the truth: later abortions are done for elective socioeconomic reasons. Just like earlier abortions. They are not all medical emergencies. In fact, a third trimester abortion is a terrible way to respond to a medical emergency, because the procedure can take several days. 

A typical second or third trimester abortion is one where the mother simply didn’t know she was pregnant in the first trimester. Sometimes, the mainstream media even admits this. We’ve compiled stories from The Washington Post, NPR, Teen Vogue covering elective late abortions. We’ve also compiled peer-reviewed studies and government data on the reasons for late abortions. And we’ve compiled statements from the late-term abortionists themselves that contradicts this medical tragedy narrative.

There is a dedicated page on our website with links to all of that information. It is airtight. Use it. Now, is everyone going to be open to the facts? No. Some people are blinded by ideology and unreachable, at least for now. But, some people are going to start wondering what else the pro-choice movement is lying to them about.

Remember, when you’re debating someone, even if the person in front of you may not be persuadable, the onlookers are. Especially on social media. When a debate is very out in the open, the pro-lifer who takes the time to cite the sources is not doing so in vain. People several degrees of separation removed from the debate can be clicking on those links.

So, I’ve just given you several secular arguments against abortion, and you can probably think of more. As I said at the beginning, most pro-life arguments are secular. Just ask yourself, ‘Does this argument that I’m about to make require a deity or a supernatural element to make sense? If not, congratulations, you have yourself a secular argument. And a funny thing will happen when you rely on secular arguments. Your opponents will start bringing up religion.

Remember, they want the distraction. So be prepared to respond to that. If you’re a none, you know, of course you can just tell them, ‘I’m an atheist,’ ‘I’m agnostic,’ ‘I don’t believe in God,’ that’s usually enough to get the conversation back on track. Although I’ll occasionally get people accusing me of being a secret Christian. I guess I’m a pretty bad one since I just committed blasphemy, but go off.

But, for those of you who do belong to a religion, obviously don’t lie about it. Don’t compromise your integrity. I would suggest that you say something like, ‘Since we’re discussing a public policy matter and I value separation of church and state, I don’t think a religious tangent is appropriate.’ Or you could say, ‘I was raised in XYZ church, but it would be very arrogant of me to think that my religion is the only one that has any insight on a topic as important as abortion.’

It’s a little disarming. For the religious folks in the room, I want to devote a little time to secular turn-offs, because you sometimes don’t realize that you’re doing this. Secular Pro-Lifers in the audience, feel free to vigorously nod. 

Number one, when you use words like leftist or liberal or democrat as synonyms for pro-abortion, they are not the same. I know the Democratic party is in a sorry state. You do not have to tell me that, but there are pro-life liberals out there fighting the good fight. And they do lean secular. Please don’t write them off. If you mean pro-abortion, just say pro-abortion.

Number two is anti-lgbt rhetoric. Secular people almost universally support gay rights, like same-sex marriage. Trans rights may be a little more mixed, particularly hot-button issues like sports. But, at the very least, the secular community has a broad consensus: the trans people should get to live their lives in peace and that there is nothing morally wrong with wearing whatever clothing or makeup you like.

So, when pro-life organizations and leaders take these vocal anti-lgbt positions, first of all, it’s mission creep. Every minute you spend doing that is a minute that you’re not saving babies from abortion. And it’s also turning off secular people, because they perceive you as just being weirdly obsessed with sex and gender roles. And abortion gets mentally lumped into that framework. We need abortion to be in the human rights framework. The life and death framework.

Third, and finally, there is a language barrier. Religious communities tend to have their own jargon, and that’s only natural, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Communities naturally develop their own language. But I’ll just give you an example.

The first time I heard somebody say to me, ‘He’s discerning his vocation,’ he’s thinking hard about going to trade school? What are you talking–I had no clue what “discerning your vocation” meant. And if you grew up surrounded by other people who used religious phrases like that, it’s easy to forget or not realize that they are religious phrases.

The good news–not that ‘Good News”–uh the good news is that Secular Pro-Life is here as a resource for you. We have, excuse me, if you’re working on a press release, or a pamphlet, or a speech, whatever it might be, you can run it by us and ask, ‘How does this sound to an atheist ear? Free of charge.

We are happy to provide that feedback. We will not be offended, we will be thrilled. Please take advantage of this service. Our website is chock full of information that you can use. We have blog articles that you can reprint for free. All we ask is that you include a statement that it originally appeared in Secular Pro-Life. 

Live Action News and Life News reprint our content all the time. We are on all the social media platforms with lots of bite-sized content that you can share with your contacts. You can get in touch with us about hosting a Secular Pro-Life speaker. Zoom presentations for student organizations are always free. In person and non-student presentations, there’s sometimes a cost associated with that, but we will work with you.

I’m almost done,  before we move on to the Q&A time, but I do want to say a brief word about post-abortion healing. This is an area that is really dominated by faith-based groups like Rachel’s Vineyard and I get why. I mean, putting myself in the shoes of a post-aborative person, the Christian doctrines of forgiveness of sins and being reunited with your deceased loved one in the afterlife, I can see how that would be appealing.

But, again you gotta remember 38% of abortion seekers are religiously unaffiliated. They may not be interested in converting religions And we don’t want that to become a barrier to processing the grief of losing a baby. So, we get asked all the time what secular post-abortion resources are out there. This is something that we hope to work on more in the future, but there are two smaller organizations that we have found to be pretty secular-friendly. Those are Abortion Changes You and Support After Abortion.

So please, add those to your list. That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you all again for inviting me to share this time with you. And for whatever time we have left I open it up to your questions. [Applause]