Last February the good people at Choose Life Marketing reached out to Secular Pro-Life to ask if I would give a keynote presentation at their conference for staff and volunteers of pregnancy resource centers. They specifically asked if I would talk about how pro-life Christians can “build bridges” to more secular demographics. Frankly, I was […]
First Things, a conservative Catholic magazine, recently published “We Are Repaganizing” by Louise Perry. It is an eloquent article exploring possible relationships between abortion, euthanasia, and the decline of Christianity in Western civilization. A friend asked for my thoughts on the piece, which I’ve decided to reprint here: I believe that humans, especially women, have […]
This podcast and transcript are republished with permission from the Equal Rights Institute. Monica Snyder shares a very emotional story about going undercover in a late-term abortion facility in Washington, D.C. while being 28 weeks pregnant. She talks about what was harder than she expected and the perspective she gained about the employees at the […]
[This information is available in the form of a Twitter thread here.] Research finds that women seeking abortion believe providers should offer them the option to view the ultrasound. But providers don’t always do so, and abortion advocacy groups (Planned Parenthood Action, NARAL, ACOG) oppose measures requiring providers to do so. Please note I’m not […]
Abortion activists have repeatedly claimed that abortion pills are safer than Tylenol. As far as I can tell, by that they mean that annually there are more ER visits related to Tylenol (acetaminophen toxicity) than to abortion pills. If more people each year are going to the ER because of Tylenol than because of abortion […]
The phrase “life begins at conception” is too ambiguous. People can use it to mean conception is the starting point of an individual human organism, but also to mean it’s the starting point of a morally valuable human person. Those are two very different claims. For the most part I’ve stopped using the phrase “life […]
My brother Neil (also an atheist) has spent most of his adulthood in secular, left-leaning cities on the West coast with in-person social circles which are almost entirely pro-choice. Years ago, while sitting around the living room with his three college roommates, Neil started talking about reasons he opposes abortion. One roommate, Shawn, adamantly disagreed, […]
I was recently reading Forever connected: the lifelong biological consequences of fetomaternal and maternofetal microchimerism (published in Clinical Chemistry, February 2021). This post contains my notes on the paper. [Read similar information in non-technical language in the Smithsonian article “The New Science of Motherhood“] The lifelong consequences of the exchange of cells between a mother […]
This post is specifically about debating online primarily with strangers or casual acquaintances. Strategies can be very different for in-person discussions and/or conversations with close friends. Yes, debating online can be worthwhile. Secular Pro-Life exists because of online debates. Around 2007, I joined an abortion discussion board on Facebook and began arguing about abortion almost […]
Some parents get tattoos to memorialize the children we’ve lost through miscarriage. I’m reflecting this morning on how profoundly pregnancy loss can affect us. I’ve had two miscarriages, both around the 6 week mark, both deeply upsetting when they happened and, if I give myself time to think about it, deeply upsetting to this day. […]