Transcript

Over the years, I've noticed that many people who convert to being pro-life end up becoming Catholic.

These include people like former abortionist Bernard Nathanson and former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson.

Lila Rose started Live Action as a teenager when she was an Evangelical but then she later converted to Catholicism.

And of course there are many people who were non-religious or even Protestant and became Catholic after spending years in the pro-life movement.

In today's episode, I'm going to examine those reasons they convert, some of which should really move all pro-lifers to consider the moral worldview that is unique to Catholicism.

But before we do that, I hope I can move you to hit the like button and subscribe to our channel so you can help it grow and reach a lot more people.

Now, I admit that in many cases these conversions come about because of social reasons.

Catholics have been over-represented in the pro-life movement for decades, and so it's not surprising that non-Catholics entering the pro-life movement may see Catholicism as a foundational belief system within it.

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said of her conversion to Catholicism, quote, I think my conversion story, it's fairly simple.

It's meeting other Catholic leaders within the movement, talking with staff members over the years, and just really hearing the truth about our faith.

As I showed in my episode about pro-choice Protestants, which I'll link in the description below, the Catholic Church started the pro-life movement in the United States through things like founding the National Right to Life Committee.

Major conservative Protestant bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention even had pro-choice views until the mid-1980s.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church also provides a way to mobilize Catholic pro-life activists that's not as robust in other Protestant denominations.

Finally, if you get involved with grassroots pro-life activism like praying outside of abortion facilities, you'll often find the people praying next to you are Catholics reciting the rosary.

So one answer is a bit simple.

There are a lot of Catholics in the pro-life movement, so Protestants who get involved are likely to be introduced to Catholicism by people they already admire as comrades in the fight for life, and so they're more open to learning about the faith than if it were in a more adversarial context.

But beyond the social reason, I think there's a deeper theological and philosophical reason that becomes apparent when we start thinking not just about abortion, but how we should treat human beings at every moment of their lives, and even how we should treat them before they come into existence.

And this comes from asking the question, how many rights do unborn children have?

Pro-lifers sometimes mistakenly think that the unborn only have one right before they're born, the right to life.

And they often interpret that right very narrowly, as simply the right to not be killed.

But this leaves them open to pro-choicers who say, I'll agree for the sake of the argument that a fetus is a person.

They may have a right to life, but they don't have a right to life support.

According to these pro-choicers, just as a dying patient in a hospital doesn't have the right to my kidney, even if it happens to be a perfect match, unborn children don't have a right to use someone else's body to stay alive.

But this argument doesn't work because the pro-choicer is not granting that the unborn child is a real person with a right to life.

How can that child have a right to life if they don't have the right to the one and only thing that they need in order to have a life, their mother's body?

My kidneys were made from my body, so no one else has a right to them.

But what is the purpose of the uterus?

For whom was it made?

If you leave adults alone for a long time, you generally respect their right to life.

But if you leave small children alone for a long time, you often violate their right to life.

You kill them.

A right can make someone leave you alone, but it can also force someone else to help you.

Many pro-choicers even think that the right to abortion can force Catholic hospitals to provide abortion.

But at least with small children, the right to life includes the right to assistance from other people, primarily the child's parents.

Bioethicist O. Carter Snead writes the following, Our embodiment situates us in a particular relationship to one another, from which emerge obligations to come to the aid of vulnerable others, including especially the disabled, the elderly, and children.

Snead says a law that doesn't take into account our necessary embodiment, quote, fails to recognize these obligations and leaves the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human community invisible and unprotected.

Since unborn children are persons, they have the right not just to be left alone.

In fact, leaving them alone violates their right to life.

Rather, they have a right to be cared for by their mother and their father.

Unborn children have a right that compels their parents to make sacrifices for them, be it a father's occupational sacrifice or a mother's anatomical sacrifice, using the bodily organs designed for sustaining these children.

But let's go deeper.

If the unborn truly are persons, then they have more than just the right to be kept alive.

They have the right to be loved.

They have the right to a relationship with their parents.

If they didn't have a right to a relationship with their parents, then parents could abandon their children to the state whenever they felt like it, for any reason or no reason at all.

But deep down we know that's wrong.

Parents should only be allowed to relinquish custody of their children if they are unfit to care for their children.

In 2008, the state of Nebraska faced the unintended consequences of having a safe haven law that allowed parents to legally abandon their children, but the law did not define what a child was.

As a result, parents came from out of state with children as old as 17 years of age in order to abandon them to state officials.

In just three months, 34 children from seven states were abandoned in Nebraska.

28 of them were older than 10 .

only one was an infant.

And the intent of the law was always the protection of newborns in immediate danger of being harmed.

Nebraska lawmakers are now considering whether to change state law and limit safe havens to infants up to three days old.

Safe haven laws do not contradict the view that children have a right to not be abandoned by their parents.

In some cases, their parents are truly unfit to care for them.

But in other cases, these laws are a social toleration that tries to prevent the greater evil of infanticide.

Safe havens go back to the Middle Ages where Pope Innocent III decreed in 1198 that foundling wheels be installed in Italy to prevent incidents of infanticide.

So to summarize, children have more than just a right to life.

They have a right to love.

They have a right to a relationship with their biological parents, and their parents cannot abandon them simply because they no longer want to raise them.

But if children have a right to be loved by their parents, then this entails that these children have a right to many other things.

For example, children have the right to come into existence as the fruit of marital love, and not as the end result of an evil like fornication, prostitution, adultery, or rape.

Obviously, children who come into existence through those evil means are still persons with human dignity, but that doesn't change the fact that it was wrong to engage in those acts that bring children into existence by those means.

Now so far, many Protestants would agree with what I've said and they would wonder, well, why should they be Catholic?

They just already agree with all of that.

But once again, follow the line of reasoning.

What else do children, in virtue of being embodied persons who can obligate others, what else do they have a right to?

When you think in this way, distinctly Catholic bioethics start to make sense.

For example, if children did not have the right to reside in their mother's body, then there would be nothing wrong with a pregnant mother choosing to raise her baby in an artificial womb simply because she didn't want to undergo the difficulties of pregnancy, as can be seen in the 2023 film, The Pod Generation.

But many Christians would consider this a selfish abdication of motherhood, but you don't need science fiction to see that many Christians see nothing wrong with the grotesque practice of using egg donors, sperm donors, and gestational surrogates in order to birth children, as long as abortion isn't directly involved.

Pope Francis has recently called for a global ban on gestational surrogacy, but I find many Protestants see that this is wrong and it's sinful, but they have a hard time articulating why it would be sinful for a married couple to use a gestational surrogate or to create a baby through IVF if the surplus embryos are not destroyed.

Now, you could say embryonic human beings have the right to be mothered, not manufactured, but if Protestants think the Bible doesn't clearly condemn contraception, and so contraception is not sinful, how could the Bible be clear enough for them to believe that it condemned modern evils like gestational surrogacy that the apostolic authors would have had no idea about?

If a Protestant believes children have the right to come into existence within the safety of their mothers' bodies as the fruit of the marital act, then many of them may also be open to an argument against contraception, specifically the argument that children have the right to come into existence as a freely received gift from God and not to come into existence as an invader who managed to overcome birth control security defenses and infiltrate their mother's womb.

In fact, the bioethicist William E. May argues in his book, Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Life, that contraception is wrong because it expresses an evil, anti-life attitude toward a couple's future children.

He writes, Since contraception is specified precisely by the choice to impede the beginning of a new human life, it is an anti-life kind of act, one expressing a contra-life will.

It is precisely because contraception is specified by a contra-life will that it was, as we saw earlier, regarded for centuries as analogous to homicide by Christian writers.

Contraception is always seriously wrong because it is always gravely immoral to adopt by choice the proposal to damage, destroy, or impede the good of human life.

Now, one might object that natural family planning, NFP, also impedes the good of life, but that's not true.

Contraception directly attacks fertility as a bad thing that must be suppressed.

NFP, on the other hand, merely allows couples to use their natural God-given yet unequal levels of fertility at different times in marriage.

Many authors use a wedding analogy to make this point.

Imagine you and your fiance are choosing the date to have your wedding.

If you pick one Saturday, you know your 20 cousins can attend, but if you pick the following Saturday, you know the cousins probably can't attend because they're busy.

If you feel like you can't host all of them, you may pick the next Saturday and still send them an invitation.

If they surprise you and show up to the wedding, it might be stressful, but it's still okay that they're there.

But imagine how hurtful it would be if you picked the Saturday that they can come to the wedding when they're free, but you also sent them a disinvitation that said, Stay out of our wedding.

You aren't wanted here.

Likewise, when a married couple is intimate during the wife's fertile time of the month, that's like having the wedding on the Saturday when the cousins can probably attend.

Being intimate during the less fertile period of a woman's cycle is like hosting the wedding during the Saturday when the cousins probably cannot attend.

But using contraception is like hosting the wedding on the best Saturday for the cousins to attend, but sending the cousins a disinvitation that says, Stay out of our wedding, or for married couples, Stay out of our bodily renewal of the wedding vows and the marital act.

You aren't wanted here.

So to summarize, my goal in this episode has not been to conclusively prove that contraception, IVF, and other anti-life acts are wrong or that Catholic bioethics is true.

I just want to point out something I've seen among many Protestants who spend time among Catholics and begin to deeply ponder the question, how do I respect every right an unborn child has, and not just the child's right to life?

Although a Protestant who agrees with me so far might ask this question: Why can't I be a Protestant who personally rejects IVF, gestational surrogacy, and contraception?

There are some Protestants who do that, and I have a great respect for their virtue, but some of those Protestants believe that these evils, they aren't just evil from their perspective or for their family.

These things are evil for everyone.

But if that's true, then why didn't God make this clear in the scripture that he's revealed to bind Christians to oppose these evils?

Well, maybe God's ways of authoritatively and infallibly teaching His people, including moral theology, maybe those ways go beyond the Bible alone.

Maybe God gave us a Church with universal binding teaching authority that can lead the body of Christ when it is faced with novel issues, things like gestational surrogacy, IVF, hormonal contraception, that it can give not just suggestions to Christians, but compel them to follow the natural law and respect the dignity of every person from when they are conceived, and even before they are conceived, to make sure that they are conceived in a holy and dignified way.

I hope this episode was helpful for you, and if you'd like to learn more, I recommend Patrick Madrid's book of conversions to Catholicism among pro-lifers called Surprised By Life.

And when it comes to in vitro fertilization, check out Stephanie Gray Connors' book Conceived by Science, and for other moral issues, see my book with Leila Miller, Made This Way.

Thank you so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.