Right to Life Radio

Josh starts the show with a quick rant about annoying people who nitpick other people’s language that aren't "pro-life" enough. As you can guess, this happened to him recently. Afterwards the Life Report team discusses something Justice For All Director David Lee said during Josh’s interview with him. David said that "everybody is a little bit pro-choice." Is this true? Do pro-life people REALLY believe that unborn children are full persons? Do they act like they believe that? Lastly, the Life Report responds to a pro-choice argument Josh had never heard before: "abortion is just a medical treatment for unwanted pregnancy, and medical treatments should be legal."

Josh & Liz respond to questions from the audience. Caller: 1: "Are you pro-life activists because of your belief in God, or because of something else?" Listener Mail: 1: "I think pro-choice bodily rights arguments are all strawmen arguments." 2: "How would you respond to a consistent death ethic, where the person responds that it would even be okay to kill toddlers for that reason?"

Special guests Steve Wagner and Becca Haschke from Justice For All join Josh for a discussion on how pro-lifers can best interact with post-abortive people. We don’t want to make them feel unnecessarily guilty, but we also don’t want to overcompensate and act as if abortion is no big deal.

This is the first of a series of recorded conversations between Josh Brahm and abortion advocates we're going to publish exclusively on this website. It's not an attempt to make pro-choice people look dumb, but an attempt to understand them better, as well as let you hear the arguments and methods we talk about on Life Report used in real time, with real people. Primary Dialogue Topics: 1: Summary of Crystal and Josh's positions on abortion 2: Are the unborn constructed or developed? 3: Is the current capacity for conscious thought necessary for personhood? 4: Is the zygote comparable to bodily cells? 5: What about rape?

Special guests Steve Wagner and Becca Haschke from Justice For All join Josh for a discussion on how to respond to "impossible" pro-choice people.

Josh Brahm interviews Jen Roth, a pro-life philosopher who’s also an atheist and co-founder of All Our Lives. Jen explains how she communicates and defends her pro-life position. Jen also responded to questions from both pro-life and pro-choice live listeners, and closes the show by asking Josh how he grounds his view that humans are valuable. Josh’s Questions for Jen: 1: How would you communicate your pro-life position? 2: How do you respond when a pro-choice person says the unborn are not persons as you and I are? 3: Do you distinguish between humans and all other animals? 4: How would you respond to someone who bites the bullet and concedes that newborns are not valuable people? 5: What about rape? 6: Assuming the unborn are valuable people, how do you respond to the objection that making abortion illegal would you would be violating womens’ bodily autonomy, or bodily integrity? 7: By basic needs, do you mean universal or something else? 8: As an atheist, would the argument that the uterus is designed for pregnancy hold weight? 9: How would you respond if a pro-choicer moves from bodily rights to rape? Does parental responsibility hold up in that case? 10: Some say that not allowing abortions is inherently discriminatory because she could not walk away from the pregnancy in the same way a jerky man could. What do you say to that? 11: And what do you think of the counter that a law prohibiting abortion would not be inherently discriminatory unless it stated that only women could not have abortions (as men could, theoretically, one day become pregnant despite the extreme risk of danger)? 12: Would you consider yourself a moral relativist? 13: How would you respond to the pro-choicer who thinks that we should be able to abort babies that have physical or mental defects? 14: How do you think the way you ground your pro-life argument differs from pro-life theists? Questions from Live Listeners: 1: Would the thought that birth gives us full human rights not be consistent? 2: Even if we concede there is an intrusion going on in the woman’s body, in the case of rape, to remain pregnant against her will, the intrusion against the child’s body in the case of abortion outweighs the intrusion in the case of rape. Is that a good pro-life argument or a bad one? 3: As an atheist, what do you believe makes humans so valuable that all humans, even the unborn, should be protected? 4: As an atheist, from a pro-choicer who believes abortion is permissible from a moral relativist position, how would you answer that objection and say that abortion is never morally permissible?

Josh describes an abortion debate he's having online with someone, who's using philosopher Eileen McDonagh's argument that the fetus is comparable to a rapist, implanting itself in the mother's body without consent, and that the mother has the right to refuse consent and repel the fetus like she would a rapist. How should pro-lifers respond to this fringe version of the bodily rights argument?

Includes caller questions and listener mail on heading off relativism at the start of a conversation, responding to pro-choice questions and Josh takes back something he said in an earlier podcast about ineffective biblical arguments!

1: How Josh's pro-life story started 2: How pro-lifers should use social networking (and how they shouldn't) 3: How can we activate pastors that are afraid of preaching clearly on abortion? 4: How did Life Report get started? 5: Is the pro-life battle a winnable war?

The Life Report team brings back a classic Life Report topic: pro-life bumper stickers. It quickly becomes a debate between Josh and Andrew on what the purpose of a pro-life bumper sticker should be, while Liz, as usual, mediates. Listener Competition: Create your own pro-life bumper sticker and email it to Josh. It can't be based on a bumper stick or slogan already in use. We'll vote on the best bumper sticker in a future episode and the winner will receive a $50 Best Buy gift card!

Guest Co-Host: Christina Dunigan, Pro-Life Researcher/Blogger http://realchoice.blogspot.com/ Caller 1: Isn't claiming that the aborting of disabled babies will shut down the Special Olympics a bad pro-life argument? 2: It seems like our government is turning a blind eye to abortion facilities with low health standard. Do you feel there will ever be a time when our government will take action on this issue? 3: I think it's a good idea to try to understand the motivations of pro-choice politicians. Listener Mail: Antonio from Portugal writes to us with some shocking excerpts about abortion from a sexuality textbook in Spain.

Live Action President Lila Rose and Media Director David Schmidt join Josh to discuss their latest project, IStandWithIndiana.org. They explain why Indiana is the "ground zero" of the abortion battle right now, discuss their project and Planned Parenthood’s reaction to it. They then respond to listener comments & questions, from both pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

Note from Josh: Open Line runs through Skype, and Skype was apparently working very poorly the night we recorded this. Thus, the audio is pretty skippy. You can still follow what we’re saying, but it’s not nearly the same quality you’re used to from Life Report. If you’re willing to be patient with that, I think the content of this show will be helpful to you. From now on, we’ll run a backup recording off our mixer so that if Skype acts stupid again, we can replace the audio straight from our board. Caller Questions: 1: "How would you respond to this pro-choice argument: ‘DNA is like computer code, and many fetuses die before birth because their computer code malfunctions, so we really can’t know if a fetus is human until it’s born.’" 2: "I think the popular pro-life quote, ‘abortion has killed one-fourth of our generation’ is both a false statistic and a poor argument." Listener Mail Questions: 1: "Technically, ‘abortion’ is the termination of a pregnancy following, accompanied by, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus. Because a) this can apply to miscarriages and b) it’s the killing of the child, not the ending of the pregnancy, that we oppose, do you think it would behoove us to use a different word?" 2: "My friend wants to become an embryonic stem cell researcher. Is there any unique way you would discuss the issue of life with an abortion doctor or an embryonic stem cell researcher?" 3: "I was wondering, why some people would oppose reproductive cloning but not therapeutic/research cloning? It seems the one that doesn’t kill people would be preferred."

The Life Report team responds to the concern that by exposing poor pro-life arguments, we are helping pro-choice people win debates with pro-lifers who use those arguments. Are we inadvertently equipping "the enemy?"

Guest Co-Host: Pro-Life Pastor Kristopher Mobbs. Includes listener questions on legislating morality, pro-life warning labels, the burning IVF lab scenario, and a pro-choice listener calls in to ask about whether women might be unjustly prosecuted for miscarriages if abortion becomes illegal.