We Don't Talk About Abortion: The Rhetoric of Pro Life Propaganda

Now this makes me think of some weird idyllic society pro-life people might envision where nobody has to get an abortion because all unwanted babies can be scooped out early on and raised in an artificial uterus and then grow up in a society that raises children communally so that no child would be without parent. That's basically the only world I can think of where theoretically everybody wins but it also sounds like some year 4000 stuff and I don't think we'll survive that long as a species.

Dracowolfie

I think the toughest philosophical dilemma is determining the point between zygote and a near-born infant does the act of abortion go from a morally meaningless procedure to an act of murder. It seems impossible that there is a gradient between those two, but also unlikely that there could ever possibly be a meaningful theshold where it flips from one to the other.

Chad Wilson

"if you are not willing to engage with and accept that some people DO think a fetus in the first trimester is a human life the same as a one day old baby, and no amount of telling them to just *conveniently stop believing that* is going to help, then you are not actually listening to the person you are trying to change the mind of" While I'm on the side that it isn't, I always come at the issue from the standpoint that it is, specifically *because* it's a subjective but deeply held opinion. One that I don't believe outweighs all the other issues involved, so I focus on those instead. But when the topic comes up, the pro-life crowd tends not to care, maybe even agrees, but then falls back on, "but murder". Like you said, "there is a simple wall there", but I don't think the wall is built on a foundation of pro-choicers insisting on forcing people to believe the first trimester isn't "alive". For some of course it will be, but there is also a wall built and intentionally maintained by the pro-lifers which usually tends to be built on a foundation of retribution for the woman having sex. This wall is the same one that also prevents reasonable discussion about things like contraceptives or sex ed that would actually reduce the need for abortion in the first place, but are vehemently opposed by pro-lifers, along with post-birth childcare and the like. The punishment of the mother for having sex is the point, and no good-faith argument will change that opinion. As for the question of where to draw the line, I think really that's the wrong question to ask. Instead, I'd ask "who are you to draw the line for me?" - and equally, "who am I to draw the line for you?" There are a ton of complications and scenarios surrounding birth, and a one-size-fits-all threshold to make other people who aren't even aware of a given situation feel comfortable about it just doesn't make sense. If you dove into individual cases regarding late stage abortions, you would probably find that the vast, vast majority of them - probably 100% - had very justifiable reasons for the mother making that decision. Neither pregnancy nor abortion are just some cakewalk women are lining up for to choose to go through for 8.9 months before terminating. It's hard, and ending it is even harder, both physically and mentally, which is why only a vanishingly tiny percent of pregnancies end in abortion in the third trimester. Adding a ban with exceptions for medical issues that would result in the mother's or child's death or result in undue hardships is just an unnecessary added stress factor that someone having to consider an abortion shouldn't be burdened with for no reason (especially given the way some areas intend to handle those cases - by scheduling court dates and the like for *after* the due date). So why draw the line at all? The decision should be between the pregnant woman and her doctor, and no one else. We can't reasonably account for all details pertaining to all cases for everyone ever, and people aren't just going out and doing this willy-nilly just because they can.

Big Joel, I love how you approached this. I grew up with these peeps, used to be one, have argued against this for years, and have recently gotten in several heated discussions and you nailed it. I had to stop my mom in our last argument because I was like, why do you keep making up hypothetical situations that are bad that only involve one doctor or clinic? Give me an actual argument. It's a million smoke screen or just blatant lies or misinformation, and if you challenge the smokescreen, they send you videos of bloody fetuses. Ive never had words for the fact that I've never engaged in an actual argument over this. I even got in one argument where a prolife was saying prolife should listen to women more and by the end of the convo, we were both left with, pro-life cannot listen to women. Because the inevitable conclusion is that, listening to women leads to pro-choice. My one criticism is: I think you should put stats to the "abortions arent dangerous" claim if possible. They exist and I can send them but maybe it doesnt suit the vid. I also love the ending, Yoh presented the two options and... I think there is a lot of realness there- I notice I have to be unflinchingly pro-abortion. I notice once I engage in good faith, with unabashed pro-abortion, its the only time I make progress. Otherwise, if I give them an inch, calling it a baby over a fetus, they see that as the moral victory. I can't tone it down or make it more palatable

Juliet Saxton

OK I'M SORRY JOEL I GOTTA LOT OF WORDS ON THIS SUBJECT SO LET'S GO: So background: I was raised in a pretty right wing christian environment (church every sunday and wednesday, private christian school, christian summer camp, voted for bush etc).I was an only child, produced ~out of wedlock~, and my father wanted me to have me aborted. And that was the end of his relationship with my mother! My mom honestly is great and raised me to the best of her ability even if we no longer agree on basically anything when it comes to politics and religion. I'm bringing this up only because while I think your overall point of 'how people want to talk about abortion but not REALLY engage with the moral quandary it presents' is largely, in my experience, true, the whole part where people present statistics *really is still really super important*. Like, maybe not to someone who has been prolife down to their bones their entire life. But honestly I think you'd be surprised at how much people who are prolife have never heard any of this. Like I *literally was taken on a field trip to an anti-abortion clinic when I was in elementary school* so that they could horrify us with JUST HOW EVIL abortions are. I remembered that experience and the misrepresented data given to me for the next ten years. Presenting data that combats that IS important and it's why I eventually decided to be pro-choice, because learning that the data that had been used to support pro-life ideals my entire life was inaccurate or being used disingenuously fucked with me and it created an instability in my ability to trust my upbringing which, while generally shitty to experience, was an important step in me learning to investigate more on my own. Now, do boomers care or listen to any of this? IDK. But I think it's important to realize there a lot of children, teenagers, and young adults out there who are learning to make their own choices and see the world outside of the bubble that has been constructed for them, and a lot of the information that probably seems painfully obvious to you, that you have probably heard ten thousand times and it feels like no one is listening, may honestly be the first time someone who is 18 and was raised in a Christian household is encountering the idea. NOW. That out of way: When I was really dealing with my feelings on prolife/prochoice, I thought about and was frustrated with a lot of the stuff you bring up here and honestly I... am not sure I've ever heard someone who wasn't from a Christian upbringing (unless you are I guess I do not know) talk about this. It's true that the question of 'where do you put the line of when it's okay to kill a baby' is a really important one that I don't think pro-lifers or pro-choicers are discussing even though to me that was always the heart of the issue. People who grow up believing in Pro-Choice all actually do have their own lines of when abortion is no longer okay. The third trimester? the second? The first? what if it is a day before the first trimester mark or a day after? At what minute of what day does that life transform from something that only had theoretical value to something our society treats as pure, perfect, to be cherished and protected at all costs? This inconsistency and the fact that no one wanted to talk clearly about it really haunted me and was a big part of why I was hesitant to even consider being pro-choice. People mock the idea that Christians consider zygotes babies, but *no one* wants to murder a child, and at least 'at conception' is a pretty clear and easy to define line that that philosophically makes sense for the average person. And, here is the thing. While I am very adamantly pro-choice now, it's not because I moved the line. I have always felt that 'well, I will just say a baby is not a baby so then it's okay for it die' was a pretty weak ass way to resolve a deeply moral quandary. I understand a lot of people are not raised to think of fetuses as babies or people, and I do not blame them for that. But I was. So any argument that effectively amounted to 'well, have you considered that actually this life *doesn't matter* and you are stupid for thinking that it does?' just... didn't have any power with me. No, I am not going to arbitrary move the line to make a huge swath of lives valueless just so I can not feel bad about their deaths. In general, I think that is a really bad way to approach life or death questions! What I had to do to accept that I felt pro-choice was still the best choice for our society was to learn about all of the surrounding factors. For example: 1. WHY do we treat the lives of babies as more valuable than the lives of adults? In reality, while my friend's baby dying would make me sad, it would make me less sad than my actual friend dying. There is a tendency to idealize and sanctify the notion of what infancy represents. But in reality, it's the people who are currently activate and participating in our lives and the world who we truly value, love, and need. I realized that in social terms, the life, future, and potential of a young woman was more important to me than that of her child. 2. Why, when it comes to abortions, do we suddenly act like we are a society against death? I was dealing with a lot of this during 2008 which was not a good period overall but we were years into a war I had only tentatively supported at the start and which was supposed to be well over. I was learning about the problems and complexities behind the death penalty, and our country's health care, and behind racism and how some lives are fundamentally treated as less valuable than others. I realized I grew up believing unquestioningly that it was okay to kill for your country, but could never shake the blog entries I read of people who lived in Baghdad when we invaded. The reality is... humans kill a lot. As a (right wing) American I was taught to embrace the idea of death and collateral damage and making the hard choices because there is no utopia where everyone lives happily and there are no sacrifices. That because of this there is fundamental aspect to life that makes death 'okay'. So to me, 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life' really just boils down to do you value the bodily autonomy, agency, and potential of a woman who grew up in a society that informed her regularly that large amount of her value was going to be in sex and motherhood, or do you value the question mark of the unborn baby who would be raised by that woman? In a better world, I might be pro-life still. But the complexities that go into why someone ends up with an unwanted pregnancy, and how the world is just unilaterally skewed against them at various points in their lives, means I can't in good conscious support ideas I used to believe like 'You made your choice and now you have to take responsibility'. My mom fucked up when she was dating an asshole at 21 and not using protection even though she knew she should. But god, who didn't fuck up at 21? I don't think she was obligated to completely derail all of her plans for her future to make up for it. And while I am glad to be alive, if I had died in the womb I never would've known. I worked at a clinic that had planned parenthood when I was dealing with all this and I saw fourteen year old pregnant girls going in there and yeah, at the end of the day I took a hard look at my priorities and decided I cared more about the young girl's life and future, and if a baby with no name who meant nothing to anyone other than the woman carrying it needed to die so she could have a better future, so be it. There is a broader conversation to be had about all the ways the abortion question could be made less dramatic in our society. If the adoption system was better, if healthcare for pregnant woman was better, if capitalism was less awful, if society was less sexist, if men were expected to participate more in raising children, if sex education was better, if sex discussion was less taboo, if contraceptives were easier to access. There are *many* steps that can be taken to make this a less terrible scenario for all involved that are not unilaterally deciding that after a woman has sex she may or may not have really wanted, she no longer gets a choice in a decision that massively impacts her entire future and also the future of her child. Anyway, sorry that was long! I haven't thought about this in a while and I haven't talked about it in years. Even when I moved to the left on this issue it's true that I found that people do not really want to actually engage with the moral weight of an unborn baby's life. I talked to myself about this and I settled my values internally, but I do not think that most pro-lifers, especially those who have been on that side for a while, will do this. And it's true that if pro-choicers are not actually engaging with this, I do not think their arguments will be strongly felt by pro-lifers. Because there is a simple wall there, if you are not willing to engage with and accept that some people DO think a fetus in the first trimester is a human life the same as a one day old baby, and no amount of telling them to just *conveniently stop believing that* is going to help, then you are not actually listening to the person you are trying to change the mind of.

AV

hi joel my names shaun, are you wearing a coogi sweater in this video?

shaun t

both you and dan olson making videos about reframing the way we see and argue against reactionary views. you even both call back to arguments made by other youtubers 💕 god damn love lefty youtube. like a lot

q T π

Also, and this is much less important, this testimonial from a very pro abortion rights former president of Planned Parenthood who felt like she couldn't build out the public health oriented organization she wanted to kindof showed me that the pro-choice movement benefits from being right and good but that they have culture warriors too who have been fighting political battles for too long https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/sunday/leana-wen-planned-parenthood.html

Ope! Nevermind ! Video and transcript are both here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?124642-1/cuomo-notre-dame-speech I'm really excited about this resource. I am going to sit down with my never-Trump Bob Dole voting Catholic parents and watch with them. I knew all of this stuff was bullshit when my buddy's mom who is Syro-Malabar Catholic and leads ladies in her church in the rosary at home said to me that she was voting Clinton enthusiastically in 2016, that abortion just didn't figure prominently in her political calculus. White American Catholics are brain poisoned by Reaganism by and large, that's the problem.

Hi I just wanted to say that I only just started and when you said "The Christian begins by saying that..." and the screen just said Mothcub I thought "whoah is he using Mothcub as an example of a Christian and dunking on her" and it was a very confusing moment. I thought that was fun :)

Sesselja Kristinsdóttir

Hi BigJoel! Great video as always! I'm really excited about this one because my mom saw Unplanned in theaters and after she saw it she urged all of us kids to watch it. Seeing this response video was much better than watching the movie maybe multiple times with a notebook myself, so I appreciate it on that basic personal level in the first place. Secondly, I do want to say that from a greatest good for the greatest number point of view, I think it would be better to leave in your impersonation of the fœtus being aborted but to take out the audio of laughing right afterwards. I thought your voice work was funny and felt mirth myself, but when you laughed right after, I couldn't stop thinking about how my mom would take that part in her gut. Finally, and I will try to be brief, I think this is the perfect time to be making this argument. I think the Pro-Life political mvmt should die and that Republicans are on the ropes through their support of DJT. I happen to be a person who accepts premise 1 of your two premises listed towards the end but I emphatically reject premise 2. I believe in my heart that the probability of a particular person unknown to us all yet but who will have a full on personality by ages 3/4/5 goes way up when they're conceived. I think Reagan walked through a big hole in our culture when he leveraged Christianity to attack the autonomy of women and other people who can get pregnant. When you go back and look at white leftists like Norman Mailer it was just a huge open flank. Two pieces of history that I think are important to this fight are 1. The homunculus theory of human development, prevalent throughout most of the 19th century and 2. Mario Cuomo's trip to Notre Dame University, the heart of American Catholicism, in 1984 - mid Reagan era - to try and prevent all of this. He made appeals to history ie the treatment of Catholics in England and to practical reasoning ie that he was a Governor who believed in the sanctity of life (ie all of that stuff other Catholics had always believed and that American conservative Christians had always considered a weird Catholic thing until it was politically expedient for them) but knew what would happen in his state if they were to pursue the criminalization of abortion and knew that that was a bad idea, there's a video somewhere but not online, I think there's a transcript though

To play devil's advocate on the whole "if they truly think it's murder, why are they simultaneously somewhat gentle and forgiving about it", I suspect it could be defended on the basis that: (a) yes, abortion is murder, big time 100% evil terrible murder and in a perfect society it would be condemned with the same vigour but (b) as a matter of demonstrable fact, in this reality there are many people who are otherwise honest and kind people who have been indoctrinated/conditioned to be numb to its horrors, and (c) if our opposition to abortion is presented with the same uncompromising and unforgiving viciousness as that which we treat murder with, those otherwise honest/gentle people will not identify themselves as murderers and will reject our arguments outright. The film DOES truly believe abortion is murder, in the worst sense, but its primary goal is to propagandise its audience to be effective activists. The whole marriage thing is obviously weird - you don't marry someone you believe to be a murderer no matter how effective you want your activism to be - but that could be seen as a filmic technique. The film does not expect its audience to ACTUALLY marry murderers - but it is instead attempting to set the bar for the level of outward-facing forgiveness that the movement needs to exude in order to achieve its aims. That said, haven't seen the movie, so could be bollocks.

I think that pro-lifers majorly don't believe abortion is actual murder, because as you stated, that would imply that your immediate family, friends, society, and government are complicit and even eager to commit mass murder. That belief would not be satisfied by the meager action of visiting the murder factory every weekend to tell murderers they're bad. I think what pro-lifers actually hate is that the state and by extension society accepts a moral framework that does not line up with their own. As shown in Unplanned, the primary demonization is of the company that facilitates abortions and of their unbridled greed. They cannot demonize the people who undergo an abortion or even the people administering it because that drives the moral quandry to a personal level. The real critique of Unplanned is anti-capitalist and pro-theocracy. The actual policies being implemented are immaterial, the desire is for a society that structures itself around the Christian beliefs and that aberrations within that society are fixed not by systemic power, but by the most moral people within that society.

Good spotting, I noticed it too, an odd repetition, this needs to be tidied up.

H Johnson

nice video bigj! i think around 1:05 you say “why are you mad that i’m not always having sex/women have their periods” twice in a row right? or am i crazy? ? anyway appreciated this sneak peek 🤘

I totally agree with the first point and am trying to incorporate it in the video. But I’m not sure how cody is denying Shapiro an interlocutor here. In that video, the only argument cody shows Ben making is that we should ban abortions because fetuses are people. Wait I see what you mean. Though I actually do bring exactly this up though, right? Ben says the reducing abortion will lead to less of them, Cody says no it doesn’t, yet the argument, at least the one between the two of them, has no actual weight whatsoever. It’s being proven or disproven means nothing.

Big Joel

I really enjoyed the video (and the jumper you're wearing absolutely rules). One quick minor note I'd have is that given your use of the phrase "people who get pregnant" later in the video, it might be good to use similarly gender neutral language when you mention periods in the first hypothetical?

Lavender

I like that you take seriously the fact that people who are against abortion think of it (sometimes) as an ongoing genocide that their country is forcing them to be party to; a lot of time that gets lost in this debate. However I don't think you're diagnosing the point of Cody's/Ian's argument here. In short, it's not meant to convince a pro-lifer, and it's not capable of doing so. It's meant to do one of two things, or both: 1. Convince somebody witnessing the public debate who's got less cleanly defined ideas about abortion; i.e. the large number of people who feel, vaguely, that it's wrong, but also aren't entirely comfortable with the idea of forcing women to take pregnancies to term. Most people don't have a strong and consistent position here, and if some people find 'banning abortions will reduce the number of them' persuasive, then they can be persuaded by 'allowing abortions and also women's health and contraception is more effective at reducing the number of them.' That's not necessarily people who are strongly pro-life, but that's not the only type of person out there. 2. Denying your interlocutor the ability to claim that they care about reducing the number of abortions. If you see somebody making the claim that making abortion illegal is good because, even if it won't stop every abortion from happening, it will at least reduce the number of them (as Shapiro does in that Some More News video), and you point out that that's not the case, their response has to explain why reducing abortions doesn't actually matter, then, and there's another reason to do it even if it's not effective. Again, that doesn't matter to somebody who thinks that abortion is murder, but that's not the only group of people up to be persuaded.

Richard Jackson

Oh and this facial hair is most amenable.

H Johnson

Damn you for exposing the intellectual vapidity of my latest smug leftist YouTube-influenced superficially persuasive argument/delusion on how to convince the pro-lifers by rational means. But your theory is generally sound, compelling enough for YouTube (o; It rambles a bit in the last five minutes, you could streamline a few minutes away. And when you said "...at the drop of a..." I was disappointed that you missed the chance to say "foetus" (o;

H Johnson

Oh sure! Lots of things do! Lots of people make very good pro abortion arguments haha. I’d recommend curios video about abortion in media too, if you’re interested. Might recommend some of this stuff in the outro! (That said, I’m not actually hugely fond of the violinist argument olly uses. Sure I agree with him that even if all fetuses are people, abortion would still be permissible. but if we assumed all that, it would still render abortion a hugely problematic thing to do. I mean sure, it might be acceptable to kill the violinist, but is it desirable? Should the government give people access to violinist killing operations? What’s more, wouldn’t we want to judge people for having sex, if they wanted to terminate the pregnancy if it occurred? I know I’d see that sex as an immoral act. All things considered, I just don’t know if we can have the abortion protections we need if we don’t accept the basic truth that fetuses are not people. What’s more, I’ve never been entirely sure why we ought to invoke the hypothetical in the first place. Is there a contingent of people producing the hypothetical, “what if your appendix was a person, would it be wrong to get it removed?” Seems to me that before we start introducing hypotheticals, we should ask “why on earth do I see this situation as applicable to the real world, and why should we entertain it in this case specifically.”)

Big Joel

Great video! Only thing I felt was absent based on the conclusion section when talking about Cody and Ian's videos is a mention of Olly's video on the subject, which I think does move further into the kind of discourse you are advocating in the end.

Haha I’m actually looking forward to getting this comment a lot. If you’re interested, here’s a lengthy footnote I made in response to it! I’m considering adding it to the end of the video actually. Footnote 2: So, I’m well aware that both these guys probably know full well that the argument they’re making *won’t* convince pro lifers. Cody no doubt doesn’t actually think he’s going to get Ben Shapiro, and an extremely important point in Ian’s videos is that this argument would NEVER convince pro lifers, because conservatives are broadly more concerned with punishing evil than actually doing something about the problem. But here, I want to make a distinction. A distinction between an argument that is likely to persuade people and an intellectually persuasive argument. We all intuitively understand that this is a meaningful distinction, right. We know that there’s no way to convince a flat earther that the earth is round, but we also know that the arguments we can provide for the roundness of the earth are very good. That if the flat earther was thinking rationally and cared about the evidence, he would accept that he was wrong. The problem I have with these arguments is not that they wouldn’t actually persuade real pro lifers. I know that I probably haven’t done that myself. Rather, my problem is that they aren’t intellectually persuasive. They accept the terms of pro lifers insofar as that they assume, for the sake of argument, that abortion is something people might rationally want to reduce. But they ignore the actual problem pro lifers have with them, that they think, on some level at least, that fetuses are people and that ending their lives is murder. If you really accept that, then your argument to ban abortion is as simple as the words “I believe murder should be socially prohibited, outlawed in some way.” And that’s just not a particularly hard claim to defend. Most people would agree with it. In other words, pro lifers don’t think abortions are like driving your car too fast or shoplifting, they think it’s a very important problem. And so, saying “well if we did this social thing, we’d at least reduce them somewhat.” it’s just not a good enough case. It’s not just that it wouldn’t persuade pro lifers, it’s that it shouldn’t persuade them because it’s not persuasive. It’s for this reason, by the way, that I make the case here that our argument for abortion needs to be as simple as “abortions are fine. They’re not a Big Moral Problem that needs solving. The core assumption of the pro life argument is wrong.”

Big Joel

Good video, only point I'd make is that I feel like Ian's video sort of agrees with you about how it's not about stopping abortions, it's about punishing people who get them and otherwise act outside the way they see is appropriate.

Sethzard

Love the video!! :)

Max Throm

thank you!!

Big Joel

Great video as always! Just thought I should mention the typo for the title card of part three, where you wrote "absense" instead of absence.

Also, just as a side note, this is one of my favorite sweaters of yours.

Henry R. Seymour

no sorry, this is what lilly decided to draw and it's gorgeous

Big Joel

As a piece of feedback, maybe have animations by Mothcub instead of just a black screen with white text that says Mothcub.

Henry R. Seymour

to be clear there's more to the vid than just mothcub drawings lol

Big Joel