UnAborted

Technical Setup and Opening Remarks

Okay, so we are now recording, and that same problem I had earlier on Facebook is just.

Not, it's just not going. I don't know why it's doing that.

And you're signed in the way that you're supposed to be.

Seth, I heard you speaking at Jack Hibbs Church a few weeks ago.

Yeah, that was fun.

I appreciated your passion.

Thanks, yeah. I'm actually going to be back there Sunday morning.

I'm in Menifee. Do you know where Menifee, California is?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's where I live.

Awesome.

That's my mom, Seth.

Awesome.

We're actually in the same room, in the same home, but two different rooms.

Alrighty, well let me know when you're ready.

Alright.

You know, just go ahead. I'll just try to get this as best I can. It's, for some reason, I don't know if it's the browser or what, but it had been working fine until last week. And just, yeah, just go ahead.

Terri, we're recording.

Okay. Alright, well then let's get started. So, I am Terri Camersell, and we are the Creation Fellowship Santee, normally meeting at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. And we're pleased to be able to do this online series since we haven't been able to meet in person since all of the shutdowns at the beginning of this year.

And our common thread is that we believe that God is the creator of the universe and everything in it belongs to him. So, we're excited when we get to have speakers that are a little bit off topic from our Genesis account, but still related.

And that's what Seth Gruber is here for us tonight because we know that God is the creator, creates all human beings, and he knows each of us, even when we're in the womb. So, we're happy to have Seth Gruber.

Seth is a professional public speaker focused on equipping Christians and pro-life advocates to make a gracious, winsome, and persuasive case of their pro-life beliefs in the public square. Seth's passion is to help equip Christians to be able to love their pre-born neighbor.

And he has a podcast that you can find on his website, SethGruber .com. His podcast is Unaborted. So, with that, we're happy to have him here with us tonight. Seth, go ahead.

Awesome.

Defending Life as a Christian Calling

Well, thank you guys for tuning in. And it's good to be with like-minded people, especially during a time where people have not been able to gather together as often or as frequently. So, thanks for having me on.

I'm going to be giving one of my lectures tonight called Defending Life, How Christians Can Be a Voice for the Unborn. And it's sort of my evergreen lecture that I think just stands the test of time. And so, I thought it would be the most applicable for our purposes tonight, just to lay what I kind of call the philosophical groundwork, if you will, tilling the philosophical soil of this issue, so that you're positioned to water that soil well, so that you can be equipped to defend life, engage the culture, and be a voice for the unborn.

I went to a Christian college. I went to Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. And I was the founder of the first and only pro-life club on campus. It was Westmont College. That's a large experience in and of itself, as my college doesn't take a position on the issue of abortion, and they actually hire pro-abortion faculty.

So, you just have to sign a statement of faith, but you don't have to believe it's wrong to tear limbs off of pre-born image bears in the womb in order to teach at Westmont College. I say all that to set up this comment and quote that I want to read to you from my time at Westmont College.

You see, I became somewhat notorious at Westmont, and I was not well liked by many because of my outspoken voice on the issue of abortion and my critiques of the college's cowardice in claiming to be a Christian college whose motto is Christ preeminent in all things, except apparently the prenatal Christ and all babies created in the image of the prenatal Christ who apparently don't deserve to have Christians raise their voice to protect them.

And so, the faculty advisor for my pro-life club one day sent me an email correspondence in a thread that he was in where professors at Westmont were sharing their opinions on abortion and their opinions on how Christian colleges like Westmont ought to interact with the issue of abortion.

And here's what one professor had to say about how he views the role of the Christian in regards to literally genocide, the genocide of one million baby image bearers every year. He said, the moral particularities of abortion are so fine textured and open textured that Manichean distinctions about being pro or anti-abortion strike me as ethically obtuse.

Our community and our students are best served when our chapel speakers invite us to tarry in the liminal spaces of complexity. Now, if you're thinking, what? What does that mean? I don't really know what that means.

But I wish I could tell you that that was merely a parody of professorial thinking. But I'm afraid it's much more of a window into the church's deep-seated confusion on the issue of abortion. And the statistics, unfortunately, bear this out.

A Pew Research Center study from 2016 on religious views on abortion categorized those views according to morally wrong, morally acceptable, or not a moral issue at all. And of course, if you don't think abortion is a moral issue at all, that's basically the same as saying that it's morally acceptable.

And amongst white evangelical Protestants, they found that 76 said abortion was morally wrong, right? So 24 being broken up into morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all. Catholics reported 51 saying abortion was morally wrong.

Amongst Black Protestants, 46 said abortion was morally wrong. And amongst white mainline Protestants, 33 said abortion is morally wrong. Those are sobering and staggering statistics. Because, of course, as I went down the list, less and less of those denominations and their adherents were opposed to abortion.

And a larger percentage of them thought abortion was morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all. So this is in our ranks too, right? This is within the walls of the church. One of the reasons why the church has been so deafeningly silent on the abortion of the lambs is because they're killing their own children within the walls of the church.

So, of course, they don't feel equipped to talk about it. Of course, they're afraid and guilty and shameful because they haven't even done anything to prevent the slaughter of baby image-bearers within their own church, much less out in the culture.

And unfortunately, I can testify to the moral and spiritual confusion amongst the church on abortion today. When I went to Westmont College, I encountered apathy unlike I had ever seen before amongst Christians.

And the current sitting president of Westmont College, President Gail Beebe, who was the president when I was there, looked me in the face in a meeting and said, we're not going to take a position on the issue of abortion because there's so many issues.

You know, there's just so many. So killing children is really just morally equivalent to women in ministry or speaking in tongues or creationism versus evolution. It's just all the same. So we're just not going to take a position on abortion.

Obviously unbelievable, right? And now I travel all across the country speaking in Protestant and Catholic high schools, secular and religious universities, youth groups, churches, pregnancy care clinic banquets, conferences, and the moral fog that our Christian leaders and pastors are living in is affecting the next generation as well.

And the other side understands that the battle and fight for the future of America is the fight for the current generation. They understand that the fight for the future is the fight for the posterity of America.

And so if we can win their minds now, we'll own them forever and shape an America that looks how we want it to look. And the church has abdicated their responsibility to equip and raise up, to disciple, right?

Go out into all the nation creating disciples and then teach them to obey all that I have commanded you. That's discipleship. And we have not been discipling our young people to be salt and light in culture.

And this is why a universal theme within the pro-life movement is the deafening silence of the church on abortion. And so I think our role as Christians at the very least is what 2 Corinthians 10 5 tells us to do, which is to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

But unfortunately, many of us don't know how to do this with the issue of abortion, do we? We don't know how to take those thoughts and those ideas captive to Christ, to objective truth, to objective reality.

We feel passionate about our pro-life beliefs, but when we're confronted with opposition that is counter to everything we believe about life and dignity and the image of God, then oftentimes we crumble and we don't know how to respond.

So my hope is that by the end of the evening, you will know how to do that with the issue of abortion. So make no mistake, there are two radically different views of humanity when we talk about the issue of abortion.

One view says, yes, we can kill unborn children because they're not one of us. They're so different. They're obviously not a person. The other view says, no, we can't kill the unborn because they are one of us.

These are two radically different views of humanity. And Reddy, I'm going to leave you with a crazy idea. Someone is wrong.

Someone is wrong.

The law of non-contradiction is very clear. Two opposing ideas cannot both be true at the same time and in the same way. There is no moral neutrality. There is no gray area on the dismemberment of baby image bearers.

Someone is wrong and someone is right. And so this evening, we're going to talk about why you're right and how you can articulate and defend that right belief, that orthodox belief, which is the pro-life position.

The Moral Crisis Inside the Church

So how can we defend life? How can Christians be a voice for the unborn? Well, before I tell you, this is so important and significant because Christians and non-Christians alike are deeply confused on abortion.

You got Tim Keller two and a half weeks ago sharing on Facebook that, well, the Bible tells me that abortion is wrong and a great evil, but it doesn't tell me the best way to decrease or end abortions.

Therefore, the Christian has liberty of conscience, liberty of conscience politically, to vote however he wants. Keller says when it comes to voting, determining political alliances and political involvement, the Christian has liberty of conscience.

And then he says Christians cannot say to other Christians no Christian can vote for or every Christian must vote for unless you can find a biblical command to that effect, end quote. So according to Pastor Tim Keller, apparently Christians during the 1850s in America had the liberty of conscience to vote for the Democratic Party, that party of slavery in the KKK, because you know what?

The Bible doesn't tell us the best way to decrease or end slavery. I guess Christians have liberty of conscience to support Hitler and his regime in 1940 because brother, you have freedom, liberty of conscience to vote however you want.

Now of course, if Keller rejects these suggestions as permissible for the Christian, which I'm sure he does, but he is pro-life, then his own argument is rendered false, isn't it? Because abortion is wrong for the same reasons that slavery and the Holocaust were wrong.

They legally denied rights of personhood to image bearers of God while dehumanizing them in order to justify their mistreatment. But that truth is lost now on woke pastors like Tim Keller who politically speaking are the Levite and the priest in the parable of the Good Samaritan who walk by on the other side of the road to avoid a bleeding victim in need of help because the way that we say bleeding victims and use our voice to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves in America is our political voice, and the pre-born child is the greatest bleeding victim in America.

So this moral and spiritual fog is pervading the church and those predisposed to protect life because we believe that every human being is created in the image of God. That's the first reason it's significant.

Secondly, it's because even those who feel passionate about the unborn and defending life rarely know how to engage with others in a meaningful way that will get them to reconsider their views. And lastly, this is significant because over 63 million image bearers of God have been poisoned to death or ripped limb from limb in the womb since 1973 when abortion was legalized.

We're nearly 48 years since that bigoted decision that, like Dred Scott, said that not all humans are persons, and now we have the most pro-abortion political ticket in American history, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who have said that they will institute pre-clearance guidelines so those pesky pro-life states can't pass pro-life laws that Kamala Harris doesn't agree with.

And make no mistake, if Joe Biden becomes president, suddenly he will be declared mentally unfit by the DNC and Kamala Harris will become president. Mark my word. They are going to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.

They're going to threaten or promise to pack the Supreme Court with justices who have the jurisprudence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg until she recently passed. They're going to make D .C. a state so that they can immediately get two more Democratic senators.

They're going to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which keeps federal dollars from funding abortion through Medicaid reimbursements and is responsible for saving over 2 million babies. Oh, and they're going to increase the tax funding to Planned Parenthood by the millions.

This is why this is all significant. A Kamala Harris Joe Biden political ticket will be to unborn children what Hitler was to choose. And babies will be rounded up and targeted for slaughter, unlike any other time in American history.

So this is why this is significant. Christians have to get off the bench and engage the culture and love our pre-born neighbors who are our greatest bleeding victim. Surrender is not an option for the Christian.

Apathy is not an option for the Christian. Sitting on the bench while cheering on other pro-lifers is not an option. We have to get involved. So how can Christians be a voice for the unborn? Well, there's three simple things that we have to do.

We have to engage, we have to equip ourselves to engage, and we have to sacrifice to engage. So firstly, we have to engage. Now this kind of seems like a given, doesn't it? But because of the deafening silence of the American Church on the abortion of the lambs, it's not a given.

So I actually have to include it in my first to-do, in my first task, in my first marching order for you is we have to engage. Unfortunately, friends, Christian silence in the face of genocide is nothing new.

Bonhoeffer, Wilberforce, and the Duty to Resist Evil

That's actually the rule and not the exception for the Church, at least for the last 1500 years. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this better than many. He was fighting that type of horrific silence in the face of a holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s, wasn't he?

Now Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, martyr, prophet, and spy if you don't know. He was the founder, one of the co-founders of the Confessing Church in Germany. Eric Metaxas has written a phenomenal biography on his life, and I highly recommend that you read it.

But Dietrich Bonhoeffer was involved in an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler because he understood that the mania of that man was so unhinged that the best way to love his Jewish brothers and sisters was indeed to take Hitler's life.

Now that assassination attempt failed, and he ended up being executed for that attempt. And we have plenty of Bonhoeffer's writings in prison prior to his execution. Powerful man, right? And powerful story.

But Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of a core group of Christians called the Confessing Church in Germany at the time. Now why did they call themselves the Confessing Church? Well, Bonhoeffer was creating a line of demarcation between himself and his friends and the rest of German society that called themselves Christian but whose Christianity was entirely silent on an actual holocaust, on an actual genocide.

This was echoed earlier by William Wilberforce, that great British abolitionist who said that a private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all. Bonhoeffer would later say not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.

God will not hold us guiltless. There was no moral neutrality on the genocide of Jewish image bearers of God. And so Bonhoeffer's close friend by the name of Eberhard Bethke explained to us in some of his writing what Bonhoeffer was wrestling through during this time and the realizations that he was coming to regarding the Christian's role and involvement to promote righteousness, restrain evil, and rescue bleeding victims from a genocide.

And here's what Eberhard Bethke had to say. He said, Bonhoeffer introduced us in 1935 to the problem of what we today call political resistance. The levels of confession and resistance could no longer be kept neatly apart.

The escalating persecution of the Jews generated an increasingly intolerable situation, especially for Bonhoeffer himself. We now realize that mere confession and he doesn't mean like Catholic confession, he means like proclamation.

We now realize that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we would preach Christ alone Sunday after Sunday.

During the whole time, the Nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. Why should it? Thus, we were approaching the borderline between confession and resistance. And if we did not cross this border, our confession was going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals.

And so it became clear where the problem lay for the confessing church. And he said, we were resisting by way of confession, but we were not confessing by way of resistance. Do you see? He was saying that their opposition to genocide and state sanctioned slaughter was only evidencing itself through words and proclamation.

And isn't that a perfect diagnosis of the state of the American church today on the issue of abortion? Our opposition to our genocide and Holocaust, which kills one million babies a year at least, is typically proclamation.

I'm pro-life. We're a pro-life church. We check the pro-life box. We make a one-time donation to the local pregnancy resource center. I'll even say that I'm voting pro-life and nothing else. No form of resistance to state-sanctioned slaughter beyond your words, beyond your proclamation.

But saying your pro-life is not enough, saying that you were opposed to killing Jews was not enough. We have to engage. Engaging is the only proper response, Christian response, to evil of this magnitude, isn't it?

Proverbs 31 .8 tells us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. That's obviously the unborn child. But sometimes what Christians fail to forget, or fail to realize rather, and what we forget, is that apart from Christ's sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, we are also those who are unable to speak up for themselves.

Not one of us can stand before Christ on the day of judgment saying, actually, Lord, check this out. Perfect record, baby. Open up the gates of glory. Like the unborn child, we are unable to speak up or vouch for ourselves.

But 1 John tells us that we have an advocate, right? If we do sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. What's an advocate? An advocate is someone who speaks up for someone else.

So how can we not speak up for the unborn children in our midst who are unable to speak up for themselves if Christ spoke up for us when we were unable to speak up for ourselves? You see, the Christian response to abortion, which must be the pro-life response, is merely a response to the gospel itself.

We don't seek to save unborn children in order to gain God's love. We do it because we already have God's love, and that is the right response of the heart that has been changed by the gospel, is to love because He has loved us first.

So we have to engage, and that's why we have to engage. But our willingness to hit the field of battle and go to bat for unborn children to defend them means little to nothing if we're not equipped to do so.

Only a fool walks onto the battlefield without his weapons. So we have to equip ourselves to engage. Just as a soldier would be a fool to enter the field of battle, Christians must be equipped to enter the battlefield of abortion.

1 Peter 1 .13 says, Therefore gird up the loins of your mind. Gird up the loins of your mind. Prepare. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Prepare your mind to engage on this intellectual battlefield that's been being waged for far too long.

And we have the best thinkers in the church, don't we? Because we have people who recognize objective reality and its source, God Himself. We ought to be the ones on the front lines defending, in the most persuasive manner, the pro-life position.

And yet it's the church, those predisposed to protect life, that have been the most silent. I love Matthew Henry's commentary on the Bible, and he unpacks 1 Peter 1 .13, this idea of girding up the loins of your mind to prepare.

And I'm just going to read you what he says. It's a caliber of language that we have lost in America in 2020. He says, Wherefore, since you are so honored and distinguished as above, gird up the loins of your mind.

You have a journey to go, a race to run, a warfare to accomplish, and a great work to do. As the traveler, the racer, the warrior, and the laborer, gather in and gird up their long and loose garments, that they may be more ready, prompt, and expedious in their business.

So do you by your minds, your inner man, and affection seated there. Gird them, gather them in, let them not hang loose and neglected about you. Restrain their extravagances, and let the loins or strength and vigor of your minds be exerted in your duty.

Disengage yourselves from all that would hinder you, and go on resolutely in your obedience. That's what Matthew Henry had to say about 1 Peter 1 13. Gird up the loins of your mind, equip yourselves to engage.

Clarifying Moral Reasoning, the Question That Matters, and the Case for Life

So how do we do that on the issue of abortion? There's three things we do to equip ourselves to engage. We clarify the nature of moral reasoning, we clarify the only question that matters, and we clarify the case for life.

Firstly, we clarify the nature of moral reasoning. Listen, pro-lifers are not claiming that abortion is wrong because we dislike it. We're not claiming abortion is wrong because we have personal qualms against it and it gives us a queasy stomach.

Our claim is that abortion is wrong regardless of how you feel about it, right? It's wrong whether you like it or not because it violates rational moral principles. That principle being it's always wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings without proper justification.

Now I'm going to tell you two different claims and you're going to immediately recognize the difference between these two claims. The first claim is vanilla ice cream is always better than chocolate ice cream, right?

Now some of you are shaking your heads and you're disagreeing. It's all right, we can still be friends. The second claim is that it's wrong to torture toddlers for fun. Now you immediately recognized the difference between those two claims, didn't you?

The first one, vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream, is a preference claim. Now I may feel like it's an objective claim because if you think chocolate ice cream is better, you're wrong.

I'm just kidding, right? That would be a silly thing to say because we recognize that you're not right or wrong dependent on your preference for ice cream because it's a preference claim, right? And so it's true about the subject.

This is what is called a subjective claim, right? I'm not making statements that are objectively true for all people at all times and in all places. That's merely a subjective or preference claim. But the second claim that it's wrong to torture toddlers for fun, that's an objective claim, right?

Because if someone said, actually, Seth, don't impose your morality on me, maybe it's okay for me to torture toddlers for fun.

We would say, no,.

Even if you think that, you're wrong, right? That statement is true or false regardless of how anyone feels about it. Now, why is this important to the abortion debate? Because the other side confuses the nature of moral reasoning all the time.

When we say abortion is a moral wrong, do you know what the other side often hears? They hear, oh, pro-lifers don't like abortion. They don't like it. Seen that bumper sticker? Don't like abortion? Don't have one.

As if.

Your.

Friendliness or hatred towards abortion has anything to do with the moral nature of abortion. Try this. Don't like spousal abuse? Don't beat your wife. That would be a silly thing to say, right? Don't like slavery?

Don't buy slaves. That's ludicrous because those things are wrong and ought to be illegal regardless of how anyone feels about them. That's the type of claim we're making when we say abortion is wrong.

We're not making preference claims. We're saying it doesn't matter how you feel about it. We're saying it's objectively wrong. But one of the main reasons that most people continue to think about abortion as a preference claim, as a subjective claim, is because they've never seen what abortion is and does to unborn children.

I'm fond of saying that it's easy to be pro-choice if you've never had to look at what that choice looks like. It's easy to be pro-choice when you're not the one being aborted. And it's also easy to say you're pro-life and do nothing about it if you've never had to look at how bad abortion is.

Many pro-lifers know abortion is bad. Few of them know how bad. And I know that because I grew up in a pro-life family. I did the Walk for Life every year. I was the top childhood fundraiser every year.

But it wasn't until my senior year in high school, when I volunteered for a pro-life ministry, that I saw abortion for exactly the heinous act that it was. And I had to scan 300 images of first trimester aborted children on their high-quality scanner and categorize them in their database.

And that was one of the most fundamental turning points of my life. Because I realized exactly how horrific abortion was. So we're not going to show any pictures or display or slides tonight, but I encourage you to go to abortionknow .org.

That's abortionknow .org. And I encourage you to spend a few minutes there. Listen, it's easy to be pro-life. It's easy to say that. And it's easy to not engage. It's easy to not get off the bench until you know how evil abortion is.

And when we look at the victims who literally have their limbs torn off of their body in an abortion, it's going to be uncomfortable and it's going to be disturbing. But you know what, friends? It's going to give you the drive that you need to fight this injustice.

To know what they're going through. William Wilberforce once said that you may choose to look away, but you can never again say that you did not know. Proverbs 24 11 says, hold back those staggering towards slaughter.

And if you say, we did not know about this, does not he who made your life know it? Does not he who sees your heart know it? And will he not judge man according to what he has done? Proverbs 24 is saying, listen, if you pretend to not know about the slaughter of innocence, but you do know, you're going to be judged for that.

So I encourage you to spend some time to look at abortion imagery at abortionknow .org if you've never seen it before. It's very important for us to know what we're fighting and to know what we're trying to end.

So that's the first way we have to equip ourselves to engage. We have to clarify the nature of moral reasoning. Secondly, we have to clarify the only question that matters, the only one in the abortion debate.

Listen, our opponents tell us that abortion is a deeply complex moral issue, right? In reality, the entire complex debate only comes down to one question and one question only. And to illustrate what that one question is, I want you to imagine for a second that you're standing at your kitchen sink, cleaning dishes one evening.

And as you're standing there cleaning your dishes, your three-year-old toddler walks up behind you. Now your back is turned, and your three-year-old toddler says, Mommy or Daddy, can I kill this? Can I kill this?

Now what would be the first question out of your mouth in response to your toddler's question, can I kill this? It would be, what is it, right? Because if you turn around and he's holding a cockroach, you know, you might say, here son, here's a hammer, have fun.

But if you turn around and he's holding the newborn neighbor puppy, you know, you're probably going to have a different reply. And if he's holding his little sister by the throat, you really have deeper problems now.

So you couldn't answer the question, can I kill this, until you first answered the question, what is it? Similarly, on the issue of abortion, we can't honestly answer the question, can we kill the unborn, whatever the unborn is, until we first answer the question, what is the unborn?

Ray Cockel, the president of Stand to Reason, says that if the unborn are not human, then no justification for abortion is necessary. Meaning, if it's not a human, you don't have to justify it, who cares, get as many abortions as you'd like.

But then he says, however, if the unborn are human, no justification for abortion is adequate. You can't provide a moral justification for the taking of an innocent human being's life, if it's a human being.

So we have to equip ourselves to engage by clarifying the nature of moral reasoning. We're not saying abortion is wrong because we dislike it, we're saying it's objectively wrong. Secondly, we equip ourselves to engage by clarifying the only question that matters, which is, what is the unborn?

And putting the burden of proof back on pro-choice individuals who say that we can kill whatever's in the womb. Well, you better be able to answer what that is before you kill it. And thirdly, we clarify the case for life.

The case for life. This is where we make our defense for the pro-life position. This is where we bring moral clarity to this issue. And so many Christians who say they're pro-life and they love life, this is where they struggle.

This is where they don't know exactly how to defend the humanity and dignity of the unborn child. So pro-life individuals make their case for life, their case for the rights of the child, by using science and philosophy.

And our case is both scientifically and philosophically sound. And once you understand that case, you can make it in a minute or less. So I'm going to give you the case for life, give you the tools of thought you need to make that case, and then I'm going to summarize it for you in a minute or less.

Okay? So firstly, we start with the science. This answers the question, what is the unborn, right? And we turn to the science of embryology. What's that? Well, it's just the study of unborn human life.

And we've known what the science of embryology has taught us for decades. And here is the summary of the findings from the science of embryology. From the moment of conception, right? When sperm and egg meet, sperm and egg die, new human being comes into existence.

This was high school biology, right? From the early stages of development, from that moment, the unborn child is a distinct, living, and whole human being. Not a hole in the ground, W-H-O-L-E. What do these terms mean?

Well, distinct means separate, right? Distinct means unique. Distinct means that I'm not you and you're not me. You're a distinct, unique individual. There's only one of you, right? And there will only ever be one of you.

That's how God made it. So if the unborn child is a distinct human being, from the moment of conception, then what does that mean to the abortion debate? Well, it means that the body in her body is not her body, right?

And this makes sense because pregnant women do not have 20 fingers and 20 toes, two brains, two hearts, two different DNA codes, right? This is silly. And certainly if she's pregnant with a boy, pregnant women do not have male genitalia.

But you're told it's her body, her choice, right? That there's only one body involved. Obviously, that leads to some pretty strange conclusions. So the unborn child is distinct. Secondly, the unborn child is living.

What does this mean? Well, dead things don't grow. The unborn child meets all of the requirements for a living thing that we learned in high school biology, and the unborn child directs their own internal growth from within.

So believe it or not, pregnant women do not will their unborn children to develop, right? They don't rub their belly saying, don't forget to grow today, baby. Unborn children develop themselves from within, so they're living.

And thirdly, the unborn child is whole. This is an important concept, and this is probably where people get the most confused on the issue of abortion, is this idea of wholeness. Because we look at this six-week embryo, right, in the womb, and we go, is that a whole human being?

Because we confuse wholeness sometimes with development, or rational faculties, or functions, right? But that's an incorrect.

Assumption. All.

That it means to be a whole human being is to have everything you need to realize your full growth and development as a participating member of the human species. Here's what I mean by that. I'm 29, and I'm not 40.