‍Jo Vitale [00:00:35] So welcome to the podcast where we invite you to Ask Away. Hi friends, welcome to Ask Away. I'm Jo Vitale and just really glad that you could be here with us this week. Thank you so much to those of you who've been sending in questions. We're looking forward to getting to some more of them in the following weeks. Please do keep them coming. We absolutely love hearing from you. But this week, Vince and I wanted to share with you a conversation that we held in 2019 when we were invited to speak at an event on the question of what is the measure of a life. And this was particularly addressing the topic of the value of the unborn. And I know that for some of you that is a particularly sensitive topic to listen to and to think about. It certainly is a very personal one for us. Actually, in that very same year in 2019, Vince and I had a miscarriage and one of our reflections upon that experience was just how hard a grief that can be, because often you feel so unseen and so alone in it. It's often one that people don't know how to talk about. Often you're going through it without the context of a wider community even being aware. And so it can be uniquely painful in its loneliness and in the struggle to even know how to walk through that grief. 

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[00:01:50] But one of the kindnesses of God that we experienced during that time was actually that we were asked to speak on this topic of the value of the unborn. The first and only time we've actually been ever asked to talk about it. I had two months before the miscarriage actually happened. And obviously at the time we had no idea that it was coming. But I think something in having that opportunity to really think and reflect on why this matters so much to God, it didn't lessen the grief, but I think it helped us to make sense of it. I remember particularly going out of the ultrasound when we found out that our child's heartbeat was no longer beating and the doctor in that meeting they immediately changed their language from talking about the baby to talking about the product of conception. And I found that so jarring because I just wanted to say, "No, this isn't just a product of conception. This is my child and they're still my child even if they've died." I want to talk about a child that has died not about sort of waste just to be disposed of. And I think something about grappling with this topic, it helped to make sense of why we held such strong intuitions on that topic. I remember a colleague and friend of ours, Daniel Gilman at the time, he said "This isn't the loss of a potential life. This is the loss of a life with great potential." And I think that was what was really resonating with me at that time. 

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[00:03:08] And even as I went on to reflect on it over the months afterwards, I remember thinking actually it's not even that; is it? It's not even just the loss of great potential, but actually within the Christian story there is actually room to think about this child as continuing to have great potential because I believe in a God who has set eternity in the human heart. And I believe that the Lord has set eternity in the heart of our child as well and that that great potential is actually not ultimately lost. And so as you're listening to this podcast today, I think, Vincent, my hope is just that if you've been through the loss of an unborn child as well, if this is an area of grief in your life, whatever the circumstances may have been, I just want you to know and I hope it will be a comfort to you as you're listening, just to be reminded that your grief isn't unseen and you're not alone in it. That the Lord knows and the Lord loves you and the Lord loves any child that you may have lost and He's a God who is committed to really making things right because of course in his eyes there is no measure to the value of any life. Every life is worth so much to him that he gave himself fully in order to bring every one of us to himself. So, yes, I hope this is a comfort to you as you're listening. And here's Vince and I speaking on the subject of what is the measure of a life. Typically, when people hear that someone called Jo Vitale is coming to speak to them, I'm pretty sure this isn't what they have in mind. Usually they're picturing a kind of fast-talking Italian-American wise guy from New Jersey. That would be my husband, Vince. Yeah. 

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Vince Vitale [00:04:56] Amazingly, Jo was the first one to be confused by her own name. We were on the plane heading to our honeymoon after we got married, and we were having one of those conversations dreaming about the future and dreaming about possible children, and we were throwing around a few names. And I said, "How about Joseph? Joseph's a strong name. And Joe said, "No way. No way we could call our son Joseph, because then people would call him Joe Vitale." She said, "That's way too mafioso." I was just looking at her, and then she said, "Oh no, that's my name. I don't look like my name." 

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Jo Vitale [00:05:33] That's true. It is true. Ironically, we now do have a seven-month-old child, and I don't think we could have picked a more Italian -sounding name. He's called Raphael Vitale, so he's either going to be a painter, a tennis player, or a ninja turtle. But it was really Raphael who truly got us thinking in a much deeper way than before about the question that we'll be discussing tonight. What is the measure of a life? And I recognize, I just want to say right at the beginning, that for many people in the room I know this isn't an abstract question, it's deeply personal. And for some people, perhaps it's actually even a deeply painful question as well. And we do want to be sensitive to that tonight, and for you to know that whatever perspective you hold or whatever your experience has been, you are so welcome here. You are deeply valued and you are loved. And, for me, this question became particularly personal on the day that we went to the doctors for our eight-week ultrasound. 

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[00:06:31] And suddenly, this noise filled the room that I wasn't expecting. It sounded like the flapping of wings, and it took me a moment to realize, wow, that's his heartbeat. And on the screen we just saw this little bean shape with this giant pulsating heart. And in that moment it just felt like the whole earth shifted for me in the most profound way, and I felt this overwhelming conviction that actually whatever might happen during the pregnancy, actually even whatever the outcome of the pregnancy, that nothing would change the fact that actually now I was a mother. And that felt like this permanent shift in my identity. And I think there's a sense in which the question that we're considering tonight is whether I was right to feel that way. At what point did I become a mother? Was it during labor when he entered into the world? Was it all those nights beforehand when I would lie and put a hand on my stomach and feel him move to kind of press up against it? Was it when I first heard the flutter of that heartbeat? Was it when he was conceived? When did Raphael truly begin? 

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Vince Vitale [00:07:37] as a father saying that he began at conception makes sense of the fact that Jo and I are equally his parents. If instead he began at birth, and I had to make some sort of argument that I was somehow equally involved in the birthing process, I don't think I would survive that argument. 

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Jo Vitale [00:07:59] This question of what makes life valuable and how we should treat the lives of the young, actually, it's been reasoned through many different forms of literature over the centuries, and often from radically different perspectives. And here are just two examples for you. 

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Vince Vitale [00:08:14] So one is Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Some of you will know it. It's a satirical essay published anonymously in 1729. And Swift goes on to compassionately, extensively detail the plight of starving beggars in Ireland. And then about halfway through the essay, he gives this shocking solution that he has for this. It's satire, but this is what he says. He says, "A young, healthy child well-nourished is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled. I make no doubt that it will equally serve as a fricassee or a ragout." And then in great detail, he goes on to describe how this would work, and he goes into calculations about how this will be helpful economically and how this will actually be better overall for the society that he's living in. 

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Jo Vitale [00:09:08] A second example for you is a story that's more than 3 ,000 years old, and it's straight out of the Old Testament. It's the story of two women who share a house together and both of them give birth to a child, and one night, one of the babies dies. And so the mother of that child, she sneaks into the room of the other and she swaps the children and she takes the living child for herself. And so the two women are arguing over who the living baby belongs to, and their case winds up before the king, King Solomon, and they're both pleading with him, claiming that the child is theirs. And so finally, Solomon, in this very cold, pragmatic resolution to the problem, he suggests, well, why don't you just cut the child in two, and then you can each keep one half. And then at that point, one woman bitterly accepts the verdict, while the other begs the king to give the child to the other woman in order to spare the child's life, at which point, of course, Solomon can discern who the real mother is. 

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Vince Vitale [00:10:05] Now, the reason we bring up these examples is because both of these proposals have one thing in common. They're perfectly rational. What I mean by that is there's no scientific law that you could state that could tell me what's wrong with Swift's Modest Proposal. There's no scientific law you could state that could tell me what was wrong with Solomon's proposal. There's no law of logic that you could tell me that could tell me what's wrong with either one of those cases. These proposals are well reasoned through. You read Swift's essay and he goes into detailed arguments, argues persuasively about the economics of the situation and if all that was being considered was the economic advantages then he would have a case to be made. Solomon's proposal, well it's totally fair, he has two people, he doesn't know who the owner is, well they each get half. If fairness is the only virtue that we're going for in this situation, again, is perfectly rational. But what reason can't tell you is how to weigh the value of a child against economic advantage or fairness. Atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen, one of the most prolific philosophers alive, he saw the problem clearly, and here's what he said, he put it very succinctly, he said, "Pure, practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not get you to morality." Science and reason can tell us what we can do, but they cannot tell us what we ought to do. And part of the problem, I think, when it comes to life issues, is that the science is being taught and the conclusions are being drawn and they're being acted upon before we've ever taken the time to consider seriously the moral assumptions that dictate everything else that follows. 

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Jo Vitale [00:11:58] And this reality was brought home for us recently when a friend of ours, who's now a qualified MD, but he wrote to us about his experiences during medical school a couple of years ago. And in particular, he shared about one of his compulsory classes, which was called pregnancy termination. And our friend described how in the first 20 minutes the lecturer began by attacking Catholic hospitals for refusing to participate in abortion and made a sort of mocking joke about a comic called When Life Begins, written by a Catholic priest. And yet, when she actually got to the content of the lecture itself, her whole delivery changed radically. She became strangely clumsy, she kept dropping her water bottle, and she started using the term product of conception instead of the normal medical term fetus. And then she didn't use any surgical illustrations, as would be normal in that classroom. And instead, every time she was using the screen, she would just show the baby as kind of a blurry gray blob shape, and that was all people could see. And then our friend sent us an exact transcript of a public question that he asked his professor and the exchange that followed between them taken from an online recording of that lecture. And Vince and I are going to repeat it for you now with Vince taking the part of the student and I'll be the professor. 

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Vince Vitale [00:13:15] Okay. This was our friend's question and the transcript that followed during his medical school class. A growing body of published ethics literature suggests that consciousness is a less arbitrary cutoff point than viability for birth. Viability of birth for the right to life. What do you think? 

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Jo Vitale [00:13:39] I don't think anyone knows when consciousness begins. That's my personal belief. I'm not sure how anyone knows that. I think I'm here to help women, and I'm here to help women reach their reproductive goals, whether that's delivering that pregnancy or aborting that pregnancy. I'm not here to make a judgment about consciousness. If they want to terminate that pregnancy, I'm going to help them do so. I'm not here to impose my views on them. 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:00] No, the consciousness argument refers to sometime after birth, not sometime during pregnancy. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:06] Consciousness. 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:07] Yes, being aware of who you are as a person. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:10] Right, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:13] These ethicists don't want to move the cutoff backward before 24 weeks, they want to move it after birth. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:20] Oh, I see. So, like, 38 weeks? 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:22] No. More like several months after birth. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:25] So you're talking about infanticide? I don't understand. I'm sorry. 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:28] They don't call it that, but some people do. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:30] Hang on. I don't support infanticide. I'm really trying to understand. 

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Vince Vitale [00:14:35] In the last five years, a number of ethicists at Oxford, Princeton and a number of universities in Italy have argued that consciousness is a more consistent cutoff for abortion and early euthanasia. They see it as less arbitrary. I was wondering what you think of that and why you don't think that is a good view. 

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Jo Vitale [00:14:53] Okay, I see. You mean someone theoretically with, I don't know, [inaudible] a child is born and clearly disabled, and euthanasia is provided at two months of age. Okay. You know what? I don't know. I don't know. There may be some relevance to that. I think that that would probably be distasteful to a large number of society, but that's for the ethicists to debate at this point. From my point of view, I still work with gestational age cutoffs. To me, in part, it's part of viability still. I appreciate that a 23 -week -old barely hanging on to life in a NICU may not have a great quality of life, and it does get murky, because you can have a 23 -week abortion and a 23 -week in the NICU. That's pretty murky, so I don't know. I'm going to put a hold on the ethics of that right now. 

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Vince Vitale [00:15:40] So that's an exact transcript from the recording of this lecture. And the problem is that when you put a hold on the ethics, you could wind up anywhere. Reason is a mercenary, okay? It will serve whichever bidder pays the highest price. And so when you put ethics on hold, when you don't have a moral compass to rightly direct your reasoning, you could wind up on one trajectory one day and on a completely different trajectory the next day. 

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Jo Vitale [00:16:10] In fact, our MD friends shared that just two weeks later the same exact group of students had another class, this time not on pregnancy termination but on the topic of saving babies in the womb with extraordinary surgery, some of them before 20 weeks. And what stood out to him was the way that both the language and the students' viewpoint changed. So they were talking about the unborn during the very same window of time, and yet no longer was the language the product of conception. Now the lecturer just called the fetus a baby, and instead of a gray blob on the screen, the surgeon gave this stunning video footage from fiber -optic cameras guiding the surgeries, where the baby appeared 10 feet tall and in HD on the big screen, and the entire class was oohing and aahing over how cute he was as he moved around. And that was the very same class that just two weeks earlier didn't even bat an eyelash at the prospect of signing the death warrant on a fetus at the very same stage of life. 

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Vince Vitale [00:17:06] There are 42 million abortions each year globally, oftentimes not only permitted but celebrated. And yet at the same time, in many countries, including our own, it's illegal to move forward with a death penalty for a woman that's pregnant. Well, why? If it's not a life, then what's the issue? 42 million abortions. Now, many people don't see a problem with that, and yet most states have laws with harsher penalties if the victim is a pregnant woman. Again, why? We seem deeply, deeply confused. 

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Jo Vitale [00:17:47] And perhaps the image from this year that really stuck with me the most was the picture of the New York City skyline lit up in pink to celebrate the signing into law of the Brewery Productive Health Act. This is a law that gave women the right to have an abortion right up to birth, not only if the life of the mother was at risk, but even if her health was at risk, which is just quite vague language. And chillingly, one of the buildings that blazed pink that night in celebration was the World Trade Center. And yet, if you look not to the top of the building, but to the base, then around the memorial fountain, you will see inscribed 11 names among the mourned dead. And these 11 are the unborn children who were killed in the September 11th bombings. It just seems that we're a culture in confusion so deep that we can celebrate death and mourn the loss of life in the very same instance, in the very same place, and we don't even seem to see the contradiction. Reason without morality, it just lands us in incoherence. 

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Vince Vitale [00:18:46] So we need a moral foundation for our reasoning. We've already considered one, Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal. That could be perfectly rational if you're, for instance, an extreme utilitarian. If you think that all that should be considered is to maximize value overall in some abstract way, the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of people, well, then if a few need to be sacrificed for the good of the many, then you would say so be it. 

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Jo Vitale [00:19:16] And then, of course, some would just prefer to get rid of morality altogether. The woman whose baby died in the case of Solomon wasn't actually thinking about morality at all. She was thinking in what today we would call Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest. The strong prey on the weak might makes right. I need to get mine. And if others need to suffer in the process, then well, so be it. 

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Vince Vitale [00:19:40] Jesus Christ thankfully offers a very different option for a moral foundation. Jesus is not a utilitarian. The utilitarian looks down from 30,000 feet on things and makes abstract calculations about how to proceed, how to maximize value. Jesus's love is so much more particular than this. It's not 30,000 feet high. It comes down. It's face to face. It looks in the eyes of the individual, it gets into the muck and into the dirtiness and the mess of our lives. It's the good shepherd. It's the good shepherd that is close enough to the sheep to smell their dirtiness. Jesus leaves 99 to go after the one. We've heard that story so many times, but you just pause and reflect on it for a moment. You're going to leave 99 good sheep and put all of them at risk so that you can taste after one, the one that's probably been the disobedient rebellious one that's not doing you any good? Anyway, that's crazy. I think it's a craziness that a mother understands well. One of our best friends miscarried not too long ago and there was a really deep grief that came with that. And one of the things that we noticed and then we talked through with her was that people kept saying to her, "But you have three beautiful children. You have so much to be thankful for." And it's not that that's not true, but it didn't help. It didn't help one bit. It wouldn't have mattered if she had six beautiful children, nine beautiful children. She longed for the one. It was that one particular one who was lost, the same one that Jesus ran after. We were built to long for the one, to love in that particular way. And that's right at the heart of Jesus's ethic. 

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Jo Vitale [00:21:43] And Jesus also didn't approach morality as a Darwinian. In fact, the central theme of Jesus' life is a complete inversion of that Darwinian paradigm, not survival of the fittest but actually the fittest, God himself, willingly giving up his life for the unfittest, for the least fit, for you and for me. So what was Jesus's ethic? Well, the 20th century psychologist Sigmund Freud suggested that actually when you're pushed to your visceral limit, then the real you comes out. When you're in intense pain, when your back is up against the wall, when you've been wronged and wounded and trampled on again and again. Now, I don't know about you, but in those moments what comes out of me is not very attractive at all. What came out of Jesus was mercy, forgiveness, love. Jesus turned to his mother when he was hanging there on the cross and his best friend, and he said, Mother, here is your son. And he said to the disciple, here is your mother. And from that time on, this disciple took her into his home. Even as he hung there, dying, Jesus's first concern wasn't for his own life, but for the life of his mother. And then he didn't stop there. He looked down from the cross with a heart full of love at those who were killing him, and he prayed over them. Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. 

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[00:23:02] And then after that, he turned to one of the criminals who was being executed alongside him, and he asked him to look upon him favorably. And Jesus promised that man, "Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." It's really no wonder that when the centurion who stood in front of Jesus saw how he died, he said, "Surely, this man was the son of God." Because when you're pushed to that limit, the real you comes out. And what came out of Jesus was absolutely divine. What came out of him was an ethic that valued the life of every single individual, not just the life of his mother who loved him, but the life of the criminal beside him and the life of the soldiers who were killing him. The ethic of Jesus Christ is an ethic of pro -life, because he is pro every life. It's an ethic that doesn't value people on account of what they've done or who they've become or how they've behaved, but simply because they're alive. It's an ethic of unconditional love, an ethic grounded in that valuing of the one. Each and every one. 

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Vince Vitale [00:24:06] Let's dig more deeply into this ethic. If Jesus's ethic is unconditional love, the next question we have to ask is whether the unborn are part of that moral community that God lavishes that love on and that extravagant grace upon. Now, there's two ways to explore that question. The first is to assume that in general, we take it to be the case that all people are equally valuable. That assumption is built right into our Declaration of Independence. All people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, including the right to life. That right is generally assumed and granted for all people. So here's the question. Is there any difference with the unborn that would disqualify them from having that right to life? Well, the most obvious difference is one of location. The born are outside of the womb. The unborn are inside of the womb. They exist in two different locations, a different physical environment. But that's a very dangerous thought to think that we're going to measure the value of someone based on their location, based on the physical environment that they live in. And there's a name for that, xenophobia. Prejudice against people from another place. You're not as valuable as me because you're not from where I am. You're from across the border. You're from that other place. You're not on the right side of town. You don't go to the right school. That's not an attitude that any of us should want to adopt. 

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Jo Vitale [00:25:44] Maybe it's not location, but perhaps the unborn are less valuable because they look different than us. We have a beautiful son now, but the first time I saw him on the ultrasound, I definitely wondered if I was going to be giving birth to a jelly bean. And yet the assumption that somebody is of less value simply because they look different to the way that you look, it actually not only implies a hierarchy of worth based on some arbitrary standard of what looks good. But it's also a dangerous assumption that has led to a long history of oppression, abuse, torture and death. And we have a name for an assumption like that, racism. 

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Vince Vitale [00:26:22] And so maybe the difference is that the unborns, their cognitive ability is not as developed, right? They're not as smart as us. Well, that's true, but again do we really want to place the value of someone to be based on their cognitive ability, on how intelligent they are? Or we could say the same about a physical ability. Do we really want to measure the value of a person based on their physical capability? There's a name for that as well. It's ableism; it's discrimination against the disabled. 

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Jo Vitale [00:26:53] So perhaps the distinction is just that they're young, but that doesn't seem to work either because it really goes against our basic intuition, actually, which is that the younger a person dies, actually, the more tragic it is. One of the reasons we so deeply grieve the death of a child is precisely because we have that sense that they didn't get to live the life that they could have had. Why would it be any different whether they die three weeks after birth or three weeks beforehand? 

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Vince Vitale [00:27:22] And, of course, you can have a 24 -week -old inside of the womb or outside of the womb. Exactly the same mental capabilities, exactly the same physical capabilities. When you think it through, there is no option, there is no good reason to disqualify the unborn for the same rights that we give to everyone else. And I think attempting to do so lands you dangerously close to the types of arguments that have led to xenophobia, racism, ableism, and ageism. 

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Jo Vitale [00:27:52] The second way to ask whether the unborn are part of the community that Jesus loves is actually to flip the question around. And instead of asking whether there is anything that would disqualify the unborn, we can ask, what is it that grounds the value of human life generally? And then ask whether the unborn have whatever that thing is. I think most people will grant that all people have equal value and that this should actually be the foundation of morality and social justice. But, of course, it raises a crucial question; if all people are equally valuable, there has to be something that is equally true of every single person in virtue of which they're equally valuable. So that question is, what is it? What is equally true of all of us? 

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Vince Vitale [00:28:43] Now, if we take a naturalistic, atheistic view of the world, it's actually very difficult to answer that question. Because all of our natural endowments are distributed along a spectrum. Some of us are going to be more intelligent than others, some of us are going to be stronger than others, some of us are going to be more capable of passing on our genes than others. Every natural feature that we have is distributed along a spectrum. It's not the same for any of us, and it can change over time. So what is equally true of every single person and completely unchanging? I've thought about that question for a long time, and the only answer that I come up with is the love of God; and the fact that we are created in the image of God. And not just any God, there are plenty of supposed gods out there who will love you if you are obedient or who will I love you believe the right things. But no, I'm talking about the extravagant, unconditional love of the Christian God that is for every single person and that cannot be lost and that cannot be earned. That we are loved by God is the one and only thing that is absolutely, equally true of every single one of us and every other person and that could never change and that we could never do anything to lose. And I think that's why only God gives us our identity, and that's why only God can ground the equal value of every single person, which has to be at the foundation of any plausible morality. And so the question is, do the unborn have this? Are they among the beings that are loved by God and created in His image. 

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Jo Vitale [00:30:27] Well, according to Christianity, the answer is a resounding yes. According to Christianity, not only are they made in the image of God and loved by him like a parent loves a child, but even more than this, they're actually intentionally and lovingly crafted by him, even before they've taken their first breath as it says in Psalm 139. "For you formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother's womb, I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." 

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Vince Vitale [00:31:17] The question of life and the question of abortion is fundamentally a question about how we're going to love. There was a moment in our dating relationship before Jo and I were married, and at one point Jo turned to me and she said, "Vince, I don't deserve you." And I think she was fishing for a few compliments. And I turned to her and I said, "No, you don't." Not recommended. And thankfully, I didn't stop there. I said, "And I don't deserve you, isn't it wonderful?" How could someone ever deserve another person as their very own? Surely, that's beyond what any person could ever deserve. Love at its best, the best forms of love are not about what we earn or what we merit or what we deserve, they're about grace. They're about unmerited love. And I like that type of love. That's the type of love that means you don't always have to be looking over your shoulder or around the corner, worrying that someone more worthy of love than you is going to come along. That's a love that you can be secure in. It's a love that you can stop competing for and just enjoy. That's a question for every single one of us. I wonder what the instinctual answer of your heart is when I ask that question. Do you compete for love or do you just enjoy it? Do you rest in the fact that there's nothing you could ever possibly do to lose it. What if, even before the foundation of the world, God loved us with that sort of love, with grace, with love that is a gift, with love that you cannot earn, with love that you cannot lose, with love that is exactly the same on your best day and on your very worst day? With that love of a parent that looks down at a newborn child and that child can't do anything to earn the parent's love and yet that love could not be more extravagant, that love of a parent that sees a lost son on the horizon. 

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[00:33:19] That beautiful story that Jesus told, and that son had done everything wrong. He had demanded his inheritance early. In that culture that was basically to wish your father dead and he had run off and done everything with the money that he shouldn't have done. And he winds up eating with the pigs and he turns back and it says that the father sees him still far off on the horizon. And he would have hiked up his robe in that culture, embarrassingly exposed his bare legs as a grown adult man, and he took off running like an embarrassing fool after his son. And I've always wondered about this story from the other perspective. I've always wondered what the son thought when he saw he having done everything wrong, seeing his father sprinting towards him from afar, he probably thought it was much more likely that he was going to get hit. Then what actually happened and the father reaches him and throws himself on his son and embraces him and kisses him and gives him the finest robe. It would have been the father's own robe. Gives him a ring, probably the family ring. You have the authority of the family again. Gives him sandals for his feet. Yells back to the rest of the family, "Kill the best animal we have; we're throwing the biggest party you've ever seen because this son of mine was lost, but now he's found." What if God loves us like that? And what if as a society we chose to love like that? With a love that's not to be earned, but simply to be given; not to be earned, but simply to be returned. 

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Jo Vitale [00:34:46] I think what it comes down to is that our decision about abortion as a society is ultimately a decision about whether we're going to love conditionally or unconditionally. Will we be pro -life, or will we only be pro -certain types of life? Pro -the -good -looking life, pro -the -successful life, pro -the -American life, pro -the -people -like -us life? Just exactly who are we willing to stand up for? The lives that we think matter, or the conviction that actually every life matters? And in 2012 the Journal of Medical Ethics, they published an article in which the authors used the term "lives unworthy of life". And they concluded that to bring up Down's children might be an unbearable burden on society as a whole when the state economically provides for their care. Now, one of the disturbing things about that statement is how closely it actually mirrors the language on a Nazi propaganda poster, which declared that "60 ,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect cost the people's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money, too." Once we start putting some people in the worthy of life and love category and some people in the unworthy category, we've started ourselves down a very dangerous path. 

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Vince Vitale [00:36:13] So here's a question that I think we need to be willing to ask as a society. If we treat people from the very beginning as if they are potentially unworthy of life, then why are we surprised when that question haunts them until the end of their lives? I was recently doing an amateur analysis of the top 1 ,000 questions on Google. You learn a lot doing that about human nature. And there's some random ones at the beginning. What's my IP address? How do you tie a tie? There's a few funny ones. How old am I? I think it's slightly concerning that people go to Google to figure out how old they are. We have slightly further down on the list: why are cats scared of cucumber? 

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Jo Vitale [00:37:03] How about why are thousands of people asking that question? 

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Vince Vitale [00:37:06] Yes, exactly. What are people doing with their cucumbers? It's very, very unfortunate. So you have all of these random questions. You have some funny questions, top thousand questions on Google. Here's the first three of any substance. I'm not talking about specifically faith questions. The first three of any substantive meaning. How do you kill yourself? Number 179. What happens when you die? Number 194. How can I love myself? Number 381. We receive questions now at pretty much every single event that we do about suicide, both in non -Christian contexts and in Christian contexts. Not abstract questions, young people asking is suicide an option? Asking, if I commit suicide will I go to hell? Loneliness, anxiety, depression, suicide. You can look at the statistics, all of them are drastically on the rise and I have to believe that the root of all of this is the same question. Is being enough for being loved. Just existing, just being alive, is that enough? Or do you need more? Will you always need more. My dad use to tell me start as you mean to go on. If we value the unborn only conditionally, only when it meets our conditions, it should be no surprise that we spend the rest of our lives deeply anxious and deathly afraid that we will never meet the conditions. The question of how we value the unborn is so important because it is at the very foundation of how we value everyone, including ourselves. 

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Jo Vitale [00:39:02] What's so fascinating to me is that it seems as if the primary reason why our culture today is actually so deeply divided over this question, I believe it actually stems in part from a good desire. And I think that desire is to honor and respect women. And as a woman, I can appreciate that. I think many people today, though, they feel faced with this kind of cultural ultimatum because they believe that actually they have to make a choice whether to stand up for women or to stand up for the unborn. And I think the assumption there is that to be pro -life is to be anti -women. And personally I believe that to be a deeply troubling and questionable assumption. My body, my rights, that has become the rallying cry of the women's rights movement. And what I find so problematic about this rhetoric is the erasing of a body from this narrative until it's nothing more than a little gray blob. It's as if the story were only about one body, not two bodies. Last month, a pro -abortion organization, they posted this statement on their Instagram in support of having a positive body image. They said this, "The size of your body doesn't define your worth." And I couldn't agree more, actually, but something tells me that actually they completely missed the irony of that statement. The size of your body doesn't define your worth. My body, my rights. Jesus Christ actually says this refrain is wrong on two counts. 

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Vince Vitale [00:40:42] So first, my body. That is exactly the right question. To whom do the relevant bodies belong? Who owns them, both the body of the child and the body of the mother? And there is a relevant passage in scripture. Jesus was once asked if it was right to pay taxes. Many of you will remember the passage. I wish he gave a different answer, but this is what he said, "Bring me a denarius. Bring me a coin." and so they brought him the coin. And what question did he ask? He said, "Whose image is on it? Whose inscription is this?" And they said it was Caesar's and then Jesus said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's but give to God what is God's." They walked away. They should have stayed and they should have asked the question well what is God's? And if they had, Jesus would have responded, "Well, whose image is on you?" If our bodies are on loan, if they actually belong to someone else and if they're given to us for safekeeping, then that really matters. Then we have an obligation to know and to act in accordance with the wishes, with the desires of the person who they belong to. And that makes it, I think, darkly ironic that the phrase that's often used for when an abortion is carried out is to say, "I took care of it." And I think that's darkly ironic because that's exactly what God is asking us to do. He's asking us to take care of what he's given us and that's exactly what we failed to do. 

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Jo Vitale [00:42:25] Now, let's talk about my rights. There are so many wonderful things about being a woman that are worthy of celebrating. And one feature that makes women unique is actually our ability to bear and carry children. It's not the only thing, but it is a wonderful thing. Which begs the question, what kind of warped feminism that actually takes the very life -giving capacity that women uniquely and incredibly hold, something we can do uniquely, and we distort that from a beautiful symbol of our ability to bear life and we turn it into a celebration of our ability to end life. And, of course, the irony is that feminism claims to be a cause that defends the rights of the oppressed and the abused and a trampled people group. And it claims to stand for those who cannot stand for themselves and yet the right that we women are expected to boast in is the right to exercise our independence at the expense of the most vulnerable of all, their death for our autonomy. Back in the first century, the Christian faith, it actually stood out amongst the culture of the ancient world precisely because it was so radically pro -women. One of the key ways in which early Christians showed this to be the case was in their treatment of female infants. Back then it was actually common practice amongst the Romans to practice exposure, which was when a parent had the right within the first eight days of the life of a child to leave them outside to die in the elements. 

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[00:44:00] And, of course, it was the female infants who were at the greatest risk because they were seen to be a drain on family resources rather than a source of future income. But it was the early church, actually, with their belief in the equal value of every human life, whose teaching and practices brought this to an end. And in our world today, it's also the case that female infants are actually once again under threat, this time inside the womb. And worldwide if you look at the statistics of either aborting girls or killing them at birth, actually, it's so high that it's reported that a minimum of a hundred million women are missing from the world population today. There is an imbalance in the ratio of men to women because of how many girls have been killed. We live in a world rife with gendercide. Gendercide. And by advancing a culture of abortion and normalizing it, we're actually complicit in that tragedy. We talk about women's rights, but which women are we talking about? Which women even get to have rights? And at whose expense are those rights coming? Let me just propose to you, as we conclude, a different solution. If you want to be pro-women, how about seeking justice for the rape survivor? And how about seeking to protect the pregnant teenager? And how about providing for the single mother? But ultimately, I truly believe that if you want to be pro -women, then be pro -life. 

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Vince Vitale [00:45:35] Jesus is pro -women, he's pro -life, he's pro -the unborn, he's pro -everyone. And he said something very different from my body, my rights. Not my body, my rights, but he said, "This is my body given for you." Given for us who were unborn. Let's not forget that spiritually we were dead, spiritually we were unborn, and we needed to be born again. Jesus had a choice to make about what He was willing to bear, about what length He was willing to go to ensure that we, the unborn, could have life in the deepest sense, could have spiritual life. When we were unborn, when we depended on Him for everything, when we were helpless, when we were in the dark, would He do what it took to bring us into light and into life? He could have aborted us. He could have aborted us when it just became too much or when we became something as humanity that he had not hoped we would become or when he saw just the length that he would have to go to give us. If we want to know how committed Jesus is asking us to be to the lives of the unborn, all we need to do is look to the cross and to see how committed he was to our life, to us stepping into spiritual life with him, the fullness of life, eternal life when we were yet unborn. 

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[00:47:27] Been a real honor to speak with you and we love questions. That's a big focus of our ministry. Questions are how you get to know someone. And sometimes we're taught that if we have questions, that means that we're doubters or we have something to be ashamed of in terms of our faith. We actually think quite the opposite. A question is how you get to know a person. A deep, hard question is how you get to know a person deeply. So we love the idea of receiving some of your questions. We may not have the answer, but we'll do our best to offer a response. And if I don't have a good one, I'm sure Jo will. 

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Jo Vitale [00:48:03] You have a lot of faith. 

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Vince Vitale [00:48:05] I think there's a couple of microphones around the side and if you just put a hand up a microphone will come to you for a question 

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Jo Vitale [00:48:10] There's a hand going up over there on this side. She's coming. 

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Vince Vitale [00:48:17] It's coming. 

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Jo Vitale [00:48:19] She's right behind you. Just hang one second. Could you tell us your name as well, please? Thank you. 

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Question 1 [00:48:22] Hi. 

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Jo Vitale [00:48:23] Hi. 

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Question 1 [00:48:24] I've lost my voice recently. I'm a single mom of two kids and I recently, two years ago, adopted a baby who was born to a meth addicted mother. She was an eighth baby from this same birth mother. And the thing that compelled me to adopt her was words that I had heard from my pastor, which was you're either walking in fear or you're walking in faith. And God doesn't call the equipped, He equips the called. And that stuck with me. How am I, who am I to adopt this baby who I had no history on her family other than drug addicted parents? I didn't know what I was walking into. She could have had autism. She could have been handicapped in a million different ways. But those two things stuck with me. So my question for you is, I'm involved in a group called Brave Love that's trying to empower the choice of adoption since less than 2% of unplanned pregnancies result in an adoption. And how do you instill the faith instead of the fear that so many people live with? And it's always fear -based decisions that winds up in an abortion. It's never a decision of love when you terminate a pregnancy. It's always fear. And I want to help because so many people are living in fear. And I feel like if that's the thing we can turn around, then we can save millions of lives. 

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Vince Vitale [00:50:00] Thank you so much for your life, for what you're doing, for the way you're trying to empower others. I think you spoke to it so well. And the line in my head is perfect love drives out fear. There's only one thing that deals with fear, and it's perfect love. And even as I was praying before, I was praying that verse that we would be able to comfort others with the comfort that we have received from God. Inherent in that verse means, one, we need to be in relationship with God, and then we need to be in relationship with others in order for us to deal with difficult situations, with suffering, with things that are beyond us. We need to receive comfort from God, so we need to be in that loving relationship with Him, and then we need to be in relationship with others so we can pass it on in a loving way. And if we have that love vertically and horizontally, then that drives out fear. So I think that has to be the foundation when you're working with people, when you're talking with people. What does that relationship of love look like this way, and what does it look like this way? 

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[00:50:59] And when those are solid, then you'll see fear being driven out. The other just one thing that I would say is have people tell their stories. Tell your story. Keep telling it. And I heard a quote recently, (I don't remember who said it, Jo will probably know) but it really impacted me and it was along these lines, this is a paraphrase, but it said, God does not give hypothetical grace for hypothetical situations. He gives real grace for concrete situations. And I think sometimes the reason that we don't step into a possibility where we can really help someone is because we imagine it in this hypothetical way. And then we know who we are today and we go, "I couldn't do that." But God doesn't give hypothetical grace for the hypothetical situation. He gives real grace when we step into this situation. And so with you telling your story, with others telling their story, and just be completely honest about that. I did not have what it took to do what I'm doing. But God gives grace right at the moment that you need it and just the amount that you need. 

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Jo Vitale [00:52:13] Just one more point to add to that is I think a lot of the reason why people are scared is because they think they're going to be alone in it, and there's just that feeling of being completely overwhelmed. We know our limitations; we think what can I possibly have to offer if I'm carrying this burden by myself? And I think that's where we have something to say as Christians and as the church, because of course the call of the church is so that people are not alone. And so I think the way we respond to people's fear is by saying, "You're not going to be in this by yourself, but we are committing, as the body of believers, to come around you and be with you in that, too." And in that sense, we're actually fulfilling a promise that Jesus made when he says that actually when you become a Christian, when you choose to follow him, whatever the cost, however hard that is, and the sacrifice of relationships, actually you have a hundredfold and not only in the life to come, but also in this one. And the hundredfold is Christian family. 

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[00:53:09] So I think it's a serious challenge for us. If we're asking people to make these kind of life -affirming choices and to step away from fear and into a choice for love, are we going to back that up as the church in the way that we receive people and love them? This was really driven home to me in a major way actually, this time last year, when I was actually in this neighborhood speaking at the Dallas Country Club, and it was this beautiful women's event with everyone dressed in beautiful clothes like they are right now, and at the end of my talk, the first question that was asked, I was speaking about human trafficking, someone stood up and they said, "Jo, you've spoken about human trafficking as if it were just an international problem, but I was human trafficked in this city of Dallas for 20 years, put into it by my own parents." And they rolled up their sleeves and showed their arms and the scars from where they tried to kill themselves and the cigarette burns and the rope marks. But their question was I feel like the police and social services know how to respond to me, but whenever I go to the church, I feel like Christians flinch back from me because they don't know what to do with me. And they just seem so uncomfortable. 

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[00:54:14] And the whole room of 400 women was silently uncomfortable in that moment because it was so convicting. It was so convicting to think about we're asking other people to step out of fear, but we as Christians, will we step out of our fear of moving towards people? When they're suffering and they're struggling, will we be the people who actually step forwards and say we're not going to let fear rule us in our decisions either, that we will come alongside you and be that body that Jesus committed us to being when he made that promise? So I think if we're asking people to get over fear, then let's dive in ourselves. I love the phrase "love takes initiative" because I think that's the way Jesus lived. And I think that's what we're called to as his followers, so let's help people get over their fear by coming alongside them so that they're not alone in it. There's a question here. 

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Question 2 [00:55:17] We have younger women here today, 20-something-year-olds, really lovely group of young women. I have six granddaughters, and they're two to 15. I was at a political rally a few years ago, and these young, beautiful girls were screaming, the right to choice. And I went up to one of them and I said, "How old are you? And why would you be doing it? Do you have any idea what you're standing up for and what this could look like? 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, or 60 years from now?" How do we help our daughters, our granddaughters, now my granddaughters, have the same desire to come here to wherever these young girls are tonight? How do we tell them how wonderful life is and against the world, what the world's telling them? 

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Jo Vitale [00:56:12] That's a really great question because the messaging is so strong, and I understand that I speak all the time on questions of sexism, but so often there's a sense of-- there's another question over here as well. So often you can say you're as pro-women as you like, but if you're not willing to hold to that slogan on this issue, people don't even think you count. They think you don't care about women, that you're just unconcerned. There's such a strong cultural push in one direction on this question. What's interesting is I hear that all the time, and yet, if you just begin to ask people questions, very often they haven't actually thought through even what they're saying. They actually haven't thought through the implications. It's just that's what you do because being a feminist is cool. And so I would just say the best way to engage isn't to go in with hostility. I think that's all we see in our culture at the moment is people yelling at each other, and it's like whoever shouts the loudest wins. But as Christians, we have a different approach to go in with gentleness and respect. And if you come back with a strong argument against people, they're going to put up their defenses. But actually, gentleness and respect disarms them. 

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[00:57:23] And the best way to disarm is just to ask people questions. Just to say, tell me why? I hear you're saying this; why do you feel that way? Why do you care about this issue? What do you think it means to have autonomy here? Where do you think your value comes from as a human being? Because when you get into those questions of value, it becomes very interesting. I think one of the things you hear all the time at the moment is if you hold to a naturalistic worldview, actually, that really clashes with feminism, for example, because how do you ground your value in a system that says that Mike makes right and it's every man for himself? That doesn't sound like a great deal for women. Whereas, actually it's the Christian foundation that can say, hey, you're equally made in the image of God and that's why you have value and that's why you have worth. So it kind of get to the roots of, okay, what is it that actually makes us a human being, and who has the right to decide that? And just help people think through what are they saying because often they don't know, they haven't thought through it. It's just what everyone else is saying and they want to join in with it. But I think we can get mad and yell at people, but that will just entrench them in their own position. So instead, I would just encourage you just to have those one -on -one conversations in a gentle manner. 

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Vince Vitale [00:58:33] And the encouraging thing is that your granddaughter is not indifferent, right? She's passionate about something, or her friends are, and actually that's a good starting point. The really bad starting point is when there's just complete indifference. But when there is that passion for a cause, and you can start to ask questions about where that comes from, and that might work its way back to God. We often talk about origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. Four questions that we like. Where did we come from? Where are we headed? What's the purpose of life? And therefore, how should we live? So oftentimes, rather than like Jo said, getting in a debate with someone and trying to convince them initially of our view, we try to lay those four questions out and we try to show someone actually in order to live a meaningful life, you need answers to those four questions. And I sometimes give the analogy of a sports analogy, we're in a room which is sometimes used for basketball, so this is appropriate. But I say if you showed up at a game and you're supposed to be playing in the game, but you don't know when the game started, when it's supposed to finish, what the objective of the game is, or what any of the rules are, it would be completely meaningless. There's no way you could engage in that game in a meaningful way without answers to those four questions. And then you can help to show someone, well, what about life? If it's obvious that, of course, you couldn't engage in a game meaningfully without answers to those four questions, then how could we engage in life meaningfully without answers to the very same four questions. The start, where did it all come from? The end, where are we headed? The purpose, the objective of the game. And then the rules, how should we live? And if you can get that open conversation on those topics, then that'll lead in a good direction. 

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Question 3 [01:00:18] My name is Cece and I lived for 12 years here in Dallas and now I'm in New York, so I really appreciate what you shared about 9/11 and the memorial which I didn't know and I will share that in New York City. When I moved to New York it was a scary thing and I found my people which was actually an amazing pregnancy center in the middle of New York and one of the things that I learned over the last couple of years was just how prevalent past abortion experiences are. So many times we talk about the numbers. What would you say in terms of the scripture to unpack to more than, I think, it's one in four women that have had an abortion in the past? And many times those decisions are made so quickly and they're panicked and they're in fear and then there's deep regret. How can the church more address the healing that's needed for the men and women that have been through it already? 

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Jo Vitale [01:01:07] That's such a good question. And I think Jesus gives us some model here in how to respond to people because the temptation so often with the church is that we point the finger in judgment and we come down with condemnation. I think that's often the message that people hear, is that the church is against me. I couldn't even walk in the door because if Christians knew my past, if they knew what I did, if they knew that I had an abortion, they wouldn't want anything to do with me. I think that's the messaging people hear. And yet there's this beautiful story in Luke chapter 7, where Jesus is in the house of Simon the Pharisee and this woman comes wandering in the door of this very fancy dinner party, and everyone freaks out because she's known as the sinner in town. She's known as perhaps the woman who's kind of slept around. And, of course, there's no mention of the men she's been sleeping with. It's all focused on this woman who is the sinner. And everyone flinches back from her and then she falls at Jesus's feet, she starts weeping and crying and washing his feet with her hair and kissing his feet. And then everyone flinches back from Jesus because they say who is this guy that he's associating with her? What does that say about him and his sinfulness and how dirty he must be? How can he be a prophet? 

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[01:02:22] And then Jesus is in the middle of this scene of judgment and condemnation. And just into the silence he just speaks and he asks this amazing question, he says, "Do you see this woman?” You're not seeing her by the label, not judging her by what she has done in the past and holding that against her, but seeing her for who she really is.  A woman who has been scared and has suffered and been in pain and maybe at a point made bad choices, but who knows the factors going on that led her to that decision and how hard life had been and what she had been through. Do you see her as a human being and as a person? I think that has to be our starting point, and that has to be our messaging as much as we speak about the value of life. Always our message has to be first and foremost grace, because if that wasn't the heart of our message, what hope would there be for any of us? 

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[01:03:13] We're all in that situation, so I think that has to be the place that we begin these conversations whenever we talk about it. I have so many friends, people I know, who've had abortions. And I want to be someone who's safe for them, someone they can trust to talk to about that and not feel like they'll come to me and I'll judge them for it, but knowing that actually I'm going to love them. I'm going to love them in that. And the message of the gospel is salvation and hope, whatever you've been through and whatever choices you made, that your worth isn't defined either by anything you've done or anything that's been done to you, but because you're made in the image of God and He loves you and He's redeemed you. So I think the gospel is for those people, if it's for anybody. And if it's for us, it's for them. So I think that's got to be where we begin when we talk about this. 

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Vince Vitale [01:04:01] It's so well said, and just the verse that's coming to mind is anyone who believes in me will never be put to shame. And I think so often we focus on the forgiveness of Jesus, and that is so true and essential and right at the heart of the gospel. But Jesus not only came to forgive us from our sins, but he also came to free us from our shame, and that's what so many people are walking around with. But when Jesus hung on that cross, he hung there naked, he hung there mocked, he hung there abused. Anything that we've been through, anything that we've done or anything that's been done to us in our life, Jesus wore our shame and therefore we can be freed from it. 

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