Chris Charbonneau: My name is Chris Charbonneau and I'm the host of the Fall of Roe Podcast. I'm a 40-year veteran of the Pro-Choice movement. I have been the CEO of Planned Parenthoods in seven different states, and have decades of experience in the pro-choice realm.
This is an unapologetically pro-choice podcast. We are going to talk about the disaster that is the unfolding dismantling of the Roe standard across the United States creating 50 states' worth of patchwork laws and the danger that that poses to anyone of reproductive age and all of us who love them. We need to figure out how we as a collective are going to get through this, change this situation, give ourselves some hope and get back to sanity in this country.
Hi, friends! This is Chris Charbonneau, and this is the Fall of Roe podcast. With me is my guest Valerie Tarico. She describes herself as a former fundamentalist Christian. She is also, importantly, a philosopher and an author of more than 4000, probably 4000 by now, Valerie, but at least 400 articles that you can read on the internet that she has written - influential thinker in the reproductive health movement. Welcome to the show, Valerie.
Valerie Tarico: Thank you, Chris. It's good to be here with you.
Chris Charbonneau: It's great. Well, Valerie and I decided that today we were going to focus on the hypocrisy of the right-wing as our topic. Let me tell you, as I was researching a bit for this show, this could be an eight-part series. But we are going to do some highlights of what we know goes on in the anti-choice movement, the right-wing, regarding abortion, and reproductive health.
And the kinds of things that spring to everyone's mind immediately are the people who vote anti-choice in their various state and federal legislative bodies, and then spike their girlfriends' drinks with abortifacients? The people who talk one way and behave another. We, of course, believe everyone has the freedom and right to choose, and that's the current law of the land. But that these people would actively work to make the options they themselves take advantage of less available to other people and would pontificate about it more to the point over and over again, in legislative and other spaces. We all know that that happens.
I would say in addition, I was very surprised early in my career when I was the CEO of Planned Parenthood in Little Rock, Arkansas, when my colleague Mose Smith, that had a high-quality abortion facility down the street, would open up for special office hours for the nuns of the local area that came in and needed that kind of care.
And some of these nuns obviously were having affairs, and some of these nuns were attacked. I believe these nuns, of course, had every right to exercise their freedom to choose. But that's not the image many people have of how that works in the Catholic church that has made anti-abortion vitriol a big part of its organizational construct.
I was also talking to him about a local right to life leader, right to life is the actual former name of the chapter of the thing he ran, brought his 15-year-old daughter in for her abortion. And when was asked, 'How did that all come to be?' He said, 'Well, she's only 15.' To which the clinic folks responded, ‘Well, many of them are only 15.’ And he said, ‘Well, I talked to God. And God said it was okay because, you know, insert reasons here.’ So, Valerie, does that surprise you at all?
Valerie Tarico: It doesn't surprise me at all. So, my background, as you pointed out, is in evangelical fundamentalism. I attended Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College, by choice and actually found it to be more theologically diverse and liberal than the church I grew up in. And then I also went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology, counseling psychology.
So, the intersection of those two things leaves me not at all surprised about the way that people are able to compartmentalize different aspects of who they are and their values and to make exceptions for themselves that they don't make for other people.
One of the patterns in terms of the blame game that we all participate in is that we have, as humans, a broad tendency to kind of blame others for what we perceive as negative behavior of other people on internal factors as their fault.
So, in this case, it would be their poor moral character, it's their sin. And then things that we do that we perceive as negative we blame on external factors. So, external attributions, 'It was this thing that happened to somebody, somebody else did it, it was the context, it was the situation.' And those things contribute broadly to our human capacity for hypocrisy, including in this situation.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, indeed. People have often said in the cases of abortion, and people making decisions about it, the three acceptable reasons for having an abortion are rape, incest, and me.
And so, it's kind of like whatever personal story people have. And I would say, just to insert here in case people think that there are a lot of people who really do have abortions for incredibly frivolous reasons. In my career, I had cause to interview thousands of women who were deciding to have abortions, and never once did I hear anyone say anything, the kind of thing you hear anti-choice people talk about, like, ‘Well, she couldn't fit into her prom dress, or she was worried about this event or whatever.'
People have very serious misgivings about their ability to parent well, they have very serious misgivings about whether they can afford to feed someone else, whether their lives are stable enough to give somebody a decent environment, and whether they're ready to be good parents. And I think we should point out here that many people who have abortions go on to become those good parents later on, and it contributes to the quality of everybody's life.
Valerie Tarico: I was just gonna say, I think that the anti-choice folks point to abortion regret, as an indication that the decisions haven't been thought through or that people are making decisions lightly. There are people who get married on a whim in Las Vegas, right? There probably are people who have abortions on a whim but that is not the majority case.
As you said, most people have thought this through long and hard. And there will still be people who have regrets, just like people have regrets about who they married or about other choices that they made, about the choice to have a child, about the choice to kind of accept a job, about the choice to make a move across the country.
We make the best decisions that we can often under the circumstances and the information available to us, and that stacks the odds in terms of us being able to make a decision that's going to help us and the people we care about to flourish.
But of course, there are always unknown factors. And as Charlotte Taft says so beautifully, kind of in her abortion counseling work, ‘What women are trying to do is to make a choice they can live with under adverse circumstances, and then live with the choice that they've made.’
Chris Charbonneau: No, that's exactly right. I would add to that, that people's mental health is not improved by being challenged by difficult and long-term decisions, either.
So, if someone had mental health issues before they were faced with an unintended, mistimed or whatever, pregnancy, making a decision to continue that pregnancy is stressful, and would not improve their mental health. And making a decision to end that pregnancy is also stressful, and not likely to improve their mental health.
So, the fact that 90 plus percent, 95 plus percent of people don't regret their abortions is not necessarily an indication that it wasn't a difficult thing for folks to go through. But what we're talking about is compassion, right? For people who actually have to make those tough decisions and all of that and I find in much of the anti-choice rhetoric, the idea of compassion for people wildly lacking and sort of surprising how many people in right-wing fundamentalist faith really go quite extreme about the end games of this.
I think I remember very early in my career, the first time someone decided I needed to die because I was in this work because they're pro-life. The idea that it's okay if all the doctors die, it's okay if all the clinic workers die, because they have such a respect for life always struck me as this giant fallacy in their thinking, like, can you honest to God call yourself pro-life if you just threaten the life of walking around living person? It was fascinating to me that that happened a lot and that they saw no irony in it.
Valerie Tarico: Yeah. And if you think about the kind of beyond the bounds of human life, it's even clear that this is not, quote, ‘pro-life’, right? That we're talking about the same people who seem to have a fairly significant, visible indifference to the well-being of the intricate web of life that gave us all birth to kind of the well-being of other sentient species, our fellow travelers on this planet, and then the well-being of human beings in other contexts, right?
So, whether we're talking about gun violence, like the anguish that people have experienced after mass shootings, or whether kind of the war, or whether you're talking about just the almost seeming indifference to, for example, pandemic deaths or whatever, there's an extraordinary Swiss cheese, if you will, quality to this kind of idea that life is sacred and that human life is uniquely sacred, and that life should be preserved at all costs, regardless of the quality.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, it's extraordinary. Not five minutes after the leak of the not-yet-certain Supreme Court decision, the state of Louisiana was having a debate about whether they should imprison women who want to get abortions, or they should just execute them outright, to say nothing of the doctors. They were obviously on the line for being executed right off the bat, to this differentiation idea, and let's stipulate here, no one in America really should have to care what the Bible says about these things. We are not a theocracy, yet.
We don't establish any single religion as the way our law works. People make a lot about the right of Sharia law and how you can allow Sharia law because presumably, Sharia law applies to many Muslim countries, but they are really fond of the idea that there should be some sort of Old Testament biblical law in the United States. Talk to me about where that comes from, Valerie?
Valerie Tarico: So, this idea of the Bible as a perfect and complete essentially dictated by God to the authors is, to some degree, a morphing or a uniquely American kind of perspective on the Bible itself, in that it was a kind of fusion of American culture, a fusion of the idea that there is kind of scientific truths and then people trying to apply the type of analysis that we do, rational analysis and empirical analysis that we do to other areas to the Bible, and come up with these justifications for the idea that the Bible is perfect and complete.
But in reality, if you look at the Bible itself, in this context, you're right, we shouldn't have to because this is not a theocracy. That should be something that the theologians are doing specifically for people who believe that the Bible is the Word of God.
But in some ways, that's a false dichotomy in that Christians often believe, evangelicals, in particular, that part of their Christian spiritual mandate is to impose what they perceive as God's will and theological truth on the world around them, whether it's convincing people to accept Jesus as their personal Savior, or whether it's convincing them to abide by a specific set of moral precepts that may have little to nothing to do with actual morality.
So, it's not easy if we're honest, even for any of us to say there is a hard line there because you can say, well, people can believe what they want, they can preach what they want, but if their beliefs mandate them to impose those beliefs on other people, which evangelical Christianity does, which certain forms of Islam also do, right? Then I think it gets complicated and you just have to have a hard external stop that says no, we're not going to allow that.
So, if you go back to the Bible itself, and you look at how this relates to abortion, there are several different factors there. One is kind of the role of women in those Iron Age societies in which the biblical texts were written.
Another is the whole question of what it means to be uniquely human and uniquely valuable. And so, just to take that second one, there is little in the Bible about abortion with the exception of one Old Testament verse that actually prescribes an abortion procedure. If a man thinks his wife has been unfaithful, they will give her a kind of a potion, essentially, that is designed to kind of induce pain and abortion, and it's a way of testing to see if she was actually unfaithful or not.
Apart from that, the Bible doesn't specifically prohibit abortion in any form. It talks in the Hebrew tradition and talks about the kind of personhood, beginning at birth. And in fact, Christian history has had this long, complicated kind of set of disagreements about when human life becomes uniquely valuable, related to a process that the Catholic church called ensoulment, which was thought, prior to the advent of modern science, to take place, at the point of what's called quickening, meaning the first point at which a woman can experience a movement of a fetus that's growing and developing within her.
Chris Charbonneau: It has been interesting how wildly divergent those sorts of definitions have been over the history of various religions, and people's various thoughts about that, and what they have thought about what even fetuses are.
There's the homunculus idea that fetuses are tiny little perfect human beings from the beginning. I mean, they didn't know a whole bunch about how that all took place at that point from miscarriages, but nothing much else. And there wasn't huge respect for fetuses, even late in pregnancy, stillbirths, and things, I remember early in my career, the Catholics used to have these rules, that they wouldn't do funerals for fetuses from stillbirth that were less than X inches long.
The idea that, really, you weren't really talking about real children until well, past seven or eight, nine months of gestation. And that earlier on, it was simply kind of just bad luck that people had miscarriages and certainly not treated the same way, and they have now erased all that because it obviously shows up that there is not a unified opinion in all churches about when those things happen, and when it's important and when it's not.
And so, this idea that everyone always thought that at the moment of conception, which is a scientific fallacy, because there's not a moment, there are a series of very complex processes that go on for conception to happen and they are all processes. They're not events, not a single moment in time. But that is a given and it's always been a given, and that's how they've always thought about it. And therefore, it has this length of acceptance.
We even see that in the Supreme Court opinion a little bit from the very Catholic Justice Alito, I shouldn't say opinion, I should say draft. He suggests that here are the ways they thought about this in 1700 and 1800. But what he neglects to write about, is the pretty ubiquitous presence of abortifacient methodologies, which were not particularly secret back then. And there were plenty of newspapers and various things one could look at today and point to the talk about potion for this and the menstrual regulation concoction for that to bring on late periods and bringing on late periods is kind of 1700 speak for causing an early abortion.
People used to let that stuff go. And it has only been in relatively recent years, actually, a little bit of a fight between the AMA and other practitioners. The AMA made it a very medicalized idea, in order to defend their medical turf, if you will, and guarded against actions by midwives and dentists and other people they didn't consider to have the same skills as they had.
What's bizarre about it, though, is that it comes across today as a really solidly baked doctrine on the part of the religious right. Would you say inside there, there are agreements or disagreements about that?
Valerie Tarico: I think there are all kinds of disagreements about that. So, as you probably know, in the United States, something like 70% of women who have abortions, they self-identify as Christian.
But within that group, a significant percent belongs to mainline Christian denominations, not evangelicals, not Catholics. And most of those denominations in the 1970s, for example, went through a kind of a process in which they actually articulated the compassionate basis for allowing abortion access, right? Acknowledging that there were values at play here that were in conflict with each other, that these were situations of hardship and duress, that people were making difficult decisions. No one making the decision to have an abortion was expecting this decision. Either, it's a surprise pregnancy, or they have surprised circumstances that have come up since the pregnancy or there were surprise factors in terms of the pregnancy itself going awry.
So, the churches were recognizing of that, in fact, when I was once the token non-atheist on the board of the Washington Association of Churches, which is selective of mainline denominations and Catholics that were focused largely on social justice, and as we were cleaning offices, I found a document from the 1970s in which each of them had articulated their compassionate theological basis for supporting abortion access and choice, with the exception of the Catholics.
They had already crystallized an anti-abortion position at that point and in general, have had more of a pro-natalist competitive breeding strategy baked into their theology for a longer time.
You mentioned the idea of people talking in the past about regulating their period. I think that it's in Dominican culture at this point where they still talk about bringing down your period. The idea, of course, if you actually think it through, it's obvious to somebody who knows much about pregnancy and about the fact that something like 60% of fertilized eggs actually self aborts, and what we're talking about in terms of menstrual irregularity, for women who are having unprotected sex, is that a lot of that is the beginnings of pregnancy that are then spontaneously aborting because that's how reproductive processes work in humans. It's a big funnel, right? There are a lot more eggs and sperm that get created than actually ever meet. There's a lot more that meet and join than ever, either kind of implant and then there's a lot more than implant that ever goes on to become babies and a lot more babies than grow up to be in the past that grew up to be kind of humans and reproduce again, right?
So, kind of that's the whole reproductive funnel is intended, actually, as a process designed not by God, but by nature to produce healthy offspring. And so, when you talk about medical abortion, or therapeutic abortion, what we're actually talking about is recognizing that the fact that that process, which is the funnel designed to produce healthy offspring is imperfect. And that what we are doing is actually complementing that, right?
There are times that the pregnancy is defective, or the time that the circumstances are wrong, that a woman's body will go ahead and carry forward a pregnancy and work on incubating that into a child when there's little possibility of that child and family flourishing. But it is actually an augmentation of a natural process, just like antibiotics augment our natural immune system, right?
Chris Charbonneau: I think people have no idea how many pregnancies are aborted, naturally, spontaneously, before they probably ever even know about them.
Valerie Tarico: Yeah, I wrote an article once talking about the fact that the people who have the most abortions are people like the Duggars, you know, the quiverfull folks who are having lots of unprotected sex with the idea of maximizing their number of offspring, because if you're maximizing your number of offspring, you are also maximizing your number of spontaneous abortions.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, you would have to be mathematically right just it stands to reason. If you're willing, talk to me a little bit about your journey from being the Wheaton College person who voluntarily went and your family situation too. How did you come to be on the side of philosophy that you are now?
Valerie Tarico: Well, I grew up in an evangelical family. As I said, I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior probably several times during childhood just to be safe, because Hell was a scary place. By my own choice. I went to Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame. But even while I was there, I was struggling to hold together the rational and moral contradictions within evangelicalism.
So, from high school on I couldn't quite wrap my brain around the fact that my friend Kay who was Mormon was going to be tortured forever in Hell because she belonged to the wrong religion, even though she was clearly a nicer and better person than I was.
I could never kind of get my head around this kind of idea of suffering, was somehow compatible with, kind of, the vastness of human suffering was compatible with an omnibenevolent, omniscient interventionist, personal deity.
And so, I kind of found myself building more and more idiosyncratic forms of belief in order to hold together my Christian faith. And then, by the time I was postgrad – I'm kind of a slow learner on this. My friend, Jeff decided in something like the 4th grade that he didn't believe at all. When the nuns at his school were trying to bless or put holy water on the only black kid in his class because he was misbehaving and they were convinced it was the work of Satan or demons. And Jeff, in grade 4 was like, ‘Wait a minute, it's because everyone picks on him.’
So, Jeff had it figured out then. It took me clear through grad school, and into my life here in Seattle when I was working as a psychologist on the consult liaison service at Children's Hospital, working with children, as a psychologist working with children and families who, where the children were suffering until death and listening to people rationalize and justify that in the context of their belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent interventionist deity, and it all just sounded like so many rationalizations and justifications. They were making excuses for God.
And I finally got to the point where I said, I'm not making excuses for you anymore. I realized that for years, as I put holding God together with my version of God with duct tape and baling wire. And all that was really left when I stopped making those excuses was the duct tape and baling wire.
Chris Charbonneau: That must have been a scary thing for someone who had grown up in a structure that I think is quite comforting for many people.
Valerie Tarico: Well, I think at that point, it wasn't a scary thing for me. I think it is often for people who are still more immersed in that culture as it was. I was surrounded by folks who were analytic and largely secular. And if you go to someplace like exchristian.net, where there are literally thousands of testimonials of people leaving various forms of Christianity, what you see is that those stories are quite varied.
In particular for men, as often as not it's a matter of having read the Bible. You know, these kind of devout Christians who read what's there or start looking at theology a little more closely. For many people, it's a matter as you kind of said, of this question of compassion, which, as you probably know in Buddhism, and some other moral spiritual traditions, is the actual center and crux of ethics.
For a lot of young people, it is the trashing of queer people and repeatedly kind of trying to pull out what is called the clobber verses in scripture in ways that don't make sense to them anymore.
But I come back to kind of your very quick question at the very beginning of this conversation, which is about compassion, and kind of when you're centered on compassion, really, this whole kind of anti-abortion thing doesn't make a ton of sense, right?
Compassion is about the lived experience of other people. It is about the golden rule or about the platinum rule, which focuses not on what I would want for myself, but what this other being would want for themselves.
So, that centers on what they are capable of experiencing? What are they capable of preferring? What are they capable of feeling or thinking, yearning for?
What we know about those embryos and early fetuses is they're capable of thinking, feeling, and preferring absolutely nothing. Whereas women and their pre-existing children and their partners and families are capable of thinking and yearning and hoping and feeling a great deal.
Chris Charbonneau: Absolutely! I find that the most compassionate people in this debate are very often the pro-choice advocates who, in their various ways, just want people to be able to live a life that they can accept that would be good for them and that would help whatever children they take care of, thrive – if they have any -would help them become the parents that they want to be.
I have always seen the pro-choice side, if you want to label that the side, that allows for the agency of individuals to be those most concerned with all of the impact on people and be the people of compassion.
I was so struck when we were lobbying in Alaska for the Affordable Care Act extension, that would help lower-income people get insurance coverage that they had not heretofore been eligible for, and to hear for 'pro-life' legislators argue against covering thousands of Alaskans because it would mean that something like three or four poor women could decide to have abortions and that those could be covered by insurance.
Never mind how many people would die from strokes or elevated blood pressure issues, heart failure or any number of cancers, or any number of the other things that people need health insurance for. If you could cover no one, then those three women couldn't make the decision to have abortions and have them be covered and would have to, I don't know, go borrow cash from their friends.
For that, it was okay that thousands of people wouldn't have access to health insurance. I was so fundamentally shocked by that. I don't know why after 40 years, I continued to be shocked by these sort of bizarre extensions. But it was absolutely clear to me we weren't talking about life and we weren't talking about compassion. We were talking about control. Can you say whether there's any explicit acknowledgment in your theocratic background that talks about this openly as a control matter and not as some fake life issue?
Valerie Tarico: Well, I will say that I think some of the people who have been sucked into the pro-life anti-choice movement experience themselves as operating out of a place of compassion.
They feel like they're being compassionate towards little bitty babies because there's a lot of misleading information out there about when and how fetal sentience actually emerges. They are convinced they're being compassionate towards women because they only hear the stories of abortion regret, right? Those rare stories.
I mean, that's one of the challenges in policy making, in general, is that you can take stories that are not representative and elevate those stories. So, you're operating out of a set of priorities that have little to do with the actual center of gravity, in terms of how people's lives are lived, and how you create well-being.
But to come back to this control question, again, I think that has roots that go all the way back into the Iron Age that have to do with gender roles and such. So, if you look at the Bible closely, at the roles of women in the Bible, what you see is that women are literally reproductive chattel.
They are economic assets that belong to men. That is why in the Old Testament, for example, if a woman is raped, the rapist can be forced to kind of essentially purchase her from her father, and then is forced to keep her as a wife and maintain her.
It's why a woman if she were to kind of allow herself to have sex with someone, if the rape happens within a kind of like the town limits, and nobody hears her crying out and she's judged to have been complicit, she can be stoned to death because she has squandered her economic value to her family. And then women produce offspring of known origin because you're controlling their kind of reproductive capacity. And then basically, those offspring also become economic assets of the fathers, essentially, which is why they, as females, grew up to be given in marriage by their fathers. As males, they kind of grew up to kind of work in the family fields and such. We have a cattle herd…
Chris Charbonneau: An actual cattle herd?
Valerie Tarico: Yes, an actual cattle herd. My husband and I are partners in an actual cattle herd. It's a long complicated regenerative agriculture ecological story that I won't go into, but we have a cattle herd. I've looked at those cattle sometimes and thought about how it's so much like the role of women in the Bible and the role of women through much of history in other cultures as well, right?
That the cow belongs to someone, it's her job to get pregnant on their schedule, not hers. If she fails to kind of produce offspring, you will, in this case, get sent to the hamburger factory.
In human culture, she can get a divorce and the man can bring in a younger wife to produce offspring, a wife who's more valued, because she produces more offspring, etc. Right?
There are all these ways in which it's actually remarkably similar. And then her offspring also belong to the owner, who can do what he wants with them, right? So, if you look at the Old Testament against circling back to humans instead of cattle, a man can send his offspring to war. He can sell them, if he's destitute, as slaves. He can make them into human sacrifices.
In the Old Testament, he talked about the kind of Abraham sacrificing Isaac or Jephthah sacrificing his daughter, whatever. So, the analogy is just remarkably robust, even though I think we rarely think about it.
So, I think that the question you asked about control of women's reproductive capacity has very deep roots. And oftentimes, because we don't even think about those roots, we're not even aware that they are affecting the shape of our more superficial experience or our social structures.
Chris Charbonneau: And it has been my experience as well, that there is sort of a very deeply ingrained fear around these control issues of the sexuality of women.
I remember when Viagra was first produced, and we had been fighting for years to get birth control pills covered by insurance companies. And insurance executives would say, “Well, deciding to get pregnant or not, that's a lifestyle choice.” Even though we know that that can be an incredibly perilous physical thing for women to undertake. And we would say, “Well, you know, it's not really that easy.”
Women spend a tremendous amount of a number of years trying to prevent themselves from being pregnant when they don't want to be and you cover everything that men need, including Rogaine. In insurance companies, at that point, male pattern baldness was definitely covered, but not contraception.
And when Viagra came about, I thought, ‘Wow! America really has taken a giant step forward in acknowledging sexual dysfunction and this means that we are now in a different language about all of that because people have acknowledged that sexuality is important and erectile dysfunction is now being covered, you know, we need to go take another crack at all that birth control coverage and walked into those insurance companies and they said, ‘No, erectile dysfunction is a health matter, and pregnancies are not.’ The lengths to which people went to argue that things women need, our choices and things anything men need, including a head of hair are imperatives. And when you talk about it for another three seconds, pretty soon, you'd have somebody say, ‘Why should our insurance pay for somebody's slutty behavior?'
Literally, the same people who demanded that men can have erections anytime they want. Now, Valerie and I are not anti-male, we want to say now some of our best friends have erections. But seriously, when you're talking about this stuff, where's the parity here?
We had this whole debate when we were successful in getting insurance coverage for contraception, ultimately, that you'd have these conversations about, ‘Why should I pay for you to have fun?’
The idea that women might actually enjoy sex, or that this would allow them to, was anathema. I think this comes from one of those deep dark religious places that you know so much more about than I do, Valerie.
Valerie Tarico: Again, there's very little there has been very little talk within Christianity and none that I know of in the Bible that talks about sexual intimacy and pleasure as one of humanity's most treasured cherished experiences apart from this question of procreation.
And so, I think that when you talk about people flourishing when you talk about people being able to live their best lives, that very often gets left out of the equation and/or cheapened, I think, right?
So, you hear people talking about someone's slutty behavior. How about someone's ability to be loving and intimate and close and connected? We don't hear those kinds of words when we talk about kind of women's sexual behavior, or even often the kind of sexuality of men.
You talk about the sex difference in terms of how we think about these things. I think that to jump back a bit, the whole question of the right-wing obsession with conception, the kind of, quote, ‘point of conception,’ even though you're right, it's a process, not a point. Paradoxically, again, has to do with this perception of men as being active agents and powerful. So, somehow, life becomes uniquely valuable at the point at which a man does something as opposed to a kind of human DNA cluster clump of cells kind of getting incubated into something uniquely valuable built by a woman over a period of time, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Couldn't have that! That might make her a super valuable member of society.
Valerie Tarico: Well, I think it goes all the way back to ancient ideas that have like the man putting the homunculus, or whatever the word you said, into the woman, the idea that the woman is just a vessel, essentially, as opposed to, ‘She's taking this thing that is actually fairly plentiful. Actually, tiny. Actually, not all that valuable. Her body is incubating and developing and creating over time through a long process, a baby, which is in fact, precious to most of us.’
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, exactly. I remember when there were a lot of discussions about how poor people in our society, in the United States – that the 98% are a drain on the 2% of producers that have to pay bills for all the 98%.
There's very little conversation about how that fetus that the anti-choice folks were absolutely bound and determined needed to come into the world has now become a taker, the moment that fetus is born, and there is a remarkable dearth of support for people to make sure that that new baby that we have all decided, I mean, our society calls it that at the moment of birth, you are now a member of society, you get your own insurance card and all of those things. You are recognized as a separate human being.
That's when babies become not so valuable in this discussion. There's an unwillingness to pay for them to do well as little children and there's an unwillingness to pay for support. And there are not commensurate benefits that one could get as the parent of a newborn to make sure that that goes well.
We're having a giant debate in this culture about whether parents should even get leave of any length and duration to take care of these babies and make sure that they get their little feet on the ground. It seems so dissonant to me when you have this absolute insistence that this group of people is going to dictate that this must be, the minute it is, this kid is thrown into the hopper with all the sort of miscreants of the world that are somehow taking your tax dollars.
What does the Bible say about any of that? Do people have an obligation to continue philosophically their support through actual people being born and living?
Valerie Tarico: Well, of course, as you may know, that theme within the Bible is also strongly there. The idea of compassion, the idea of kindness, the idea of what's called the prophetic voice in Scripture, which is about building justice within society and mercy. That is part of why you see that within such a strong trend within Judaism, the experiments with kibbutzim, for example, and kind of utterly communal compassionate societies.
So, these things are in conflict. And so, what you see throughout the Christian tradition, throughout the sacred texts of Christianity and before that, the sacred texts of the Hebrews that derived from even earlier texts, is people struggling to figure out what's God and what's good, and how do we live in a moral community with each other.
And our ancestors did the best they could, under the circumstances, but you have to remember that the Bible writers would have been shocked by technology as sophisticated as a wheelbarrow. And also, that they thought that the structures of society were largely imposed by gods.
We're talking about a kind of a hierarchy that includes kind of privileged bloodlines, kings, etc, and kind of powerful, strong men's families. And so, a lot of the ethics in the Bible just focus on individual ethics, instead of focusing on what it means to actually create the circumstances, the societal structures under which people broadly can flourish, there is a weakness to that aspect.
And then Christianity, evangelicalism has taken, again, selectively filtered through and focused specifically on personal salvation on individual sins and on the idea of individual righteousness.
And so, it has shifted even more away from those collective kind of more systemic themes that are there in Scripture and what we do to create flourishing.
So, if you look at the abortion battle, again, to come back to that, it seems like evangelicals have focused, as you pointed out earlier, on the idea of individual sinners, women who get abortions, doctors who perform them, whether they should be jailed or executed at the most extreme, and there's been a remarkable dearth of interest in creating the systems and structures in society that make abortion largely obsolete, right? The need for abortion.
So, they're focused on stopping supply, on blocking access, on punishing people who kind of managed to get past their strictures. And yet, what we know is that we now have contraceptive technologies that could eliminate most of those early pregnancies that are driven by surprise pregnancy, or kind of early abortions that are driven by surprise pregnancy, right?
So, look at the Colorado Project where long-acting contraceptives were made broadly available to young women and to women without a lot of financial means -- IUDs and contraceptive implants. The abortion rate dropped by about 40%.
If you look at the work that the Upstream USA did in Delaware, again, they made the top-tier long-acting expensive contraceptive devices, get it and forget it contraceptives, available to all women, regardless of means. They went in and they taught systems of care how to provide those kinds of contraceptives, that top-tier contraceptive to everyone in a timely way that didn't mean people had to come back for three or three appointments or whatever. What they found was that they got between, what was it 2014 and 2017, Delaware saw a 37% drop in abortions without reducing access at all. So, there are all of these solutions that if you really cared about just trying to reduce the prevalence of abortion in our society, why mitigate harm if you can prevent it, that is how I would put it.
Why would you have to end a pregnancy if you can simply prevent an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy in the first place? The anti-abortion folks seem remarkably disinterested in that.
Chris Charbonneau: I never understood it. Valerie. All these years, it's sort of quality sex ed helps people make good decisions, the revolution or the evolution in all of this so that people know how all of this happens and they know what the tools are that they could use to prevent unintended or mistimed pregnancies. That'd be something that we all can link arms and sing Kumbaya about together. And yet we get nothing but pushback from the anti-choice, right-wing folks.
And these high-quality methods, I was astonished at the rates of unintended, mistimed pregnancy that we just didn't see anymore, that just tumbled down. I mean, really rapidly when we adopted the projects as they did in Delaware and Colorado. And we were already very good providers in terms of you how many people were interested in long-acting reversible contraceptive methods, but when we really made sure that everyone had access to it by making it affordable, the number of people who took us up on it, and the number of those pregnancies – I mean, we had something like 1.2 million abortions in the United States the year before we started these projects, and a couple of years after we were down to 800,000. It made a massive difference.
These very interventions are precisely the first things that these right-wing fundamentalist Christians are going after. Promises to make the post-Roe environment even worse, it's kind of like, not only can you not rely on abortion care that you can get in your own state, and you may have to go somewhere for it, but all the ways that you could avoid putting yourself in this position are also not available to you.
This is where I come back to these control issues. It's like if you really cared about not having people have abortions, these would be precisely the wrong things to be doing. And yet here we are.
Valerie Tarico: Well, evangelical Christians, if the data hold, have abortions at approximately the same rate as other people. They probably feel much more conflicted about it, those young people, because they've had it pounded into them that abortion is bad and that their own sexuality is bad, that most young evangelicals now have sex before they get married because we've delayed the age of marriage. And in fact, some evangelical older leaders have suggested that the solution to sex outside of marriage and the solution to abortion is to push young people to get married sooner. Yikes!
Chris Charbonneau: 1957 is calling and want their solution back.
Valerie Tarico: Yeah! So, it's crazy stuff. But the fact is that, when young evangelicals are having sex, they're more likely to kind of not think about it ahead of time because they feel guilty. It's better to kind of commit spontaneous unexpected sin than premeditated sin.
Chris Charbonneau: If you plan it, it's even worse, right? It's a bigger sin of some sort.
Valerie Tarico: It's a bigger sin. And so, as a consequence, that sex is more likely to end up in an unexpected, mistimed, unwanted pregnancy at a point when a person hasn't really been able to kind of choose their life partner, and/or prepare in the ways that would allow them and their children to kind of flourish.
Chris Charbonneau: Do you think this resurgence sort of in child marriage that we're seeing in some of the right-wing spaces has something to do with this, they're trying to get a jump on extramarital sex? Like, why wait for puberty to be done? Marry these people up so that we can check that box. Is that what we're talking about here?
Valerie Tarico: And I think that's a fringe phenomenon. But in those kinds of extreme countercultural communities, as culture kind of moves forward, those communities have to become more and more weird and insular. They have to kind of build walls and kind of stake out their difference from society at large. And so, what you see sometimes is more extreme positions emerging because of that, just like in small cults, right? The smaller, the more countercultural it is, the more they have to come up with these ways of structuring their own society, kind of being standoffish, kind of creating a set of rules that keep people apart from the world outside and one of those is getting married young. And then women, of course, or girls in that context, being comparatively isolated from other people in society not going on to higher ed or things like that.
But if you look at the trend line, actually, young people, kind of, evangelical young people aren't trending in that direction and they are in fact not actually trending towards greater opposition to abortion. It'll be interesting to see how all of this recent decision around Roe v. Wade actually shapes them.
If anything, I would expect that what it's going to do is probably mean that there are more young evangelicals who have thought about it and who are less comfortable with the idea of these total abortion bans or the idea of criminalizing providers and women.
Chris Charbonneau: We certainly see that in the polling, that young people has a much more pro-choice outlook. They don't understand the anti-gay stuff at all. People under 50, even if they belong to evangelical churches, they don't get why you need to hate people for this. It just doesn't hang together for them in the same way, I think that's a hugely hopeful sign that what we may be looking at is a pendulum swing that is of naturally short duration as these younger people step into the voting booths around the country, assuming voting still matters at some point, because I mean, I think we have an attack on our democracy from these very selfsame forces. But yeah, young people aren't necessarily going along with all that.
Valerie Tarico: Yeah, Chris, can I also add something that's a little bit wonky, from a perhaps philosophical-theological standpoint?
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah.
Valerie Tarico: What the Catholic Church has done, and what evangelicals are doing around kind of the sanctity of life is centering it squarely on human DNA, right? So, anything that has a kind of full contingent of human DNA is somehow uniquely valuable, regardless of what it's capable of experiencing, whether it's capable of self-sustaining, etc, right? They've kind of pinned their hopes and their bioethical concerns around that.
And then, if you think about it in a very different way around the question of personhood, what are the attributes of personhood? Instead of just what kind of DNA do you have? You come up with a quite different set of ethical concerns, right?
So, the attributes of personhood being, what is it capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, preferences, intentions, consciousness, self-awareness, and the ability to relate to other beings, right?
In secular ethics, there are robust conversations about that, whether we're talking about aliens in movies like Wall-e, or District 9 was it, or whatever it is, whether you're talking about kind of robotics, and the questions around whether, at some point, we may have actual sentient beings whose code is not in DNA, but in silicon. And then if you look at the animal rights movement, what are the rights of nonhuman animals and what is our responsibility to those sentient beings?
I think that the way that most of us ideally would think about abortion is in that same context as this whole broader conversation about what our responsibility is to beings that are capable of experiencing thinking and feeling.
And that is a conversation that the Catholic Church and some evangelical theologians find remarkably threatening. It threatens their worldview, not just around abortion, it threatens the whole idea that we humans are uniquely made in the image of God, and that we were given dominion over all of the other species to exploit and use them and use them up. That's why they fought so hard to kind of take this concept of personhood and redefine it as human DNA, and in the whole fetal personhood thing.
So, there's a broader conversation that I think is likely to emerge in the coming years around the personhood of potentially sentient AI, it sounds really kind of far out there, but also around what are the emotions and cognitive life of other animals. And then, if we can kind of keep this from all getting centered on human DNA, which the Catholic bioethicists are trying to do, I think there's a very interesting conversation that will then come back to shape people's thoughts and feelings about abortion.
Chris Charbonneau: Along those lines, it would be very challenging to the current sort of right-wing approach to climate change, for example. If you're responsible for all the species and you're responsible for the quality of life for lots of different people, and, and all of that, then you need to take care of your environment.
We get a lot of, 'God created this in 6 days, and it's there for our exploitation', which I find bizarre. If you must have a child, but you don't have to create an air that the child can breathe or food that child can eat or any of those things, it feels to me like your circle of life gestalt really falls apart very quickly.
Valerie Tarico: Yes, it does. It does. Again, there are evangelicals. There are young evangelicals for climate action. It’s a group. There are people who kind of talk about creation care. So, it's important, I guess, to underscore as we talk about some of the toxic theology that is playing out in terms of our policy fights, that not all evangelicals, right? We're talking about a subset of folks who are imposing their dogmas not only on the rest of us who are secular, or who belong to other kind of religious and spiritual traditions, but also, they are imposing them even on their fellow evangelicals, and trying hard to wield the tools of guilt and coercion in order to make that happen.
Chris Charbonneau: One of the things I always wondered is, how do you take a country where we've had abortion rights for decades, and we have a lot of women who are now proudly and openly talking about the decisions they made in order to de-stigmatize them and all that. And you have a lot of people who had abortions, and know it was the best decision they could have made among a set of difficult decisions. How do you guilt trip everybody back into a pre-Roe box? Is that possible? What kinds of ideas do you pull from religion to try to underscore your authority to do that?
Valerie Tarico: I honestly think it's a losing battle for them. Not the abortion fight narrowly, right? They've had the advantage, for example, of exploiting what science has taught us about fetal development. So, the fact that we humans are very visual animals, the fact that a human fetus looks humanoid, even though it functionally lacks all of those attributes of personhood, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Right, the outside finishes first, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the fetus is compatible with life.
Valerie Tarico: Right. So, that's a challenge for our movement. But in terms of coming up with this being a way of re-centering people in the kind of traditional religion and family structure that they are hoping for, that's not happening.
Chris Charbonneau: They have so many examples of things that they talk about. And once again, you're saying these are the extremists' versions – we're not talking about all people of faith or even people that are confused about this, we're talking about people who are deliberately telling a story in order to have a legislative end that meets their needs - these same people are against COVID masking and against vaccination. They are arguing for guns and against gun control. They will fight you on the ability to keep the guns out of the hands of mentally ill people. They will fight for everyone's ability to buy weapons of war to use in a casual walk-around ways without licensure on the streets of the country.
We talked earlier about preventing people from getting health insurance for a variety reasons. Like, how is this not the most hypocritical stuff one can imagine if you're talking about valuing actual human life?
Valerie Tarico: It's a great question. I mean, I have to say that it all kind of fits an Iron Age worldview, right? If you're stuck in the Iron Age with conflict and slaughter, I mean, there is a verse in the Old Testament in which God specifically tells His people to go, the chosen people, to go in and after a war to kill everyone, to kill all of the children, to kill all of the male children, to kill the women who have been with a man and then to keep the virgin girls for themselves.
The idea that there is justified violence, the idea that we live in a world of conflict, that there are these kind of spiritual battles that some people need to come out on top, that degrade the humanity of outsiders, it's, unfortunately, all there baked into the Iron Age texts in the Bible.
So when people are selectively looking to reinforce that kind of world view, the Bible has human handprints all over it. You can see kind of how it was formulated, if you look closely, and it is clearly man making God in the image of man. But when you mistake those manmade words for the voice of God, or when you mistake the words in your own head, your own preferences, and ideas and thoughts for the voice of God, then all kinds of, all manner of things become possible.
Chris Charbonneau: A huge respect for hierarchy where there's an unknowable God presence at the top, and there's some guy right under that, and then there's not anyone for a long, long, long time. Underneath that come all the chattel, the women and the animals and the planet and all the other considerations. And if that was the golden age, my friends, we've got big trouble. It's important I think that we all hold people with this kind of Iron Age view accountable. We have real people that we compassionate folks need to be caring for. It's not compassionate to make people travel across vast state lines. It's not compassionate to beat up gay and trans kids. It's not compassionate to do a good many things that are coming under the rubric of somehow being the doctrine of a specific kind of faithful. The hypocrisy of it is breathtaking and overwhelming and it cannot stand, I believe. Valerie, are we both saying that I don't think that that can last?
Valerie Tarico: I don't think it can last either. In the long run, it's just incompatible with trendlines in terms of human knowledge and human technologies. There are so many things that we know now that our Iron Age ancestors didn't know.
As I said, they did the best they could with the information that was available to them and their best guesses about how the world worked and what it was going to take for them to be able to live in moral community with each other within their then technological and cultural context.
We can do way better. We just know a lot more. We've got the privilege of, kind of, having had generations of folks’ kind of participating in this struggle before us.
Chris Charbonneau: So, there you have it, friends, the last gasp of Iron Age thinking that is in all likelihood going to be violent, maybe a little bit explosive, and once put down, we would be in a different and better and more understanding, and finally more compassionate era.
Valerie Tarico, I can't thank you enough for your time and expertise. I am in healthcare, not a theologian. Thanks for bringing theology to the table. Thanks for talking about the things that hung together really nicely in the Iron Age, but less so in 2022. It was wonderful to have you on the show.
Valerie Terico: Thank you, Chris. It's great to be able to have a conversation with you.
Chris Charbonneau: Thank you for listening, friends. This is Chris Charbonneau. It's been my pleasure to host this broadcast for you today. If you'd like to hear more, please subscribe to Apple podcasts or Google podcasts and give us a five-star review. If you'd like to connect with me in some way, please go to fallofroe.com for information. Thank you!