BONUS: Interview - Jen Roth, Pro-Life Atheist

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