Interview with Francis Beckwith, Ph.D.

Family North Carolina Magazine—January/February 2009

On Air With . . .
Dr. Francis Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church Studies at Baylor University in Texas. He also currently serves as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. From 2006-2007, he served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society, and, in 2007, he was selected as “Person of the Year” by Inside Vatican Magazine. Dr. Beckwith is the author or co-author of several books, including To Every One an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (co-written with J.P. Moreland and W.L. Craig).

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Francis Beckwith conducted by NCFPC president, Bill Brooks, in November 2008, for the NCFPC’s weekly radio program, “Family Policy Matters.” Dr. Beckwith discusses issues from his book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion.

This interview can be heard in its entirety here: Listen (.mp3) — (Real)

Bill Brooks: You write in the introduction that your book is not so much about abortion as about human equality. Why the distinction?

Francis Beckwith: Well, I think one of the points that often gets missed when people talk about abortion is they forget that pro-lifers believe that abortion is wrong because it results in the death of a human being. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. Years ago, when I was more involved with politics than I am now, I was chair of a platform committee for the party that I belonged to, and we had in the section on abortion this language: “Our party believes that a woman has a right to terminate her pregnancy, if and only if, it does not result in the death of her unborn child.” What we did with that language was to force people to look at the question of ‘what is the nature of the unborn?’ because, ultimately, that does the work in the abortion debate. That is, if the unborn is a human person, then none of the arguments that are used can justify it. If it isn’t a human person, then none of the arguments are necessary. So, what I say in the introduction is that abortion is ultimately about the question of who and what are we. What is the nature of the human community, how wide is it in its scope? And if, in fact, it includes the unborn, what’s our responsibility to that?

BB: And that’s such a fundamental question...

FB: That’s right, and at the end of the day, if in fact, the unborn are one of us—which I believe they are—in fact, I make that case in the book—that means everything we believe about human equality extends to them, that we believe about ourselves.

BB. The pro-life arguments that you outline in the book are not necessarily theological. Was this intentional, if so, why?

FB: Yes, it was intentional. In fact, I’ve written articles, and in fact a book, in which I have an entire chapter dealing with the theological case for the pro-life positions from a Biblical Christian perspective. So, I think it is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. But in the book…the audience I was trying to attract are people who may not be Christians, or people that accept any authority of Scripture, or any theological tradition, but who could very well be persuaded to accept the pro-life point of view. My view has always been—and this is a view held by a number of people in the pro-life movement, most of whom are Christian—is that the pro-life view is consistent with and established by the Christian and Biblical tradition, but it’s a truth about reality that even people who may not share our worldview as Christians can be persuaded by these arguments. In fact, over the years, I’ve met many people who are pro-life who would not consider themselves Christian or even religious citizens of any sort…. As you know, the book is published by Cambridge University Press, which is the leading academic press in the world, and so, part of my reason for writing it this way, was to show those individuals that are academics that one could make a sophisticated clear case from a pro-life point of view without appealing to theological reasoning.

BB: Well, and I think that’s one reason so many people are going to be excited about this book, and about the arguments that you present and the way you present them. One of the common assertions we hear from abortion supporters is: “If you don’t like abortion, then don’t have one.” You write that this assertion reveals a misunderstanding of what we mean when we say “abortion is morally wrong.” What does it mean to say, “abortion is morally wrong,” and why are we often misunderstood?

FB: Well, I think, there are a couple of reasons why we’re misunderstood. One is that for some reason people think that if a position is moral—that is to say, if you are making a moral argument, for some reason, it’s just like a subjective argument. That is, you’re just simply announcing to somebody what you like or dislike. But in reality, moral arguments are normative arguments. That means that if I say, for example, “Racism is wrong,” I’m not saying that racism is wrong for me, I’m saying it’s wrong for everybody. The same thing with abortion. When a pro-lifer says, “Abortion is unjustified homicide,” they’re not saying, “I don’t like abortion.” They’re saying, “Abortion is wrong.” So, you know, there’s a quote that you cited, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.” I actually saw that on a bumper sticker when we were living back East years ago. And it occurred to me, can you imagine if somebody had a bumper sticker that said, “Don’t like spousal abuse? Don’t beat one,” people would say that person doesn’t understand what it means to say that spousal abuse is wrong! If it’s wrong, it can’t be something that is a matter of taste, or a matter of like or dislike. It is something that is, in fact, wrong. Now, of course, the pro-lifer has to make the argument for the correctness of his or her position, but it doesn’t solve the issue by simply turning it into something it isn’t. It really is a debate about who and what are we, and what is the nature of the unborn.

BB: What is moral relativism, and what does it have to do with the debate over abortion in this country?

FB: Well, moral relativism is the view that there is no objective right or wrong—that morality is simply relative, either to the individuals or to the culture. Oftentimes, when people debate abortion…you’ll hear, for example, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.” And so people think that because on moral matters there is such disagreement, there is no objective morality. And that impedes our opportunity to really have a conversation on this question. And that’s how I think moral relativism affects the debate. It isn’t so much that people down deep are really relativists. I mean, for instance, when somebody says, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one,” they don’t apply that to other issues. They don’t say, for example, “Don’t like spousal abuse? Don’t beat one.” I mean people would say, well, that’s crazy and it’s wrong. It’s the same thing. So I think relativism gets used in the abortion debate as a way to avoid actually discussing the issue. In fact, most of the arguments that one hears n the public square are ways to deflect the issue, not really to advance the conversation.

BB: You write that no Supreme Court decision has been more misunderstood or misinterpreted than Roe v. Wade. Explain what you mean by that and give us some examples.

FB: Well, Roe v. Wade is often portrayed as a very modest opinion. And it really isn’t. When it was decided in 1973, a lot of people thought that it simply allowed abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, and then allowed states to have regulation in the last two trimesters. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t, in fact, the case. The Supreme Court in Roe first off, said, that the unborn child has no rights under the Constitution until it is actually born. So, even though the Supreme Court allowed more restrictions of abortion as pregnancy develops, the fetus is never a subject of rights at all during the entire pregnancy. This is why a state could, if it wanted to, simply have no restrictions on abortion for all nine months. Now, the Supreme Court does say that as the fetus develops the state has greater interest in prenatal life. Well, people sometimes interpret that to mean [that] the court is actually allowing abortion to be banned in the last, let’s say, trimester. Not so. The court says, you can restrict it, but you have to have exceptions for the health and life of the mother. But in a companion case, called Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court defined health so broadly as to include everything from psychological to familial health, simply at the discretion of the physician. And the physician doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist; it doesn’t have to be a defined, sort of diagnosis or pathology. So it turns out Roe v. Wade is a radical opinion. It denies that the unborn has any rights under the Constitution for all nine months. And it pretty much allows abortions for all nine months as well….

BB: Well, one of the problems too with Supreme Court decisions is that they seem to be so final.

FB: Yes.

BB: You can’t introduce a bill to bring that back up to debate it, to amend it, to perfect it, to clarify it, to abolish it. You just sort of have to wait to see what happens in the great scope of things with other laws that are passed, and cases that are brought and decisions that are made. And it’s just very messy whenever the court starts making public policy.

FB: That’s right. Now, it’s interesting in the early 1980s, right after Ronald Reagan was elected, there were two bills—the Human Life Amendment, that was intended to amend the constitution, and the other was a Human Life Bill or law that would simply recognize the unborn under the 14th Amendment as a person. And if I’m not mistaken, I believe that the latter only lost by one vote… As many of your listeners may know, Section 5 of the 14th Amendment actually gives Congress the power to define the scope of the 14th Amendment. So it would have been very interesting to see what would have happened...

BB: Dr. Beckwith, in chapter 5 of your book, Defending Life, you tackle some of the popular arguments for abortion including what you call “ad hominem” arguments. What is this, and give us an example of how it is used in the abortion debate?

FB: Well, ad hominem…actually comes from the Latin phrase, “against the man.” We would say probably today, “against the person.” Instead of actually arguing against what somebody says, the person’s character is attacked, or not only their character, but their religious beliefs or where they may have learned these beliefs... In the abortion debate, for example, let’s say somebody were to say to me, “Oh the only reason you’re pro-life is that you’re a Christian.” I can say, “Well, that may be an explanation of why I’m pro-life, but that’s not the justification of why I’m pro-life. I’m justified in being pro-life because I think these arguments work.” It gets a little bit more personal when you hear, for example, pro-lifers accused of only caring about the child before it’s born, not afterward—which is actually false entirely. I don’t know how that myth developed. But it seems to me from my experience working with Crisis Pregnancy Centers and other sorts of groups around the country, pro-lifers are in fact deeply engaged with women who are pregnant, as well as those that have newborns as a consequence of a crisis pregnancy, so this is simply not true. But, having said that, we have to tell people that the rightness or wrongness of abortion is not contingent upon whether pro-lifers are virtuous people. It’s either right or wrong. I remember, several years ago, I was in a debate where a woman in the audience asked me and my debate partner, “Why don’t we adopt the children that we don’t want aborted?” And I looked at her and said, “Look, let’s suppose that I have three children, and I tell you, unless you adopt them by midnight, I am going to kill each one every hour, and let’s say they are two, four and six years old. Would I be justified in doing it, if you didn’t adopt them?” And she said, “No!” And I said, “So, you’re adopting them or not adopting them is not relevant to whether I’m justified or not justified in killing them?” She said, “That’s right.” And I said, “Well, the same thing with the abortion debate. Whether pro-lifers are willing to adopt the children that they don’t aborted has no bearing on the question of whether abortion is right or wrong, or whether those entities are in fact really children….”

BB: That was very well put. As you know, we are facing 36 years of abortion in this country with over 40 million unborn children dead, and millions of women and men suffering the after-effects of the abortion choice. Dr. Beckwith, is the debate over abortion something we as pro-lifers can win?

FB: You know, I think the pro-life movement has done remarkably well, especially in the past 15 to 20 years. I can only speak from my own experience. And having talked to colleagues who are pro-life and who are also college professors, a number of us are really pleasantly surprised at how our students are far more pro-life than they were 15 to 20 years ago. Even the students that were, leaning towards an abortion-rights position, they’re much more tolerant and open to hearing the pro-life arguments. I think it’s been elevated far above what was understood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was sort of thought of as a kind of a fringe movement. And now with the help of so many churches and so many individuals in public life associating themselves with the pro-life position, I think that has helped the pro-life position. Now, in terms of how we change the culture, I think it’s going to have to come back to the sorts of lessons we learned in our churches. I think we should hear more from the pulpit. In addition, I think pro-lifers have to be well equipped to be able to present their views in the public square in a winsome, attractive and intelligent way. And that means that sometimes we may have to scale back harsh rhetoric in some places, and there are other places where we have to be more assertive…