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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #078 | Which Humans Are People? A Conversation with Nancy Pearcey
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- [00:11]
Jen Friesen
Welcome back to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm your host, Jen Friesen, and I'm really excited for the conversation you get to listen in on. Today we are joined by Professor Nancy Pearcey. She's the author of Love Thy Body, Answering Hard Questions about Life and sexuality, as well as a number of other books like the Toxic War on Masculinity, the Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and Total Truth. She's a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She's been quoted in the New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in the Economist as America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual. No pressure for me as I talk to you. But Professor Piercey, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [00:58]
Nancy Pearcey
Oh, thanks so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
- [01:02]
Jen Friesen
So I was sharing with you with Nancy a little bit before we started that I'm such a big fan because as many people know, my story intersects with some same sex attraction and gender confusion. And the book Love Thy Body, which Nancy wrote in 2018, was. Was pretty foundational for me. And so that's the conversation we're going to have today. But Nancy, to start, I'd love you just to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience. Tell us about anything about yourself. You'd like us to know your background, what brought you to where you are right now as a wife and a grandma and a professor.
- [01:37]
Nancy Pearcey
We'd love to hear. Yeah, thanks. I love it when people ask me that question because it gives me a chance to talk about what's most important to me, which is how I became a Christian, because without becoming a Christian, I wouldn't be here. And the story is that I did. I was raised in a Christian home. But I don't know if you know this, but all Scandinavians are Lutheran. It's an ethnic thing. So my parents were Norwegian and Swedish. And the trouble is that when I started asking questions in high school, you know, I'm going to a public high school, all my textbooks are secular, all my teachers are secular. And so I simply started asking, how do we know Christianity is true? And the response was almost like, well, we're Swedish. What else are you going to be? I talked to a Christian university professor and I asked him point blank, why are you a Christian? He said, it works for me. That's it. And I even had a chance to talk to a seminary dean and I thought I would get a more substantial answer from him. But all he said was, don't Worry. We all have doubts sometimes. It's like it was a psychological phase that I was going through. And so when I didn't really get any substantial answers, I thought, I guess Christianity doesn't have any answers. And I very intentionally walked away from my Christian upbringing about halfway through high school and decided it was up to me to find truth. I was going to sift through all the religions and philosophies of the world and figure out which one was really true. But I realized fairly quickly that if there was no God, that was very consequential. In other words, there's no purpose to life, there's no meaningful life, there's no intention for us to be here, where life is a cosmic accident on a rock, flying through empty space. And if there's no God, there's no foundation for ethics. It's just true for me, true for you. So how do you know that you're building your life on something that really matters, that's really right, and that will have a good outcome? How do you know, even if you can know truth, if you can have knowledge? The way I thought of it was, if all I have is my puny brain in the vast scope of time and space, what makes me think I can have any sort of transcendent, universal, objective truth? I thought, ridiculous. Clearly not. So by the time I graduated from high school, I was a complete relativist and skeptic. Well, in my science classes I was even taught philosophical materialism, which is complex biochemical machines, anyway, who have no free will. So I. I adopted that too. And so it was. I was clearly really set up for an approach that would be apologetics. You know, a purely emotional appeal wouldn't work for me. So I did end up at Labrie, which is a ministry of Francis Schaeffer, who is best known as an apologist, and it's his residential ministry in Switzerland. We lived in Europe when I was a child, and so I had saved my money off of high school because I wanted to go back to Germany. And so that's how I kind of stumbled across Labri, which is in Switzerland. And I was stunned by this place. I had never heard anyone defend Christianity with good reasons and arguments. And who could show that Christianity could stand up against the secular isms in the marketplace of ideas, and especially the ones I had adopted. And so that's why I now everything I write, everything I teach is about apologetics, because I really want to help young people who had the questions that I had when I was that age. And the reason I wrote Love Thy Body is because the questions have changed. People are no longer asking, is Christianity true? They're asking, why are Christians such bigots? And it has to do with all of these issues of abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and so on. And so I thought, okay, that's what we have to address these days. We have to bring our apologetics to these issues. And so that's what I do. In my book Love Thy Body, did.
- [05:42]
Jen Friesen
You feel like you had the same sort of issue with conversion? I think CS Lewis talks about this, that he was so intellectual and he was trying to reason. I think Jordan Peterson is actually like this quite a bit. He's so smart. He's trying to think, if I could just figure it all out, then I will become a Christian. Did you feel like you got to a point, though, where you got good answers? There was good reason, but there still was things. Well, I'm never going to understand this, but I just kind of have to. I think CS Lewis says he basically had to leave at some level at the end.
- [06:15]
Nancy Pearcey
Well, you could keep asking questions for a lifetime. So you do have to reach a point where you say, you know, I know I could come up with more questions, but to be honest, I know enough now to be intellectually convinced that it's true. Now, I did have to reach that point where I said, to be honest with myself, I am convinced it's true. And now what? There's a difference, of course. And so I did, you know, I said, okay, God, you. Basically, I said, you won the argument. But there is a difference on being intellectually convinced and being emotionally really committed. And that took a lot longer because for the first year and a half of my Christian life, all I read was apologetics, you know, oh, I wanted to be really sure I'd made the right decision. You know, did I just do something really stupid? So I continued to read Apologetics, but then I had to deal with the fact that my emotional life was a wreck. I tell the story in my next book, Toxic Masculinity. So I'll go ahead. It's public, so I'll tell you. I grew up in a very abusive home. My father was very physically abusive. And you can see why I put that at the beginning of a book on masculinity, because that's something I had to really work through. I mean, it's been the center of my life. It was so abusive that it's sort of been the center of my whole life as an adult, is getting psychological and emotional and spiritual healing from that. So that's the other side of the coin is that yes, you have to be intellectually convinced, but then you have to experience the, you know, the emotional healing and the emotional connection with God. You know, God is actually a person and God actually loves you. And you have to get to a point where you really experience God's love in a deep transforming way. So they are slightly different parts of the Christian faith. And there's probably more too. I mean, it covers all parts of your life. You know, what about the practical side? What about practical charity? What about how do you bring your Christianity into your job? How do you bring it into political issues? So there's very lots of different dimensions of Christian faith. That's what one thing that's so wonderful about it, it's so rich that the truth applies to every area of life.
- [08:32]
Jen Friesen
Oh, that's so good. Wow. So much to think about there. Transitioning to love thy body specifically. You start the book by describing the concept of morality and then you talk about that there's been a split in the understanding of morality. Sort of there's competing worldviews, there's a secular worldview about morality and there's a biblical worldview. And you have a great quote that I paraphrased a little bit in chapter one where you talk about we're in a moral wasteland, but there is hope we can discover a reality based morality that expresses a positive, life affirming view of the human person. And this actually is what liberates and inspires us more than the secular worldview. But can you help us understand the dual idea of morality? And then why, why has that hung? I mean, it's messed Christians up. We kind of have bought into that there's a secular morality and there's a biblical one and then we're having trouble making sense of that.
- [09:29]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah. So actually this was one of the main themes that Francis Schaeffer used to talk about at Labri. He talked about it in terms of this is the main barrier to Christians communicating with the secular world. And that is the concept of truth has split. So most civilizations have believed that there was a natural order and that there was a moral spiritual order, but that the two were integrated into a single coherent, unified cosmos, and therefore truth about the cosmos would also be a unified, coherent whole. But after the rise of modern science, many people began to say, oh no, the only reliable form of knowledge we have is scientific, you know, what's empirically verified facts. What do you do then with spiritual and moral truths? Well, many people decided they didn't qualify. It has truths anymore. They decided that those were just personal preference, you know, subjective, you know, what gets you through the night. And so philosophers often use the metaphor of two stories in a building, right? So in the lower story is science and reason, rationality and objective truth, public truth. And then they've sort of thrown everything else into the upper stories. So morality, spirituality, theology, and even things like aesthetics have been reduced to purely personal preference, private and subjective. And so the reason Shaffer talked about it is that it really hampers us when we talk to non Christians because if we talk about Christianity, they immediately unreflectively throw it into the upper story where they think we're talking about this is my subjective truth. And if they're kind, they'll say, well, I'm glad that works for you. Right? I'm glad that works for you. I'm glad that makes you happy. But they don't sense, they don't even understand that you're making an objective truth claim anymore. And to give people a label for this, in secular academia, it's called the fact value split. So some people know it that way, fact value. And so when I started looking at other topics, though, I discovered your concept of truth shapes everything, which makes sense, right? It's essential. And so when I picked up these moral issues for Love thy Body, I discovered that it also led to a split view of the human person. So that in questions like abortion, transgenderism, and so on, we're treated as though, okay, scientifically, we know that we're biologically human, but we're not a person. So personhood becomes this upper storied, arbitrary subjective concept. So, yeah, so that's sort of the big picture.
- [12:15]
Jen Friesen
That's exactly the. The next question I was going to ask you is that you, you really shifted how I started talking about abortion when I read some of those, when I read your chapter on it, because that is the main argument now. I've heard someone talking about, you know, someone will say, well, it's not a human, it's just an embryo. And it's, well, what other species could a male human and a female human produce? It has to be human. It's a species. And then you're right, they immediately shift, well, it's not a person. So how do we answer people who start splitting those apart? How do we engage with that argument?
- [12:50]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, so not everybody, ordinary people don't always understand the topic as clearly. But professional bioethicists like Peter Singer at Princeton, he's probably been the most influential in making this Distinction and saying professional bioethicists, nobody of any stature denies that the fetus is human from conception. The evidence from science, from DNA and genetics is just too strong to deny it. So how do they then support abortion? Like you said, they'll say, well, of course it's human from conception, but it's not a person. And so personhood is defined in terms of mental abilities, like a certain level of cognitive functioning, self determination, autonomy, self awareness and so on. And so, yeah, the person, you know, the human being has been split in half, has been divided, just like the divided concept of truth, where what's public knowledge, what's scientific, is just the body and the fetus is acknowledged to be human on that level. But then they'll say, well, it's not a person yet. And you can, you can probably figure out pretty quickly what the problem with that is. The first problem, the most obvious, is that nobody can agree on how to define personhood because if it's not connected to biology, what's it based on? Well, it turns out I read lots of different bioethicists and they all have a different definition because it ends up being arbitrary. Which traits really qualify as personhood? How developed do they have to be? So every bioethicist out there draws the line at a different place. So you can see why it's an upper story concept. You know, the fact value split. It's in the value realm where it's arbitrary and subjective. And so when any particular definition is imposed on the nation through the law, somebody's personal private values are being imposed on all the rest of us. And it's kind of ironic because, right, pro life people often told, don't impose your private values on us. You know, don't bring your private values into the public squares. Well, these days it's the secular view that based on private values. And it is pro life people who are saying, no, no, let's go science, we want to be pro science, let's stick to the scientific definition because that gives us a definition that is empirically testable, that's objective, that can be known scientifically. So ironically, it's for life people now who are pro science.
- [15:21]
Jen Friesen
Are people using personhood to argue for euthanasia as well at the end of life, like you can gain personhood in some way and then you can lose personhood in some way. Or is it a different argument they're using?
- [15:33]
Nancy Pearcey
Absolutely. By the way, it actually has a name. It's called personhood theory. And personhood theory is used for euthanasia and like you said, it's just in reverse, right? So fetus doesn't become a person until it gains a certain level of cognitive functioning. But if you lose a certain level of cognitive functioning, bioethicists will say you are no longer a person, even though you're obviously still human. You know, you didn't become another species, so you're still human. But at that point I have a bioethicist who I quote who says, you know, it's not a person anymore, it is only a body. Only a body. So now if you think of that two story dividend, you know, the personhood doesn't exist anymore. The person only exists in the lower story, is only a body. And of course at that point you can be unplugged, your food and water withheld, your treatment stopped and your organs harvested. So the bigger point here is that here in both abortion and euthanasia, bioethicists acknowledge that the fetus or that the older person, the person with brain damage, they're still human, but they don't qualify for legal protection. So they have completely changed the notion of human rights. If you can be human but not have any legal protection, then being human is no longer enough for human rights. This is world changing. The very fact that we're losing the notion of human rights is going to have huge impact across the board.
- [17:05]
Jen Friesen
To your point, when if any of us agree or allow personhood to be unchained from human, then we're just at the mercy of whatever the subjective, I guess, the people in power. And you can just think about all the atrocities around the world at some level because they're claiming a people group or an ethnic group or cultural, they're not like us or they're not as much people and then they justify horrific atrocities against them.
- [17:32]
Nancy Pearcey
Yes. I mean look at history. It usually today it's based on cognitive ability, but in many cultures it's based on other things, ethnicity and culture and so on. All through human history there have been groups that have been isolated that these guys aren't fully human because they're not like us. We should have learned this by now that anytime any group is said to be less than fully persons, they're going to be oppressed, they're going to be killed, they're going to be put into the gulag, you know, into, into death death camps. Whatever the current, you know, whatever the current punishment is. History is replete with stories of once you deny personhood to some group, then they will be oppressed and, and even wiped out.
- [18:17]
Jen Friesen
Yeah, yeah, it's It's a really good thing for folks to educate themselves on when we're talking to people, to not allow that to be. I. I like saying now, you can't be a human and not be a person. That's just immediately. You always are a person if you're a human, period, you know?
- [18:35]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah. That's how you have to finally say it. Just point blank. Every human is a person. Right? Yeah. And that's the, that's the underlying principle. Yeah, you've got it.
- [18:45]
Jen Friesen
The book continues. You talk about abortion, euthanasia, you talk about homosexuality and transgenderism or activism. And I think people might be able to start connecting some of the two story argument that you're saying when it comes to sexuality and our gender identity and different things. But you say that all of these issues are actually about us devaluing the physical body. Can you explain more what you mean by that?
- [19:13]
Nancy Pearcey
Yes. Well, let's take the one we just talked about, abortion. What they're saying is even though the fetus is human, it has no moral standing, it does not warrant legal protection, has a very low view of being human. Right. And when we transition to the sexual issues, the most obvious case is transgenderism, because transgender activists argue explicitly that your body is not part of your authentic self. You know, that your authentic self is only your feelings. BBC documentary called Transgender Kids said, at the heart of the debate is the idea that your mind can be at war with your body. And in that war, who wins? You know, it's the mind. The body is denigrated. There's another BBC film that was done for teenagers and it featured a young woman who identified as non binary. And she says, quote unquote, it doesn't matter what meat skeleton you've been born into, it's only your feelings that count. So the body has been demoted to a meat skeleton. And then I have to read the academic literature. The first book that ever came out defending transgenderism on the academic level was a Princeton University professor. It's interesting because she acknowledges that transgender identity involves a disconnect, self estrangement, self alienation, because your mind and feelings are alienated from your body. And then she says, that's not a problem. Or in other words, that's not pathological, she says, because, listen to her reasoning, because what the physical body tells us is nothing. It has no meaning at all. So that's an extreme denigration of the body. Your body has no meaning at all. And this is what's being taught to young kids down to kindergarten. And then the other side of it is the detransitioners. It's fascinating that detransitioners often say it came through a renewed appreciation for the body. I'll give you just one for starters, unless you want some more. But this was the first one I found. It was by a 15 year old girl who had transitioned at age 11 and had lived as a trans boy for three years and then recovered her identity as a girl. And here's her exact words. She said, the turning point came when I realized it's not conversion therapy to learn to love your body. And this came out shortly after my book. So it's not in the book, but it would have been a great quote for a book titled Love Thy Body. And I thought, wow, from the mouths of babes. You know, she's just 14 and she's not Christian. It was a very secular website that I found this interview on. But even secular people are beginning to realize that at issue, especially in transgenderism, is the low view of the body. And sometimes you'll see this phrase, transgender ideology expresses body hatred. It is not part of your authentic self. And so that's the denigration of the body we're talking about. It's not just the split, but it's the split that devalues the body.
- [22:14]
Jen Friesen
There's something so insidious too, about the activism that's been happening or the people pushing the ideology. A lot of it is trying to stop puberty, trying to halt, make sure it doesn't occur. And I think the stats say that, and this is what happened for myself as well, is when your body starts, it becomes undeniable you are male or female. You know, you hit those secondary sex characteristics and those sorts of things, it starts helping write your mind. And when people are trying to stop it before the body can help you write your mind, that's really sad. I think the majority of people who struggle with some gender confusion say that puberty helps right their mind in some ways.
- [22:57]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, yeah. With that rush of hormones in puberty, depending on the study, 80 to 90% or so of young people with gender dysphoria do come to, you know, come to be at peace with their biological sex. Now, in the book, I do tell the story of a young boy who had severe gender dysphoria and who did not. Puberty didn't solve it for him. He had a pretty, pretty sweet, extreme case, but so I call him Brandon. And he had clearly had gender dysphoria from a very young age. And by the way, that actually is the more classic version. Back when we called it transsexualism, it was almost always male and it started at a very young age, whereas today it's mostly female, mostly young girls, and it's starting in adolescents or teens. So they had to come up with a new name for it because that was just so different. They call it rapid onset gender dysphoria. But anyway, so Brandon had the classic version. Before he was even walking, his babysitter said to his mom, he's too good to be a boy. By which she meant he was sweet, gentle, compliant, the things we normally associate with little girls. And in preschool, when his mother picked him up, he was always playing with the little girls. No, not the little boys. And already in elementary school, he was coming to his parents weeping and saying, I don't fit anywhere. Boys talk about sports and video games and girls talk about feelings and emotions and relationships. And that's what he was interested in. And here's how he put out his exact words. He said, I feel the way girls do. I'm interested in the things girls are. God should have made me a girl. So this is very painful. Just to give you a sense of gender dysphoria is a very painful condition to have. He suffered greatly. Like I said, he came to his parents weeping frequently. So some people think, you know, you just choose this. No, no, no, you don't. Nobody would choose gender dysphoria. You know, the real thing. So by his early teens, he was scouring the Internet for information on sex reassignment surgery. So you ask, what did his parents do? First of all, they made sure he knew they loved him just the way he was. Because I had a friend when I was in seminary who was a former homosexual, and he was like Brandon, you know, he liked music and art. And he said my father was baffled and kept trying to toughen me up by pushing me into more masculine things like sports. Well, Brandon's parents didn't do that. They said, it's perfectly okay to be the gentleman, sensitive, relational boy. It does not mean you're really a girl. It could be that God has gifted you for one of the caring professions like counselors, psychologist, healthcare worker. And of course, it's equally okay for a girl to be gender non conforming, to be interested in STEM subjects, you know, be more sporty or athletic. His parents most common phrase was, it's not you that's wrong. It's the stereotypes that are wrong. You don't have to fit the John Wayne masculinity image. They took him through the gift of the spirit in the New Testament. Because the new. The gift of the spirit, prophecy and teaching are not masculine as we might expect. And mercy and service are not feminine. They're not divided into pink and blue boxes. So Brandon did not overcome in puberty. It wasn't really until his mid-20s. There's a famous TED talk by a cardiologist, and the most famous line from it is, every cell has a sex that men and women are different down to the cellular level. And here's the way Brandon. When Brandon finally seemed to be making peace with his biological sex, here's how he put it. He said, a person is not a computer disk that you can erase and start over again. I kind of like his metaphor. So, yeah, Brandon did finally, you know, overcome. He never did transition, fortunately. But if he had not grown up in a Christian family and if he had not been homeschooled, if he'd gone to public school, yeah, he had a very severe case. All that to say. People always ask, but concretely, you know, practically, how do we help these young people? And I would say tell them that they're fine the way they are, that God has gifted them. You know, maybe they're a bit gender non conforming. And by the way, I have several studies that I cite in my book saying that the most frequent correlation, most reliable correlation with non heterosexual activity in adults, whether that's homosexuality or transgenderism, it's nothing genetic. The most reliable correlation is just gender non conforming behavior. In other words, it's kids who behave in a way that's more typical of the opposite sex. And so I think the most important thing we can do is we need to sort of nurture those kids especially, I think we need to actually put some emphasis on giving them special nurture because right now they are being targeted. You have to realize that in a public school they are being targeted both by teachers and kids. I have a niece who was homeschooled until she was age 12. She went to a public school. I don't know, maybe she's a little more masculine looking. But the kids said, oh, you're gay, you, you know, you're lesbian. And she says, no, I'm not. Yes, you are. You are. You know, and so she, she didn't have a Christian background or anything. She had nothing to work against that. And eventually she just decided, well, maybe, maybe my friends are right. And so now she's gay and has a lesbian girlfriend. But so even by peer pressure, they're being targeted. So I think we need to make a special point to try to nurture young people who are gender non conforming, because in our day, they will be targeted and told that even if they didn't think they were, that they will be told that they are either transgender or. Well, that's more common now. They might be told that they're same sex attracted, but no, it's even more common now you're trans. So all that to say we should have a special place in our hearts to reach out and nurture those kids.
- [29:31]
Jen Friesen
Yeah. Wow, that's really good. Well, and I've even heard from people anecdotally that have said their kids in school will be the only kid that has not identified within the LGBT community. Community. And that makes them more. It's like everyone is pressured. You have to be something, you have to be bi. I'm gender non conforming, I'm gay, or you're not going to fit in in some way. So that's a really interesting shift.
- [29:55]
Nancy Pearcey
Culturally, I think bisexual is the most common. And yes, there are whole schools that are at least 50%, but the majority are bi because that's the safest one. You know, you're not a boring old heterosexual, but you don't have to really commit to being either gay or trans. So that is actually the most common today. So this is another. A different niece on the other side of the family. She said, every day in school, kids are just, are you gay? Are you bi? You know, constant, constant pressure from other students. This is my brother's daughter. And finally my brother said to her, you know, there's a lot more interesting things about people than their gender, but it is a window into the pressure that young people understood. I think parents don't always understand how much pressure our young people are under on this particular issue. And so we need to come up to speed if we want to be there for our kids. We need to be much more aware of the secular world and how it's impinging on our children.
- [31:00]
Jen Friesen
You say that our view of science and nature directly shape our ethics. I wonder if that kind of means, you know, the things that are naturally common sense, observable, and that's. That contrasts with this devaluing of the body. When we recognize, you know, if there's an intelligent designer, there's been an intelligent design. So how can see. How can seeing intentional design help inform our ethics, help us answer these questions, but particularly with people who struggle with gender or sexual, like, attraction confusion.
- [31:32]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, well, let me start with an example, because there's a fairly well known public intellectual named Camille Paglia. You know her? Yeah. So she's been well known as a lesbian for many, many years. And by the way, do you realize she's now come out as trans? Yeah, for at least a year now, she's come out as trans. She hasn't changed her appearance at all. She still looks like a woman. But she's in interviews, she now says she's trans. But the point is, the interesting thing, the reason many Christians actually read Camille Paglia is that she's a bit of an iconoclast because she says nature made us male and female. In fact, here's the exact words, our bodies are designed for reproduction. Designed, which is kind of an odd word for an atheist. But if nature made us male and female, we're designed that way, then how does she justify being either lesbian or trans? And here's a direct quote. She said, well, why not defy nature? After all, fate, not God, has given us this flesh. We have absolute claim to our bodies and may do with them as we see fit. So that's the philosophy behind it. In other words, if nature and our bodies are products of blind, material, purposeless forces, then they have no intrinsic purpose that we are morally obligated to, to respect. They give us no moral message, they give us no clue to our identity. We can do with them as we see fit. So I love the way she has captured the logic for us. And of course, the answer to that is science itself shows us that living things were designed for purpose on a very elementary level. Eyes are made for seeing, ears are made for hearing, wings are made for flying, and fins are made for swimming. In fact, the development of the entire organism is driven by an inbuilt plan or blueprint, which is DNA. So science itself gives evidence, observational evidence, that living things are designed for a purpose, that nature has a plan, an order, a purpose, a design. And so what Christians are saying is when we live in harmony with that design, we will be happier and healthier. And that's the way, you know, that gives us a positive message. And so we're not just saying, you know, don't do it. It's against the Bible, it's a sin, and there's something wrong with you, you know, which is kind of the message people get. No, we give them a positive message that there is a real design to their bodies, there is a purpose to the way they were designed, and we can live in harmony with that purpose.
- [34:15]
Jen Friesen
Okay, kind of harkening back to our human rights conversation a little Bit you say in your book, once a culture abandons the conviction that all humans are created in God's image, human rights are up for grabs. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about this. In a way, something that particularly intersects with them before us and our audience is the things like ivf, embryonic stem cells, research, surrogacy. Can you help us understand with the framework that you offer in Love Thy Body, how do we approach reproductive technology? What are the ethical things we need to consider there?
- [34:50]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, I know it's hard because everyone wants infertile couples to have a chance to have children, but if you're against abortion, if you followed the arguments on abortion, even secular bioethicists now agree that life begins at conception. And all the way back in the 1970s, there was a Christian ethicist named Paul Ramsay who was arguing against in vitro fertilization because he said, you cannot even develop this technology without killing hundreds of thousands of embryos. And so he was already, back then, warning that, you know, I realize that that's in the past. You know, we've already developed the technology. But he was warning that you're killing hundreds of thousands of embryos. And so the very process of developing this technology was immoral. Now, today, I do know of some people who will fertilize only one or two eggs. I just met somebody actually, who did this. She fertilized one egg. And, you know, at the fertility clinics, they said, you know, that's not enough. You need to. You need to fertilize several so we can pick out the best one, the healthiest one. But she wanted to be ethical about it. She didn't want to throw away any embryos because that's destruction of life. So she fertilized one egg, and it worked. She did achieve a pregnancy with one egg. So it can be done. There are some couples who try to stay within ethical bounds by doing that or the other. What I think is really. What I think is really clever. Have you heard of. Well, I'm sure you have snowflake babies.
- [36:34]
Jen Friesen
Oh. Huh. Yep.
- [36:36]
Nancy Pearcey
So one of my friends did that. So there was a Christian couple across the country who had fertilized four eggs and had used two. And then the wife developed some kind of health problems, and they couldn't have any more pregnancies. So they had two present embryos. And so my friend who teaches with me actually here at Houston Christian University, got the. Well, one at a time, got one embryo and had the first child and got the other embryo. And unfortunately, it did not take. So they have just one child. But that's another solution is for the snowflake babies. I wish that were better known that there is a solution for people who, like in this case, through no fault of their own, did have some excess embryos. And my friends who got the snowflake embryo said the benefit is, of course, that you're in charge of the pregnancy. The benefit over adoption is that you're in charge of the pregnancy. You can make sure it's healthy, no drinking, no smoking. And you also bond with the baby. Right, because the mother and child especially, they bond. The baby's hearing the mother's heartbeat. And so there are a lot of benefits to embryo adoption. So that's something that I think should be better known is that when there are excess embryos, and there are a lot right now, of course, from couples who created way too many embryos and then took one or two, I think we should be promoting snowflake, Snowflake baby adoptions a whole lot more. But the main question that you are asking is, yes, I do think that anyone who is against abortion by logic, by sheer logic, they've already acknowledged that the fetus is human from conception. And so they have to be against in vitro fertilization, you know, unless it's done in an ethical way with. Without any excess embryos being created and destroyed.
- [38:39]
Jen Friesen
Well, I can see using what you've talked about when we think about genetic editing or trying to do CRISPR clipping out of, you know, when you have an embryo, and I'm trying to say, well, I want a male. I would want one with blue eyes. We really are. We're separating them from human and person. Or when we use a surrogate, you're thinking of people as products or things to be bought and edited. And if it's not quite right, then I don't want the product anymore or I can rent a womb. And so it does seem like it's a protective ethical feature to not separate apart human and people. But if someone's human, that means they have human rights and I should only treat them in a certain way.
- [39:23]
Nancy Pearcey
Yeah, there's. There's a lesbian writer who I quote in my book. She writes in particular about the surrogates, by the way. She. She says, you know, a lot of wealthy gay couples, and she is herself lesbian. She's a wealthy gay couple, but basically, you know, turning their third world into, you know, buying the womb, rent a womb. Even though she is herself a lesbian, she's very much against this and thinks it's very dehumanizing to the girl, to the young woman who serve as surrogate. But the wider point, as you're pointing out, is that anytime you turn a human being into a product, into a consumer item, you have essentially denied their personhood because you can't do that to a person. You know, the whole notion of there was a Supreme Court decision, which I would have to look up again to see the date. It was, excuse me, it was the state Supreme Court, I think it was New Jersey, that was against surrogacy many years ago. And the point of it was you can't buy and sell a human being. If you buy and sell a human being, you're treating them as a non person, as an item, as a product. And it was a great Supreme Court decision. We should all go back and find it again and start promoting it. Because the argument was very well phrased in terms of once you treat even one aspect of a human like a woman's womb, one aspect of a human, you treat it as a consumer item. You have depersonalized that part. It's alienated the person from that part of themselves by treating it as something you can buy and sell. And so I think that you're right that that's another example of treating people as less than full person. And I think it's amazing that in our age where human rights is such a big issue that we're not making the connection. This is also just a way of destroying human rights. It's not just, you know, the Soviet Union, when they threw people into the gulag, you know, Nazi Germany, they threw people into death counts. You know, it's a consumer kind of eugenics where people are saying are treating their children as if they were products that they can tinker with and like you said, and throw them out if they don't want them. You know, there have been several cases of surrogacy, for example, where if the child wasn't perfect, the purchasing couple, you know, said, nope, we don't want it. And then the child is in limbo until somebody's willing to care for it. So the rejection, it's not just that we're treating them as objects, but in treating them as objects, we're also saying that you can just toss them out if you don't want them. And again, that's a huge attack on the very notion of personhood.
- [42:17]
Jen Friesen
Well, Nancy, thank you so much for your time. I'm sure I could just ask you questions, questions, questions for a long time. But is there anything you're working on right now. And then where can people find you? I follow you on X and I really appreciate your commentary there. But yeah, what else is going on for you that people can come and find you?
- [42:33]
Nancy Pearcey
Oh, well, you know, my publisher redesigned my website, so it's very pretty now and colorful. Nancy Pearcy.com Nancy Pearcy and it's P E A r c e y.com so you can come and browse my other books. You can read the endorsements and get a bigger picture. And yeah, I do appreciate I'm pretty active on X now. It used to be Facebook, but Facebook doesn't move fast enough. My ex is like, you get the headlines the very day they come out. And so it's a great way for Christians to stay up on what's happening in our world. So those two places, Nancy Piercey.com and Twitter are probably the best places to stay up. Thanks for asking.
- [43:16]
Jen Friesen
Yeah, great. When we'll put those links and everyone can go purchase your book Love Thy Body on Amazon. We'll have that in our show notes as well. So. So yeah, thank you so much for your time and all of your work helping Christians think rightly about so many of these really important topics.