Ep. 234 - 5 Strategic Shifts to Win the Battle for Life

The battle for life did not end with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In fact, it has only moved to a new and more complex front. In this episode of the Prolife Team Podcast, Jacob sits down with Dr. Marc Newman, a retired professor and author, to discuss his latest book, Pivot: Five Strategic Shifts to Win the State-by-State Battle for Life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Well, welcome to the ProLife Team podcast. I'm Jacob, and I'm here with Dr. Mark Newman. Mark, would you tell us a little bit about your backstory and then we'll dive into what's currently going on in your world?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Okay. Um, yeah, I uh I'm a retired university professor. It's taken me a long time, by the way, to get to the point where I can actually say retired. For a while it was semi-retired, but then I finally had to go all in and say, Yeah, I'm fully retired now. I'm not teaching at any universities. But I started off many, many years ago in the late 1980s at the University of California at Irvine, where I was the director of speech and debate there. And then I uh taught for about 35 years, ended my career teaching in the doctoral program at Regent University. During that entire time, uh probably in the late 1980s, a guy by the name of Arthur Ellison, uh, who later went on to run a thing called Life Steward Ministries, he was the associate pastor at my church. And he took a one-year leave of absence and he said, Hey, Mark, I know that you're up there at uh UC Irvine and you're doing some corporate training. Would you come down and train my people? I said, Well, sure, Arthur, who are your people? What are you doing? And well, I'm on a one-year leave of absence and I'm running this thing. And it was called a crisis pregnancy center. Something I had never heard of before. And so I said, Well, sure, uh, just tell me what it is and what you do, send me some information about it. I'll take all the material that I use to train corporate people and I'll use it to work with your folks. And so he sent me Kirk Young's The Least of These and a book by Bernard Nathanson. And I read these books and my jaw dropped. I had no idea. Keep in mind, I'd been a believer since the probably the mid-1970s. I'd been constantly in church. I knew nothing about this. But I got the materials, I put the thing together, I did a uh pro-life speaker training, and I thought that was it. Within two years, 95% of all of the consulting work I did was with pregnancy centers and with national right to life uh affiliate staffers and uh executives across the country. And over time it just kind of built out and built out and built out. And then somebody asked me, Hey Mark, do you do banquets? And I went, sure. And so I found myself doing fundraising banquets, and uh I do about 20 or so of those a year, uh raising millions of dollars for pregnancy centers across the United States. So I do apologetics work, I do uh public speaking training for people in pro-life ministries, and I do a lot of fundraising work. And then when I'm not doing that, I write books. So uh but in 2020, I wrote my second book on the abortion issue, it which was called Contenders, which is a book that's designed for messengers. And then right now, just last week we dropped uh this book, uh uh I don't know if you can see it, called Pivot. Yeah, uh Five Strategic Shifts to Win the State by State Battle for Life. And uh Contenders was a book for messengers. It was designed to give people the apologetics they needed and the uh speaking skills necessary to be able to bring the message of life out into the public. Pivot is a book for everybody. It's a book that explains to to us where we are now that the the Dobbs decision came down overturning row. Uh kind of where do we find ourselves, and then five strategic shifts that we need to make in order to carry the battle for life forward. And and I intend to win it. I don't have any desire to draw this to a stalemate. I want us to win and I want us to save the lives of unborn children created in the image of God, and I believe that we can do it if we will be smart about it.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Yeah, so I'd love to hear more about this new book, Pivot, and also just yeah, the your ideas on what you know in this post-row in this Dobbs world, what does it look like for us um and the changes we need to make? Yeah. So I'd love to, yeah, tell us more.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Well, when the Dobbs decision came down, unfortunately, I think a lot of people thought we were done. That we won. I've heard from pregnancy centers all over the country that believe that since the Dobbs decision uh since the Dobbs decision came down that uh pregnancy centers aren't even needed anymore. I I've actually heard that being told to uh directors from donors. And nothing could be further from the truth. When uh the Dobbs decision first came down, as you know, uh the the people in the abortion industry uh and their allies lost their minds. You had people, you know, protesting in front of Supreme Court justices' houses, we had guys like Crackhead Barney running around doing all kinds of horrible uh street theater. Um it was it was just uh unbelievable. And I think everybody thought, you know, the the sky was falling. But the fact of the matter is that our opponents are very wily, and what they did was they uh they retreated a bit, they retrenched, and already in motion, right, there was a a retreat to the abortion pill abortions, uh which uh initially was to seven weeks, then was to ten weeks. And there's research out there showing abortion pills are very effective into the uh early third trimester, 26 weeks and beyond. And so they've retreated, come back, they've uh re-established themselves in very uh friendly states that have uh have uh shield laws and they're engaging in e-tail abortion. Some people use the term telehealth, but there's nothing health, uh there's nothing healthcare oriented about abortion pills. And so uh now the battle, uh the the large part of the battle is shifted. And what we have is we have people in death states violating the laws of life states and shifting and uh shipping pills, abortion pills into uh life states, and that's one of the reasons why abortion continues to go up instead of down in the post-adobes world. So that's the the scenario that we currently find ourselves in. Um and then I think there are five key things that we can do in order to overcome that. The first is we have to change the way we speak, and we can talk more about that. Uh we have to change the way we educate. Uh, and in fact, I would say we got to start. I know some people say, gosh, the pro-life movement's been around for over fifty years. What do you mean start educating? Um, I like what G.K. Chesterton says about Christianity, right? He said Christianity has not been found uh what does he say, it's not been tried and found wanting. It's been found difficult and left untried. Pro-life education has not been tried and found wanting. It's been found uncomfortable and left untried. We need to change the way we uh operate inside of life states. There are a lot of people who I could, like I said, think that we've won, and there are things that we still need to do to lock uh life states down for life. And then we cannot leave our uh our brothers and sisters who live in death states alone. We can't just say, you know, well, you know, our kids are safe, so you know, forget about their kids. We've got to find a way to infiltrate death states and help them to see the truth about the lives of their unborn neighbors and why they need to protect them. And then finally, uh the last shift that I talk about is the the shift from intention to action. There are a lot of people in who have uh pro-life sentiments, but they aren't really doing anything. And so we need to move from people who say, Well, I've I've got good intentions to people who actually uh r rise up and act.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Wow, this is a lot of good good good areas to talk about. So let's let's talk about language. Uh one of the things that comes to mind is how the sidewalk has moved to a mailbox or or a dorm door, you know, or a dorm hallway. And there's no longer a sidewalk unless there's a virtual sidewalk online. Um and that's definitely impacting in, you know, the opportunity to talk. But what are your thoughts on yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts on language and what you're thinking in that space.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Well, you're you're absolutely correct that the uh that the not just the advent, because the advent was quite a long time ago, but the massive expansion of abortion pill usage. What it's really done is it's it's I want you to think about, you know, back in the say the 1990s when a woman uh had an abortion, she could actually get into a car, drive past a building, uh, point her finger at that building and say, you know, that is where that guy did that to me. Right. You you uh you could separate yourself from the act a little bit now because of abortion pills. And by the way, this is uh this is an unbelievably clever attack by the enemy because now the woman is much more intimately involved in the uh in the intentional death of her own child, right? Now there's no building to point to. She just looks in the mirror and sees the the abortionist staring back at her. She took those pills. Absolutely. So yeah, we don't have buildings anymore. We've got bathrooms, we've got dorm rooms, uh, we've got bedrooms where desperate women are uh are intentionally ending the lives of their of their own children. So that is one part of the battle. But but in terms of how we talk about it, now I'm not talking about in a counseling room, but I'm saying out in public, one of the things our opponents have been very good at is medicalizing this issue. Right. And so even when we use the term abortion, we've got uh people in Senate testimonies, you know, talking about how abortion is absolutely fundamentally health care. And abortion couldn't be anything any more but health care than I could possibly imagine. And so I think it's important for us to call things what they are, and this is the way I explain it to people. So just to let you know, Jacob, this is not a trick question. I'm just gonna ask you a question and just answer as briefly as you possibly can. What is child sex trafficking? No, what is it? Describe it. What what happens?

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Uh stealing someone's childhood, stealing someone's child, and uh abusing someone to uh to put them into selling for money for sex, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah, it's a hard thing to even even contemplate and talk about because you know immediately what it's about. It's about people using children for sex for money, right? That it's simple. Nobody has to wonder what child sex trafficking is. And you can't find a pastor anywhere that would be unwilling to preach about child sex trafficking. No pastor would ever get up in a pulpit and say, Well, you know, there are different views about child sex trafficking. Some people are in favor of it, some people are opposed. I don't want to split our church over child sex. Nobody would ever say such a thing. But we've but we've been able to say it that way about abortion because we've politicized and medicalized abortion and made it seem like a a rights issue or a health care issue. But what if we called abortion what it really was? What if we defined abortion in the same way you just described child sex trafficking? If what if we called abortion intentional child killing? Because that's what it is. It's intentional, there's a child, and we're killing that child. And by the way, I I'm not the one who's saying it, but Planned Parenthood says this. People say, well, they don't say it now, but they used to. Back in the 60s, they used to. I've got a brochure called Plan Your Children for Health and Happiness. It was distributed by Planned Parenthood. They asked the question about birth control. Birth control, is it an abortion? Their answer, no. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it is begun. It is dangerous to your life and health and we make you sterile so that when you want a child, you cannot have one. That is what they said. They used to put out a brochure, uh, a little flip book called The Gift of Life. It was a uh it was a sex education manual, right? And it says right there in black and white that when a male sperm meets and unites with an egg cell, a new life begins. Planned parenthood is always known that human life begins at conception. Planned parenthood is always known that abortion intentionally kills a human life. The target is the child. So we know that abortion intentionally kills, we know that that what it intentionally kills is a child, because that's the only thing that two human that a human mother and a human father have. In fact, it wasn't uh that long ago that people used to refer to pregnant women and they say, Oh, look, she is with right child. Um and this is a way also to get get uh outside of what I would call um developmental gestational arguments because the one thing that I can tell you absolutely is that what's inside that woman's body is the product of her body and the man that she had sexual relationships with uh relationship with his body, and that that being inside of her womb is absolutely relationally her child, not a baby, not a child, her child, her baby. And I think that if we would just begin speaking more clearly about it, we would be better off. Because right, we've got people running around that are literally saying that miscarriages are abortions. Um, you have people in the medical literature, right, when a woman miscarries, they call it a spontaneous abortion. We use abortion in a lot of ways that that uh doesn't reflect what we're talking about when we discuss elective abortion.

unknown 16:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

And so I think that substituting intentional child killing is a clear, easy way for people to understand. Now, you might notice that I didn't say the word murder. I didn't say the word murder for a couple of reasons. Number one, because legally it's not murder. And that's that's just the facts. I mean, you have carve-outs in just in every state in the United States that says that we don't prosecute people for self-managing and abortion, for example. So to call it murder is is a lie. It's not murder, murder is a legal category. The second reason I don't like to use the word murder is because murder is is it's being overused rhetorically. Um PETA, right? People for the ethical treatment of animals holds up signs at their protests, declaring that meat is what?

SPEAKER_04 17:25

Murder?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Murder, murder. People call all kinds of things murder anymore, and after a while, rhetorically it doesn't have as much impact. But if we will simply call abortion what it is, it's intentional child killing. That's what happens. The question then becomes, should intentional child killing should it be illegal to intentionally kill your children? And I would argue yes, it should be. Um and uh and the way to move forward uh right now, absolutely, is to go after the people who per who are um purveying it, the people who are out there promoting and shipping abortion pills. Uh we've already done a very good job in pro-life states getting rid of our uh bricks and murder uh bricks and border uh abortion facilities. But what we can't manage right now is because of shield laws, we can't seem to stop California, Illinois, New York, and other states from shipping these pills into our states. That's the next uh that's the next uh step in this battle is winning at the federal level so that these folks cannot violate the laws of these states by mailing in abortion pills.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Wow. So when it comes to people who distribute the pills, when it comes to people who would, you know, essentially be like an abortion um provider, um comparing that to a woman who may or may not have informed consent on what she's doing, how would you you know, when it comes to intentional child killing, um it seems like the abortion providers would be very intentional on what they're doing. Um and and when it comes to the woman who uh the the mom of this child, there's gonna be different scenarios. Would you speak to that?

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Absolutely. So um all the people who are abortion providers, these folks are medical people, they'd absolutely positively know exactly what it is that they're doing. You can go back to Warren Hearn's book on abortion practice, and he's very, very clear that he understands that what he's doing is intentionally killing this child. But we live in a nation where we have had over 50 years of the medical community telling women that what's in their body from the moment of conception is nothing more than a blob of tissue. It's an undifferentiated cell mass, it's the products of conception. Um I like what uh Planned Parenthood had called it for a while, they called it pregnancy tissue. Um and then we've got states that not only uh teach their people this, but then they absolutely go forward and they pay they actually pay for these women's abortions. And so uh this is one of the reasons why I think it's important for us to lay blame squarely where it it it it belongs, which is with the people who are abortion providers. There may come a time in the future once we have uh have kind of repented of this national sin and begun educating people properly on the the truth about what's going on in their bodies, but all you have to do is watch uh Mark Harrington's videos uh on TikTok, um watch some of uh Charlie Kirk's old videos where he talks about the baby inside the woman's body and watching college students, right? Not rank and file just anybody on the street, but college students at major universities screaming at him, it's a fetus, it's a fetus, right? Um indicating that they cannot tell that this is a human child inside their bodies. Um I spoke with uh I think it was at at Washburn, I spoke with a student after a uh an apologetics class I did, but she told me that her professor described the the child inside of a woman's womb as a uh as a violent parasitical invader. And so yeah, if if people are taught if this is the worldview that they're coming at this with, then then yeah, I can completely understand it. There's also problems, of course, with issues of just uh uh b bodily autonomy in the most negative sense of that word. Nobody truly, as you know, has total bodily autonomy. Um and so you've got people basically saying, look, I I I don't want to be pregnant. And since I don't want to be pregnant, I shouldn't be pregnant. And as far as they they know, and if you look at Planned Parenthood's own uh websites, they just talk about abortion as something that stops you from being pregnant. Now you're just no longer pregnant. They never ever introduce the the thought of a child in your womb that you're uh intentionally killing. They know, but they're uh they're withholding it from the women that they are sending abortion pills to.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Awesome. Well, so I want to move on to your next area uh education. So I I believe it was um I want to say it was Jim Sprague when I asked him a few months ago um what's the The greatest need in the pro-life movement, and he told me he thinks uh we need um let me think if I can get the wording right. Um we need in the medical education community and just also maybe in the educational community for people to learn the value of life, or there's another phrase he used, um, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of life as a layer of part of their educational experience when you know in in college, in in medical school. And then um I was talking to another gentleman at the same event, and we're and he thought the greatest need that our movement has is for higher quality and higher quantity of people to be trained and to join the pro-life movement. I think it was Bryce Asperg, and he's and he's working on some projects, one's called Titus something, where he's working on trying to grow people in a nearby college to see what people are doing, the prancing clinic movement, and to help them, you know, get onto that pathway. So, you know, there's there's obviously one person was saying we have a need for hire, you know, more people to be educated and prepped and to be pulled into this work. And the person was saying we need to grow, you know, and and then also to weave in the um the value of life into our educational system. And I'd love to hear what you have to say about education, but I think you know, I've heard a lot of people saying like this is the greatest need recently.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Absolutely. And I've got to tell you something, it's gonna have to start in the church. People keep talking about uh there's an entire movement of people, you know, arguing we've got to, you know, criminalize women and uh we're gonna pass these laws and state legislatures. And and my response to them is we can't even get our churches to tell our own people the truth. George Barna had done, or I'm sorry, Lifeway, I think, had done some research not uh too long ago, but within the last 10 years or so, that indicated that 40% of all women having abortions were in church at the time of that procedure. So if we cannot get the message of life in our churches first and foremost, we're never going to win the battle outside. So uh in in pivot, I basically say there is no city, there's no state, there is no nation that's holier than its churches. So we've got it's got to start at the church. Now, the good news is education works. Um, and one of the stories that I tell in pivot, it's great. Uh, the guy's name is Professor uh Ron uh Hasn uh Ron Hasner. Uh yeah, Hasner. And he was a professor over at UC Berkeley, and he went up to one of these protests, right? So I'll I'm gonna start a line and I'll see if you can finish it for me. Um these protesters were uh were marching around campus with signs that said, From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free. Free, that's right. And so they're running around with these signs. So Hasner decided, I wanted to find out if these people actually knew what they were protesting about. So he walked up and he said, Can you tell me um which river? And can you tell me which sea? And what he found out was the vast majority of the people protesting could not identify the river, could not identify the sea. So he pulls out a map and he lays it out in front of them and he says, Well, here's the river, right, the Jordan River, and here's the sea, the Mediterranean Sea. And I want you to see who's in between the river and the sea, and what are you going to do with all of the uh the Jews and the Arab Israelis that occupy all of this territory? And once people finally realized what it would mean to completely, you know, liberate Palestine from the Jews and what would happen, the vast majority of the students who had been protesting stopped protesting and they disavowed the statement. What was the problem? The problem was simple ignorance. And I'm telling you, in most of our churches, we are plagued with simple ignorance. The pro-life message is not a difficult message to understand. It's just become a political hot potato that a lot of pastors don't want to mess with. Also, no fault to the pastors, and if you're a pastor listening to this, I've got your back. Uh, pastors are the most messaged at group of ministers in the history of human culture, of Western culture at the very least. Every single TikTok channel, uh YouTube channel, and they've got their own subject matter expert on literally everything. So every pastor out there is expected to respond. So think about the burden pastors face. Uh, they got to knock it out of the park every Sunday morning, right? They've got to be phenomenal communicators. They've got to be deep biblical exeges, right? Be able to understand the scriptures. They've got to be moral philosophers. They've got to be able to look across the landscape of popular culture, ferret out, you know, all of the different um, you know, moral and uh and theological and uh and cultural ideologies that are floating around there and have responses to every single one of them. And oh, and then they have to be astrophysicists, biologists, and geologists, right, uh and historians. It's amazing what we expect a single pastor at a one-pastor church to be able to do. And now here comes Mark Newman or Scott Klusendorf or one of us, you know, or Jacob Barr coming up to the pastor and saying, Hey, pastor, yeah, I understand that things are difficult, but I got one more thing for you. And you can see where they, you know, they're they're nervous. There is there's going to be some kind of pushback because they don't, they're expected to be the subject matter expert. They don't feel prepared. Why? They went to a Christian high school where nobody ever talked about abortion. They went to a Christian college where nobody ever talked about abortion. Then they went on a seminary where nobody ever talked about abortion. And now suddenly they find themselves in a church where people are saying, Can you talk about this? And they have had literally no preparation uh in order to do so. The job of my uh my earlier book, Contenders, was to equip them to do that. We also put on a uh a session called How to Teach the Toughest Topic, where we bring pastors in and we walk them through how to successfully preach about abortion. They get a lot of other little uh kind of wonderful side benefits from that uh that session as well. But the whole idea here is to get them ready to go. In the evening, then I'll train all their people in a three-hour uh apologetics class called uh Contenders Making the Case for Life. And so we can we can get it all done in an in a day, but most of these pastors are are horribly ill-equipped to do it. So, yeah, we need to train our pastors, and then we need an army of apologists. I've been talking with pregnancy centers now for two years, saying that every single pregnancy center, all 2,700 of them, ought to have a staff apologist. Their only job is to find places to speak and then go around and talk with people about life issues and about what the center is doing. And that would easily be a full-time job just about anywhere. So we are we've been working to try to raise that up myself, Scott Klusendorf, John Enser from Passion Life Ministries. We actually had an applied bioethics program that we taught at Oklahoma Wesleyan University and then later at Cedarville University. We currently are not housed at a university. But if anybody's listening to this and knows administrators at a university that would like to bring a class in that would uh that's designed to create the very kind of people we're talking about, uh we're ready to go. Uh Scott and I have also been talking about just setting up an academy to kind of put people through the ringer and get them ready to be one of these kinds of staff apologists because it's yeah, it's absolutely uh positively needed. People need to know the truth. Most people have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

That's good. That's an interesting idea to have a staffed apologist. I don't think I've ever heard that presented before or shared. That's an that seems like a novel or new idea. Do you know how to do that?

SPEAKER_00 29:21

We have 2,700 Yeah. I'm sorry, yeah, we have 2,700 pregnancy centers in the United States. They're generally well liked everywhere they're located. Uh they're they are the tip of the spear on the abortion issue. They literally stand in the gap every single day for the lives of unborn children. And so they are the perfect place to house a staph apologist who then can go out and speak. And that's what we need. We need a lot more of that.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Yeah, that seems to speak to changing the culture by engaging the culture. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah. I do hear prancy clinics talk how we have a desire to change the culture. I hear that, you know, I would I would estimate almost all privacy clinics would have that desire. Um probably all of them. And so a staph topologist is a real way to work towards that goal.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

The best part is they would only have to fund it the first year. After that, a good staph apologist who understands when he goes out to speak that information creates obligation, they would be raising their own uh their own support within a year. Oh. And probably uh over and above. Well, yeah, I mean, if I'm gonna go out and tell you, uh, look, there's this incredible threat to our the people right here at our own church, right here in our own community, uh, and we are the people who stand in the gap for it. And would you like to become a part of supporting that ministry, then yeah, I would think a lot of those people at almost every preg uh uh every presentation they made where there were adults involved, I would imagine that they would raise money.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

That that that does make sense. Um Yeah. Wow. So if someone wanted to learn more about this idea or you know, trying to build a playbook to get started, could they reach out to you? Or would you what would you suggest someone reach out to to learn more about this idea?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

I'm sending people uh to contendforlife.com. It's c o C O N T E N D uh 4 F O R life L A F E dot com. That's where we uh are putting out these uh can uh these uh Contend for Life, their one-day seminars that we're taking out everywhere. It's a good place to start. Um getting a book like Contenders, getting a book like Pivot and reading through it, if you're a reader, um, can give you all of the information that you would need to be able to move forward. So there are a lot of different ways that you can uh that you can manage this. But we're doing, I think in the coming year we're gonna do 20 contend for life events uh uh around the country. And we still have some slots available if people want to bring us in.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Awesome. Um I noticed that you were on the list for the new pregnancy centers together uh conference. Are you gonna also gonna be at CareNet or Heartbeat or where where where might someone find you um doing a workshop or a keynote?

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Live? I wish it would have brought the list with me. Um in a couple of weeks, I will be at the CareNet conference. Uh, I'm gonna be doing a session on public speaking and then another session on these content for life events. And then I'm gonna be, I'll try to list it best I can. I'm gonna be in Prattville, Alabama. Uh I've got I'm I'm traveling every week from the end of August until the end of October. So, and sometimes I'll be at two two different places on two different coasts the same week. So, yeah, we'll be in uh if they want to find out where I'm gonna be, uh they can go to speakerforlife.com and just uh click on I think it's either events or schedule and it shows where I'm where I'm speaking live. I'm doing, I think, four or five Contend for Life events and about uh 10 or 11 banquets. I'm also going to be at the Salt and Light Conference in North Carolina. I'll be speaking. Uh that's the Faith and Freedom Group. So Ralph Reed's gonna be there, a bunch of other folks, Abby Johnson and uh and others will be there as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Wow, I'll be speaking on that Sunday. I've heard you speak several times, and I would say it's very impactful, very helpful, um, very motivational. And uh yeah, I enjoyed every time I got the chance to hear you speak. Um Thank you. Well, yeah, so let's move on to the third area, le legislation in pro-life states. So, yeah, what's what's going on there? What are we what what are what are your ideas on what we need to do and how to pivot?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Well, the the the biggest uh struggle that pro-life states are facing right now are shield laws. A lot of pro-life states have passed great legislation that's designed to uh to protect their children from abortion. So they've separated themselves from Planned Parenthood. They're not allowed to come into their schools, uh, there are no bricks and mortar facilities uh offering abortion anywhere in their state. That's all great. But these other states, and by the way, not just other states, you know, India, France as well, uh are willing to ship abortion pills into the United States, and they're very, very difficult to stop. The first thing that I think we need to do is we need to um have case law move forward, uh, including court challenges, to um to challenge this idea of shield laws. Some states are doing a very good job right now. So um Louisiana, for example, uh has got a uh they they indicted uh Margaret Carpenter, who's an abortionist out of New York, for shipping abortion pills into their state. Um, the state of Texas, I think it was Ken Paxton who sued Margaret Carpenter for the same thing. And so these cases are going to slowly work their way up. The more states that pass these sort of anti-shield law provisions, especially when they offer um civil penalties rather than criminal penalties, right? In other words, they allow anybody to go after the abortionist. So if you've been negatively impacted by the abortion pills shipped into your state, you would have standing to sue. So let's say, for example, um you are the boyfriend of the girl. You didn't want her to have an abortion. It was illegal for them to send in the pills. And so the guy says, I wanted to have that child, and now he can sue the abortionist. Um, the child's parents or grandparents could sue the abortionist. And I believe in uh I believe in Louisiana, I think it's up to $100,000 per incident. Well, you wouldn't need too many of those to go forward successfully before most of these folks would just be out of business. So uh using the civil provision is a really intriguing way forward because it certainly opens up um opportunities for a lot of people to become involved in the process. So that's that's an example of some things that we can do moving forward. But I would say fundamentally, that is probably one of the biggest things. But another area, and on a more positive note, there's no reason in the world why a state that has pro-life legislation can't build into its curriculum uh teaching the kids about the law and the reason for the law, laws in other states, and why we don't share them. It's an interesting thing. Over in uh in California, for a little while, they uh uh they had a ruling that said that there um that no state money could be spent on uh on travel to other states that had anti-LGBTQ plus you know uh legislation on the books. And then an interesting thing happened. California decides, or uh UCLA decides they want to become part of the Big Ten, a more prestigious football um, you know, uh division. So they they want to do it. The problem is four of the schools in the Big Ten are in states that have those kind of laws. So suddenly, oh no, there's no money. How are we gonna send our teams to go play in those states? Well, um, the guy who was uh the, I think he was the assistant athletic director at the time said, well, you know, we're gonna raise private money to do it. But beyond that, we're gonna make sure that our students understand the laws in our state, understand the laws in their state, and what the difference would be. And I'm thinking, challenge accepted, that's exactly what we should be doing in pro-life states. We should start young, teach kids basic biology, show them the baby Olivia video, right? Some of you just type it in if you've never seen it, watch it. It's wonderful. Live action video. Um have them watch that video. They've got a baby Oliver video now, I guess for equity reasons. Um, so we've got these videos that show them to little kids, help them to understand. Then once they're in elementary school, teach them the truth about where babies come from, right? You don't have to get graphic. You can just let them know that from the moment of conception, new life begins. That's not an unusual thing to say. It's what more persod and torture said uh in their book, um uh the development, uh gosh, this is what happens. I don't have notes directly in front of me, and and I haven't uh and I've had a month off from speaking. Umtors in their book Um The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology. They uh they they say human life begins at conception, that every single one of us began our lives in exactly the same way, right? A male sperm penetrates and fuses with an ovum, creating a zygote. And it is a todopotent cell, and it is the beginning of every single person as a unique individual. That is what they say in this book. So we're not trying to teach and teach anything that's weird, it's just the truth. And then when they get a little bit older, we talk about the fact that we've got pro-life laws. For example, I live in Tennessee. In the state of Tennessee, we have pro-life laws. These are the laws in the state of Tennessee, and this was the rationale for passing them. Well, the reason why we have these laws is we protect the lives of people in our state. And since your human life begins at conception, we're gonna protect you starting then from people who want to intentionally kill you. As they get older, we let them know there are other states where they don't share our views. And these are the laws that they passed. This was their rationale for passing it, and then let's evaluate that rationale and see if it's worth anything. And you're gonna find it doesn't take a lot of in-depth analysis to discover that these laws do not uh, they aren't philosophically or morally justifiable. And there's no reason in the world why we should not be teaching our children in pro-life states these truths. So those are some examples of some things that we can do. By the way, on the pro-life state level, one other thing that I, if anybody knows anybody in a pro-life state who knows the governor, and I'm hoping Marsha Blackburn is listening because she's, I think, is about to be the governor of the state of Tennessee. California's uh governor, uh Gavin Newsom, put together this thing called the Reproductive Freedom Alliance. It's got 20, I think 22, 23 governors who are uh who are signed up for it, and they proudly talk about their pro-abortion uh initiatives that they've championed. You go into Google, go into any search engine and type in pro-life governor association, do you know where you're gonna be sent to? The Reproductive Freedom Alliance, because they're gonna tell you there is no pro-life governors alliance. Why in the world is that? So, governors in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, uh, Mississippi, Alabama, I would like to call on you to form together a pro-life governors alliance because we need to be sending the message that we are aligned together to save the lives of unborn children created in the image of God.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Oh, that's good. Yeah, that that is, I would say that's one of the greatest needs in our movement, probably a top three is unity. And that aligns with uh a real step towards greater unity.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah, well, you know, we've got issues. Uh I'm I don't know how many of these folks you've had on, uh, but uh I refer to them as immediatists. Um they refer to themselves as abolitionists. I don't like to use that term for them because I think all of us in the pro-life movement are abolitionists.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Yeah. A few have um requested to be on this podcast, but uh um through counsel, I decided to not platform them and because I I don't I don't I look at their their voice as being dangerous to pro-life work, almost like the like a friend shooting someone on the same team when we seem to have the same goal, but yet they're shooting at people working towards that goal.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Yeah. There's been a lot of really good analysis of uh of what their approach is. Um Scott Klusendorf has got a chapter of it, a chapter on them in his uh second edition of his book, The Case for Life. There's an incredible video of a debate between Greg Cunningham from the Center for Bioethical Reform and uh T. Russell Hunter, who is uh one of the uh immediately leaders. Um Craig Ireland has an incredible Substack out, and it's called uh Clean Hands Dead Children. And uh I reference it in Pivot. If people want to pick it up, they could they'll be able to find the link to it. It is an incredible uh analysis of their uh of their approach. In Pivot, I take a slightly different approach than the ones that are uh that you'll read elsewhere. And my approach is what they're trying to do, and the reason why what they're doing is so dangerous, is uh it's always a bad idea to put forward um unenforceable laws. And uh the laws that they're talking about, at least in reference to abortion pills, are unenforceable. Well, why? Number one, because the drugs that are being used, rightapristone, misoprostol, they metabolize so rapidly in the body you can't find them in a blood test, in a blood test. As a matter of fact, the people who ship the drugs tell women if you have a difficult, if you have difficulty, if you are have excessive bleeding, if you're having an incomplete abortion, just go to an ER and tell people you're having a miscarriage because they won't be able to tell the difference. You don't have to tell them you take you took pills, just tell them, you know what, we're uh we're done. I just I'm I'm I'm bleeding and I need you to help me out. And they will. And there is no blood test available that's gonna find those drugs in your system. So uh that's that's one issue. Now, in my book, I do talk about there, there were a couple of examples, because you know, I want to be straight up with everybody, where they have been able to find um these drugs in the system of either the mother or in the baby's um tissues. The problem, of course, is that for most of these abortions, the baby's tissues are never available because they get flushed down a toilet. And even in the woman's case, it was very, very shortly after she took them. Um, usually between five and 24 hours after taking the drugs, they metabolize, you cannot find the drugs in the woman's system. So you're not going to be able to prosecute these folks. Miscarriage is an unbelievably common occurrence in early pregnancy. In order to have true equity, right? You hear people talk about impartiality of the law, you would have to investigate every single miscarriage, right? It's it's logistically impossible to do. And now imagine the trauma. This woman who wanted her baby lost her baby in miscarriage, and now she's got to go through the indignity, right, of having blood draws and other things to find out whether or not she she miscarried that child on purpose, right? This is never, ever, ever going to happen. Then California goes on, goes out, I think it's AB 240, passed a law. On the pills that they send out through the mail, uh through their SHIELD law, they don't identify the dispensing physician, they don't identify the dispensing pharmacy, and they don't even identify the name of the person receiving them. It's not on the label of the bottle. So you're not going to be able to do it there. And then worst of all, the two worst parts are right now we have centers that are having tremendous success with abortion pill reversal. A woman takes mifopristone, she feels bad about it, she comes to the center, the center flood, you know, gives her a prescription, they flood her system with progesterone, which is safe. And 65 to 68 percent of The time they're able to save the life of that unborn child. But now imagine everybody at the center is a mandated reporter, just like they would be at a school for child abuse. If a woman comes in and says, Hey, I took mithopristone, mithopristone is an apport of facient. Uh, if you don't do anything, only about twenty less than twenty-five percent of those children survive just the mithopristone. And so they can flood her system with progesterone, but now because they're mandated reporters, and this woman clearly tried to kill her child, they're gonna have to um report her, and now she's gonna go to jail. If that happens, if that happens one time, how many women do you think are gonna come in for abortion pill reversal?

unknown 44:44

Right?

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Yes. And so what I'm saying here is yeah, children who could be saved will not be saved. And they will not be saved because of these uh laws these guys want to pass, um, crim uh basically uh targeting women for prosecution. Because you can't target the men, right? There's there's no way you don't have any DNA evidence. All you've got is that woman's word that it was that guy, and all he's gonna say is, ah, it wasn't mine, and I didn't do anything. And if there's no evidence of it, right, that the only person at risk here um is this woman. So what I've been telling people for a long time is the the difficulty about all of this is the womb is the perfect crime scene, right? I mean, uh there are there are no witnesses, there is no evidence, right? There's just no way you're ever going to be able to do this. So the appropriate path forward is not legislation that's designed to criminalize these women. The way forward is to, number one, go after the people who are providing the pills, and then number two, education. I really do believe that if people knew the truth, knew that there were resources available for women, if more people knew about pregnancy centers. I mean, you've got state governments running around telling pregnancy centers or telling their people that pregnancy centers are fake medical clinics, which nothing could be further from the truth. So there is a massive ideological battle going on, and we have to wage that one first. And until we can win it in the church, then we can win it in the community. We can win it in the community, then we can win it in the state. We can win it in the state, eventually I think we're going to win it in the nation. But the worst part about this is if these guys were ever able to be successful in any single state, the first time a woman got prosecuted, trust me, the their photograph would be everywhere. The people over in death states would be using this as propaganda. We already have 22, 23 governors out there saying, hey, I'm all on board for abortion. We're getting perilously close, right? Once we get, I call it the race to 38. The first side that gets to 38 states is going to be able to pass a constitutional amendment, and then that will be the law of the land. Well, our opponents already uh have uh they're way ahead of us in that race to 38. There are pro-life states, there are pro-death states. There are a lot of states that I would just call in the mushy middle. Those mushy middle states, they're gonna get hardened the first time they see a young, beautiful woman prosecuted in a state for uh for having an abortion. And then as soon as they hit 38 and they pass and they they um they enshrine Roe vs. Wade in the constitutional law, every single protection we have ever been able to cobble together for the lives of unborn children will be immediately swept away, and we will just become a Molech worshiping nation. And so we've got to be smart about how we move forward here. And uh, and the way to move forward is let's draw the distinction, the distinctive lines as clearly as we can between life states and death states, because I think God's gonna bless life states. And I think people are gonna be able to look over there and see that these people's lives are better. And then we'll be able to build up uh an intellectual and a political uh storehouse of knowledge, information, and votes. We'll be able to move that forward. I think we'll be able to infiltrate, and that's where I think we're gonna go in a minute, uh, into these death states. We need to be establishing more and more presence in these death states. Some of these states are surrounded by pro-life states. We ought to be sending resources across the border, establishing more pregnancy centers, doing more apologetics work, working with more churches, and to begin to turn the tide. Um, have you had Mark Harrington on your show, Jacob?

SPEAKER_01 48:34

No, but I I could reach out to him.

SPEAKER_00 48:36

You should. Um, he's got a program called Make Abortion History, and they've got um empirical evidence that demonstrates that they can go into areas that are uh identifiably uh pro-abortion areas and by engaging in a campaign, have a massive voter shift.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

And so uh the I think I might have heard him speak once at a 115 meeting. He sounds really familiar.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

Very possible. Well, uh Trevor Polo is the person over at uh Protect Life Michigan who uh who inaugurated this program, and then Mark kind of picked it up and ran with it. But I'm telling you, if we can get the message out, we can win this battle, even in death states. So, I mean, all of these things are possible. It just takes courage and resolve. And we have to move from where we most of us are right now, which is just we are intentionally pro-life, we think pro-life's a good idea, to actually doing something about it.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

Yeah. Now that's really good. I want to share a story that may reflect, you know, one way uh that this can be done when it comes to well, reversing or reverse engineering what you know, California is trying to do to Texas, for example. Um, so I'm working with a project called Abortion Pill Talk. And we we moved our um legal address and our headquarters from Arizona to Texas so that we would be under a pro-life body of law, under a pro-life in a pro-life state, under a pro-life governor. Um, and effectively, um, so when New York, California, or Washington um want to shut down a marketing project in their state, um, they're going to have to come fight in the Alamo. And uh, I know we didn't win the Alamo the first time, but I still think it's a really good example of like fighting until the end, regardless of the result.

SPEAKER_00 50:34

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, the idea is this cross-border skirmishing is a very, very good tactic. You're in a place where everybody supports you, and now we just start moving in. Because by the way, our our opponents have no difficulty doing that. They'll set up uh, you know, you've got Mayday Health, uh, Governor Newsom put up billboards in seven pro-life states, you know, need an abortion. California is ready to help with a scripture verse at the bottom of it. I mean, these guys are not, uh, they have no shame. They'll cross borders in order to do the work. We need to return the favor.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, there's and they're and their attorney, oh yeah, under a pro-life AG. So, you know, in Texas, under Ken Paxton as a pro-life attorney general, there's there's protection there. Uh, or it seems like there'll be protection there. We haven't we haven't tried it in a court of law yet. Um, but like for centers or groups in New York, California, Washington, Illinois, there there's a great deal of just danger based on jurisdiction. Um they're in they're in enemy territory based on the current AG in those pro-abortion or you know, abortion supporting states.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Yeah, Bacero is bad, Bonta's even worse in California.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

Um and then one of my colleagues or friends, or I guess colleagues, Connie Ambrecht with Sparrow, she bought some pills from India with no prescription needed. And the instructions that came with the pill, actually, I can see I'll see if I can, at least on YouTube, this will show up. Let me share my screen. Share my entire screen. And there we go. Share. All right. So this is the uh image of the pill. Um, this was in the the paperwork, and it said if you soak two pads in two hours or have a fever for more than six hours, I won't lower with Townol, go to the hospital. Do not tell them you took medications, they are not detectable, and they will treat you for miscarriage. And this came inside of a um uh an abortion pill kit from India, and as part of this, it included a bag that had MS for misopristol, and a little bag that had MF for mifepristone. It also had raspberry leaf tea, it had a morning after pill, it had um diatame and ibuprofen and a heat patch, plan C paperwork, uh uh ice pack, and um but and the return address went to a dirt lot in Las Vegas because Connie ordered it in Las Vegas, and so the return address um essentially went to a lot in Las Vegas that had no building. And when I went to Google Maps, it actually showed a homeless camp. And then I went there more recently, and the homeless camp was cleaned up and it was just a dirt lot. But that was literally the return address um that came from a website in India with no prescription needed. And um and it's just simply lies on top of lies. Um it and it just shows the author of, you know, the author of this campaign uses lies on top of lies.

SPEAKER_00 53:53

Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the reasons why, even if you were able to make it illegal in the United States to ship these drugs, these drugs are still going to come in from overseas. And and there's going to be a black market created. And so this battle is not going to be won uh solely in the legislature. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that uh it's a good idea to go after uh to uh go after abortion doctors and abortion organizations. We should be absolutely going after these people and shutting them down.

SPEAKER_01 54:23

I want to share one more I just want to share one more story about how easy or hard it is to detect. So after the Dobbs case, there was a group in New Mexico that was, they put out these videos and their website's no longer online. I essentially found them when I was doing research on every abortion clinic website I could find. So I went to 167. But this one group, they were taking the abortion pill and they were dissolving it and then letting it dry on top of a business card so someone could consume, cut out a piece of a business card and consume it to get the medication into their body. And they were putting these into bookmarks so they could put them in libraries on certain in certain books, and they were able to put them in these mylar bags in order to distribute. They were putting them in church, like they were putting them in very aggressive places where you, you know, that were Christian or book places of books, or and and essentially the idea was they were trying to make and they had like videos on how to dissolve, how to put it in the cards, how to mark it off so that someone could effectively put this paper in their mouth, let it dissolve over X amount of minutes in order to have the contents be absorbed. And they had all the instructions, and the goal was to make it, you know, taking it from a pill form and putting it into a paper form that would resemble a bookmark. And that was the level of um what's the word? You know, uh I I don't even know.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

Dedication.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

Dedication these people are to make it so that it will it will not be stopped at the border because now it's in it's been disguised, it's been uh and it's been put into a place that now it's flat and it doesn't come into it's not in a plastic bottle. They were trying, if you know, and so that's the level of um deceit that we are up against.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Greg Cunningham years ago said that our opponents are far more dedicated to killing children than the church is to saving them. And until the time comes when we are as dedicated to saving the lives of unborn children as our opponents are to killing them, we will not win this battle. So uh there is a spiritual component here. And people sometimes blanch when I talk about Molech worship. I tell people, you know, abortion isn't, you know, like Molech worship. Abortion is Molech worship. It's done for the same reasons, it's done in the same way as it's always been done. Child sacrifice is nothing new, it's been going on for all of human history. Uh, this is just our turn at it. And we need to rise up and call things what they are and then help people to make life-affirming decisions for their children. And we can't. We have got the infrastructure in place to do it through 2,700 pregnancy centers here in the United States. And now what we need to do is we just have to have the courage to tell people the truth.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

That's good. So let's move on to your next point in this book: invading abortion states. Um, what more would you like to say there?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

Well, we already talked about most of it. I just want to encourage people to realize, you know, getting your own state locked down is insufficient, right? We don't want to throw other people's children to the wolves. And so I think doing cross, you know, cross-border um, if we want to call it, we'll call it that infiltration is a good idea. So uh once your state's locked down, you should start funneling some of your resources to pregnancy centers and advocacy groups across states. I think that uh that uh make abortion history is a great place to send some funds. I think uh Heartbeat International has got a plant ascent, it's got a fund that's designed to plant new centers in other states in underserved areas. We can funnel uh resources there. Uh, they're doing a terrific job. So there's lots of different ways uh to go forward. But a lot of it's gonna be, I mean, it's almost sounds like radio free Europe, right? I mean, uh, we've got to get the message across the border and into those states. And I think we have to be dedicated to do it. It's gonna take resources and personnel. But there are probably some young people, you know, listening to this or watching this podcast today and are thinking, you know, I'm in college right now, I don't know what I want to do. Think seriously about full-time pro-life advocacy work. There are plenty of organizations out there that would be happy to have you, um, but it is gonna take some dedication. But as a result, you could find yourself in the middle of the most significant human rights movement in all of human history.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

That's really good. One of the things that Heartbeat put out, um one of the things that Heartbeat put out late last year was a training on telecare to, and the way that Drell pitched it when I when he was sharing it with me was imagine a pregnancy clinic building a team that's similar to the type of team someone would build for a mobile ultrasound unit. You know, imagine building a telecare team that can provide coverage for when someone calls from a desert where there's not a nearby pregnancy clinic in the area. And so just imagine if we if a pregnancy clinic had a telecare team that could answer calls during certain hours, and and the heartbeat model is to block off at least four hours and two hour blocks, and then you can get calls from option line. And but then if you also were to advertise in a desert in your county, in your state, in the nearby state, in the nearby county, where there's a desert involved, in order to provide care remotely, the same way that many people did before we had 2,700 brick and mortar locations or 3,000 plus brick and mortar locations. Um, you know, and helping someone remotely going through uh options counseling, helping them identify what they need to do next, providing, you know, helping them avoid decisional regret. Um so yeah, so that's uh heart, uh kudos to Heartbeat for putting that training out. And I just would like to encourage people to explore that because I think that is innovative. And that's what we need in this space is innovation and to try things that align, align with got the gospel and excellence, and then and are innovative and new. We need to, you know, keep exploring how we can pursue, you know, where God's calling us to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:36

Well, in the first place that that ought to be happening is in our churches. Everybody at every evangelical church on the planet should know the name of their pregnancy center, where it's located, and at least generally what kind of services they offer. Every single person in church should know that. Um I did an apologetics class. I'm it was out in the west somewhere, and uh when I was done, we had 150 or so plus people there. I said, How many of you have ever at your church heard a comprehensive case for life, even over many weeks, similar to what you heard here this evening? Three hands went up. Two gals who were from an Orthodox church and one Catholic gal. Not a single evangelical Protestant's hand went up. This tells me that there's this tremendous um apologetic um lacking in our churches. And so we're you're talking about going into these deserts. The easiest access point should be through area churches, and that should cost next to nothing. Now, I agree, we still need billboards, we still need, you know, um, you know, bus benches in areas that have buses. Uh, we need uh advertising on television and on radio, but my goodness, we should absolutely be able to get to people through area churches, and it's a it's a it's a battle.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

Yeah, the number one way for a long time, and way, you know, the way that someone would find a privacy clinic was word of mouth. And then in 2011, internet slash Google started to become number one and word of mouth fell to number two. And today, word of mouth is a solid second place on most lists, you know, with internet slash Google being a solid number one. And but word of mouth is still there, and for 40 plus years, word of mouth was the most common way that someone heard. And so church, you know, have churches being connected is going to increase word of mouth. Communities talking, people talking and sharing. That's where word of mouth comes from. And and that's a very valid and and you know, excellent place to spend effort and time is bolstering people, providing good referrals on where to go when they, you know, when someone's experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. Word of mouth is epic.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:53

And it's less expensive, it is more time consuming, but it also avoids the problem of what I've kind of refer to as ephemeral messaging. So what you have is you've got people out there who are you know, you you buy a Google ad, you know, or you buy at a buy an ad on Facebook. Well, people see it, scroll past it, and then they see the next one, which may be from Planned Parenthood. So you've got messages constantly replacing other messages all the time. When we're out in the public, when we are speaking to schools and civic groups and churches, we are putting a face on a local pro-life ministry and we're showing them I'm a real human being, I'm here to help you. And then if if you know somebody or if you yourself find yourself in the middle of an untimely pregnancy, you won't be thinking about an ad that you saw, you'll be thinking about a person that you met. And I'll I'll grant you, this is uh this is a difficult way forward, right? But I don't know that I want to put my movement in the hands of an algorithm that is uh potentially unfriendly to me and who could, with the flip of a switch, turn me off entirely. And so I think we've got to be careful where we invest all of our resources. Don't get me wrong. We need to be in all of those spaces, but we can't rely on any one of those spaces. Um, I remember talking with a gal who had an abortion pill reversal. She was a pastor's wife. She had gone in, she'd had uh four kids in four years and was pregnant with the fifth and couldn't take it, went down, took the first pill. On her way home from that appointment, taking that pill. She saw a billboard she said she'd never seen before. It was an abortion pill reversal billboard. And I'd been there for a long time, but it never caught her eye because she wasn't involved. But the minute she was involved, it did catch her eye. She went, went to the center, had abortion pill reversal, and I actually sat next to her with her baby that was saved at that banquet that I spoke at that evening. So we need to look uh across both digital and analog methods of communication, and we've got to get the message out everywhere because our opponents do that. I mean, you got Mayday Health, they're they're using airplanes flying uh banners across uh, you know, like NASCAR events. Um, you know, they're doing flotillas, they're they've they're doing uh placards on top of uh on top of gas station pumps. I mean, our opponents don't have any problem utilizing all of the available means of communication to people, and we ought to be doing the same.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

Wow. So one of the projects we're working on is to get work on a working on a campaign for the UK. I mean, in the UK, there's there's a couple of unique issues. One is um freedom of speech isn't um a right, and so that's an issue. There's also socialized medicine. Uh the number of pregnancy clinics in the area that provide ultrasounds seems to only be three in the UK. And there's several that don't provide ultrasounds, like, well, not several, but more like 20 that don't provide ultrasounds. And so we're working on a campaign to reach advertised there for people who are seeking the abortion pill. Oh, and the abortion pill has a usage level of like when it comes to abortion. Abortion versus surgery, the abortion pill is between eighty to ninety-seven percent.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:05

So maybe that's where it's gonna be here in no time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:09

And so it almost looks like you know, if freedom of speech is removed here in the US, which our opposition is actively doing with a you know, with the lawsuits in New York, the lawsuit in California, the attorney generals and this activity here, which are trying to, you know, tell a pregnancy clinic or a group that they can't even tell someone in that APR abortion pill reversal even exists. Um, they call themselves pro-choice.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:37

Yeah, they're they're gonna lose those.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:42

This isn't the first time, this is after Nisla versus Vassera. And so you know, if we were to look into the future and our freedom of speech is gone, we're going to see a scenario where, you know, it's just a very different atmosphere in the UK and it reflects where we could be if the opposition was to win here in the US uh sooner. I mean, it it's just it it feels like it's we can learn lessons from how bad it could be. And so one of our approaches is uh when it comes to something being turned off. So if we were to advertise with Google or something in the UK, and let's say our you know that gets shut down out of our even with our Texas roots across the pond, then one uh one uh one way for us to respond is to then advertise on a different platform. Maybe it's on the Bing, maybe it's on Facebook, maybe it's with outdoor media. But to be creative and to not settle for being defeated and to pivot and to move and to shift and to keep working through other avenues of communication and marketing. And and so that's sort of how we're currently postured based on you know uh how that may go. And so that's just a you know one one option when so when Google turns you off or this marketing vehicle turns you off, consider the other marketing vehicles that are available to communicate with.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:06

Yeah, and I and I would go all the way across every platform you possibly can. I mean, you've got it absolutely nailed. And it's funny, you know, we've got people, you know, who are making these threats, right? Oh, we're gonna tell you you can or can't say certain things. My response is go do it anyway and make them shut you up. Right? Never ever bend in the face of this kind of stuff. Um because what ends up happening is then that the mere threat of it is enough to get people to be quiet. Um pastors for the longest time wouldn't talk about things that were political from the pulpit because they felt that somehow they were going to put their 501, you know, uh status in uh in danger. And the fact of the matter was it was never in danger. And so uh got some guys got together and they had a political Sunday day where they told pastors to preach overtly political sermons and then send copies, transcripts into the IRS. Well, they did it, and every year it got bigger, and then you you want to know how many people lost their 501s? None. Nobody did. So if people are gonna cancel you, make them do it. Don't uh don't just roll over because of a threat. And then push back and push back hard. And yeah, my my thoughts are the only way we're gonna lose our freedom of speech in this country is if we give it up. So don't give it up, keep talking, keep sharing, and and force them to shut you up.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:25

That's really good. Well, I would like to encourage anyone who hears this. If you hear this, I'd like to encourage you to take on a homework assignment of reading the pivot and then making a list of questions, and then send those to Jacob, myself, and Dr. Mark Newman, and we will be glad to address the questions that you find after when you read this book and you work through it, and you you have questions that are unique and pertinent to your situation. Um give us the chance to address those and we will do a follow-up when you um send us that uh that list. And maybe we'll invite you on. If you're interested, we'll invite you on to ask those questions directly to Mark. And um yeah, so I just want to I like to, yeah. So feel free to um take this to the next level and be a part of it. Um Mark, did you would you like to say anything else about the book or you know, the last chapter or section, moving from intention to action? I think we did talk a little bit about that, but anything else you'd like to say there?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:27

The bottom line is, you know, uh I keep coming back to the parable that Jesus tells about the two young men, but uh the father tells him to go work up in the vineyard, one of them says that he will and then he doesn't. And then the other one tells his father, No, I will not, but then he thinks better of it and he goes out and does it. And then Jesus says, which one of these did the will of their father? Intention's not enough. You know, for people to say, Yeah, I'm pro-life, but not to do anything at all about it. It doesn't really move the needle at all. And there's something that everyone can do. Now, sometimes people blanch a little bit when you start talking about things like donating money and and you know because they think in their heart, I'd really like to be out there and be working. Well, guess what? Money is portable work. When you donate money, you're donating your labor to a center. And for some people, they make so much money that an hour's worth of their labor could be translated into 20 hours of ministry work if they would just donate some of it. And so I I I really do believe you need to find a local pregnancy center in your area, find a struggling but good pregnancy center in an in a in a you know that's mired in an abortion state, find a good advocacy group. I think about people um, you know, like my friend Scott Klusendorf at Life Training Institute, Mark Harrington over at Created Equal, um the Trevor uh Polo over at uh at Protect Life Michigan, these guys are all out there doing uh yeoman's work, uh Heartbeat International Care Net, all these groups. Um finds find a place to get yourself plugged in. If you've got time and you live locally, find out about your local advocacy group or your local pregnancy center and see what kind of things that they could use you know, utilizing skills that you currently possess. That would be great. Or if you you want to learn some new things, they can teach us the things. I mean, it's uh everybody's got a role to play. And if everybody would just play their role, we would be uh a a lot farther down the road. My friend Kirk Walden in his book The Wall said that if if only 20% of the people who claim to be pro-life donated eight dollars and thirty-three cents a month. So only twenty percent donating eight dollars and thirty-three cents a month, it would unleash over a billion dollars for pregnancy center work in the United States. So, yes, everybody can do something. But the key is don't watch a podcast like this and turn it off and say, oh, that was interesting, or gosh, you know, that Dr. Newman guy seemed really entertaining. That's not the point here. After you watch something like this, you want to ask yourself, what would God have me do? Then pray about it, and then this is the most important part don't wait. The longer you feel the obligation that knowledge you know evokes in you, the longer you feel without doing anything, the less you will ab and you'll be able ever to act in the future. And as as C.S. Lewis says in the screw tape letters, the less you'll be able to even feel. So once you know you've got an obligation, act on it. Act now. You know, turn off the podcast and go to your computer and find a center and make a donation. Do something today and it'll make a difference.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:29

Wow. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah, I would say the reason to get involved is to answer the call from Jesus. Like that's why people should get involved in this work. Um, because there's lots of good areas to work that are that align with with uh with got with the values that God promotes and shares in the Bible. Um but if when God calls you to work in this space, um you know, the the the right response is to follow. And and so and and just simply, you know, at my church, they you know, they often ask the kids before a church service, what is prayer? And the kids have learned it's talking and listening to God, not just talking to God, but l also listening to God. And and so talking and listening is um those are equal parts when it comes to a conversation. And so when you're praying, talking and listening to God, um when you hear from God that this is where you should go, well then then go. Like that's that's that's that's what it that's what it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:34

Yeah, and go now.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:36

And go, yeah, get going.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:39

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

Now so uh so Mari, thank you so much for being on here and for sharing this motivational um call to action. Would you wrap up our podcast with any final thoughts and a prayer and and then we'll yeah, ask those who are listening to join in.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:56

For starters, thank everybody. I want to thank everybody for taking the time to listen to this if you made it here to the end. Uh you clearly got some interest here, do seek the Lord uh about what he would have you to do, and then immediately go out to the end and let's get it done. Because here's the thing that I do know somewhere in your community today, there is a woman facing an untimely pregnancy trying to decide whether or not she is going to make a life affirming decision regarding her unborn child. The thing that you do, no matter how small you might think it might be, it could be that little nudge that that would be all it would take to give that woman the hope and the courage that she needs to make a life affirming decision. So that's why that's why I would want you to act now. Because the the problem is is existing now and decisions are being made right now. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you so much for an opportunity just to talk about all the things that are going on in our country regarding uh the the uh the the evil of abortion, the opponents of life, and the work that's being done amongst pro-life organizations to uh stand in the gap for the lives of these littlest image bearers. Father, I pray that you will allow uh whatever's that that's been said today that is true to really stick and penetrate. And if anything today has been said that's not true, we pray that it just blows away like the chaff in the wind. But Father, I pray that you will give us courage, give us resolve, and help us to step uh to step forward and uh and do what is right on behalf of our tiniest brothers and sisters. And Father, not just that we might give them life, but that through the people who do this ministry work, that they might uh usher them into your kingdom and into eternal life. We ask for all of these things in the name of your precious Son Jesus. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:42

Amen.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:20

I should not be on makes me like that, makes me by that you reach and ring store my soul. You ever's my shepherd I shall be in one.