Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. This is our final episode, at least as far as I planned, in our discussion of abortion. Today we are going to look at probably the most contentious area, the hardest for a lot of pro life anti abortion Christians to deal with. That is the issue of ectopic pregnancies. We did discuss this a bit, more of the moral aspect of this in our Consequentialism episodes, I think it was eight or nine, episode nine probably, which I'll try to link below.

And we discussed the moral issue in detail there. In this episode, we'll rehash some of the moral arguments, but we're going to spend more of our time actually expounding on the situation of ectopic pregnancy. So what are ectopic pregnancies? They are generally when the embryo is stuck in the fallopian tube or the ovaries or the upper uterus, some place where it's not supposed to be. And especially if it's in the fallopian tube or ovaries, this can be life threatening for the mother.

If it causes the fallopian tube to rupture, you can have hemorrhages and especially like my wife has anemia, and so if you're prone to bleeding, then hemorrhages can be extremely life threatening, even more so than normal. So the case, most Christians think aborting ectopic pregnancies is okay, and that's a problem that the pro abortion side latches onto because Christians go around telling everybody, you know, don't abort, don't abort in cases of rape, don't abort in cases of, you know, if there's a mother in a third world country or a developing country, sorry, where they can't put food on the table, it's still just not the right thing to do to abort a kid. But, you know, because Christians in the West won't ever get into any of those obscure situations that are are results in developing worlds, we can criticize all of those other people for aborting in difficult situations. Yet when we get into a difficult situation that can befall anybody, including those of us protected in the wealthy, well protected West, you know, well then it's justified to abort in this regard. And we defend it by bringing up the idea of the principle of double effect where, well if two people are going to die, then it's better that only one dies.

And while it is better, the end is better if only one dies. The problem we have here is that it's not the ends that we have to question, it's the means. Okay, only two die, I'm sorry, if only one dies that's great but how are you going to ensure that only one dies? And if you have to ensure that by killing another, then that's a problem. One of the examples we looked at in our consequentialist episode was the example of you've got a guy at the bottom of the list for a heart transplant and a guy at the bottom of the list for a liver transplant.

They're both doomed, they're both going to die. You know, can you go out and kill the guy at the bottom of the liver transplant list so that he can give his heart to the guy at the bottom of the heart transplant list? Instead of both dying, you kill one to save the other. And we'd say no because that's murder. You can't use murder to bring about some good.

And that's what you do in ectopic pregnancies. So the double effect just doesn't hold. Now I forgot to caveat all this at the beginning like I did in the consequentialist episode, but I don't at all want this to come across as judgmental. We know people who've had ectopic pregnancies and have aborted. We ourselves have thought we've been in that situation fairly recently after thinking about this issue And we empathize.

We know that it's really hard. And I don't want to minimize how difficult that is, and the goal here isn't to bring forth condemnation, but it's to to say, hey, Christians, if we really believe this stuff, what are the implications for our lives? What sacrifice might that mean we make? And while I can understand people not making that sacrifice, we're not here to discuss how hard something is or all that. We're here to discuss what's right and what's wrong and how can we be consistent if we're going to hold to this logical position.

We can show grace to people who deal with this and choose abortion. Should show love, all of that. But right now we're just talking about the case. So, hopefully, I don't come across as if this is just an easy thing to do and something that if you've done this in the past, if you've aborted an ectopic pregnancy that you're wicked. That's not that's not the point at all.

The point is life is hard. God has given us his his moral decree, and we try as Christians to live out that decree in holiness, and where we don't, God is gracious and the community of believers should be too. And we can work through this together, whether it's a future issue of an ectopic pregnancy or whether it's guilt from from a past one. This is not meant to be a hopeless podcast that dams, but rather one that that encourages us to all live live holy and pleasing lives in community. So, with that in mind, let's dig in a little bit more.

When we are inconsistent, when we bring up this double effect idea where we are willing to take on killing another person in order to bring about better results. That leads to lots of logical inconsistencies and other scenarios which, again, you can go back to the last season to to hear more about that. But it's just great fodder for atheists who recognize our hypocrisy or for pro abortion advocates. They recognize our hypocrisy here. We don't call abortion and ectopic pregnancies abortion.

We change the language in circumstances that we think are legitimate killing And that right there is a big tell to me too. We, we neuter the language, make it less abrasive. And we wouldn't recognize the legitimacy of abortion in cases where the mother's life is at extreme risk or in developing countries with starvation, yet we're going to change the language for our convenience. So here's why I disagree with that morally. Miss uses the double effect since the means are killing, right?

The means can't be evil and still be a double effect. Second, the good examples of the double effect that we can give, chemotherapy, right, if a mother takes chemotherapy, it likely will kill the child, but its intent is not to kill the child. Whereas in most ectopic pregnancies, the way that you get rid of that is you take a pill that is specifically intended to kill the kid. And in my opinion, or I think fairly clearly, killing a kid in ectopic pregnancy is a lot more like our example in two Kings that I gave in the previous season, where the killing at the bottom of the transplant list. You know, the Kings example where one mother, two neighbor mothers agree to kill their children one day and then they'll eat them, another the next day and then they'll eat them in order to save their families from starvation because they're being besieged.

We would say, that's terrible that you would murder in order to preserve your family. You would murder your own kid and eat them order to preserve a family. That's a problem, we just can't do that. So while faithfulness might often lead to harmful results, there may be more hope in this situation. So to be faithful in an ectopic pregnancy, most people would say is to resign yourself to death.

And we know that killing in an ectopic pregnancy is not the right thing to do, it's not the moral thing to do. So people would throw their hands up and say, Well fine, then you're just going to let both people die? That's ridiculous. And while the ends don't justify the means, and so there are times when more people die when you do the right thing, I've come to discover that I think the ectopic situation is not portrayed to us the appropriate way. And I'll link some sources down below, but there are ectopic pregnancies, a good number, which terminate on their own.

There are many ectopic pregnancies which are misdiagnosed. You can just look up stories of misdiagnosed ectopic pregnancies and find plenty. There are times when the fetus actually dislodges and moves to a habitable place. There was a successful transplant of an ectopic pregnancy which occurred as early as 1915. You know, it has to be done very early on and caught very early on, so this isn't something that's likely viable for, who knows, like ninety, ninety five percent of people probably wouldn't be able to use this.

Especially, I know in The States you only go in at like eight weeks, think, for your first eight to ten weeks for your first checkup, and you'd have to start getting checked up earlier than this. But you know, if if more Christians were refusing to abort their children in ectopic pregnancies and if more Christians would say, Hey, in case there is an ectopic pregnancy, we need to make sure we get earlier ultrasounds. If we try to advance the medical field here so that we did value even kids in ectopic pregnancies, I bet we could increase that number. If they could do it in 1915, they could transplant, surely they could do it today. But we'd have to insist on that.

Even more than this, not all ectopic pregnancies carry the same risks. If an ectopic pregnancy is called ectopic because it's in the upper uterus versus one in the ovaries, there's very different risks. We also know that though ectopic pregnancies can lead to death, they rarely do if a mother is monitored very closely. Now, that could be problematic if a mother has a job and as she gets up in weeks in her ectopic pregnancy, if she has to be in the hospital and monitored and the cost of all that. Sure, there are some big hurdles to this sort of thing and I'm sure there are big hurdles depending on what part of the world you live in and what resources you have.

So I'm not saying that this is all easy stuff, but we know that we can monitor mothers and have a good, a largely good outcome. And the more mothers we started monitoring with modern day medicine instead of just aborting, we'd get even better at this process. In the end, the Christian call in life is to faithfulness, not to effectiveness. It's we're called to use holy means, not to seek about seek a numbers game and try to figure out the most lives to save if if the means to save those lives involves evil. We could seek a legitimate double effect, right?

We might have some other options. So for instance, if we know that a transplant of an ectopic pregnancy occurred in 1915, but really they can't see much success of a transplant after like forty days, you know, has to be done, the earlier the better. You know, if you're at ninety days, you could still choose to say, look, I know it's probably not going to work, but I'm not just going go kill the kid. I know it's going to involve surgery, but that's okay. I want you to try to transplant it.

Now that's a legitimate double effect. You are trying to save the life of the kid who will probably die as a result of a surgery that happens too late, but instead of killing as a means to save one life, you are likely losing one life while trying to save both. And that's something that's very different. When we do it the way that we currently do it, which is to abort, the world sees our hypocrisy that we are willing to protect ourselves in situations that are inconvenient and difficult for us. You know, one good thing about this, the way that we are hypocritical right now, is that it really should give us empathy for people in difficult situations, for the mother in the developing world or for the, the mother in the ghetto who doesn't know where their next meal is coming from, or a mother who has serious health risks.

It should give us empathy. It it shouldn't be this condemning thing where we hate ourselves because our Christian community has been doing it wrong for for a while. But instead, it should be something where we say, look, life is hard and we mess up here because we we this is one of the few areas of life where life can be hard for us and we have to be called to have integrity. And if I can recognize that it's hard for us and and if we can forgive if we can ask for forgiveness for that and, you know, then then I think this is a a great thing for us to to be able to be humbled and to walk in solidarity and humility and love with people who do abort because we do it too. That's all for now.

So peace because I'm a pacifist. When I say it, I mean it.