The Impact of Abortion on Women's Mental Health | Calum & Lois Miller | EP 85

if you take women who have an unwanted pregnancy and then have an abortion and you compare them with women with an unwanted pregnancy who keep the baby the mental health is actually significantly worse for the women who have an abortion tax system for example is not very forgiving for mothers who choose to stay home for a while and take care of their children but we do get rewarded uh the earlier we return to work after pregnancy so the way that Society is structured around women puts us on a path to believe that we are only successful if we take all these career boxes I think part of looking after your family is is succeeding in your job so there's always going to be a balance this is not about controlling women this is not about religion this is just about human equality and who counts and I think if we look at the scientific consensus then we have to accept it whether that makes us popular or not and so I'd encourage people listening to do the same good afternoon ladies and gentlemen here I have two two guests today I'm not used to that one at a time uh I like two or three even three is fun it's challenging and it's um it's interesting to get the same question from different people in real time like that you know so I like it and uh today my my guests are from the UK um I don't know I'm blessed to have people who talk to me from all over the world and very grateful and uh today we're going to talk about ethics we're gonna talk talk about ethics we're gonna talk about the sticky subject of uh abortion and uh pro-choice and pro-life and uh I think maybe you guys can introduce yourselves and tell us what what else we might talk about but also tell them what you what you're up to and then I'll get started asking you some questions so maybe maybe uh Lois you can go for first sure yeah thanks for having us on Tammy uh my name is Lois I work for an organization called Alliance defending Freedom at UK so we are uh champing the rights of everybody to live and speak the truth and as part of that I've been looking specifically about how we can uphold the right to life in our culture and in our society and in our law uh so at the moment I've been looking particularly at uh the abortion law in the UK uh looking for uh ways that we can change it for the better for women and uh children uh and that's but we'll get much more into that I'm sure thank you and uh Callum yes I'm Callum Miller I'm married to Lois which is probably my biggest achievement but other things I've done are I'm a medical doctor part-time and I'm also a researcher at the University of Oxford where my research is on the topic of abortion policy and all the things that come up in these debates and so as someone whose Pro lifee that's been sort of challenging as you'd expect as you've probably seen with with other issu issues um but it's also been fascinating to see how there actually can be good arguments good evidence in support of this view when it's often seen as a backwards religious superstitious thing so I get the opportunity I'm very privileged to get the opportunity to speak to wonderful people like yourself and even more privileged to do so with my wife so yeah thank you for having us on Tammy oh my pleasure I wonder Callum if you could start I looked briefly at your blog and um there was something that you wrote about an argu an argument for um pro-life that you were can you can you do a quick I'm sure you know that argument so maybe you could just tell the viewers that argument sure well so it's it's often seen as a debate about you know when life begins and and it is a big part about that but it's you know it's often seen as a religious thing and you know a philosophical issue you just stick to your position I'll stick to mine whatever the way I like to think about it is an issue of equality so I grew up and I still am pretty Lefty um in many ways and so I was always into kind of you know Justice for the vulnerable and that kind of thing and that's really shaped me for pretty much my whole life and what was interesting to me was that people on the left with me seem to have a real concern for the vulnerable in many areas and yet some of the most vulnerable innocent human beings those in the womb seem to be totally disregarded dehumanized in a way that didn't quite make sense to me and and that's not to say the pro-life position is automatically correct but it it gave me a bit of uneasiness I think and so I began to think well what does human equality really mean if if we really believe in human equality like we say we do it means that every human being has the same value and they have the same fundamental rights as any other human being and that's that's the most basic part about a liberal democracy is human equality the same rights for everyone and so then the question arises well who is included in that when we say everyone who exactly do we mean do we mean only men do we mean only white people do we mean only able-bodied people and you know we've come to learn fortunately that the answer is no of course not we mean every human being because that's where our value comes from and so I realized that the answer to this was really well what is that thing in the womb is it just a clump of cells is it a parasite is it another species is it just you know a bit of matter or is it a human being and for me that was a scientific question I was studying medicine in Oxford when we studied embryology it was very clear that a new individual human was formed at conception and this wasn't something I came to from religion or from reading the Bible or anything it was just a scientific fact and therefore I had to wrestle with the question of well if it is a human being and if that's what biology says then we have to say that it's equal just like anyone else um the other thing I I guess that that really struck me as I was in medical school I was already kind of leaning and and pretty solidly pro-life by this point but I was struck by an experience where I was doing a or I was assisting with a cesarian section in New Zealand of all places it was an incredible experience and we were doing a cesarian section on twin on a woman who was having twin babies and so at one point we had pulled out the first baby and the other baby was still inside they were identical we could see the baby inside they were twins same age same development same everything and yet the law in New Zealand said that one of these babies is a human being with the same rights as any other person in New Zealand except for maybe Australians I don't know how they do that in New Zealand um and yet the law said that this baby who was exactly the same in the womb had no rights at all and that was just striking that it it just made no sense from a legal or a philosophical or ethical point of view and that's ified my view that this was something that you know every human being is equal that has to include human beings no matter how small or undeveloped they are and no matter how unpopular that makes us and so I've chosen the path of unpopularity which has been a good Adventure so yeah so in what way has it in in what way have you seen this make you unpopular oh wow it's uh in many ways so I you know I think probably everyone could list the abuse that they get on Twitter I don't know if that's particularly distinctive that's just no that probably isn't um but you know we've seen how it how it changes my academic career and things like that you know being told by whistleblowers are academic journals I've been told by someone at the top medical journal or one of the top medical journals in the world actually um that they will not publish anything that I write on any topic just because they know I'm Pro lifee think I'd try and sneak that into anything or just they don't like me um you know when I I wrote a piece on abortion in Ethiopia which said when Ethiopia legalized abortion about 15 to 20 years ago it didn't actually stop women dying from unsafe Backstreet abortions it actually made the problem worse and that's a whole other story now this group of academic radicals and activists hounded the journal trying to get my paper retracted they did a big smear campaign and trying to get the paper retracted not because of Any scientific problems but because of the conclusions and the journal reviewed it a second time and said no the paper's fine it's academically sound it's worthy of being published and so then they took it to the press and they wrote a hit piece in the National one of the biggest newspapers in the UK kind of smearing me as an activist and saying how my research had been discredited and that sort of thing so you know it comes in you know there's there's light persecution which is the odd comment on Twitter sometimes it really does affect our friendships our careers and um yeah we can only um we can only imagine just how much it has damaged the academic career of me and and other people with my position but we do know that that's the case so it's been it's been a a challenging ride very interesting isn't it when you uh you step on a bees nest like that then you can see who wants to engage in that and who wants to run away from it who's afraid of it who you know you see all kinds of things H um when you think that the world is going along just fine and then you step on a bees nest and all of a sudden the world starts to divide and come together but in different ways than you thought yeah it's quite it's quite a thing to be in the middle of things so were you you uh Lois were you also a liberal no no cons to the core uh I wish I had a cool story like C but well I suppose I do have a cool story it was rais by wonderful Christian parents who um have St me in the teachings of the Bible um so I was always very informed uh by my faith can you so can you share with me some of the experiences that you've had coming from your background and making you an advocate for Life how did those how did those one come from the other yeah I so I grew up in a very Christian family and I was very informed by my faith from a young age but didn't necessarily connect that early on to kind of the social justice issues of the day um it is a little different here uh in the UK rather than in North America and the church the Evangelical Church at least over here is not quite so involved in these more thorny social issues and was less kind of um teaching on it I'd say inside the church body um so I don't think I had really made the connection uh until I went to University uh and even later on at I went to study my llm in human rights law and at that point I actually decided to look into surrogacy uh which was a kind of emerging issue in Europe at the time and I was looking at surrogacy from the perspective of the rights of the child involved and as I did that um I became more and more conscious of the question about where those rights began uh does a child have the right not to be sold yes in law yes definitely uh and if that's the case can that happen before birth and can that child claim that right and is there a protection for that child and if there is well surely that child has even more fundamental rights to life um so that's kind of what drew me into this sphere uh I've been very passionate about it and I think uh since then as I've met um peers and women along the journey who have had experiences with abortion and hearing their story um that has really given me a sense of the need to protect both lives and abortion I think the debate has been very torn uh and framed in a way that we have we're told we kind of have to choose we have to choose either to be proom or Pro baby we there's no kind of Middle Ground uh and I think the ultimate pro-life position is neither of those but in fact to say let's find Solutions and a philosophy that can actually protect and uphold both Liv so that's kind of how my journey took me to where I am today so that that tells me that uh it's possible that the The Narrative around being a mother has been uh Twisted so that if you have a baby then you don't have a life as a woman yeah that's absolutely right yeah pretty you know that's pretty that's pretty um one-sided that's pretty one-sided so I I can see that there's a lot of Need for uh conversation because of that right it's often treated like a death a death of your own life you kind unbelievable yeah women are kind of told they they have to pick do you want to continue your own life sort of death it's a sacrifice sacrifice of death because you have to give up something so there's death involved in it there's sacrifice involved in it so I think they're just uh they're too vague in their terms terms of of what that means it's more nuanced than than that and I think the Nuance often is what's left out I I don't know what you guys have found but it does sound like it's not very nuanced I think we kind of especially since you know the sexual Revolution the 60s the 70s we have one um idea one mainstream idea of what success looks like for women and that typically demotes the place of a mother in society so we're given accolades and trophies and Applause for getting into board rooms or for kind of being the boss babe uh if you like um and of course with the sector Revolution came in um the pill came in abortion it came all these um factors that would um kind of steer women away from motherhood um but little is uh done to respect applaud or value uh those women who actually would choose personally to to find their fulfillment in families and children I mean in the UK our tax system for example is not very forgiving for mothers who choose to stay home for a while and take care of their children but it uh we do get rewarded uh the earlier we return to work after pregnancy so the way that Society is structured around women puts us on a path to believe that we are only successful if we take all these career boxes and and for some women that's great for some women they love their career but for many women they don't have careers they have jobs and there's no space for them right now in the narrative to be valued and upheld as women and mothers and I think that uh the abortion discourse where it is today has really suffered from that loss and women have suffered from that loss now when the birth control first came in in the 60s is that when is that when abortion also began because I know that when the birth control became uh legal then there was more promiscuity so then there were more unwanted births I imagine and so then they had to do something about that is that when uh abortions started to be more accepted in our societies as well to a to a degree so it started with the Communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union so they first legalized it in 1920 in the USSR and then in the 50s in most of the Soviet Block in Eastern Europe um it was simil you know it wasn't because of contraception but there was a similar common theme which is that it's about family planning birth control you know sexual Liberation and so on and also a strong element of we need women in the workplace so they shouldn't have babies and so we need to stop them and sort of destroy their biology um so that they can be laborers and so the Communists kind of got there first and then China was I think late 40s maybe early 50s but it is true that in the West W World other than Scandinavia where it was 1930s and 40s as well you know in the UK we legalized it in 1967 the US state started to do so in the late 1960s early 1970s and 73 was roie Wade um Canada I think was maybe late 70s I don't remember exactly when the Supreme Court struck down every abortion law in Canada and just made it a free for all but it certainly was very closely connected to the sexual Revolution and this idea that and sex and pregnancy or sex and babies have nothing to do with each other why would anyone think that that one leads to the other they should be totally free and of course what we've learned over the last 50 years is that you can never fully extricate them they're always inherently linked sex is powerful precisely because it generates life so even when you take away the life at the end it still has that emotional power that relational power and still has incredible power to make or break people and we've seen that you know so many times in the celebrity world over the last few years so sex is important and the reason for that is because it was from the very beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago it was connected to the creation of life and therefore in a sense it's what Society is built upon you know I think that makes me think about the uh trans problem that we have now and that um when we had when we got the birth control pill then it meant that uh homosexual relationships and hetosexual relationships could be very similar because you wouldn't have to NE you could have sex and not have any children and so then it was well then do you you know then do you have to be a man and a woman and then who's and actually who's the man and who's the woman because if you're both neither of you are having kids or have to have kids neither of you have to have kids and if both of you have access to the workplace then who's the man and who's the woman and maybe it doesn't matter you know what the we go down these Pathways and we just have no idea what we're playing with right it's just so so weird that we've come to where it's so weird that we've come here but it actually makes sense where we are because of the decisions that we've made yeah that's right I think we we lost track of what a woman is many many years before the trans debate came to the four I think yeah right yeah it was coming wasn't it this whole question it was just coming certainly peaked during that sexual Revolution kind of being the um the ultimate shaking off of women and men being distinctly different and and celebrating that yeah and then sex Revolution told us that well women are equal to man kind of anything we can do anything they can do we can do better and we're just the same and ended up that we just ended up doing everything which didn't ultimately make women happy if you look at studies out of Yale over the last uh five decades you actually see that women's happiness although initially it was higher uh than men I think in the 50s and 60s has declined uh in relative and absolute terms so uh what we've done by by liberating so-called uh women is actually kind of just diminishing women and that's not made us happy at all yeah well when we take if we take on jobs uh desires really um dreams and visions that are male then we're not fulfilling any of our feminine dreams and desires and Visions that's not going to make us happy you know the hungarians you probably know the Hungarian family policy that they've had in for over 10 years now and that has diminished the abortion rate uh it's diminished the divorce rate with no compulsion and now women who have children uh they have a tax break they have a tax break for having kids um the one thing that I'm not certain about uh I think that a lot of those kids end up in daycare because they really want women to go back to work and women actually want to go back to work because they make more money because they don't their income tax goes down for the rest of their lives so so they are getting women back in the workforce but now kids are being in institutionalized so I you know you know it's not perfect it's not perfect they were trying to change things they did change things but there's still work to be done I guess is what you could say but I I certainly am thankful to them that they have done this because now we know we have data we have data that uh you can bring down the abortion rate without uh making it law you can change the system to work better for couples you know if you get married before you're 25 and hungry you're you don't pay any income tax that way you can right so if you get married young and have babies you don't pay any income tax so you make more money so it gives you just a little more chance to survive and to prosper so for you know I think they've been very clever by having all these very attractive policies and then having a language that is impossible to learn so that no one can go no one wants to go and take advantage of it because none of us can get anywhere close to speaking but it's it's true that you know they are they're the only people even really trying for the most part that see that this is a huge population problem and you know the whole Western world is relyant to immigration and you know going back to my my Lefty Roots I'm pretty Pro immigration certainly way more pro-immigration than most conservatives and yet it's just not a long-term solution not least because all the other countries are going to run out of people as well the fertility rate all across the world is absolutely plummeting and soon you know in 20 years time there won't be anyone who wants to immigrate to the west and so what we will see is huge economic Devastation empty classrooms teachers out of jobs I saw a statistic the other day that there are 2 million I think don't quote me but I think it was two million Chinese Teachers out of jobs because they have so few children two million teachers unemployed it's it's really phenomenal to see and as you say Hungary has been really leading the charge on this and I think revealing that I think what they've done by reducing the abortion rate is showing that this is not something that most women want in itself abortion is not something that people desire for its own end it's really seen as the only choice they feel that they have because they stand to lose so much by having a baby and so I think when we can map out a path that says women can succeed in their not just their career because that's not the only other important thing but they can succeed in their friendships in their relationships in their career their dreams and have a family I think that's ultimately what most people want most people still want kids they still like kids and so if we can create a society that lays the foundation for that then as you say you know um the law makes a difference but it's it's certainly not the only tool for reducing the abortion rate when I was a young mom uh I stayed home with my kids and uh the way I met other people because we moved to I didn't know anybody where we were when we had little kids um you know I I met other mothers really I met other mothers so through their children it was really because it was the children that played together and then so it was the mothers who were with them so I got to know the mothers so that's how you your community was built and and can be built if you stay home uh as um I know that I did a little bit of work having kids play in a play gym and a lot of the people who came with their kids were nannies it was I was surprised at how few mothers there were there so even when I was having children there were fewer mothers that were with their kids and I I imagine I don't know but I imagine now it's there are fewer even fewer mothers all the mothers are working uh I I know quite I know a couple of young moms and I really don't know that many which is kind of sad I should know lots of young moms right now and uh most of them work they most of them work and and it's funny because I think if they had like the first child uh and the second child maybe you learn that you miss your child more because you didn't really stay home with the first child then the ne you have the next child well maybe maybe that was too much day care so then maybe don't send him quite so much and then the third child get to the third child you know I hardly saw either of those two maybe this one I'll actually stay home for so I think sometimes it takes I know my sister I think she had she had a nanny living in her home so the kids were actually together and at home but she was working away it was only the third child where she was more at home from and so it it's really It's tricky to learn and you have to learn on the Fly it's really good to have these conversations that that uh young women can hear because uh staying home with your baby is challenging it's super challenging you you don't have a lot of sleep and you have to learn what all these cries mean so you have to be at their backck and call and uh when your husband gets home you are so tired that you have no and and you're and you're sick and tired of being close with someone so you last thing you want to do is have a hug from your husband you know and he he comes home and he wants some attention it's like yeah no baby you know you know there's so there's all this stuff that you learn when when you're young but there's a it's a sacrifice and the thing is with every sacrifice you make the uh the Bounty that you receive and it's not always the kind of bounty that you think you're going to receive but you receive all this love and attention it it's overwhelming the amount of attention you receive because your kids are just you know they're there looking at you for everything and so you think it's you know people women say they're lonely but lonely for what exactly maybe lonely for a for an adult conversation but you're not lonely for touch like definitely not so it's a different all of a sudden it's a different life right it's a you he you were this independent young woman and now you're at home doing laundry and having cuddles it's a completely different kind of life and nobody knows that my sister when I got pregnant and I was youngest in my family she said now you know this is called the family club and you don't know it exists until you have a baby and once you become part of that family Club other people on the street they kind of Nod at you like yeah you're a family I have a family too you know and it's but it's an in it's like an inside joke that you are part of now that you understand as you take your prom down the street you know before that you never even knew it was there you never even noticed so I I'm a I don't know I always wanted to have a baby I wasn't always certain I wanted a husband you know I was I was trained in feminism I knew that I wanted to be an independent woman I was going to have a baby but I was definitely not going to have a husband by by the time I got to be maybe 22 I figured out that it was going to be kind of tricky just being just being that you know that I probably how was I gonna pay for the truck right how was i g to travel around the country if I didn't have any help and you know so I I finally grew up a little bit at least I didn't think I didn't think that I had everything figured out by then but you know my brain was only just getting formed by the time I was 22 or 23 right so you got to give me a break on [Laughter] that I think sorry go well I'm curious you have research resech research on the impact of abortion on women's mental health and its correlation with maternal mortality I don't know anything about that yeah well it's it's an issue as I said you know the academic space is you and your husband know better than anyone is is deeply corrupted in many ways U and so it's not always easy to find some of this evidence and to get a a reasonable debate which is what we really want um what we've found I've done a lot of research on both of those things with the mental health we see that if you take women who have an unwanted pregnancy and then have an abortion and you compare them with women with an unwanted pregnancy who keep the baby the mental health is actually significantly worse for the women who have an abortion and that's still the case you know people say well those women were different to begin with they had different mental health backgrounds different social economic statuses Etc and the research has actually taken that into account and it finds even when you compare like for like women the women who have abortions have a 30% increased risk of anxiety a 70% increased risk of suicidal Behavior a 130% increased risk of alcohol abuse and a 30 100% increase in drug abuse and so one of the the main researchers who found this he was a New Zealand researcher called David Ferguson he was pro-choice he said this is a woman's Choice it should be legal but we have to be honest about the scientific evidence and he said at the the current time there is no credible scientific evidence that abortion has mental health benefits in fact it was the opposite now although you know I disagree with him on the issue he was actually a real man of integrity because he was asked by the New Zealand government's abortion committee to not publish his research in case PR lifers found out about it and because he was a good man he published the research and then he went to the press and said what happened he said they tried to get me not to publish it but this is science you don't just refuse to publish things you don't like that are inconvenient and so so his research is actually widely regarded by pretty much everyone in the field as the best quality research on this topic and it shows those those outcomes which obviously are a significant harm and all the more acute in a time when women's mental health and everyone's mental health is much more widely um concerned you know cared for and and thought about and so we have a huge Mental Health crisis Across the Western World in particular and I don't want to say that most of it is due to abortion but a significant portion is and i' you know I've seen the real life side of this women come into my clinic or Hospital who tell me that this was the reason that they feel suicidal that they're on drugs this is when it all started and so so that's one of the things that I worked on the other was the maternal mortality side and and this is really mainly about the idea that okay suppose you don't like abortion we can all agree that abortion is bad we can all maybe a lot of us can agree that abortion is even wrong um and shouldn't happen but we should make it legal because if you ban it then women would just get dangerous Backstreet abortions they'd all die and there'll be thousands of women dying and so on from all these dangerous illegal abortions and so typically the the pro-life response has been to say well that might be the case but it's still a fundamental violation of a fundamental human right and so we have to protect the child no matter the consequences um I took a slightly different approach and I said well is that assumption actually true if we look at the historical evidence if we look at the empirical evidence from all across the world is it true that when you ban abortion women start dying more and when you legalize abortion women die less because of this and what I found was the opposite that in many cases it doesn't have any impact and in some cases legalizing abortion has a negative impact and you cause more women to die because more women have abortions or because illegal abortionists feel less scared of the law because they know it's legal they're going to get a light a penalty so they offer their you know shodi Services much more widely there are many reasons um but what the the example that struck me most was Poland um you know people say if America bans abortion as as many states have now done that going to be all these women dying and that's really a conjecture it's speculation and we actually have examples that show us concretely what happens in a developed country when abortion is banned Poland did this in 199 three they banned abortion for almost every reason except a tiny number of cases for rape for disability and so on and what they found was that their maternal deaths shot right down in fact Poland now has the best maternal health record in the entire world they have fewer maternal deaths than America than France Germany UK and that's despite or we can say despite Banning abortion in 1993 they've actually done better than most other countries and so there are many other examples which I won't bore you with but I'd encourage people to take another look at the empirical evidence because we really see that abortion is not just harmful to the baby it also has really significant harms for women including sadly sometimes even taking their lives H now why do you think that is why do you think women if it's illegal then they choose to have their babies and in the end they're happier because of it yes is that what you're is that what you're saying is outcome of that well so so a significant proportion of women if they are not allowed to have an abortion will have the baby and the best example of this is um you know a lot of people say pro-life laws don't work they're useless they don't stop abortions well again the evidence clearly shows that to be false and and the best example is there was a very widely publicized study called the turnaway study from the US from the last 10 to 15 years and it studied exactly those women women who went to get an abortion they decided they had they wanted an abortion and then they were turned away from the clinic and told you're too far along in your pregnancy to have one so you can't have one you can go to another clinic you can go out of state you can go to Mexico but you can't have an abortion at this Clinic well what they found was that 70% of those women ended up having the baby 70% so it prevented the large majority of abortions and so the researchers said okay the laws do work restrictions do work but it will ruin their lives and so they studied that yeah and so so they went to all the women who had the baby and they kept going to them every 12 months and at the child's fifth birthday they asked the women do you wish you could still have an abortion or are you glad that you had the baby and what they found was that 98% of women who had the baby were glad and so what this what this shows to me as a doctor and a researcher is it's not fundamentally about what you know women don't fundamentally need abortion they need time and support and care and when we give that they are resilient to their experiences they can do things they're strong enough to make things happen to succeed in their lives and to be happy and it really it does show I think for me that this is not something that is going to ruin someone's life it's scary and we don't want to downplay how scary it is you know you were saying before it is a kind of death it's a sacrifice and we're not pretending that you know you have the baby everything is exactly the same it's easy there's no problems we would never say that but what we're saying is that when women do go through that transformative experience and I'm not saying from experience of myself I'm just I'm saying what they've said um it actually is a transformational experience which women having gone into it frightened terrified really worried about what their life is going to look like when they look back five years later the overwhelming majority say wow I I'm glad I did it that way so that's what all I can say is what the empirical evidence shows and that's what it shows yeah well it's no wonder women won't I mean it's very difficult to have a baby you know you it's it's a it's the women who die in childbirth historically go to the same Graves that Warriors go to so it it's a very difficult thing to do but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile doing because it's difficult difficulty that's that's the spice of life isn't it that's why we watch pirate movies and and superhero movies and stuff because we want to see people who are putting their life at risk that's what we want to do in our lives and when we're young and able then we can fortify ourselves it's not going to kill us it's gonna make us stronger right abolutely that's being a mother is that's for sure that's definitely devalue that kind of feminine strength hav we we don't count that to be strength we don't talk about that um no when those that kind of language we talk about it as being a pause or or being something that you you do kind of outside of your life and then you come back to your real life I think more that language life about feminine and and in comparison to masculine strength and not saying that women have to fit into that body of things but they have their own things that they're able to do the strength to get off at 3:00 a.m. when your baby's crying for example that's amazing my sister just gave birth last week and my as I'm looking at her like wow and it is an incredible human ability that men don't have and it is unique to us and it should be celebrated and not downplayed that's for sure absolutely Jordan always said he was amazed that he he would hear Michaela Peep and I would be down the stairs and and he wouldn't even really wake up but for me that was that was the call to duty that was the call to duty you know and um there's nothing like it really there's nothing like it so well I think it's also often downplayed you know we we think of the men's jobs as the more important and of course you know in the modern world men and women can do almost all the same jobs even though not always exactly the same and I think we you know men can't even create something that outlasts themselves they can't create a new life like they they cannot do anything beyond this lifetime in any significant way they can build stuff but it will probably get destroyed they can write things it will probably get lost to history it's women that actually uniquely have the power to bring in you know not just the Next Generation but the one after that and the one after that and the one after that and I think to suggest that this is just some you know biological accident or some biological Quirk I think is really demeaning I think this is something far more profound that women can you know perpetuate Humanity in a way that men can't and I think there's really something profound about that yeah also too that the man if he's going to go out and do the hard things that he has to do why do them if he doesn't have h a wife and a child at home that he is providing for that that is motivating that that's a motivation for men and we've forgotten that that was we it's not that men get to go out and work that that that's not the thing it's the thing is that they are they're taking on the dragon and they're going you know to get and they're going to get the treasure and the treasures at home with their babies and their wife that's right and again I don't want to hop on the research too much but the research shows this that there's a paper from the 90s by um a Nobel prizewinning Economist and it's called men without children and what he showed was basically when abortion was legalized in the United States there was a massive increase in men who then went into crime and went into drugs and were involved in violent crime and things like that now we don't want to say you know have a kid because otherwise you'll be a druggy or you'll be a violent criminal but the reality is that especially for for many men maybe on the margins of society many men who don't have particularly great options career-wise the one thing historically that has got them to just grow up and to take responsibility and to be good citizens is knowing that they have a wife and a kids to take care of and again it shouldn't take that for men to behave they should behave regardless but you know it's an empirical reality for society that one of the things that makes humans grow up especially men because we're particularly immature is having that kind of responsibility and if we don't have that then we're much more likely to go astray well I don't know Lois I don't think women grow up without children either I don't think men do and I don't think women do I just don't think people grow up without having kids what do you think I mean you'll be much wiser on that given that we don't have kids that we may have not grown up yet we may still be Peter Pans but I'm G to talk to you in a year and find there you go but I think I mean from what Callum was saying I think it's just so clear that we were we are people made to be in that family unit you know the kind of institutions of marriage and nuclear families they're not just you know a part of History we can do away with because we now have like new found Liberty and autonomy like we we can choose not to be part of these institutions but ultimately the data shows that it is does help and support us to thrive both as men and women I think it's been a major loss to society that that we have just discarded these things so quickly really in the last 20 30 years yes right hopefully it's a blip but I know that when you see a decline in the uh population I don't know that there's any data that says that you can turn that around so like we better get to it oh so there's been changes to the abortion law in the UK yes well upcoming so we've had the same abortion law in the UK for 50 years and it looks for many of us that that would never change and it was set in stone uh but recently uh two options have been presented to our members of parliament that they will vote on at next month in April So currently our law allows most abortions for almost any reason to give or take H up to 24 weeks which is actually an outlier in Europe uh in the European Union the average is about 12 to 15 week cap um but here in the UK much more extreme up to 24 weeks and in certain circumstances uh three to be precise one if it's to save the life of the mother if it's to prevent her from taking a physical or mental injury or if the baby has any form of disability or fetal anomaly um then you can abort all the way up to birth in you so already we qu have quite a liberal law now the proposed changes are kind of to the red fell or the blue if you like there's on one hand MPS can vote to decriminalize all abortion all the way up to birth H so this is quite a specific law it would allow any woman to self-perform an abortion using pills um on herself all the way up to birth I should clarify that the abortion provider will not be able to do it past 24 weeks for her in most circumstances so this would put the woman in a very dangerous position now whether you are ideologically pro-choice Pro lifee and frankly don't care this is an extremely dangerous situation for a woman H to be self-performing abortions H giving birth delivering uh these babies in their bathrooms uh and going through that absolute trauma on their own potentially I think that's absolutely horrendous for our country to even be considering this now this is option a option b on the other hand uh has been presented to MPS and it would actually lower the abortion cap in our country from 24 weeks down to 22 now this doesn't seem like a big change but if you bear in mind that right now babies are able to survive uh outside the womb with medical support from 22 weeks that's been proven in many circumstances it is indeed barbaric that in a country like UK you would have a hospital word where on one hand a baby is being uh killed for any almost any reason uh on the other hand a child is being helped to survive to fight for their lives at the very same age so although this is a very small baby step if you like uh this is actually uh presents a great opportunity for the UK to bring their law into a more humanitarian Direction I think it's a really exciting and important step for women and for babies how was that voted on who votes on that kind of bill so this will be voted on by our members of part or elected representatives um both of these uh amendments interestingly were put into a criminal justice Bill and it wouldn't necessarily be a natural place for that you would think the MPS would want to discuss abortion in h but initially the decriminalization amendment was kind of inserted in rammed in uh to this piece of legislation and so this bill kind of took on a new form uh to become a vehicle to discuss how we should modernize our abortion laws um according to polling uh in in the UK it's pretty clear that decriminalization up to birth or abortion up to birth uh is not a good idea for most women most women uh when they see the abortion cap at 24 weeks uh say that it should be lowered to something more Humane and very very few people I think so one poll showed even 1% uh of people in the UK would support abortion in any circumstance all the way up to birth that most people would consider themselves not entirely pro-life but not entirely pro- choice we all think there should be some limits somewhere and so this is an important uh conversation for the UK to be having uh for members over our Parliament to be having uh to think again about this law which has been in place for a long time 50 years and bringing it up uh to a more Modern Standard well that that's in the right direction then isn't it it's definitely in the right direction yeah okay well we can pray for that that's for sure so here's a question from your point of view what factors have contributed to a culture that has made life harder for women due to abortion yeah I think that's a really interesting question when abortion was campaigned for initially and actually still today when you hear a abortion campaigners talk H they talk often about the slogan my body my choice and this kind of idea of ultimate autonomy that once we have ultimate autonomy even over at the babies that we create uh then we will be fully free um unfortunately for many women that freedom has never arrived because what was once um would have led to a circumstance where someone Falls pregnant perhaps unexpectedly there would be an expectation uh that the man involved in many circumstances now except not all but the man uh would typically say okay well then we get married and this would be just kind of how life goes on they would stay together they would raise the baby together because there would be an acceptance of responsibility in many cases how however with the Advent of abortion men have now been able to say well your body your choice your issue I'm out of here this is all on you and actually although that's meant to be an empowering slogan I think it's actually a really isolating slogan it gives us the full weight of a responsibility that was always meant to be shared and I think women have really suffered uh from not having that sense of community of relationship in those big decisions and in those responsibilities and we know um from it was in the BBC uh in 2022 uh that uh they reported that almost one in five women who have abortions in the UK I feel pressured into it they would have chosen something different that makes a lot of sense to me I mean you never hear about a little girl growing up saying oh I'd love to have an abortion this is never an ideal circumstance for anyone and yet we have more and more women uh choosing abortion we have $200,000 in the UK everywhere and I can only imagine how many in the US and Canada uh and so there is something fundamentally wrong here if this is something that many women don't want to go through but our ideology and rhetoric has led us to a a point where we feel like we don't have a choice that it is all on us and we can't carry this responsibility forward ourselves and something's gone majorly wrong for women and I think we need to take a step back have a think about what it means to be Pro women what kind of this um this confus notion of feminism has done if we can reenter our thoughts without that 50-year progression of that kind of obsession with autonomy uh and then we'd be able to serve uh women men and children uh to a much better extent in society that's for sure well you know it's it's a it's probably a lack of community in one part right because we used to have the church Community the church was the center of the town now that is Fallen away we don't have that then there was the uhle your family now that's Fallen away so if a woman becomes pregnant now who does she look to to make this decision well does she look I guess she looks to her doctor and if her doctor if it's if it's legal and it's medically acceptable then that's what then that's what they're going to suggest because they have to tell you have right you're the doctor you have to tell them what the options are right right yeah yeah I think I think it's not just the community in terms of making the decision but also in the support afterwards and you know as much as you can give tax breaks you can give money you can give you know you can give your child to a stranger to look after for the day you know historically because of the geographical proximity you would be able to and because families stayed together more you would be able to leave your kids with someone you trusted with their grandparents or with your very close family friends with the other kids in the the neighborhood or the village or whatever and I think because the whole of society is so fractured not only geographically but also relationally we have a very much consumerist idea of relationships where you sort of use them for as long as they're useful and then change if they're you know if you find something better I think because we have that sort of fractured Society in general it's so much more difficult you know if so I mean we don't have kids but suppose we did if we had a k a kid and we wanted to go out for the evening in theory if our parents lived close by then we could leave the kid with our parents our parents would love the opportunity to to look after the baby and everyone would be happy we could go out and we could have our lives and you know do Best of Both Worlds whereas you know my parents are divorced they both live miles apart from me um because we live in you know Lois lives in a different country from where she grew up which is my fault mayor Cula um it it it makes it so much harder you can see why the average person who doesn't have that sort of relational Capital nearby to them will say well if I have a child what do I want to do if I want to go out for the evening I have to pay $200 for a stranger to come and look after them and it's you can see why that would make it so much more difficult and so much more convicting in a bad way for for someone to have a child because they just feel trapped by the lack of options and the lack of support they have you know when I was uh first married we were we all lived far far thousands of miles away from our families and we were the only people at our age who had kids too so we didn't even have we couldn't swap kids with other we which we did later we would swap our kids with another parent who had kids and they would go out and then the next weekend we would take their kids and and they would go out and so we did it that way but I didn't have a babysitter I don't think really until my kids were 9 and 11 years old but Jordan and I had dates at home we put the kids to bed and we had a date at home and that was that was fine it was fine you know it was just fine yeah and besides by then I was 31 or and 32 33 I'd seen a lot of the World by then you know I mean I'd seen downtown quite a few times it was kind of it was a different it was a different way of going out it was a different way of going out we were going out the living room very far very but we didn't answer the phone phone we didn't answer the door yeah it was our time to be together that there was no interruptions so that's a good tip yeah it was it was a really good tip and it was something that Jordan insisted upon because I had my daughter and you know a few months into that he was getting pretty lonely and he said told me he was getting lonely and I told him I didn't really care and then I said well if you're lonely I said I guess we could schedule dates and he said well that didn't sound very uh spontaneous and I said well I don't know it worked for us when we were single maybe it could work again so so he thought he trusted me enough so he said okay let's try this and so and he was you know when's this going to happen how many times a week is this going to happen where is this going to happen you know what's where are all the parameters and so we set up all the parameters you had to light candles and you had to fluff the pillows and you had to wear something nice and you know so you and but then after a few years of doing that uh we knew what we were doing so then he'd say you want to have a date and I'd say no I'm tired and he'd say how about tomorrow I have a meeting what about the next Daye yeah okay so then you know in three days you're G to have a and you're not going out you're just going to go into the living room but in three days you are going to go into the living room and you're going to be ready and you're G to have a have H you're gonna have a rest so that you're awake and not complaining because you didn't get enough sleep the night before and have a little bit of a time together where you can just dance and be together and that saved our marriage I think that really that practice of of putting that time together so so even if you have nobody you can do it and it can be good but you have to negotiate it you have to say what you need which is a vulnerable you have to be vulnerable and say what you want and Trust the other person that they'll listen and and talk to you and not just brush you off when you've admitted that you're that you need something yeah and so it's it's about trust and um service trust and service to one another yeah so it's a it's a workable situation even if you're out in the country and all you have for babysitters are cows yeah yeah yeah I think that's really beautiful tamy I think it's um exciting to hear how marriages can support each other in that sense I know also people might be listening and saying well you know what about single moms how are they supposed definers and and I empathize with that a lot but what you were saying before about Community is also true that I think maybe family members in and societ and kind of close communities and church groups around have lost that art of rallying around a mom not probably um consciously of this but I suppose we have more of this philosophy of like all what was her choice or oh well you can it's kind of her responsibility now so you I mean we've kind of left that and for a country or a culture that calls itself pro-choice this is actually the opposite of pro-choice it's not actually providing that different way to have a healthy um relationship with your child and um kind of continue to have a healthy lifestyle um and that's definitely to the detriment and it's definitely an indictment on us in the west at ADF we um came across um we've been involved recently in supporting pro-life Charities who offer Support Services is outside abortion facilities um we know at least one lady Alina who had uh found herself PR in a very difficult circumstance she was single she actually just lost her job she was alone and in a different country she looked she found that she had no option basically she called the abortion provider and said what are my options and they said well we only offer abortion and she went to the clinic and someone put a leaflet in her hand just to she was going in and it just talked about services available it was financial support but also practical support and social support it was uh you know a community of women who were H giving their time to be able to kind of have Community groups have Tod the groups baby groups uh those kind of things and because of that support available to her she actually changed her mind and made a different choice I you know there's hundreds of women who have made that choice those support systems those pro-life Charities are so so important to vulnerable women but unfortunately in the UK and elsewhere and I believe in Canada potentially uh the government have created these buffer zones around clinics which criminalize those offers of help and criminalize even prayer silent prayer within those zones and I often approach that conversation from a free speech freedom of thought perspective because obviously it's horrendously sensorial for a government to be deciding what people can say but also from just a female perspective from a pro-woman pro- mother perspective we really have to be finding these ways to be creating those communities and support networks and kind of makeshift families in our new era where so many people don't have those and nuclear families to rely on how can we be friends and family at to women needs I think that's something that um Christians and priers have to take on as well as the wider Society yeah well we definitely have to support one another you know when a man and a woman are married and if only the the man is working he's going to be gone a lot he's going to be gone a lot so that mother is in a way uh a single mother you know the husband may come home at night and then you you know you give them dinner and you have an hour with the kids and then they go to bed but you've been with them all day long on your own and those mother's groups that you can find if you can find people in your neighborhood but also um I used to go to the library with the kids so then I found mothers there uh you you find you can I used to find mothers where where kids where kids are going to be then then mothers are there and and you you just at the playground you just at the playground and and just talking to one another and even if that's the only relationship you have and it's at the playground it's not uh isolating yourself at the playground but saying hello to to someone else right so reaching out reaching out and making sure that uh the people who are there um know that they're part of the community of the people that are there it it it doesn't mean that you have to uh you don't have to do it on a huge level you can do it at a very basic level this community and this uh this belonging and all all of that all of those little daily interactions you know theyd make a huge difference to somebody who is alone and then when she has a sick kid she has someone that she knows I I took care of little kids when I was at home because I had no green card I was in the states and I couldn't work anyway so I took care of some other kids and I knew some other mothers and one day one of them their Nanny didn't show up so she sent she asked if her little boy could come over and so she just dropped him off there you go there he was knew there was some place to go and that was it was good I uh I loved it it was it was uh was good for my kids because then they had people to play had people to play with and I didn't have to take them anywhere that's perfect yeah perfect that's right perfect yeah sunny day just enjoy my children that was that you know we moved back to Canada so my kids could go visit with their relatives because then they could fly on airplanes when they were older without us but when they were little little it was it was just Jordan and I and um so I had to learn to find my community but it was it wasn't that it wasn't that hard I think people are told it's scary and maybe told that it's not possible but it is possible it certainly is possible uh it's nothing to be afraid of and and that way you teach your kids to be social right you be social your kids learn to be social so it's a skill that they're going to need to know and and you have to model it you have to model it I mean I don't know I wasn't a single mother so I don't know about that I don't know about being a single mother I wasn't a single mother I had friends who were single mother so yeah they did all right too yeah yeah I think that's I mean it's so challenging of course I completely I can't even imagine how hard it must be sometimes but we never I think we lack to also have those we don't see single mothers on screen necessarily or we don't kind of have these cultural influences or pointers of women who are making it work in that regard um I think that that could be that could be harmful in a way it doesn't if we don't see people thriving you know in this role it does make it a lot more scary uh so I think and finding a way to finding ways to support Empower and kind of celebrate single mothers um who are you know making things work despite difficulties and uh yeah just kind of celebrating in their victories too in a really public way um could be helpful to to those who find themselves in a very difficult situation I think you want to support everyone but I think you also want to draw uh a good about what the ideal is and the ideal is a is a mother and a father that's ideal and if you're if you're not going to have a mother and a father then a single mother has to have uh a man or two who are are in that child's life regularly and reliably and it's up to them to have that kind of uh psychological Wellness I think to have that happen and that social adeptness to have that happen to mm and that's usually uncles though isn't it that's right that's what it used to be it would be uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers and those are the men in the life even if say the husband was absent then you would still have these other but now everybody like moves away yeah from their families so then you have to create those families again and I I also used to tell people when I was older that would come from other countries that you have to make the family where you come to you may have left your family but I learned that if you make your family where you are then somehow that family that you left become it enriches it as well somehow just living with that loving attitude with people right around you um it calls to your family kind of it calls you the love love for your family it calls it out kind that's what I found I had one of my friends moms had a heart attack so a grandmother had a heart attack and my grandmother had a heart attack but she was 3,000 miles away so I took flowers to my friend's grandmother and that was good it was good I needed to give flowers to a grandmother I couldn't give it to my grandmother so I gave flowers to somebody else's grandmother and it but it had the same it was it was still good it was still good and real this wasn't my grandmother but that didn't matter either so you make family where you are yeah you have to to you have to for the for your sake and for the sake of your children when you're single but you have to realize that you've made a you've made a compromise because you don't have a husband you've compromised so now you're going to have to work doubly hard to uh and and that's that's the choice yeah that's the choice that's the life you have I think I think part of the issue is that conservatives or traditional people you know across as being moralizing or judgmental about single mothers and you know there are many reasons for single motherhood sometimes it is bad decisions sometimes it's you know they're absolutely the victim of an irresponsible man and they've done everything or he dies or he does right yeah that as well and and I think it you know when we say that having a mother and a father is best for a child and that having one parent is less good it's not because we're moral izing is because we're actually saying you're doing the job of two people and you shouldn't be forced to do that we think you're taking on a burden that is too much and it you know there's a good chance it's not your fault and we think that that's not just bad for the child but bad for you because you deserve the support you deserve to have someone else doing this job for two people and so I think a lot of this conversation also kind of um recalls the need for a good conversation about fatherhood because I think often when we you know when we shift the focus on abortion from the baby to the mother we just think okay we just need to reconceive Motherhood and then we'll be sorted but I think part of the reason we have a bad conception of motherhood is because we have a bad conception of fatherhood because we've told men it's okay to just leave your family go to work focus on your work make that your number one priority and then family is the second most important thing and so naturally in a world where people want equality and women wants equality they're going to see that attitude and say well why shouldn't the career be the number one thing for us and the family should be second best and so I think what we really need to emphasize is that this isn't just about supporting mothers and reconceiving of motherhood it's also about saying for men the family has to be the most important thing for you after faith maybe but in worldly terms the family has to be your number one priority if you succeed in your career but you fail your family then all your career achievements are worthless and it is your family that you have your number one duty to and you have to be a good and present father and I think if men really begin to modu that well and if we can show that our our number one priority as men is the family looking after them caring for them I think it will make a lot more sense to people that for mothers they should have the same priorities as well and you know no one should be putting their career above their family whether men or women I think we all have to to show that that's yeah where the priorities are what what about if a man priority prioritizes his family but fails at his job is he actually going to be putting his family first I think I think part of looking after your family is is succeeding in your job so there's always going to be a balance you know and I think I think this is part of what one of the things you know I I came to to understand the wisdom of Christianity later in life than than many Christians but I think one of the the real pears of wisdom in the Bible is this idea of idolatry which is that God created a good world with a load of good things work is good family is good relationships are good sex is good material things are good money is good all these things but any of them no matter how good they are any of them can be an idol even if it's the best thing that God created if you make that your number one thing above God and you put your selfworth in it and you define Yourself by it then it's an idol and it's wrong and I think there's a trend among traditional people conservatives including religious ones but I guess maybe even more so non-religious ones perhaps there's a tendency to say the family is really good and it's been undervalued and therefore we need to focus on it and put it number one and they do it they sort of overcompensate and actually they idolize the family and they say if you don't have a family you know and and so all that to say I think what your point comes down to is that men can idolize their family they can you know prioritize their family to such a degree that they neglect their family ultimately because they're not doing their work and so I think ultimately it's all about having the right balance of worth of effort of love and and this is what you know St Augustine said many years ago um that that sin really is is disordered loves it's not about loving the wrong things necessarily although it can be it's not about Lov not loving enough it's about loving things more than you should or less than you should and loving anything more than God and I think once we get those in balance that is what actually lets us love everyone including our family better oh good point I like that it's not mine but it was a good point wasn't it yeah pro-nationalist policies as research and Advocates what types of pro-natalist policies and measures do you believe would be most effectively support adults to thrive as parents pro-natalist policies so that is pro-life yes is that what that means pronatalist essentially supporting raising the birth rate so supporting the creation of more people um which can be aligned with a pro life VI but you could be a pronatalist and not necessarily be against abortion would that be accurate yeah I think you could you could be pronatalist and think we need to improve the birth rate but think that abortion is okay as long as there are enough pregnancies you can abort some and you know so it's not necessarily that moral kind of look at the value of the child as you know as child for its own sake um which is probably yeah but there's a lot of alignment so it's it's typically more an instrumental thing that you want to to increase the birth rate for economic reasons or or that kind of thing rather than you know the pro-life position is fundamentally rooted in human rights it's the child has a right to life it cannot be violated and the pronatalist policy can be based on valuing children but it's not based on that deep sense of Human Rights I think it might be economic as well it might be economic yeah exactly right right right right I see and so so are there pr- natalist uh conversations then that happen in Parliament or are they pro-life conversations that happen I would say the balance of our culture would be more pronatalist at the moment in terms of the conversations that are happening u i don't there's several reasons for that maybe in one sense it's more politically expedient maybe it seems a little bit too um moral to have a pro-life opinion but if you're just trying to increase the birth rate for economic reasons maybe that's a bit more palatable for people yeah right and but also I mean there is a dire need to increase the birth rate um like our our country is certain running out of of people and my uh area of Scotland our birth rate is been like one. two one. two oh wow I know so we there's certainly a space for that um and uh there's some wonderful MPS H who have championed um causes to help and support uh mothers to take that plunge of motherhood before they turn 30 I think it was just last year I don't know if it was in the UK or further a field but it was the first time that uh 50% of wom reached their 30th birthday without having a child and uh there's great demographers like Steven Shaw who have been studying this all over the world H who see that this trend uh firstly has a terrible social consequence H when it comes to uh having enough people just to run the country basically uh to enable all the Care Services we need for our aging population to be able to sustain life for the upcoming generation as has an economic impact obviously as well but also a social impact in that we are the lonliest uh generation of all time there's more single adult households in the UK than there has ever been before uh and so there's a clear social need to be um for the the sake of the parents to encourage them to have children because there's cohart and Steven Shon great right research on this who are reaching 40 between 40 and 5050 and having great regret about having swallowed this kind of lie really that um that fulfillment in life comes only from career and only from kind of Independence and travel and food and success uh and they reach a point in life where they can't turn back and say oh I I wish I hadn't believed that I wish I had had a baby when I had the chance um so from from that perspective as well I think um opening up those conversations and exposing um the reality of what that looks like at 40 and at 50 um I think that gives younger people I think and adul I see from Steven's work that is quite a striking thought for young people who have never thought about this in that way before or what will I feel when I get to that age at is this a choice I want to make for my fertility now there's a conversation um for the rest of my life um when I'm in this particular mode where I'm going out partying and I have a great so like what will I feel like when I don't have uh kids and grandkids uh when I'm older to um you know to socialize with uh basically so I think like that has that has been definitely very revealing about um the lack of knowledge about the state that we're in and how much Society has to catch up um to realize the direction that we're heading and to change Tech um in Scotland our government have noticed this and they've actually started uh they've committed to encouraging um ibf services and they've been very promotional of encouraging young young women to donate their eggs even from University to try and I've actually been targeted myself with these adverts H to encourage me to donate my eggs and many women uh even from the age of 18 have also encourage to do that uh so they're really taking quite desperate measures um now that is the wrong approach we should not be asking young women to sacrifice their bodies their health um their future connection with their children in order to encourage our birth rates and I worry about countries who are taking this TCT like my own um rather than um taking their much Kinder approach to saying to woman look if you you know look ahead of the next 15 years um think about what you want when you want when you get older um why don't you take those steps earlier on uh to be settling to be planning ahead and to be growing your family H whilst you can do so naturally um so I think that has been a rude awakening for many of us in the UK and I believe further a field yeah and I think women choose choose their husbands don't you think largely I think women choose their husbands and so it is up to us to find husbands and it's up to us to decide we want children and and you know that's a that's a great uh challenge that's a great challenge to think that it is up to us to find a husband and to have children why why not why not take that as a challenge well I think also it's part of it is is this biological asymmetry that it comes back to you know men the fertility clock for men is pretty indefinite you can have a baby pretty much any age as a man whereas for women it you know your fertility starts declining sort of early 30s and then in the mid-30s it rapidly declines by the end of the 30s it's it's really low and this creates an imbalance where especially in a culture that has told men and woman you don't really need to rush you don't need to have any responsibility take your time be yourself that's fine for men they can take as much time as they want where and so they can mess around women they can do whatever they want whereas the woman is is really on you know on limited time in a way that the man is not and so what you find is that even when there are women who you know maybe in the early 20s say yeah I do want to find a husband and I'd like to settle down and I'd like to have kids early while I have the time and while my body's capable of that it's much harder to find that in a culture where the men are you know they've been told that it's just a freefor all and they don't have to do anything in any particular time they don't have to respect the woman and so I think a lot of it is down to getting the relationship between men and women right which which is as you know one of the most broken things about our society yes right yeah I think yeah with getting it if we got the relationship right between men and women who knows what else would go right right maybe everything who knows well that's what the Bible's said on isn't it first there was Adam Adam and Eve and so I know it was very interesting out from there right I mean to trace that relationship between men and women from Genesis where you know the fall of the curse was that woman would want to overcome her husband you know to H to rule over him uh in some some translations and that really has translated Through the Ages as to what has dominated the that tension in the relationship men relationship between men and women that desire for females to overcome h a man and I it'd be interesting to trace throughout history I'd love to write a book in this one day now I'm giving away my secrets but I'd love to trace that relationship between men and women all throughout um from Biblical times throughout history uh through the sexual Revolution then we talked about already when when women were told uh we're not different we are the same as and then now uh in our day and age today when we're not only the same as but we are We Are Men or we are women just depending on what we would like to be um so that diminish the the desire to kind of overcome what a man is and to be so different to what a woman has really diminished the beauty of femininity and what blessings that we had uh in our own distinct way so women Eve listened hearkened to the serpent who said you know really you can you can do anything and you can be any you can be anyone you can do anything and she said yes to that and Adam said I'll help you do that and those were their two first mistakes they made they got cast out because of those two thoughts he thought he could do anything to help her do what she wanted to do and she she thought she could incorporate everything everything really even even the snake yeah that's a good point and so and then they got cast out that's when they got cast out and they've been climbing there and then they the rest of the Bible is in all all the ways that God would like to help us and in all in all the other ways that we fall short right so yeah Jordan's new book we who wrestle with God he he uh he explains all of those stories it's uh it's been really fun we've been traveling all over the states and he's been uh he's gone through the book once the first book that he's going to publish he's gone through it once so it was very Illuminating W and we're going to put those YouTube videos up at some point and the book isn't even out yet so everybody will know what at least the story is before they read the book we'll make it easier to read it crey yeah well they may have read the Bible and I they know the story anyway yeah yeah yeah very very interesting yeah I can't wait to read that so was there any point in this debate that you've been involved in this the censorship and the uh abortion debate was was there anything that you guys faced that you've had to overcome in order to carry on I think yeah I I think so I mean you know I I talked earlier about the censorship we have in Academia which is rampant and this is to the point how was that one are you're still working at the University though I imagine are you yeah although you know there frequent efforts to change that um I I think and you know you know plenty of people complain to the medical Regulators as well to try and get me struck off the medical register things like that so it's it's it's constant but it's you know people often ask how how have you fought against it and managed to survive how have you how have you done that I think you have to not take yourself too seriously I think you have to have a bit of humor about it um I think if if you go through life just sort of angry or resentful at the people who hate you then you're going to turn into them and so I think you know I make mistakes I'm not the best person I don't always articulate myself very well but I'm trying to do the right thing and sometimes I'm a bit of a jackass but I'm a jackass that's trying to do the right thing so um what do I tell people you know a lot of young people ask this question of you know is your career jeopardized by this do you think you'll be back do you think your opportunities will be limited and the answer is obviously of course but it's the best thing I've ever done and I wouldn't change it for the world and you know I think it you must just it must just be such a vacuous life where you know what the right thing is and you're staying quiet or you're telling lies in order to keep you know to keep the shirad going I just think that's so utterly sad that I can't imagine living that way and I think I would be miserable and so I say yeah you're going to have challenges you're going to have people that hate you you're going to have maybe really significant challenges maybe physical threats to your life or or losing your career or something like this and you know the I mean I run on that adrenaline I I think we need you know it's I know that I'm doing the right thing and I don't always do it perfectly I make mistakes I'm I'm certainly a sinner but I I know that this is the right cause and that it gives me incredible Joy even in those difficult times to know that this is the right thing that we're making a difference we're saving lives and that there are going to be kids out there and women out there who are forever grateful that we gave them the world because of what we did and so if someone wants to ruin my life or or take my life I you know at least I've contributed that life to other people and so I have no regrets at all so I'm very happy doing this what about you Lois do you have anything to say about that yeah well I uh I mean I very deliberately went into this fight so I feel like I can never complain about facing any kind of adversity or challenge uh to what I do I very much chose that we have um supported people across the world who've ended up in court Battles by not entering it by their own fault so I feel very much that I chose this path it's not um always an easy one I remember most distinctly I remember uh at the time that Robie Wade was overturned I had the privilege going on the BBC to discuss uh that happening uh and I also it happened to that be at the same time that Scotland H was debating bring in these buffer zones that we talked about H to censor any help any prayer outside of bortion facilities so I was on BBC Scotland to H discuss that I was invited on as part of a balance kind of discussion there was an MS a member of the Scottish Parliament on with me however the next day I thought it had gone just fine um next day uh I was sent a clip from West Westminster uh to hear that uh a member of our Scottish government or ruling party the S&P had stood up in our um the UK Parliament to ask why extremists like me were being allowed to be platformed on the BBC and I should never be allowed to be speaking out like this and um it was quite shocking I just hadn't realized um quite that my uh words would be so offensive to people in so much power so I suppose it was a compliment in a sense um but I guess I it did kind of bring home to me the fact that although nothing particularly bad happened as a consequence there was a bit of a Twitter storm and uh we all got a bit of a fright but it did bring home to me the consequence of of one day it could be a little bit more serious um on the 1 of April actually just uh in the upcoming weeks the Scottish government will bring in a a hate crime law H which will be uh make make it very very difficult to have open conversations in Scotland there's a similar one lined up in Ireland and we a different we've been tracking these all over the world in Finland and Mexico all essentially the same thing all essentially modern-day blasphemy laws uh punishing those who are kind of Heretics against whatever the kind of social Orthodoxy or sexual Orthodoxy is of the day H and so my country is being that in on 1 of April it's very concerning um it would put people in prison for up to seven years if they were say to say something uh that to be stirring up hate um which we don't really know what that means what's going to be defined as hatred in those contexts so I am aware that there could be a situation one day where uh we are in serious trouble for expressing what we believe whether that's about uh that women and babies deserve better than abortion whether that's about that no child has ever been born in the wrong body or any of these other uh essential truths that need to be heard in society but you know it won't be the first time in history that Christian beliefs have not been legally expressed it would be the first time that Christians have been punished or persecuted for speaking out about truth H so we shouldn't be afraid we're told not to be afraid and uh ultimately sometimes that is the greatest platform for truth after all we had our client py Rasin in Finland I don't know if you've heard her story but she was she as a grandmother and a a long long-standing parliamentarian H she tweeted in 2019 she tweeted a Bible verse and she challenged her own church as to whether they really should have sponsored the pride parade she felt that this was maybe not the right decision for her church to take and as a consequence of that tweet she was on criminal trial as she's been through two rounds the first cour court of appeal and now she's been appealed to the Supreme Court um on charges uh related to hate speech um the charges carry potential prison sentence of up to two years so she's really faced kind of the consequence of what we're speaking about here in terms of Christian censorship in the west but her platform because of that has allowed her to communicate the Christian Gospel across the world and many people have written to her saying you know I used to think that all Christians were bigots but then I heard you talk about your story and I learned more about the Bible and I've you know come to discover it for myself uh she's heard that for many many people um from the LGBT community as well who H were you know the ones who would have been deemed to have been offended by her Bible verse tweets so can be encouraged I think that uh when these things happen when these storms occur uh it might actually be an opportunity to be able to spread that message of Truth and hope and somebody just might hear it that needs to hear it so yeah I think we should not be afraid well do you have anything last to say I think that was a very good uh last question I thought that was a very good last question I you think but I [Laughter] thought closing you have anything else to say well I think yeah I I came at this originally as a pro-choice person I you know 95% of our country is pro-choice that's what I grew up with how much 90 95% 95% so it's it's a tiny minority and I was in the majority when I went to medical school and and I chose to join chose to join the minorities which yeah might be politically strategic in some cases but not in this case um I I think it's it's often a position that's not even heard and not even considered it's easy to just say you know pro- choices are bigoted they want to control women you know all this all these sort of talking points and for me it was really just hearing hearing our side out that let me change my mind and so I'm sure you know listeners of your podcast are generally open-minded people and people who understand censorship well and are open but I guess you know some of them might be pro-choice and they might think it's obvious that we shouldn't you know control women or force them to give birth or however they want to phrase it and I think all I say is just look at the arguments a bit more have an open mind ask your friends what they think you might be surprised some of them are pro-life and I really think if we go back to human equality the fundamental question is this who counts as a human being does it matter how intelligent they are how big they are how old they are how independent they are is that ever something that we base people's worth on do we base anyone else is worth on how independent they are how big they are how developed they are and the answer is no and and therefore this is not about controlling women this is not about religion this is just about human equality and who counts and I think if we look at the scientific consensus then we have to accept it whether that makes us popular or not and so I'd encourage people listening to do the same thank you guys very much much appreciated nice to meet you and good luck with uh your new life together thank you thank you so much Tammy we love we love being be able to speak to you oh love me too [Music]

Channel: Tammy Peterson

Views: 3,921

Keywords: Tammy Peterson, Tammy Peterson Podcast, Jordan Peterson's Wife, CalumMiller, LoisMiller, UKadvocates, pregnancy, abortionpolicy, bioethics, UniversityofOxford, RoyalCollegeofPsychiatrists, AllianceDefendingFreedomUK, mentalhealth, humanrights, unbornrights, sexualrevolution, motherhood, singlemothers, community, parenting, prolife, UKabortionlaw, pronatalistpolicies

Id: _BSJJ-IIi9I

Length: 92min 27sec (5547 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024