JustPearlyThings - August 01, 2023


He Was Pro Abortion Until He Uncovered This Fact


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

191.2331

Word count

1,937

Sentence count

153

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak to Dr. Callum Miller about his journey from being pro-choice to pro-life, and why he thinks a baby in the womb should have the same rights as a child born alive.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 What up, guys? Welcome to the Just Pearly Things YouTube channel, and welcome to The
00:00:05.460 Sit Down, where I bring on guests for one-on-one interviews. Today, I have a special guest,
00:00:11.900 Callum Miller. Welcome to the show.
00:00:14.200 Thank you.
00:00:15.200 So, you're a doctor, and you do research, and have done for eight years on abortion.
00:00:22.720 Pretty much, yeah.
00:00:23.880 So, tell me, when did you—what got you into that?
00:00:27.860 It's a good question. Like, as you probably have realized living here, abortion is not a big issue in the U.K., for the most part.
00:00:34.220 Nothing like it is in America. But as a doctor, you kind of come into contact with it a bit more.
00:00:40.000 You have to figure out, what do I think about this? Do I want to be involved in this in any way?
00:00:43.420 So, you kind of come into contact. Like I said last time I was on, one in three women has an abortion, so it's a common thing.
00:00:49.400 And I went to medical school pro-choice. I didn't think—I thought that, like, late abortion is bad, like most people do.
00:00:55.980 But early abortion, I was like, what's wrong with it? That's fine. 0.99
00:00:58.800 And so, that's what I was like when I went to medical school.
00:01:02.000 But then gradually, over time, seeing the reality of embryology, seeing the reality of abortion, seeing the impact on women, seeing the impact on society, I changed my mind.
00:01:12.020 The evidence was convincing. The arguments were convincing.
00:01:14.420 And so, I ended up becoming pro-life and thought, hold on, this is crazy.
00:01:19.380 There's, like, 200,000 abortions in this country every year.
00:01:22.160 In America, there's a million abortions every year. 1.00
00:01:24.820 And almost no one is talking about this or thinks this is, like, a big problem.
00:01:28.060 And so, I just felt like I have to speak about it.
00:01:31.240 And so, yeah, I found it a fascinating topic in itself.
00:01:34.280 But I also thought this is a huge problem that so many people in our society come into contact with, suffer from as a result.
00:01:42.100 We're missing so many children as a result.
00:01:44.340 Someone has to say something about this and study it more.
00:01:46.600 And so, I just kind of found myself thrown into it unexpectedly.
00:01:50.580 So, what changed your mind from being pro-choice?
00:01:54.380 Like, what was your understanding of abortion before to what your understanding is now?
00:01:58.280 I guess there's a few things.
00:02:00.400 But the key thing, you know, a lot of it was, I guess, what opened my mind to begin with was thinking about the impact on women.
00:02:08.940 Like, we know that this is bad for women's mental health. 1.00
00:02:11.260 It causes increased risks of suicide, anxiety, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, et cetera.
00:02:16.200 It caused so many problems apart from that just for women. 1.00
00:02:19.420 But then, for me, fundamentally, it was about human equality.
00:02:22.840 When I looked at the literature on this and debated this in philosophy and things at university,
00:02:28.280 you really only get two positions in ethics.
00:02:31.140 You get pro-life people and then you get people who think abortion is fine and infanticide is okay.
00:02:36.900 Because what they say is, well, it's not really a person because it doesn't have the right mental capacities yet.
00:02:42.920 And so, it's only when the baby gets real mental capacities like an adult or like a child that it becomes a person and has the right to life.
00:02:50.300 And so, those philosophers say, well, that's also true of newborn babies.
00:02:53.840 Newborn babies can't reason. 1.00
00:02:55.620 They're not like, you know, children or adults. 1.00
00:02:57.800 So, we should be able to kill them as well. 0.99
00:03:00.200 So, I was faced with this choice between like pro-life or infanticide. 0.98
00:03:03.760 And both of them seem kind of extreme, but there's really only two plausible options.
00:03:07.540 And so, like I said, for me, it's fundamentally about human equality.
00:03:11.760 Either you believe that all human beings are equal and have a right to life or not.
00:03:15.340 If not, then that's kind of bad because you're not really, like, you don't really belong super well in the Western world if you don't believe in basic human equality in some sense.
00:03:25.800 And so, then I thought, well, okay, I believe in human equality.
00:03:28.860 That has to be applied to all humans.
00:03:31.680 And then whether a baby in the womb is a human being is just a scientific question.
00:03:35.600 Like, we can't just decide it's a human being.
00:03:38.460 We can't just say it's inconvenient so it's not a human being.
00:03:40.800 We have to look from a biological perspective, from a scientific perspective, is this a human being?
00:03:46.600 And the science on that is completely obvious.
00:03:49.040 Like, it's the first thing you learn in embryology is that a human being begins at fertilization.
00:03:55.200 And so, for me, it was really just a combination of human equality and basic science was the thing that convinced me from an intellectual perspective
00:04:02.260 that this is something that is part of the human family and therefore something we have to protect and speak out about.
00:04:07.420 So, when you say there's only two options, I'm a little confused by that because I think the most common answer I hear is three months.
00:04:16.820 Right, right, right.
00:04:17.820 So, it's, when I say there's only two options, I mean, like, generally that's the case for most people who study this in real depth from an ethical point of view.
00:04:26.960 Okay.
00:04:27.160 So, the average person, absolutely, the most common thing is, like, three months or in England, they often say six months because that's the law in England.
00:04:34.440 You can have an abortion for any reason up to six months here.
00:04:38.660 When I say there's two options, I mean there's two kind of plausible options.
00:04:42.220 So, what most philosophers, whether they're pro-life or pro-choice, have pointed out is that nothing morally significant happens at three months.
00:04:50.120 Like, at three months, it finally looks really like a baby.
00:04:54.760 But, like, it looks quite a lot like a baby much earlier than that.
00:04:58.500 And we also know that what you look like doesn't really affect what you are morally.
00:05:03.260 Some people look more human.
00:05:04.580 Some people look less like an average human.
00:05:06.220 But they all are worth the same.
00:05:08.500 They all have the same rights.
00:05:09.680 That's what human equality is about.
00:05:11.240 So, yeah, many people would say three months.
00:05:13.940 But when you ask them what changes at three months to make this morally significant, what makes this a valuable human being at three months, it's very rare that they could give you an answer.
00:05:23.640 I think the most common things I hear are, like, heartbeat.
00:05:27.300 I hear brain waves.
00:05:31.880 I don't know.
00:05:32.240 Destiny has some roundabout.
00:05:33.780 I can't remember what he talks about, but there's some roundabout argument where it's, like, mental capacity in some way.
00:05:40.560 So, could you go through, like, the stages of development from, like, conception to birth, basically?
00:05:49.140 I will try my best.
00:05:50.140 Yeah.
00:05:50.460 So, there's a lot in there.
00:05:51.520 So, the heartbeat is probably the first kind of recognizable thing that occurs.
00:05:57.540 And that's typically thought to be about three weeks after fertilization.
00:06:01.720 So, super early on, most abortions take place significantly after that. 0.88
00:06:06.320 So, most abortions would, you know, take place on a baby that has a heartbeat pumping blood around.
00:06:11.380 Some people think it's even earlier, 16 days.
00:06:14.360 The University of Oxford recently suggested it might be that early.
00:06:17.240 So, it's super, super early.
00:06:18.180 So, there's a heartbeat at three weeks.
00:06:21.060 Three weeks at the latest, probably.
00:06:22.860 It might be earlier.
00:06:23.580 When are abortions most common?
00:06:25.860 So, they typically take place towards the end of the first trimester.
00:06:30.080 So, more like seven, eight, nine kind of weeks.
00:06:32.280 Okay.
00:06:32.760 Yeah.
00:06:33.600 Some a bit earlier, some a bit later.
00:06:35.260 But, yeah.
00:06:35.660 Most of them are around the middle to the end of the first trimester.
00:06:38.900 Okay.
00:06:39.160 So, yeah.
00:06:40.520 After that, you get four to five weeks, the baby starts moving by itself.
00:06:45.140 It will kind of move its head to begin with and its arms and legs.
00:06:48.780 At six weeks, you can record brain waves from the baby.
00:06:52.080 And then at seven weeks, it can hiccup and it can suck and swallow.
00:06:56.880 At eight weeks, the baby practices breathing.
00:06:58.820 Really?
00:06:59.240 Yeah, yeah.
00:06:59.440 So, seven weeks, it can hiccup and swallow.
00:07:02.240 Wow.
00:07:02.640 Eight weeks, it will practice breathing, but it's in fluid, so it won't be breathing air.
00:07:08.840 And by eight weeks, they estimate that 90% of the structures in the human body with a name are there.
00:07:16.340 So, like, you know, your heart, your femur, your lungs, whatever.
00:07:20.720 Like, all the things in the human body that have a name.
00:07:22.800 At eight weeks, about 90% of those are there.
00:07:25.560 Eight weeks.
00:07:27.200 So, there's a huge, you know, load of development really, really early on.
00:07:31.580 At 10 weeks, when pain kind of is possible and when consciousness is possible is pretty controversial because we can never really know for certain.
00:07:41.400 Right.
00:07:41.920 But the world's leading researcher on fetal pain, who is pro-choice, he says, like, women should have the choice to have an abortion, but we have to be honest about fetal development.
00:07:50.940 He actually changed his mind a couple of years ago and said pain is probably possible from about 10 weeks after fertilization.
00:08:00.200 Some people think it's even earlier, like seven weeks.
00:08:02.740 Some people still say later.
00:08:04.220 But we think, in my view, the most likely thing is that around the end of the first trimester, the baby can start to feel pain.
00:08:10.500 And, of course, it has to be conscious by then as well.
00:08:12.980 Wow.
00:08:13.420 What do you think are some misconceptions about abortion?
00:08:18.100 Oh, man, there's so many.
00:08:19.960 It's tough.
00:08:22.260 Almost everything you see on Twitter, honestly.
00:08:25.000 Like, here's just one random one.
00:08:27.640 So often people will say, okay, late-term abortions after, like, 20 weeks, this is a baby that's pretty much viable.
00:08:33.560 Viability is now around 21 to 22 weeks.
00:08:35.840 They will say that late-term abortions are only ever for these extreme situations, like the baby has a fatal disability and it's going to die after birth anyway, or the mother has an emergency medical situation that needs an abortion.
00:08:48.920 Now, we just know that's not true.
00:08:50.820 There are multiple studies, multiple sets of government data, which show very clearly most abortions after 20 weeks are for social and economic reasons.
00:09:01.580 No way.
00:09:02.360 Yeah.
00:09:03.200 What do they do?
00:09:03.660 They just survey them?
00:09:05.300 So there's a few.
00:09:06.140 So, like, in the UK, for example, the Department of Health categorizes every abortion.
00:09:11.820 So every abortion that's done in England legally, they have to fill out a form that actually has a lot of interesting data on it.
00:09:18.220 And we know that 98% of those abortions are done for so-called mental health reasons, which can mean anything at all.
00:09:24.340 It can mean because the baby's a girl, you can say having a baby girl would affect my mental health, therefore I can have an abortion for mental health reasons. 0.66
00:09:31.800 So mental health is 98% of them in the UK official data.
00:09:36.720 The baby having a disability is about 1.5%.
00:09:39.720 And then about 100 abortions a year are because the woman's life is at risk.
00:09:44.540 So that's like 0.01%, something tiny, tiny.
00:09:49.680 So that is one source of the data.
00:09:51.460 You can just see when all the abortions in the UK take place, what are the reasons they take place.
00:09:55.720 And that shows that the majority after 20 weeks are for mental health reasons rather than, you know, medical emergencies or disabilities.
00:10:03.720 So there are other studies as well, but that's one of the probably the biggest misconceptions.