Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. I'm Mitch Prosser, Vice President of NC Family, joined by our Director of Research and Education, Adamo Manfram.
Welcome to the third episode of The Truths We Hold. In honor of America's 250th birthday and NC Family's 35th anniversary this year, we're taking a deeper look at the foundational truths that have shaped our country and continue to shape the work we do right here at NC Family. On this third episode of The Truths We Hold, we're taking a deeper look at the God-given right to life. This first and foundational principle and right that our framers completely and totally understood was God-given, inalienable. Let's take a look at what that means, both in its origin and then what it means for us 250 years after those framers and founders boldly took this step in the Declaration of Independence.
Damo? Sure, absolutely. I think going back to the Declaration where we started in our first episode is key here, both from the American perspective and our own, because right before they list these three among which include these three rights, they start with appealing to these rights being given by our Creator, that we're created with these inalienable rights. And so, acknowledging that these rights come from the Creator starts from this principle that they aren't from the government, granted by the government, created by the government, or to be taken by the government, but that in fact they come from the higher power of the creator who is and who was before and then are protected by the government.
So, my life is not my parents to decide when it comes into being or when to take out of being any more than yours would be for yours. And that, in fact, the government exists to then recognize life and protect it, not define life, not create life, not create a right to life, but recognize life as created and then protect it as such.
So, this inalienable God-given right to life is the first and foundational right. Without it, most of the others are inconsequential at best because the person who would experience those rights, those blessings, those liberties, those freedoms is not alive.
So, as we work through the right to life and what we stand for here at NC Family, there's obviously a connection to the sanctity of human life. And we talk about being a pro-life organization.
So walk me through that, what it means to truly be a pro-life organization. Sure, absolutely. So as acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, but more importantly from our own beliefs, going back to Genesis, right? Let us make man in our image.
So all human beings are created in the image of our Creator, of our God. And so all human beings have that inalienable, ingrained, by their nature, dignity that comes from God. And that doesn't just apply to people who share in our beliefs, but we would extend our belief in that dignity to all mankind, that we are all created in the image of God, and nothing we do is what brings in that dignity and nothing we do takes away that dignity.
Now, you can do things that would compromise some of your freedoms, committing crimes and such, but your dignity as a human person from conception, when life begins all the way until your death, you're a human being and we treat you as such and should respect you as such and should love you as such.
So as we work through this idea of every life having value and dignity, I think we truly mean that. And there's this push today to put certain parameters, certain aggregates or filters on what lives are more valuable than others. We truly believe that every life created by God has intrinsic value and worth.
So what does that mean then for some of the modern day pushes that we see to evaluate life at different thresholds? Yeah, I think evaluate is a good word to use here.
So we often might hear a phrase quality of life. And so we can talk about quality of life. Living in 21st century North Carolina is definitely going to be a different quality of life than like 19th century Zimbabwe. Air conditioning. Thank you God for air conditioning.
Plumbing, electricity, all kinds of things. Modern quality of life can be very different. But that is not to say the value of life has changed.
So the value of their life and their person is not conditional upon the quality of life, however you're measuring that or attempting to measure that. And even measuring sort of the quality of life can, I think, invites a temptation to an unhealthy view of that. You see this in debates that were had a few years ago on restricting abortion for fetal diagnoses. Like, oh, this child is going to be born with some condition, therefore the quality of life will be less, and therefore the value of life is less, and we can take that life. And bills were passed to try to prevent that from being allowed.
And I think even asking that quality of life, like to think that you can take some extrinsic Perspective and say that if a person has X condition, even if we accept that that diagnosis is accurate, which is a scientific question to be held. Sure. Even if we accept the diagnosis, to still then say that somehow their quality of life, how you really measure that, I think is questionable in itself. But then to extend that to value of life is just unacceptable entirely.
So I know you and I have both talked about this extensively at times, and I've spent a lot of time with the special needs community. And sometimes people in our society who have Down syndrome or things like that, well, their quality of life is not what some would consider to be a good thing. And that's what we hear. My concern with that is: who are we to say what the quality of another person's life is, and then to do that preemptively through genetic screening and testing, those sorts of things. That greatly concerns me.
And to your point, we don't even know that those tests are 100% accurate. And so this preemptive screening may, in fact, be wrong and eliminating killing a life that deserves to exist. and live. Absolutely. I think some of the bills that aim to that, or if you look at there's certain countries in this world who claim to have almost eradicated Down syndrome as if, A, that should be a goal, but B, they say it as if what they've done is they've sort of cured it, which they haven't, even if you think that you should.
But all they've done is genetically identified people, living humans, who were likely to experience that condition after birth and executed them before birth. And again, it's assuming that you can judge the quality of life. And then in addition, it's transferring that into evaluating the life and judging the value of that life, neither of which is reasonable. And then it just opens so many questions about, well, what if we could know how long they're going to live or how much they're going to suffer, which then I think starts opening the door to the other end of this conversation, which is euthanasia and MAID, which is exploding in Canada, for example, in a few states across the nation even.
Well, that's a great point. I love what you said about conception to natural death and every stage in between. We are a pro-life organization. I know you're a pro-life man. I'm a pro-life.
Life man, and as members of our team here at NC Family, we stand strongly, firmly, boldly on being a pro-life organization.
So, let's go to youth in Asia or end-of-life issues. There are states around the country right now who are actively proposing legislation to eliminate life in an untimely way. What then would we say to those people who are encouraging made medical assistance and dying or the death pods in Switzerland and Europe? These things are extremely concerning. What then are we to say to these people and to these people who are struggling with this end-of-life issue?
Yeah, so I think there's a few audiences we might consider on that question.
So, you might have the general population, like, how do we talk about it? What are the policy questions? Human dignity, being pro-life. You have the medical staff who are facilitating these actions, who are willing to be the agent who brings about the end of the life. And then you have the people who are.
Suffering from whatever condition that is causing them to seek out, or unfortunately, even possibly be encouraged to seek out these practices. And in each of those audiences, you might have a different approach, but the fundamental audience, I think, is that last. The person who's being told or is already believing or is thinking for themselves that the thing they're dealing with has somehow brought their life value, to go back to the last points we were making, down to such a level that it's almost negative and that to end it would be better. And that their life, because of their suffering or their condition, or their often it will come down to some sense of their burden on others, is often involved in this, which I guess could be a fourth audience of like, what about the family members in the community around that person? Are they being pressured to think, oh, Steve is suffering so much and it's going to be so expensive to keep them alive or is going to be so burdensome on the family, his parents, his kids, his siblings, and so therefore we should encourage him that it would just be less detrimental to everybody, but that's just cheap.
Everyone's dignity in the whole community because it's saying that his life is dependent on not suffering, which it is not. It's saying that there's no human value to caring for him, which we certainly don't think. We're called to love our neighbors, and I don't want to pretend like his suffering is good because it gives me a chance to love on him, but it is good for me to love on him. In every situation, in every season, we believe that life is a good thing, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of how life gets here, and we could talk about that. We do at times talk about the origin of life and the different exceptions to laws and that sort of thing.
Life is always a good thing. At the very beginning, at the very end, life is always a good thing.
So, if we were to look at the next 250 years, how then do we move forward on life more immediately today with some of the legislation and things that we're working on to that end? But then also, how do we care for life in the next generations? Yeah, I think there are so many things that can come. Into play in the life question. And interestingly, even right now in our time, AI kind of flirts with this question because I think what will be key to us as believers, the pro-life community, the Christian community, is going to be acknowledging what it means to be human and what is human life and why is it valuable and that there's a difference.
Because the more and more we seem to equate the chat bot that can converse with me as almost being as valuable as a friend, but it's not. Like one is human and one is not. And the more we confuse those two things, the more we start evaluating human dignity and human value based on the things they provide for the people around them. And we want to not do that. We want to continue to argue for the inherent intrinsic value of each human person, no matter how they were brought into conception.
Ideally, in the context of a loving family with a mother and a father producing children, conveniently, those will be our next two episodes. But no matter how the life is brought into this world, a human life has value and dignity and should be loved and honored as such. And we must be unwavering in that because it will just be so easy over the next 50 years, never mind the next 250, to start questioning that and evaluating. And especially the more areas that we can start comparing technology and humanity, the more important it will be for us to speak for the unique dignity of the humanity, no matter what comparisons we're making, irrespective on value with the comparisons that we might or might not make with technology. That's good.
So you brought up a very interesting idea in the nuclear family and a mother and a father. Again, more episodes on that. But specifically talking about the origin of life and technology, artificial intelligence, and I don't want to go into androids and that sort of thing, but there's something very real in our present day, and that is in vitro fertilization or IVF. Let's walk through that very quickly on where we are in that process today and what that looks like moving forward. Yeah, absolutely.
I think this is another great area where technology is introducing conversations artificially, quite literally, and going back to both the Declaration and our Christian beliefs coming from Genesis, that God invites us into creation with Him. And in the context, again, ideally and in the fullest, most loving context of marriage between a man and a woman, bringing new life into this world in participation with God's unique creation of the human soul. But it becomes tempting, particularly with modern preferences and priorities of career first, children second. Economics first, family second, starts creating a space in which families or people that want families to think of children as almost a commodity, and then technology making that possible.
So you have IVF, so you can create the child, create the conception outside of even a human body. You can then purchase a surrogate.
Well, you don't purchase the person, but you can hire a surrogate. You can contract to have another woman then carry the child. And so you can go sort of souped nuts from conception to birth, not involved. You paid for it, you hired it, you farmed it out to a certain degree. And we're only a couple chapters from Aldous Huxley, Brave New World at that point.
And what you're doing then is sidestepping all of God's vision and gift of procreation. And you're taking the pro-creative like together with him and making it self-creative. Like, I want to do it on my terms and my way with technology. And every time we separate ourselves from his design, we're going to be complicating things and bringing in incredible risks and compromises. With human dignity and human value, and His plan versus our plan.
And I think all of these things are departing from the path that He wants from us and the tremendous dignity that He bestows on us by inviting us to participate in that in His way. And that's a great way to end this conversation today: the point that the first and foundational right to life comes from God. It is truly an inalienable right. And this God-given right to life also is valued by God. And our team here at NC Family, we are focused on ensuring that the sanctity of human life is at the very top of our list of priorities in the work that we do, in the stand that we take.
And so, a great conversation today. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org.
That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
