Syllogist for Life

A Conversation with Scott Klusendorf

Ever since its founding in 2004, Life Training Institute has been training people to make a case for the pro-life view in the public square. LTI’s founder and president, Scott Klusendorf, talked with us about how he trains pro-life apologists by equipping them with arguments from science and philosophy to defend the lives of innocent, preborn human beings.

You focus specifically on apologetics. Can you explain the difference between pro-life activism and pro-life apologetics?

As a pro-life apologist, I’m more focused on making the case for the pro-life view using arguments that will resonate with unchurched people. An activist is more interested in drawing public attention to the evil of abortion in a more dramatic way. Both are vitally important. I don’t pick one over the other; I take a both/and approach. We need to be doing apologetics and we need to be doing activism. They just serve slightly different purposes.

A lot of pro-life people will either give a religious argument like, “We’re made in the image of God,” or say, “It kills a human being.” But those aren’t always effective. What do you see as the areas where Christians are specifically lacking in articulating the pro-life view?

Number one, they don’t know how to bring it down to the one question that really trumps everything else: “What is the unborn?” You can’t answer the question, “Can I kill the unborn?” until you answer the predicate question, “What is the unborn?” And that’s the question most people don’t want to answer.

Joe Biden, two days after assuming the presidency of the United States, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, told the nation that reproductive healthcare, by which, by the way, he means abortion, is something all Americans should celebrate, that it’s good for everyone. But, uh, Mr. President, does “everyone” include the unborn? Is abortion good for them? You see how he simply assumes the unborn aren’t human? That’s what a lot of abortion advocates do, and I think a lot of pro-life Christians, instead of challenging that faulty assumption that the unborn aren’t human, simply ride along with it.

So the critic says something like, “Why don’t you trust women to make their own personal decisions?” And right away pro-lifers get defensive. “Oh, we love women; look at our pregnancy centers! Look at the fact that we adopt kids! Look at the fact that we care about women!” Stop right there. You just bought the premise of the objection, that somehow abortion is related to how much we care. Would you ever argue that we ought to trust women to make their own decisions about roughing up a two-year-old? No! They only argue that way with the unborn because they assume the unborn aren’t human. So that’s the first mistake.

The second mistake people make—they don’t understand the underlying worldviews that are in play in the abortion debate. If you’re talking to someone with a naturalistic worldview, talking about humans being made in the image of God strikes them as utterly foreign. Their worldview says that we came from nothing and we’re caused by nothing; humans are cosmic accidents. To talk about the Imago Dei in that kind of worldview doesn’t resonate with them.

You focus on three steps. You already talked about “What is the unborn?” Can you also walk me through how you specifically train with the questions, “What is the unborn?” “What makes us valuable?” and “What is our duty?”

There are two competing worldviews at play here. The first is what we call the endowment view of human value. The endowment view says that you and I are valuable because we’ve been endowed by nature with our dignity; that is fundamental and is not granted by the state. The competitor view is what we call the performance view of human value. And that says that being human is nothing special; what you have to have is an acquired trait that you can immediately exercise, something like self-awareness or maybe the ability to feel pain, or the ability to think through complex problems. And until you can immediately exercise those functions, you are not a subject of rights. You may be a human being, but you’re not a person with rights.

Questions about fundamental things like, “What makes humans special?” “What is the nature of human beings?” “What is the nature of the universe we live in?”—these are all what we call metaphysical or ontological questions, and you cannot avoid those questions in the abortion debate. It is very typical for abortion advocates to call the pro-life view inherently religious because we argue that humans have intrinsic value by virtue of the kind of thing they are. The problem is, the pro-choice worldview is equally religious because both sides are asking the same question: “What makes humans valuable in the first place?” That is inherently a religious question. There’s no avoiding it. Pro-choicers argue you’re only valuable if you can function a certain way. Pro-lifers argue that you are valuable because of the nature you have. If the pro-life view is disqualified for being religious, so is the pro-choice view. So that’s really where the debate is.

What I do with pro-lifers is to train them first to focus on the three most important words in pro-life apologetics. Word number one: syllogism. A syllogism is simply a couple of premises followed by a conclusion, and pro-lifers have a syllogism. The second most important word is syllogism. I think you can guess what the third one is going to be. Syllogism, syllogism, syllogism.

If pro-lifers don’t focus like a laser beam on their syllogism, people will change the subject on you. It happens all the time. Pro-lifers start to win the argument, and people change the subject. The way we bring them back to the argument is to focus on our syllogism. So here is the pro-life syllogism. Premise one: “It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.” Premise two: “Abortion intentionally kills innocent human beings.” Conclusion: “Therefore, abortion is wrong.” It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings; abortion does that; therefore, it’s wrong.

I think about all of the common arguments we hear, like, “Oh, but what about those unwanted foster kids?” So should we then go right back to, “Okay, but is it wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings?”

You keep going back to what you argue. Let’s say your critics say, “Oh, what about all these unwanted kids in foster care? Are you willing to adopt all of them? If you aren’t, there goes your whole case.”

Oh, really? Let’s go back to my syllogism. How does my alleged unwillingness to adopt a child justify an abortionist intentionally killing one? That’s the issue. Could my syllogism still be a valid and sound argument even if I don’t adopt kids? And the answer is, of course. Now, that doesn’t mean pro-lifers shouldn’t adopt. It just means our argument stands independent of our behavior.

Or they might say, “Oh, you’re against all killing? What about war? What about capital punishment?” Uh, wait a minute; did we argue that all killing was wrong? No, we did not. We argued that it was wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. You’re attacking a straw man. You’re not attacking the argument we made; you’re attacking an argument you’d rather deal with, rather than the one we actually put out.

So by having your syllogism, you keep going back to what you argued and don’t let them get away with nonsense.

Tell me your thoughts on Roe being overturned. Are we going to need to step up our game?

This is a necessary step forward, but it’s not sufficient to declare victory. And the reason is, returning the issue to the states does not mean abortion becomes illegal; you’ll have roughly 22 states that will have significant restrictions on abortion. But here’s the thing—you’ve got another 26 states that are going to go the other way.

So this country is about to get divided down the middle. We need to fight for truth. The days of believing we can leave defense of the pro-life view to some hired professionals that do all the heavy lifting are over. We’re going to have to convince our friends, our churches, our working associates, that the pro-life position is true and reasonable to believe.

And what the pro-life movement is going to learn very quickly once Roe v. Wade is overturned is that our biggest problem is not activist judges. It’s not a biased press. Our biggest problem is that the worldview assumptions that make abortion plausible to millions of our fellow citizens are deeply entrenched in culture, and they’re not going away anytime soon. We’re going to have to step up our game on the apologetics side of things, and that’s what we help people do at LTI.

What’s next for you?

Well, we are working on helping people really summarize their pro-life views in a concise fashion. For example, I wish every politician would memorize a seven-second soundbite when they’re asked about abortion. If I’m a politician, I say this: “I oppose abortion because it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.” And if they keep pressing you, you repeat it, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. You don’t give them a chance to change the subject on you. This is what it means to stick to your syllogism.

We need to convey something that is more than just a soundbite; we also need to convey the moral logic of our view. If I have a minute to defend my pro-life view—a friend asks me, or, you know, my aunt Betty who is from Boston and hates Christians asks me, “Why are you pro-life?”—here’s what I’ll say: “Aunt Betty, I’m pro-life because it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. And the science of embryology is clear that from the earliest stages of development, you were a distinct, living, and whole human being. You weren’t part of another human being, like skin cells on the back of my hand. You were already a whole, living member of the human family, even though you had yet to grow and develop. And you know what else, Aunt Betty? There’s no essential difference between you-the-embryo and you-the-adult that justifies killing you. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying we could kill you then, but not now.”

Notice I cited no Bible verses, but did I communicate biblical truth? The answer is yes.