We argue that the Catholic Church's stance against IVF is counter to both scriptural interpretations and human biology, which imply life begins before conception. We explain how prominent Catholic figures and the Bible itself points to life starting in the womb, not at conception. We also highlight how identical twins and chimeras reveal flaws around the conception argument. Ultimately, we predict the existential threat of declining fertility will push the Catholic Church to accept IVF, allowing many potential lives to come into existence.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Biblical quotes do do a fairly good job of arguing that abortion is murder, but they actually also do a fairly good job at arguing that talking somebody out of IVF is also murder.

So the Jeremiah 1 5 says before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, which implies life begins before. For conception, just as we say, we also believe we can determine truth through investigations of nature and reality. After a sperm fertilizes an egg, that can split. And that's where identical twins come from.

, that would mean the human soul splits. But even more damning than that, human chimeras can also form. This is when two fertilized eggs end up combining together into a single human being if you look historically you look at people like Augustine of Hippo, . Said that the soul enters a developing [00:01:00] fetus, 40 days after it begins developing . Thomas Aquinas had the same view. I didn't realize how recently the Catholic church had made a switch on this issue, I think a lot of Americans, I did know how recently regular Protestants had made a switch on this issue, this was seen as like a weird Catholic thing,

Simone Collins: it's a weird Catholic thing that had only been around for about a hundred years. .

Malcolm Collins: When you look at studies that show that half of all men could be infertile without IVF by 2060, this is really important when you're talking about the future of the Catholic church.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be joining you for today's very, very spicy topic. And it is one that we have avoided going into detail on, mostly because I was like, let's just like not engage with it.

I don't want to create a fight within the pronatalist community or anything like that. And the group that we would be arguing the most against [00:02:00] within this episode are Catholics. And we love, don't worry. We love it. That's actually difficult for me because every religion, I have never. There's, there's no other religion where I have literally, really liked every single person I have ever met from that cultural group, except Catholics.

Catholics, I've literally liked every Catholic I have ever met. And

Simone Collins: yet

have you met an unpleasant Mormon? I'm sorry, but like I doubt that this is

Malcolm Collins: possible. , I, I have met unpleasant Mormons. Oh, that's too bad. Bad. There are some more progressive Mormons, which are really sort of statusy in a way that I find kind of annoying and cringe.

Oh. But generally I like Mormons a lot too. I, I, I'm giving you that. Okay. Okay. But, I've just never personally, and I think it's because I've met less Catholics than I've met Mormons, and that's why maybe I have this perception. Fewer. If you can

Simone Collins: count it, it's fewer, and if you can't, then it's more or less.

Of course, of course. Sorry, I

Malcolm Collins: gotta, you know. [00:03:00] So, so, I am starting that episode, this episode with that, because the other thing I need to admit going into this is I approach Catholicism with a lot of bias against it as a religious group, specifically for, it's an aesthetic bias. It's a bit like if I went to someone and I liked all of these people, but they all had like, Runes carved in their head and stuff and like, Oh, that sounds kind of cool.

If they looked like heretics from Warhammer 40k. So you might be being like, come on, Catholics don't come off that way. Unironically, the Catholic aesthetic and perspective is like somebody went in to Indiana Jones and the last crusade and they're just like, yes, grab the big golden mug. That's the right one.

Which one is it? You must choose. [00:04:00] But choose wisely. For as the true grail will bring you life, the false grail will take it from you.

I'm not a historian. I have no idea what it looks like. Which one is it? Let me choose.

It's more beautiful than I'd ever imagined.

This certainly is the cup of the king of kings. Is happening to me? He chose poor.

Be made out of gold. That's the cup of a carpenter.[00:05:00]

you have chosen wisely.

Malcolm Collins: Because my perception, like when I read the Bible is like, Jesus is not about like a guy on a giant.

Throne framed in, like, golden outlays telling people what's true and what's not true. yoU know, I, I look at something like the Pope Stephen VI and the cadaver syndrome. You know, he put a dead pope on trial and had him hung, and I'm like, Come on, this is not like, this system for deciding who God is talking through does not seem like it's working to me.

It's not selecting very well. It's not selecting very well. Well, so then, then people will be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not all Catholic churches are like these big ostentatious displays. And it's like, yeah, you know. Sometimes, they do big displays of human corpses and bones.[00:06:00]

There's something I'd like to show you, something you might enjoy, as one animal lover to another.

Something wrong, Mr. Ventura? course not! This is a lovely room of death! Take care now, bye bye then.

Malcolm Collins: It's like, you know, you're in this. Why human bones? Why the corpse cathedrals?

you looked at our caps recently? Our caps? The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them? What? No. A bit. They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them? I don't, uh[00:07:00]

Are we the baddies? We should be able to hold them at this point here, at least for a few hours. Then why skulls then? What? Why skulls? I mean, what do skulls make you think of? Death, cannibals, beheading. Um, pirates. Oh, you haven't been listening to ally propaganda. Of course they're gonna say we're the bad guys.

But they didn't get to design our uniforms.

Malcolm Collins: I need to say here it's actually kind of cool, in like a 40k, like, grimdark way. Like, it appeals to my young, goth self, and it appeals to my, like, historian self.

But there's another part of me that is like, yeah, but You know, this person, he's like, you know, it's like a person comes up to me, but he looks like a 40k like Warhammer cultist, and he's like, hi, I'm Father Frank, the bloodthirster[00:08:00] and I have very pleasant things to say to you, and I'm like, yeah, but you know, all the ornateness, because from our perspective, right?

Any wealth, especially unearned wealth is a sign of sin, like indulging in unearned aesthetic pleasures within our reality is a sign of sin and to indulge in that within a religious center is like marking it as a house of sin,

I say all this because I think it's really important to note when I am approaching a topic with an extreme amount of personal bias, which in this case I feel I am.

Malcolm Collins: Let's get back to the topic at hand because this is really interesting to me.

So first, it's important to understand our perspective on when life begins in relation to IVF and perspective and the history of the Catholic perspective, as well as the mainstream conservative perspective in the U. S. Mm hmm.

We as humans are [00:09:00] responsible every time I make a decision, every time I make a choice for everything that happens within the timeline or reality that is created because of that choice. So. If I stop a sperm from fertilizing an egg the moment before it fertilizes that egg, or I squash the fertilized egg the minute after that egg was fertilized, to me those are two acts of exactly equal moral import.

Whereas to a Catholic, one is killing a human life and the other is merely just generically immoral. Whereas to me, they, they do not seem particularly different. But to me, this also means that you are technically ending a human life if a couple intended to have a child and you talk them out of having that child.

So, anything that prevents a human child from coming into existence, because it is the actual human children that have, like, the moral weight to them, right, like, these actual conscious entities you are responsible for ending that life. So, life, starts as

a spectrum of [00:10:00] potentiality. Yes. And the more potentiality that has to becoming an actual child, the closer that is to an actual life.

But why?

They are replacements of people who had their existence consumed. By denizens of the crimson world

Malcolm Collins: so first we need to get into what Catholics actually think and what conservatives actually think in the U. S. because a lot of people are just not up to date with their history on this subject. Well, yeah.

Simone Collins: And it's, it's not just, so I think most people know what Catholics and conservatives think, which is life begins at conception and it's very, very bad to

Malcolm Collins: destroy any I might be surprising you here.

This is what they think today. Yes. Yes. So if you go to the 1970s and you look at the National Conservative Conference where they did a poll on this more conservatives were pro abortion than were anti abortion. This is because Catholics used to be mostly a Democrat thing. The conservative party [00:11:00] became anti abortion.

Primarily to recruit Catholics after a failed electoral cycle. Oh boy. That was the purpose of it. And they were really focused on making this initiative of states rights. That's how they got their base on board with it, even though their base didn't really care about it. Historically, Protestants never really cared about this.

You know, even Mormons. You can look at what the Mormon teaching is. They're totally pro IVF. So long as it's the husband's semen and the wife's eggs, and you're not using another person. So. Historically, like, Protestants didn't really care about this. Protestants started to care about this and started to flex about this because it began to become associated with conservative identity in the United States.

And people were like, well, this is my team. So this is what I believe. But there wasn't like a doctrinal reason for this. And we'll get to the Bible because this is also really interesting. If you look at quotes from the Bible, but then you can be like, yeah, but. Catholics have always been pro this, haven't they?

Hmm. No, they have not. This is really interesting. So, if you look historically[00:12:00] you look at people like Augustine of Hippo, a really important Catholic theologian of the 4th and 5th century. Said that the soul enters a developing fetus, 40 days after it begins developing if it's a male in 80 to 90 days after it begins developing if it's a female. Thomas Aquinas had the same view.

 Now people would be like, okay, okay, okay. But what does the Bible say on this? Like I have seen that the Bible says abortion is wrong, right? It does say that. It absolutely does say that abortion was wrong.

This perspective that the Catholic Church with a completely logical and morally aligned perspective with the Bible before IVF technology was invented, which is when they took it. So when did the Catholic Church take this perspective? In 1869 was Pope Pius IX when he said delayed animation was wrong and [00:13:00] affirmed immediate insolvent at conception.

And this has been the church's baseline teaching ever since. But this is not like obviously what all great Catholic thinkers ever thought. In fact, the greatest of Catholic thinkers thought otherwise from this perception. Yeah, I guess I've not really

Simone Collins: heard of anything else that Pope Pius IX has done to be fair.

In case you were wondering what he did do, he was the longest serving pope in history, and he oversaw the first Vatican Council, where he affirmed his own papal infallibility. Um, and he is more controversially known for being the pope who issued the Syllabus of Errors,

This was a document that argued that things like the following three statements were errors for Catholics to hold. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.

In the present day, it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. It has been widely decided by law in some [00:14:00] Catholic countries that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.

Basically, it lays out that Catholic countries should not allow non Catholic worship within them, and lays out sort of the idea of the modern Catholic caliphate., so of course this is somebody who we are going to have some moral differences with when you, , look at the world from our perspective

Malcolm Collins: yes, which is important when we're talking about like Problems with how popes are chosen and the adult popes. But anyway, let's get

Simone Collins: back. He's not like famous for, you know, his various liaisons, female liaisons, et

Malcolm Collins: cetera. No, let's, let's let, oh, did he have a problem with females?

Simone Collins: No, I'm just saying like other popes were worse than him for sure.

In terms of like actually being fairly. You know, good

Malcolm Collins: practicing religion. So, so, now we're going to talk about actual biblical quotes. And, and [00:15:00] again, these actual biblical quotes do do a fairly good job of arguing that abortion is murder, but they actually also do a fairly good job at arguing that talking somebody out of IVF is also murder.

So, let's talk about them.

Simone Collins: Well, Malcolm, your, your attempt to use Bible quotes to argue with a Catholic on the issue of when life begins is kind of like a civil law lawyer arguing about law with a common law lawyer.

Malcolm Collins: So, to understand what she's saying here, civil law and common law are two of the most common law systems used in the world today.

Civil law says that law is what is in the text, whereas common law says that law is based on previous court decisions. We in the U. S. actually have a combination of both legal systems, but typically you're using one or the other. So, let's go through some of these quotes. Okay, Jeremiah 1 5. Quote, Before, before, underline here, I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and [00:16:00] before you were born, I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to nations, Okay, now Paul in Galatians 1 15 says, that God, quote, had set him apart before he was born.

Okay, so repeatedly in the Bible, what you're going to say, and this is what's really interesting. So the Jeremiah 1 5 is like really the most damning because it says before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, which implies life begins before. For conception, just as we say, now, if you look at other quotes, I'm just going to go through, like, all of the quotes used to argue that, that life begins at conception, but are really more just arguments against abortion, right?

, Isaiah 44, 24 talks about God as your redeemer who formed you in the womb. Except, again, we know from Jeremiah 1. 5 that God knew us before he formed us in the womb, so you're not arguing anything by saying you're a redeemer who formed you in the womb.

Or you could say in Plasm 139, [00:17:00] For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb, you saw my unformed substance In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as of yet there was none of them. So, he was in God's book before he was conceived.

Okay, next, Genesis 2. 24. Therefore, man shall leave his father and mother and be joined. to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Exactly what we would say, given the system where life begins before conception. So this is really interesting. This seems to be backed up by the Bible. Okay. Being Protestants and Catholics don't do this as much as Protestants do, but being Protestants, we also believe that God inscribes truth in nature and in reality, and we can determine truth through [00:18:00] investigations of nature and reality.

Okay, so this is what I mean by this is God's not like stupid, right? Like again, we are not like traditional Christians, but we believe that God's intention was carved into the Bible for us to study and learn from if he very intentionally has the Bible multiple times. say life begins before conception and never once has it say life begins at conception, then my read is that that would have been a very easy thing for God to put in the Bible if he thought, if that's what he intended to say.

It would have been a very easy thing for multiple iterations of the Christian tradition to pick up and yet really only Catholics picked this up for a long time. And it would have been a very easy thing for early Catholic theologians to pick up and yet they didn't pick it up. So it seems pretty clear to me that God did not intend that.

He was trying to tell us, and I, again, I believe that God reveals himself over time through [00:19:00] science and through understanding our physical reality, we can better understand God. So, now let's talk about this. So Catholics will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but let's play it safe. You know, the first time a biologically and genetically distinct human being exists is when a sperm fertilizes an egg, and therefore, we should say, That is when ensoulification happens.

So, so, you know, when you talk about these other people, they basically say the soul enters the fertilized egg later. Except God could have made us that way. Some species work that way. Humans don't work that way. Because after a sperm fertilizes an egg, that can split. And that's where identical twins come from.

If we go with the other interpretation, that would mean the human soul splits. But even more damning than that, human chimeras can also form. This is when two fertilized eggs end up combining together into a single human being [00:20:00] with the DNA of two people. Some famous cases around this was like one woman had her children taken from her or something.

Because they genetically weren't her children and nobody could find out why and she's like, no, I swear I had these kids. They're genetically mine. And it turned out she was a chimera between her and her technical sister where her reproductive organs were actually biologically her sister's reproductive organs who they had merged together in the womb.

Now, why did God allow this to happen in humans when this doesn't necessarily happen in all biological life forms? Because he was trying. tell us something and the implications of getting this something he's trying to tell us are very important and of increasing importance, right? Because it means that, so, so let's talk about why they're very important for Catholics specifically.

So when we talk about things like falling fertility rates, okay, that's one thing. But when you look at studies that show that half of all men could be infertile without IVF by 2060, [00:21:00] this is really important when you're talking about the future of the Catholic church. Okay. When you look at something like Catholic majority countries in Europe having a fertility rate of, can you guess what it is, Simone?

Simone Collins: 1. 9?

Malcolm Collins: 1. 3. No. Oh my gosh. It's really low. Wow. So, so, like, right now, Catholics are headed towards extinction. Now we may see conservative Catholic traditions outpace progressive Catholic traditions, but here's the interesting and great thing about Catholicism. When we argue and we say all this, and this is probably going to be what I'm titling the episode, I think Catholics are going to change their mind about this.

Because the Catholic Church isn't stupid. It took these positions because they were the morally correct positions when they were taken. Before IVF Existed when they were fighting against abortion. Yes, they were fighting for a moral position. That was absolutely correct. The lady couldn't [00:22:00] understand any other position.

And so, of course, they were going to take this position. But now that IVF does exist and they are preventing human beings from coming into this world. It's a very, very different argument with very different implications. And it's something that their early thinkers didn't believe. It's something that the Bible doesn't support.

So yeah, they'll change their minds on this. They, you know, it's the way that they'll survive and they're not stupid. And Catholics are good, intelligent people. They make up, as I pointed out, other than. Conservative Jews I, I, I point out multiple times. If you talk about the conservative intellectual class, the vast majority is Catholics or Jewish in ancestry which, which to me, you know, it adds a lot to the conservative movement to have this, but here's where this gets more interesting.

So Simone and I, before we did an episode on this, we're like, there's gotta be something we're missing. Right, right.

Simone Collins: And there was this one of my former classmates, in school actually then went on to [00:23:00] become an ordained Catholic priest. So like, this is extremely helpful. We're like, okay, we have someone on the inside.

Let us email him and hopefully he'll get back to us. And he did. And he was very generous to take time to speak with us and give us both what he, he called sort of the simple answer and the more complicated hard answer. Both of which were incredibly helpful with, you know, the, the simple answer basically being.

If you have a doubt about when human life begins, you should err on the side of the earliest possible moment.

Malcolm Collins: But that doesn't work with our

Simone Collins: argument. Yeah, because we're, we're erring on the side of the earliest possible

Malcolm Collins: moment. We believe it begins before conception, but continue.

Simone Collins: But in that way, I guess, and this is going to become ironic very soon, he's talking about the earliest possible moment in a material sense, when you have a material fertilized embryo.

The deeper metaphysical answer appears to be related to a split in materialistic thinking that took place around the time of Rene Descartes.[00:24:00] So, The, my, my former classmate and our friend briefed us on Aristotle's four causes which I wasn't familiar with and Malcolm wasn't either, but there are, according to Aristotle, four causes to a thing.

There is the material cause that from which as a constituent present in it, a thing comes to be. So bronze or silver are causes of the statue and the bowl. Then there's the formal cause, the form, i. e. the pattern. The form is the account of the essence and the parts of the account. Then there's the efficient cause.

This is the source of the primary principle of change or stability. So, the man who gives advice, the father of the child, the producer. is the cause of the product and the initiator of the cause is a cause of what changed. So like the cause is sort of why, why it happened, I guess, the efficient cause. And then there's the final cause, which is something's end, what it is for[00:25:00] in its cause as, you know, health is the cause of walking according to some people.

So. The first two causes are pretty sort of like literal and materialistic. But our friend argued that the second two causes are sort of what got thrown out with the bathwater after Descartes very much changed philosophy around. a sort of mathematically based metaphysical understanding of reality, that we cannot trust anything that we cannot prove mathematically, that we cannot see, that we cannot touch.

And with that change in philosophy, a lot of really important metaphysical stuff was lost. So essentially, uh, the, he's arguing the efficient cause and the final cause we're lost in that. And that's sort of where like the soul of a person comes in their essence, their humanness, which doesn't have like measurable human elements was lost.

So people, you [00:26:00] know, trying to. to throw the argument of the Catholic church of when life begins into these materialistic terms is kind of losing the point in the first place, according to this argument, because it is not actually about materially what's happening and when this is about the human soul.

This is about when something becomes human and going back to the original argument, which

Malcolm Collins: is what it looks like when you're looking at the original works on this continuum. Right.

Simone Collins: And, and when it comes back to that original, much simpler argument, If we're not sure, and we can't be sure, because this is all stuff that is not, you know, material, this is all very complicated, we should have the biggest preponderance of caution possible.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, which again would have us say, yeah, so you're killing kids, and you're killing lots of kids, given the increasing fertility decline, and as the fertility decline increases, you're killing more and more kids every year. Like, I understand why they took the original perspective, but here's where it gets really interesting.

So this entire argument, you know, was based on Aristotle. The

Simone Collins: original, yeah, like this, this, this [00:27:00] idea of the formal and efficient cause also being really important beyond material mathematically

Malcolm Collins: proven things.

Simone Collins: .

All of his stuff was Aristotelian because he's basically saying that there was like a pre Descartes and post Descartes era and the pre Descartes era, at least. When it came to like modern philosophy, as we're familiar with it was driven by Aristotelian.

Before we go further,

Malcolm Collins: I gotta ask Claude a question. Yeah, Aristotle's thought lifed in the beginning until 40 days after for boys and 80 days after for girls.

So Aristotle does not believe that his theory agrees with this preacher. Sorry.

Simone Collins: What?

For boys it's so much earlier, whereas like in reality, you know, like a, a zygote, like it starts out as like. you know, the default blank is like female and like, you have to go through more steps to become a boy. So like, I guess if you're trying to like make a scientifically based version of this, it should be the [00:28:00] boys started 80 days and girls start at 40 days.

Forget that. Because girls, they need their penises to invert. Don't you understand?

Malcolm Collins: He thought it began 40 days after the embryo started developing or 80 days after in the case of a woman.

Well, I don't

Simone Collins: think our friend knew that. No,

Malcolm Collins: he didn't know this, but this is what's interesting. And this is why. Yes. You know, so the Bible doesn't support this. The early Catholic thinkers don't support this. It's a decision that made sense and saved lives when the decision was made, but now likely leads to more death than it helps.

And at the end of the day, the groups that believe it, whatever the case is, if human fertility continues to decline at the rate it has been declining, are going to become extinct. So it's irrelevant what they believe, you know. And this is where we get to the final, another point that he was pointing out, right?

He's like, well, You know, you can't use this technology because it's profane because of like the associations [00:29:00] with it, right? Because it's playing God. Right. Because it's playing God. And this brings me to my two boats and a helicopter. People who don't know two boats and a helicopter. It's a famous sermon which is a guy.

Is praying to God and he says, he's a very pious man. And he says, please save me for this flood. And then a boat comes and he says, Oh no, don't worry. God's going to save me. I've been praying to him. I'm a very pious man. And so the boat leaves and then the next boat comes, he goes, don't worry. You know, God's going to save me.

Don't worry about it. The water's getting higher. He's on his roof, you know, really last chance. A helicopter comes down and he's like, nope, go away. God's going to save me. And then he dies in the flood and goes to heaven. And he's at the pearly gates. And, you know, he asked St. Peter, he goes, Why didn't God save me?

And he goes, what the f**k were the two boats and a helicopter for?

Simone Collins: And You're French, not included in the original sermon, of course.

Malcolm Collins: Not included. No, but I actually think that this is, this is a thing to [00:30:00] spit on God's miracles. To think that you as a human Know what a miracle from God is supposed to look like, and then to turn down, to deny God's miracles from you on his plan for your life, which, which is to have a big, happy, thriving family, which he has told you this, and you have turned down his pathway,

It's sleek. Do you think God is stupid? Do you think he didn't know that I. V. F. wasn't going to be invented? Do you think that if he knew that I. V. F. was going to be invented, he wouldn't have worded things differently in the Bible? Do you think that he wouldn't have had people like Thomas Aquinas, that he wouldn't have had people like St.

Augustine say different things about when life begins? It's almost as if he very intentionally worded things in a way where it could be confused into before IVF technology being used to prevent the wanton abortion and murder of many, you know, [00:31:00] later stage fetuses. Okay, but also, once the technology was invented, be revisited, and then say, Ah, okay, so this is what God meant all along.

And it's just like he's left so many innumerable hints that that was his intention. It is astounding. And then to spit on his miracle, or to act like he didn't expect IVF to be invented, or he didn't know it was going to be invented, it just astounds me.

Malcolm Collins: but worse than that, it's worse than the guy from Two Boats and a Helicopter, because he's not just spitting on God's miracles for him, he is like, Cursing out the helicopter pilot and trying to like pass an amendment to prevent the helicopter pilot from rescuing anyone else.

Simone Collins: That is where, yeah, we kind of draw a line here, right? Is that like, it's one thing to be like, let's be cautious. Let's not, you know, let's not do anything imprudent. It's another thing to impose that on other people. That can be incredibly damaging though. I'm going to take a moment to just give, you know, a fair defense of the Catholic approach here, which is and I think our friend pointed this out on the call.

Like there are [00:32:00] some, you know, amazing at the time innovations that we introduced. That are quite helpful. That can be quite meaningful. And then they have unforeseen consequences that can be quite damaging. And this is where I do think, you know, have approaching technology with caution and observance is important.

And this is why, you know, I think in the end, yes, probably the Catholic church is going to change their stance on this and many other religious organizations probably will as well. But they're not crazy to say, Hey, let's, let's wait until, let's see how this plays out. Although I think we're getting to the point where You know, IVF is, is, is proving to be pretty safe as a bet.

Pretty

Malcolm Collins: reliable. Yeah. So here, now we've got to talk about you know what he said? He's like, yeah, but ultimately you are destroying the, the embryos, which could, if they were implanted in somebody become human lives, right? Right. And this is where I'm like, yeah, but come on. Like I, I personally, I really do not think they believe they are human lives.

I think they use this for the sake of argument, but I think if you said, You can push a button. You [00:33:00] can either destroy 10 embryos or kill a five year old kid. Which button do you press? Every time they're going to destroy the embryos. Even if you made the button, you know, 25 embryos, 50 embryos to save, you know, a, a 10 year old kid, they're going to press that button.

Simone Collins: Because intuitive argument is in favor of the idea of potentiality and a five year old kid obviously has more human potentiality than an embryo. But the potentiality does still

Malcolm Collins: matter.

, I need to remind the audience here that us and Catholics are arguing to try to find out what's truth with the same goal. We are on the same team meanwhile, the antinatalists come in here and they're like, they're looking at this trolley problem we've set up and they're like multi track drifting. But yeah, and, and, and this is, I, I think one of those things are when you look at what they're saying, it just, to me, it doesn't pass, like, a sanity test with these embryos, right?

Malcolm Collins: Like, yes, if you allowed them to develop past [00:34:00] their current stage, every sperm that I emit, if I allowed it to contact a human egg in some way, it could eventually become a human being. If I take this perspective, what I should do is just ejaculate one freeze it, try to take every single one of those little sperms and put it with one little egg.

Simone Collins: It reminds me of that Legally Blonde scene where she's like, well, shouldn't he be responsible for every emission?

 Although Mr. Huntington makes an excellent point, I have to wonder if the defendant kept a thorough record of every sperm emission made throughout his life.

Interesting. Why do you ask? Well, unless the defendant attempted to contact every single one night stand to determine if a child resulted in those unions, he has no parental claim over this child whatsoever. Why now? Why this sperm? I see your point. And for that matter, all masturbatory emissions where his sperm was clearly not seeking an egg could be termed reckless abandonment.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you are [00:35:00] killing

Simone Collins: hundreds of thousands

Malcolm Collins: of full humans with every omission, if you take this perspective, because every one of them has the potential to become a full human being.

Simone Collins: Although, yeah, we will say many religious conservatives have also been very against. Any non-pro

Malcolm Collins: mission. Right. We'll do the Monty Python scene here.

You see, we believe, I'm a Roman Catholic, And have been since before I was born. Because Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a spa is wasted, God gets quite tirade.

Malcolm Collins:

If every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. . When a sperm is wasted, God becomes quite irate, . 'cause you know, it is a logical thing. Yeah. Like this is a logical production.

If you're taking this, life begins a conception approach. Yes. So, like of course [00:36:00] people have come to it before, but it's also. I don't know, from my perspective, kind of silly because I do believe you're choosing between timelines with every decision you make and erasing children when you choose.

But why?

They are replacements of people who had their existence consumed. By denizens of the crimson world

Malcolm Collins: Now this is where it gets more interesting to us.

So people would be like, do you think you are killing humans if you don't end up using all the embryos you created? Right? Now we want to use all the embryos we created. We do think that that is killing humans, but Also, when you take this timeline splitting view, killing humans doesn't have quite the same weight it does within other views, because you are also responsible for everything that happens within the timeline you're choosing.

Let me explain. Right? So suppose I had like 50 kids. I was just like, okay, well then I have to maximize all the kids I can have. And I do [00:37:00] literally everything I can to have as many kids as I have to the extent where it lowers the quality of life of my existing kids and my ability to give them a good childhood and my ability to give them a culture that they want to pass on in the future, and it leads to them not having grandchildren.

Or like abusing their grandchildren in some

Simone Collins: way. So in the end, you're, you're essentially killing potential future generations.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Every decision I make, I'm not just responsible for the one person that creates or doesn't create responsible for all of the ripple effects of that decision. Yes.

Centuries into humanity's future. Yes. I do not get out. Every decision I make, all of the future rests on that decision and everything that could happen rests on that decision. And I am fully responsible for all of that. But this is true, not just for creating an embryo. This is true of getting out of the bed in the morning.

Like people often, you know, like in terms of our personal productivity, I think one thing that really helps us is just getting out of bed in the morning. Some people wake up when the [00:38:00] alarm goes off and they're like, Oh, I could go back to sleep. I'm literally thinking how many. Hundreds of thousands of humans are going to die because I go back to sleep.

Yeah, right. If I do not perform the function I was born to perform, how many hundreds of thousands of people die for every moment of indolence? And of course, being a human, I will sin. To be a human who thinks that you will not sin is to be extremely susceptible to sin. But, um, you know, whether it's drinking, or whether it's the few days where I do fall back asleep, because I'm just feeling that tired.

But, I am responsible for all of the souls. that bear the burden of my sin, and that number is innumerable. And therefore, with every decision I make, it needs to bear an enormous amount of conscious thought from my perspective. And I really cannot be flippant with this stuff. [00:39:00] And so, you know, all of this is really interesting to me, because I think it's really an answer, are you technically killing a human, or are you functionally killing a human?

Right. I understand the technical, like, legalistic argument that you are killing a human if you do not use an embryo or you destroy an embryo. Yeah. But functionally, through not doing that, a little 10 year old boy doesn't come into this world, or a little 10 year old girl who is cute and says, Mama, Dad, I love you.

Emily, what's wrong? I'm the last kid to be born. What if by that time mom and dad don't want me? No way. But I've seen lots of families make promises.

And then break them. Not us. Emily, I will see to it personally that you're not forgotten. You promise, Jimmy? I promise.

Malcolm Collins: And this is something that we Bear every day because we, Simone, could not get pregnant naturally. Yeah. So every one of our kids who I interact with every day, every time they say, data, I love you. They give me this [00:40:00] big hug. They would not exist in this world. If I took this other interpretation or if somebody convinced me of this other interpretation, I would have erased them from the human timeline.

Yeah. And to me, that seems very, very obviously immoral and equivalent to killing them. And, and everything else is just fudging the numbers to get out of the moral weight of the action that you have undertaken. And I understand that many people have taken that action in the same way that many people have had an abortion and killed a human being and like, I don't want to like, really rub it in for them, you know, you killed a human in the same way I don't want to rub it into people who didn't use IVF when they could have, you killed a human or a lot of humans.

But, I, I, I think that it is worth understanding our perspective on this and our larger perspective is like we can evangelize our perspective towards Catholics but I do not think [00:41:00] that any cultural group, our cultural group for example, should ever use a legal system to try to enforce another cultural group to live by their values.

I believe that that is one of the ways that God shows what's true and what's not true is through which groups proliferate and which groups don't proliferate. And if I tip the scale there, then I have acted sinfully and arrogantly to think that I understand God's plan and God's miracles more than he intended them to unfold. Yeah, it's a very interesting question for us, and I guess the things that really shocked me when I went into this was one, I didn't know the position of the early church on this, two, I didn't realize how recently the Catholic church had made a switch on this issue, I think a lot of Americans, I did know how recently regular Protestants had made a switch on this issue, this was seen as like a weird Catholic thing, like my granddad, who was a conservative congressman, he even told me when I was growing up, he was like, yeah, it was really weird, because he was there during the 70s when this switch happened, and he was like, it was considered like a weird Catholic thing.

Yeah. For my early political [00:42:00] career. And then it became like a mainstream conservative thing. Well, and

Simone Collins: around that time, it's a weird Catholic thing that had only been around for about a hundred years. Yeah. Which in the larger scheme of the church is not that much time in the end.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it was a good thing.

I'm saying it was a good thing when it happened. And I'm

Simone Collins: like, here, here's another example of one of those things, like a technology that can be very, very good in lifesaving at the time, and then has to be dropped because it starts killing people. Can you guess what it is? What is it?

Malcolm Collins: Asbestos.

Simone Collins: Keep in mind at the time when everything was made out of wood, untreated.

Thousands and thousands of people died in fires all the time because there was, you know, things would just suddenly become engulfed in flames. People wouldn't have time to escape. People died and asbestos saved so many lives because it slowed the rate of burning. Of cities of houses you know, asbestos roofs, all this asbestos in buildings was truly [00:43:00] lifesaving.

Asbestos has been banned in, uh, in some, uh, part of the world, but, uh, for here In Quebec, we're telling that you should use more asbestos. Really?

Simone Collins: And then, you know, we got to the point where we had other fire returning chemicals and materials, and we reached a point at which asbestos no longer made sense. We didn't need it anymore. And so we have to get rid of it and carefully remove it from buildings because it is, you know, we now have longer lifespans and now the asbestos is going to get to us.

But the point is that there can be a time. When something saves lives and is very, very good. And then that same thing later on in, in the presence of other technologies and understandings needs to be removed. We have to change. That doesn't mean that asbestos was always bad and always evil. It means that there's a time and a place for things.

And I think that's where we are with the Catholic church and when life begins.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Well, and I, and I would say that you know, was this like just a quick summary, like. God is not an [00:44:00] idiot, okay? God did not say once in the Bible that life begins at conception. Yet he said multiple times it begins before conception.

Yeah. Okay? He has multiple times within the Bible said that baby's lives matter because he thinks abortion is wrong and we think abortion is wrong. You know, after a certain period. Right. But he, he, he also like, he'll say like, Oh, the baby jumped for joy within the womb. Right. Like at a certain trimester or something.

It's like, great. You know, we agree with that. If you kill a woman who's like heavily pregnant, you have killed two people. You have not killed one person because that person would have come to existence. They had a high potentiality. Right. But. If you convince somebody to not have a kid, you have also killed somebody.

Right. So, so, and God coded our biology. He could have made it so identical twins didn't exist. He could have made it so human chimeras didn't exist. And yet he coded that into our biology. The things do not happen by accident. I think if you look at God's plan, whether it's the Bible or human biology, or even the original arguments like Aristotle and stuff like [00:45:00] that, he has made his will imminently clear.

And I really am looking forward to the day when and again, I, again, no animosity towards Catholics, this is just something that we have like a really strong difference of perception on, but I, I, I hope and I genuinely believe that the Catholic Church is going to change its perception on this which will lead to innumerably more humans who are waiting to come into existence, coming into existence.

Simone Collins: Fingers crossed

 I don't know.

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