Ep. 81 / Abortion, Human Equality and Medicine with Dr. Calum Miller

Abortion is one of those issues where smart, compassionate people can stare at the same facts and walk away with totally different conclusions. And so, in this episode, we slow the conversation down and replaces slogans with careful thinking, real empathy and clear definitions. Dr. Calum Miller is an Oxford-trained medical doctor and philosopher who has published widely on medicine, law, ethics and the beginning of life, and who has taken these arguments into some of the toughest public debates you can imagine. 

We talk about why Dr. Calum believes - life begins at conception - is a scientific statement before it’s ever a religious one. From there we dig into the deepest questions underneath the abortion debate: What makes a human being valuable? Is personhood tied to abilities like consciousness, feeling pain, or rational thought, or does human equality require something more stable than performance? Dr. Miller also lays out three kinds of pro-choice arguments, including bodily autonomy and pragmatic claims about law and safety, then explains how he responds in a way that aims for precision without losing compassion. 

We also explore how listening changes the conversation, how to speak in pluralistic public forums without hiding faith or forcing it, and why human-rights language and medical ethics matter for public policy. If you care about medical ethics, human rights, and how to talk about abortion with clarity and grace, this episode will be meaningful. 

If you'd like to learn more from Dr. Calum Miller you can go to his website and follow him on social media. And please don't forget to share this episode and join the conversation on YouTube! 

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Transcript

Why Abortion Creates More Heat

Brian Stiller 0:10

Welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm Brian Stiller. And today we have a conversation that I think you're really going to want to lean into. Few issues in our time carry more moral weight or generate more heat and less light than does abortion. It touches medicine, law, philosophy, faith, and the most fundamental question of all: what does it mean to be human? And too often the debate gets reduced to slogans and talking points when what we actually need is careful, courageous thinking. And that's exactly what my guest today brings to the table. Dr. Calum Miller is a medical doctor, a philosopher, and a research fellow at the University of Oxford, where he teaches philosophy and has published more than 30 academic papers on medicine, law, ethics, and the beginning of life. He holds his medical degree from Oxford and a master's degree with distinction in biblical studies. He's received prizes from both the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Psychiatrists for his work in bioethics. And he's taken his case into some of the most challenging public forums imaginable, including multiple debates against the CEO of the UK's largest private abortion provider. What I appreciate about Calum is that he doesn't shy away from hearted questions. He engages the best secular arguments seriously and responds with both medical precision and genuine compassion. We're going to talk about life, conscience, science, and faith. And I think you'll find this one stays with you. But also I want to thank you for joining me for this inspiring conversation. Would you share this with a friend? Thank you. And if you haven't done so already, just hit the subscribe button. You can also join the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. Now to my guest, Dr. Calum Miller. Calum, wonderful to have you on Evangelical 360.

Calum Miller 2:15

Thank you for having me.

Brian Stiller 2:16

You have an amazing background, uh quite a pedigree of education, of science. Give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch of who you are so we can better understand.

A Future Doctor Meets The Womb

Brian Stiller 2:28

Sure.

Calum Miller 2:28

Yeah, so I came from a country that is 5% pro-life, so a very tiny minority. Uh I went up to medical school in Oxford quite a few years ago now. Uh and yeah, did medical school for six years, um, became pro-life during that process. Ended up then working in medicine for a little bit, did a bit of evangelism for a bit with uh the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics, so did a lot of apologetics and evangelism talking. Um, and then just a load of doors kept opening up for me to speak about the abortion issue. So I still have this, you know, research position, still do a lot of academic research on the topic, but also do a lot of speaking in many different countries on the topic of abortion, which I never really expected to make my life's kind of issue. My family have never spoken about it. So, how did you migrate into that? Uh it was really being at med school. So I saw what the baby looks like in the womb. I saw that it is a human life, that life begins at conception. This is just a scientific fact. I then saw what abortion does, that it's not just you know a simple procedure to remove a piece of tissue, it's the taking of a human life. Uh and then I just fortunately, because students have a lot of time on their hands, even though they pretend they don't, um, I just spent a lot of time thinking, reading stuff, debating, hearing both sides. And, you know, I think when people have an open mind and hear both sides, I think the pro-life side is way more compelling and convincing. But I think in countries like yours and mine, most people never even get to think about it or hear both sides in a fair context, which is why it's still so widely accepted. But I was fortunate enough that I got given the time and the opportunity to just think and debate with friends, uh, and that convinced me in the end.

Brian Stiller 4:18

That has become that's galvanized into what is your life, your calling, your mission?

Calum Miller 4:28

Very much so. Um, yeah, I lost a few friends doing it and certainly lost some career opportunities, but it's definitely the most fulfilling thing I've ever done is to fight for children who have no voice, to fight for their mothers, their fathers, ultimately to fight for families, because we know that if a family is intact, a child has a much, much better chance in life. If a family is broken apart, that child loses so many advantages as a result. And this is something that we get a bit nervous talking about in the West because we're so familiar with family breakdown. My own family's, you know, uh my parents are divorced as well. So it's it's something that is everywhere. But I think that can make us lose sight of, even though it becomes more obvious, it sort of makes us talk less about how important family really is. But I've just seen that family is valuable, life in the womb is valuable, children are valuable, and there's nothing for me more fulfilling than fighting for that and for trying to give kids the best start in life. And, you know, in the case of abortion, giving them a start in life is really what it's about.

Faith, Equality, And Human Worth

Brian Stiller 5:39

Did Christian faith have anything to do with this?

Calum Miller 5:42

Not a huge amount, strangely. I mean, I think Christianity does teach very clearly about abortion. Um so, you know, in if you look at the earliest church teaching, even within the first century, the Didache, which is sort of one of the maybe the earliest Christian document we have outside the Bible, written within the lifetime of Jesus' disciples, it explicitly says, you shall not murder a child by abortion. It's very strong language, language that we might feel uncomfortable about, but that's what the earliest Christians said about it. So, of course, the Bible says a lot as well about life in the womb, Psalm 139, it says, You knitted me together in my mother's womb, and so on. The Bible has a lot to say about it. The church has always had a lot to say about it. Judaism at Jesus' time had a lot to say about it. Um, but for me, it wasn't really a big part of it. It was really just looking at when does life begin? Does are all human beings equal? Because if all human beings are equal and life begins at conception, then we have to say that that baby in the womb is also equal. So for me, it was kind of coming from I grew up very kind of politically liberal. Um, and although it's not quite fair to say that political liberals have a monopoly on compassion and caring for the vulnerable, it's certainly a big emphasis in political kind of progressivism and liberalism. And for me, that was a big part of you know, my growing up at university. I was very much wanted to focus on who are the most vulnerable people in society that need a voice, that need support, that need extra protection. And it was really coming from that perspective that made me see that, okay, if we believe in human equality, we believe in protecting the most vulnerable, who could be more vulnerable than a voiceless, powerless baby that is totally at the mercy of somebody else? And so for me, that just gave me, you know, an incredible opportunity and privilege, uh, but also a huge duty to fight for them.

Three Pro-Choice Argument Categories

Brian Stiller 7:51

What are the major questions that the pro-choice people would advance that you have to wrestle with?

Calum Miller 8:01

I think it's easy to categorize it into three main areas. So there are three kinds of argument for abortion, but each of them has a lot of different arguments within those. So the first tactic is to just say it's not a human or it's not alive or it's not a person, in some way, kind of undermining the moral importance of the child. And that could be just scientific ignorance, like saying it's not alive, or it could be a very philosophically sophisticated argument about yes, it's a human being, but it's not a person in the philosophical sense, and so it doesn't have the same rights as everyone else. So denying the kind of status of the child is the first kind of argument. The second says, well, maybe it is a human being, and suppose it is a person and it has all the same rights as you and me, it still doesn't have a right to sort of force the mother to look after it. So even if it's a child, these people say, the mother fundamentally has the choice whether the baby can live or die, even if it's a human being and a person and a child. So it's kind of the bodily autonomy arguments. Um, and then the third category of argument says, well, even if abortion is morally wrong, you know, the mother doesn't have a moral right to do it, and it is a person, and abortion is a bad thing and morally, you know, the wrong choice, it should be legal just because politics should be liberal in general, or because if you ban abortion, then women will die from getting back alley abortions. These kind of practical arguments that even if it's wrong, it's a bad idea to legislate against it because it will have some sort of negative empirical consequences. Now, most people, I think, have in mind all three of those. I think if you ask them straight to begin with, they will just talk about autonomy. They'll say it's a woman's choice, and it will sound like they're going for that second argument. But when you actually dig deeper, they will usually end up saying, yeah, but it's not a person. So they kind of, I think most people have in mind a mix of those three arguments, even if they just start with the sort of women's choice argument to begin

Milestones, Consciousness, And Personhood

Calum Miller 10:18

with.

Brian Stiller 10:18

And is there a continuum from the beginning from the fertilization of egg down that pathway where the argument would be that it's not human here at this point, but it may be human at some other point along the way.

Calum Miller 10:41

Yeah, it's it's a good question, and it's kind of a striking question because if you ask the average person in a Western culture, they will, you know, you they won't agree with abortion up to birth, which is the law in a few countries like Canada, like at the moment Korea, because they don't have a law, um, and very, very few other countries. Um, but almost everyone will actually say, of course, I think there should be a limit. They'll say 12 weeks or 20 weeks or 24 weeks or something like that. And what's always been interesting to me is if you ask people why do they say then, why 12 weeks, they will almost never have an answer. It's just it's either the law of their country, and they just assume that the law of their country is right, and that's often 12 weeks, or it just sounds like a reasonable midway point, or it's a number that they've heard in the past.

Brian Stiller 11:36

Or some would talk about brain stem life or death. If if we die when the brain stem is is dead, maybe is that the point when life begins?

Calum Miller 11:49

Yeah. So so some people do say, yes, there is a scientific landmark of development that this is when kind of life begins or when a person begins. So, you know, the heart begins to beat at just two and a half weeks after conception. Some people might say the heartbeat is when life begins, but it's so early on that pretty much every abortion actually occurs on a baby with a beating heart. Some people might say when it starts to have a brain, but again, that's very, very early in pregnancy, at least in the sort of basic brain structure. Some people would say when it's conscious, but we honestly don't really know when it's conscious. And it's certainly conscious a long time before birth. My view is it's probably conscious by 10 weeks from conception, which again is very early. So people will sometimes have some sense of a biological thing that they can tie it to, but um a lot of that is speculative. And then ultimately, when you boil down to it, you know, the question is is that what makes us valuable? The fact that we have a beating heart. You know, there are times where you do surgery and you stop the heart beating for quite a long period of time to do surgery in some contexts. Um, and nevertheless, that person is still a human being. They're still alive, they still should have their life protected. There are some people who have really lost a lot of their mental capacities. So, you know, they are not really able to talk much, they're not able to think much, they're not sort of philosophically reflective in any way. But nevertheless, they're still human beings. There's still people who are valuable, who need to be protected. And so whenever you have an argument that is trying to say human beings are valuable because of something they can do, um, whether that's you know algebra or just feeling pain or whatever it might be, there will almost always be few human beings outside of that category who we all agree should be protected. There are human beings who don't feel physical pain, but they're still human beings. There are human beings who can't do philosophy, but they're still human beings. There are human beings who can't talk, they're still human beings. So ultimately the question is: do we get our value because of what we can do or what we have, or because of what we fundamentally are at our very core? And I think when we bear in mind the entire diversity of humanity, people who are all different sorts of shapes and sizes, two different sexes, people who are from so many different countries or backgrounds with so many different abilities, and we say that they're all equal, what that means is that the value of humanity must come from what we fundamentally are, because we are all human beings. It doesn't come from what we can do. Because if it comes from what we can do, more able people are going to be worth more than others. And that just doesn't make sense of our experience and our commitment to human equality. So that was the argument that really persuaded me in the end, to be prolife.

Why Logic Alone Hits A Wall

Brian Stiller 14:54

So I sit with a friend, thoughtful, very compassionate, well educated. But the idea that abortion should not be the right of a woman is abhorrent to her. And there's no way that my logic or my persuasive skills and I wonder what are we missing, those those that support a pro-life position using that as a as a uh as a label, which we generally understand. What is there that we're missing that not we're not able to show that unborn deserves protection? What are we missing?

Calum Miller 15:52

I think there's a couple of things. So when it comes to it, with pretty much any sensitive issue or any issue at all, there are kind of intellectual arguments and then there are emotional kind of responses. And then built on top of that, there's also sort of political sort of calculations and tribes and relationships that might be at stake. You know, when I became pro-life, it wasn't good for my career, and then it certainly wasn't good for my sort of social life in a certain sense. So when you sort of pin your flag to the mast on such an unpopular issue, it's much more complex than just which way do the arguments and the evidence go? There's also what do my emotions say about it, and there's also what do I stand to gain or lose, sort of in my relationships or politically, or in my career. And there's a very good book by Jonathan Haidt. I don't know if you know it, The Righteous Mind. I think the subtitle is something like why good people disagree, or something like that. And it explores this whole area of moral disagreement, even among people who are decent people, who, you know, are sincere, they care about other people, they want what's best for the world. And he says a lot of things, it's a very, very good book. But one of the points he makes is that most moral thinking is driven by emotions. And even when we think that we've come to it from rational reflection, it's often just rationalizing what we instinctively felt emotionally. That's not always true. You know, there are people who can't come to their moral views because of reason. And I like to think that I did, but that's why I became pro-life. But it's it's true to say that most people are very much emotionally driven. And that's that's fine, that's normal. Emotions are an important part of being human. But I think that is why it can be difficult in conversations about abortion, and it feels like we sort of just meet a brick wall because we're trying the intellectual argument and we're not actually engaging what are the emotions and the experiences behind this. So just to take an example, someone says to you, Well, what about a woman who's been the victim of rape? And if I launch into an you know an answer and say, look, every human being is equal, the babies who are conceived in rape are equal, and therefore they should have just as much protection as anybody else. That is perfectly logical. It's logically flawless, in my opinion. It's clearly true that if every human is equal, they must be protected whether they were conceived in a happy marriage or in rape or in some other situation. But suppose the person asking that question is a victim of rape and feels like pro-lifers just do not care about her. And her whole life she's just felt that Christians are judgmental, they don't care. Maybe it was someone at her church who claimed to be pro-life who actually committed that abuse. It's not common, but it has happened. If I just launch into that intellectual argument, all I'm doing is reinforcing her experience that Christians or pro-lifers just don't really care about me. And so, as much as my argument might make sense, it's just not going to remove that stumbling block that person has. So ultimately, I think what we're often missing is just understanding the person and where they're coming from. And for me, the best place to begin in doing that is just to ask questions and listen and hear their experiences, hear their stories, ask about why they came to their position, what their position is. And by asking those questions, you gain so much more information about why this person is pro-choice and how you might be able to persuade them in the end.

Brian Stiller 19:39

But now we have public policy that provides in our country in Canada uh provision up to up to birth. And you've got varying public policies depending on what country you're in.

Arguing In Public Without Church Language

Brian Stiller 19:57

So now you've got this uh this public issue. How are you how do you go about engaging in the issue in the public forum? And you've got public media and you've got governmental medical bodies. What's the way forward?

Calum Miller 20:15

Yeah, I think it's very country-dependent. You know, every country is going to have a very different political system, a very different way of engaging in the public sphere. Some countries love protesting, some countries hate protesting, some countries have a very intellectualized debate about these sorts of things, some countries have a very visceral, emotional debate about these things. So it really depends. But I would say the common ingredients are that you know, one of the questions people often raise is should you bring religion into it? And the answer I have is that religion is an important part of society. Most of the Western world, at least, is kind of based on Christian values. And if you go back to a pre-Christian era, you'll go back to slavery, gladiator fights, you know, capital punishment, pederasty, all sorts of horrible things that are actually not this sort of secular utopia. So the first thing to recognize is religion is an important part of our values and our foundation historically as well as philosophically. It's also an important part of most people in the world's lives. And if we believe in democracy where everyone has an opinion and should have their opinion taken into account, you have to take religion into account because that's what most people feel is important to them. So religion does play a role, but of course, many of us live in much more pluralistic societies with either people of different faiths or in a place like the UK, a lot of people with no faith in any God or any religion or anything like that. And so it's always very important to engage with the scientific arguments as well and the human rights arguments. So in my country, I almost never talk about faith. About what I saw at medical school, that this was a human being living in the womb. I talk about how the baby develops through what we've learned through science. I talk about human rights, the fact that the international human rights law actually says every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. And it also says children must be given special safeguards, including legal protection before as well as after birth. So none of this is explicitly religious dogma or scripture or anything like that. It's just there in international human rights law. Everyone has the right to life. That right must be protected. Children exist before birth, and they must be given legal protection before birth. This is something that most of us should agree with. All of us should agree with it. And so bringing those elements into the debate, I think, is much more helpful. There's also questions about how you organize politically. Obviously, politics is politics. It's not always, it's rarely just a case of making the better argument. You've got to be strategic, you've got to apply pressure in the right ways. Jesus said, My kingdom is, he says, My kingdom is not of this world. But the basic reality I see is that politics, even when you look at the word politics, it's about the affairs of the city. And that is ultimately about people, because cities and countries are about people. And politics is really just about how do we cooperate as a society to look after people. And so, in that sense, Christians saying, I'm not into politics. I'm not into cooperating to look after people. It just sounds ridiculous because it kind of is. So for me, politics is really important. Um, that doesn't mean that Christians pick a candidate and sort of defend them no matter what they do. It doesn't mean that you know you become an absolute partisan on every issue, but it does mean that we engage in politics because ultimately it's a way of loving our neighbor. One of the most important and most impactful ways that we can love our neighbor is by affecting the policies that will change their life in very significant ways. So how you do politics differs depending on the context, but I think the fact that we should do politics and that our faith should inform our politics and that human rights should inform our politics for me is really non-negotiable.

Brian Stiller 24:35

But we have in front of us a seeming insurmountable objections where state federal laws have put in place that which a seeming majority of people in many countries, in most countries that I know, are supportive of a pro-choice law. So here you are, an articulate scientist who defends a position with logic and with uh medical evidence. What do you see as a way forward in making the case for the protection of the unborn?

Why Young People Are Shifting

Calum Miller 25:25

Yeah, I as you say, in most of the West, most people are pro-choice. And the first thing I'd say is that that's not true globally. So the global majority is still pro-life because most people don't live in the West. And if you go to Africa, if you go to the Caribbean, you go to the Pacific, you go to most of Asia, you go to most of Latin America, the majority are pro-life. So there was a there was a fascinating survey recently by one, I can't remember which sort of international polling firm it was. I think it might have been Ipsos, but it said the global majority is pro-choice. And when you look at the study, probably 75% of the countries they surveyed were Western countries. So it was a very, very skewed sample. And they used that to say that the world is, and and that's insulting, I think, when you actually think about it. They've picked the Western world and they've basically this is the world. Yeah. So so first thing is, yeah, around the world things are very different. In a Western context, you're right. You know, in my country, as I said, historically, about 95% of people have been pro-choice. That's actually shifting quite seriously among the young generation in my country. I don't know about other countries, um, but there's been a number of surveys, the most recent one just a couple of months ago, showing that young people are actually the most pro-life generation. Now, I used to be a bit cynical about this, and you know, you'd hear slogans like, we are the pro-life generation, and I thought, well, really, because young people are very liberal and they didn't seem like the pro-life generation. But in the UK, it's definitely true. By far, the most pro-life generation is under 30s, especially young men for some reason. Um, but even young women are, I think, the second most pro-life group. Young women are more pro-life than older women in the UK. And I think that is a wider trend across the Western Europe, because I think people are seeing that progressive values have failed the West. You know, the West has been experimenting with secular progressivism for many decades now, and the fruit of it is record rates of anxiety and depression and loneliness, a crippled economy, a birth rate that's unsustainable, huge problems with drugs and alcohol, public health epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases. You could go on, just constant problem after problem after problem, despite being the most technologically advanced and affluent society we've ever, ever seen in the history of the universe. And I think young people are seeing that and thinking, well, if we're this prosperous and advanced, and we have everything, you know, you can just in your hands order basically anything you want to come to your house within two hours and pay, you know, pay through it without using any money. If we've got to that point as a society and we have record rates of loneliness and misery, something is missing. And I think what they're gradually realizing is what's missing is faith and family and values that built our societies. So, all that to say, I think things are changing organically without us necessarily needing to strategize about them. But on the other hand, I do think it's important that we take hold of these moments where there is a growing dissatisfaction with the sort of establishment position, and that we are there ready to offer an alternative. Because if we just sit back and we don't do anything and people see, you know, this secular progressive stuff hasn't led us to any sort of happiness. But the Christians are not there to offer an alternative, and the pro-lifers are not there to say, hey, here's a different perspective, and here's why it's convincing, then people are going to think, okay, secular progressivism was a bad idea. Let's try Islam or let's try neo-paganism or let's try mysticism or whatever it might be. So we need to be there, ready with the arguments, done in a truthful and gracious way. We need to be there with the infrastructure so that they can be part of something, part of a family, a church. In the case of politics, part of a political movement that can actually be a vehicle for what they want to see done. And I think we need to be ready spiritually, um, you know, asking God that we would be instruments of his renewal and that when he does decide to change things in a really unpredictable way, we would be there to harvest the fruit of that. So there's a lot we can do to prepare, even when it seems pretty, pretty hopeless.

Brian Stiller 30:14

So you're a young man, you're a scientist, you have you articulate, you have a cause that's sent into your mind. How do you see your next 10 years? What's where is your focus?

Calum Miller 30:30

Yeah, it's um the next 10 years that there's gonna be a lot happening. Um what we have seen in the last 25 years is that 50 countries have liberalized their abortion laws. So over the last quarter of a century, since the turn of the millennium, 50 countries have changed their laws in the direction of abortion, and maybe

Africa, Foreign Aid, And Global Pressure

Calum Miller 30:51

two or three have changed their laws towards pro-life. So there's a massive global shift that is still ongoing, and at the moment, the big battle is in sub-Saharan Africa, especially. And part of the reason for that is because in sub-Saharan Africa, there is such a dependency on foreign aid that the European Union, the World Bank, the Global Fund, the US government, most European governments, the WHO, all the United Nations agencies can basically blackmail many African countries and say, hey, you know that HIV program that we're doing in your country that's saving thousands of lives? We we're not actually that committed to saving your people from HIV because what we really want is abortion. And if you don't legalize abortion, we're going to remove that money, and I guess those people will die from HIV AIDS. That is the reality of the global dynamics. The groups, all those that I just mentioned, really are pulling life-saving funding or threatening to pull life-saving funding from countries in sub-Saharan Africa unless they legalize abortion. Now, you might think that's terribly cruel and evil, and you would be absolutely right. But what that uh that means is that there is an enormous battle with billions of dollars of leverage at stake in the continent that is, by the end of the century, going to have half the world's population. So in 2100, there will be about 4 billion people from Africa, about 4 billion people from the rest of the world combined. So Africa really is the future of the world in terms of global dominance and its population and so on. And that is partly why there is such an effort to depopulate it and to push Africa in the direction of abortion and just getting rid of families, getting rid of children, ultimately under undermining life. So for me, I think whether just for me or you know, for everyone involved in this, that is really the focus of the next 10 years because things are rapidly changing, social media is spreading rapidly across the world, attitudes are changing much quicker than they ever have done before. And if we don't recognize this quickly and share our experiences from the West with people in Africa or in the, you know, the Pacific Islands or South Asia, if we don't share the mistakes we've made and urge them not to repeat the mistakes, then they could easily walk into the same horrible, horrible situation we're in, which would lead to hundreds of millions of lives lost as a result.

Final Thanks And Next Steps

Brian Stiller 33:39

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Calum, for joining me today. Your insight and courage is simply remarkable. Now, to my listeners, thank you for being a part of this podcast with us. Would you share this episode with your friend? And then you can join the conversation in the YouTube notes below. If you'd like to learn more about today's guests, just check the show notes for links and info. And if you haven't already received my free ebook and newsletter, just go to BrianStiller.com. Thanks again. Until next time.