What’s Trending? Pro-Life Legislation, Declining Populations Approaches, and the Role of Christianity in Schools

Is the declining population our next global crisis? Tune in to discover the alarming factors contributing to infertility and negative population growth, such as pollution and delayed marriages. Marking the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, we dissect its profound ramifications on abortion rates, the political scene, and societal attitudes. We explore how the focus of pro-life advocacy has shifted to individual states and emphasize the need for continued efforts. We also examine significant recent Supreme Court rulings, including a pivotal case involving the federal government and Idaho over emergency medical access laws.

We'll also uncover the challenges and opportunities surrounding low birth rates, taking South Korea as a case study and drawing parallels to Western nations like the United States. Inspired by futurist Tom Frey, we'll discuss how churches and family-centric programs can champion higher birth rates by tackling cultural and structural disincentives. And don't miss our debate on the influence of Christianity in public schools, sparked by a recent case in Louisiana about mandating the Ten Commandments. We critique the potential backlash against such measures and reflect on the broader implications for the Supreme Court and societal divisions. This episode is packed with thought-provoking insights you won’t want to miss.

Transcript

Christa Potratz: 0:00

on today's episode.

Bob Fleischmann: 0:02

The flip side of this and I know we touched on it in an episode we did on population. But the flip side is there's a lot of mysterious things going on in the world right now regarding infertility. You know we see rises in infertility. They claim it could be pollution-related, it could be a variety of issues just getting married too old, fertility drops and so forth. But a lot of the people with the negative population growth right now that's going on, there's a concern that in a few years, even if we're successful, even if after a generation or two we convince people, oh well, maybe having more is desirable, it may not physically be possible.

Paul Snamiska: 0:46

Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.

Christa Potratz: 1:12

Hi and welcome back. I'm Christa Potratz and I'm here today with Pastors Bob Fleischmann and Jeff Samelson, and today we're going to do our July current event episode here. We've been doing this now a few months, so we're going to keep our July current event episode here. We've been doing this now a few months, so we're going to keep kind of going on it. And today we're going to start with the two years since the Dobbs decision. We just wanted to talk again about it and just discuss any new developments and new things that we have noticed since then, and there has been just some recent legislation that has come through the Supreme Court related to abortion and access and things like that too. So, Jeff, can you start us off a little bit on what we can take away from being two years out since the Dobbs decision?

Jeff Samelson: 2:05

well th e happy thing, uh, from our perspective, is that it's still out there, it's still valid, Roe v Wade is still overturned and there are plenty of good things that have come from that.

Jeff Samelson: 2:15

he know, it's been pretty well established that there are more babies being born and fewer being aborted as a result of that, and that's that's, that's a win. Another thing that's pretty easy to to see is that the progressive pro-abortion left is still freaked out by Dobbs, not just because of what it did to abortion policy and practice in the United States, but also because it for them is a signal that you know, conservatives are taking over and everything that we value is being taken away from us and things like that. And it has really informed so much of what's going on politically in the United States in the two years since then for pro-lifers as well. Politically, in that it got some pro-life people in various states a little overconfident with various things that they've legislation and constitutional amendments and things like that that they've tried to put forward that have failed. And certainly also there's slowly been the recognition that just because Roe v Wade was overturned doesn't mean that the fight over abortion is over. In fact, it's gotten even more intense in the two years since then.

Bob Fleischmann: 3:32

The Dobbs decision represented what I've referred to as an ideological position that made a lot of pro-life people very happy. There are always pictures in the paper two years ago of the celebrations that are going on and so forth. But the problem with ideology is ideology always picks kind of an end goal and then kind of reverses a mentality about how do you accomplish the end goal, whereas Christians work from a theological perspective, which is my faith, compels me, the objective word of God guides me, and so what we had happen with Dobbs is that we found out that we got our way. Roe v Wade was overturned and didn't outlaw abortion, it just simply returned it back to the states where it was up until 1973. But the people were not prepared. The people, their hearts, were not informed. In fact I was reading one columnist writing about the two-year anniversary and saying that there's a lot of young people today who have not heard the pro-life argument. It's been a culture for 49 years where it was legal for your mother to terminate the life of your unborn brother or sister. It's no different than what we tell parents. You can tell your children how to sit at the table, how to thank people and how to say please, and so forth, but if you do not model it, they learn from the modeling before they learn from the instruction. And so I think what happened is a 49-year culture of modeling abortion rights infected even the Christian community.

Bob Fleischmann: 5:00

Right after Dobbs, I was preaching out on the West Coast, me to thee. Right after Dobbs, I was preaching out on the West Coast, and I remember a couple coming up to me and asking do you think we went too far? Maybe we shouldn't have been hoping for Roe v Wade to be overturned, but I mean, that's the mentality that's been nurtured.

Christa Potratz: 5:17

Yeah, I think too, how you say it as well how the decision went back to the states and then kind of what became maybe one battle, so to speak, of overturning Roe v Wade now became 50 battles of just, and we've seen that play out a lot too, and there's been a lot of kind of back and forth on the state level. Places, you know, have seemed to maybe go lean a little bit more liberal than was expected to, and I think people, maybe on the pro-life side, just weren't prepared for all of that as well. I wanted to also just talk about some of the other things that have come out of on the Supreme Court, this last cycle of the Supreme Court.

Jeff Samelson: 6:06

I'll start with the thing with Idaho. That was, the federal government under the Biden administration basically sued the state of Idaho.

Jeff Samelson: 6:15

You, know, this was a law Congress passed 20, 30, 40 years ago, something like that ago, something like that and it's basically something that says that any hospital or maybe even state that takes federal money, has to guarantee access to emergency medicine, medical access and things like that. And basically federal government was trying to use that to say that Idaho's very strict restrictions on abortion effectively a ban were getting in the way of women who needed emergency abortions getting them in an Idaho emergency room and they were using that to basically try to overturn Idaho's law on that. And the decision did not go quite the way that the pro-life side would have liked, which would have basically just been a strong slap on the wrist and say, no, everything's fine. But the Supreme Court punted a little bit on that. The FDA's approval of mifeprestone, the abortion drug, had been improper and that that needed to be redone, and basically the goal was to undo the approval of the abortion pill and therefore make it no longer legally available in the United States to cause chemical abortions.

Jeff Samelson: 7:53

And that one the Supreme Court again did not go the way the pro-life side would have liked, which would have been to say, hey, yeah, you're right, this is completely wrong, fda, you need to redo all of this. This is completely wrong, fda. You need to redo all of this. They basically said there's a standing problem here, which is a legal principle, saying that you have to have a demonstrated interest. And so it wasn't denying their claim. It wasn't saying, basically, it wasn't ruling one way or the other. It was saying, yeah, if you conservative majority on the court that does not like abortion and would like to restrict it further, but they're being very careful to not overstep and do anything that is going to cause too much trouble or just set up their decisions for being overturned later on technical grounds.

Bob Fleischmann: 9:05

I was surprised. I thought it was sloppy on the pro-life part. You know, I remember in the early years the battles that went up to the Supreme Court on a variety of life-related issues. The legal teams that were involved were brutal on each other as they honed and refined the position. I remember being in some meetings and listening to well, you can't say that because they can get you here, you can't say that you get you there. Failing to have standing is kind of like low-hanging fruit. I would have thought that they would have caught that one early on. So it surprised me that it got all the way up there. Part of it is that if you're going to try to beat the world on the world's terms, then you have to be a little bit smarter than the other side.

Bob Fleischmann: 9:50

It's just the way they got to do it and we're recording this episode on the morning after the presidential debate and I was thinking last night when they were arguing things, that a lot of the points that have to be made require us to be precise, because I remember one candidate said last night you know that you can have abortions all the way up to the very end of a pregnancy, the ninth month, and the other candidates said well, no, no, and he got lost in explaining it. But the reality is that people think that the way the government defines the exception clause is for the life or health of the mother. If you read the Christian Life Resources position statement on abortion, we very tightly define the exception clause to be the life of the mother and it seems like a one-word difference life or life or health. But see health. There were other Supreme Court rulings Doe versus Bolton in 1973, that also said health had to be understood in the widest possible sense, so it could be not just physical health but mental health.

Bob Fleischmann: 10:58

So for one candidate to say you would permit abortion all the way right up to the point of delivery and he's trying to backtrack, the other guy's trying to backtrack, the reality is, if you favor abortion rights with that loosey-goosey. Life and health type exception. Health is defined elsewhere in the legal documents as the broadest possible definition. So when we look at things like bringing the abortion pill case up for lack of standing, that's why I conclude it's just sloppy. I mean, everybody that at least I knew early in the movement was aware of all of those little nuances and that's what made me surprised that it got that far already.

Jeff Samelson: 11:42

Yeah and I think that goes back to kind of some overconfidence on the pro-life side that it's oh well, we got this one. You know, dobbs, that's the big one. So now we're just going to push forward with all these others and knock the rest of the rungs out of the ladder to abortion access. And yeah, they jumped the gun on some things. And you know and I'm not blaming the doctors who put the suit forward they had their reasons, they thought they were doing something good, but at the same time as Bob's saying, you've got to be smart about it, because this is not the ideal world we're working in, it's the real world and you've got to deal with legal and political realities.

Christa Potratz: 12:25

Well, thank you for that. There's probably a lot more we could discuss on that too, but I think that paints a picture, a good picture, of what's been going on with that topic low fertility rate there. We've talked about birth rates here on the podcast before and the decline of those, and from what I gather, south Korea is at the lowest, or at least one of the lowest right, the lowest of the developed countries. Okay, okay, yeah. So what can you kind of tell us about the status of the fertility rate in South Korea?

Bob Fleischmann: 13:09

They define the countries basically as developed and undeveloped, and developed countries require a birth rate of 2.1 births per woman, and the reason it's 2.1 is you have two births to replace a mother and father who eventually die, and the .1 covers the women who do not have children, children who die in their adolescence or something like that. So 2.1. And South Korea is below 1. And there's been some wild estimates, like every generation, that their population could be down and gone in like three generations or four generations. So there's some wild estimates there. There is a connection, historical connection, to

Bob Fleischmann: 13:53

this. A few years ago we had a futurist, tom Fry, speak at our convention and we had him on a podcast. We interviewed him at the convention site. Actually, what kind of prompted this is earlier in the morning. I do all of my reading very early in the morning and I just got done reading about I think it's a Pentecostal church or something like that in South Korea that is trying to cast a positive light on family, offering some child care services and so forth, to try to encourage South Korean members to have children, and that you can do that to save the country to have children, and that you can do that to save the country? And I would say I don't know. I just know that the phone call came at 6.15 in the morning. Then it was Tom

Bob Fleischmann: 14:38

Fry. You know Tom had called and Tom said well, I just got back from South Korea and he's been there a couple dozen times and he said and I knew you'd be up at this time in the morning, so he called. He said I just want to talk about this idea. And I said well, you know, I don't believe in coincidences. So I said I just got done reading this article about what these churches are doing and he just said South Korea is ripe for, even like our own church body, to go in there and do outreach and to create a family ministry subset within the congregation and use that as an outreach tool to reach into the community. And I'm actually going to have a meeting on that later today and part of the idea is that maybe we look at some of the programs, adapting some of the programs we do in the States, which is preschool and childcare and so forth, and then also having a very family-centric knowledge of what's going on that's preventing the South Korean people from having

Bob Fleischmann: 15:33

children. Are they living for the world? Are the Christian South Koreans living for the world, and so do we have to do education in that regard. One of the problems that I've had whenever I've spoken with legislators, my argument has always been starting in the late 60s, getting into the 70s, we've invited, encouraged and incentivized mothers to come into the workforce. The problem is that we didn't do anything to accommodate the other workforce thing they were doing and that was oftentimes taking a lead role in raising the family, caring for the children, teaching the children and so forth. So all of a sudden, families are finding themselves struggling to find child care, struggling to afford child care. So I think in South Korea you see a lot of that blown up. Now expanded, it's probably more obvious. So my hope is and this is very early in the thought process, but my hope is, by learning a little bit more about what's going on in South Korea, maybe even trying a few things, we could better equip our domestic congregations, our domestic Christian homes, to create a very pro-family atmosphere.

Jeff Samelson: 16:51

South Korea is. Japan is also very low birth rates and such. Pretty much every Western nation is on the same trajectory, and the United States definitely is. If we did not have the level of immigration we have, our population situation would be much, much different, which politically and economically has all sorts of implications People who are relying on social security, for instance in their retirement.

Jeff Samelson: 17:16

if you no longer have young workers coming in and paying into it. Eventually that means that money either runs out or you have to start taxing people more Just politically and economically. There's a lot of strong consequences when your birth rate falls. The point is that we've got to pay attention to this stuff for our nation as well, that we can't just say, oh, those people over there, well, they need to get their attitude right or they need to adjust this or adjust that, it's coming here. I mean, it really already is here. We just haven't seen it as much. But I think if we look around, particularly if we look outside our own churches, we are probably going to see a lot more signs of, yeah, people aren't having as many kids as they used to have. And there are cultural aspects of that attitude aspects of it, and there are structural aspects to it.

Jeff Samelson: 18:04

I was reading something just recently about one of those things you never think about car seat laws and we think, well, of course, that's good, you want to keep your kids safe, but structurally, what does that mean? That means that, because it's not just babies who need to be in car seats, but now it's kids up to four or five years old. But I don't know what the current regulations are, which means you have to have dedicated space in your vehicle for those car seats, which means that if you have more than two kids and there's mom and dad, well, you're pretty much limited to just that. If you have more than two kids, where are you going to put that other kid? Because those car seats, you know, it's not like the bench seats that we, bob and I, grew up with, and family station wagons or whatever, where you could probably fit four kids there. It's limited to two because those car seats take up your room and they have to be buckled in and just that right way. So then that means you've got to get a bigger vehicle, you've got to upgrade to that bigger SUV or that minivan or whatever, and that costs money and all these types of structural considerations beyond just what Bob was mentioning about, like childcare who's going to take care of these kids if mom's in the workforce? All that kind of stuff.

Jeff Samelson: 19:23

It's a disincentive and I'm sure many, many young couples don't even really think about it, as this is a reason why we're not having more kids, but it's all just part of that whole stew of things that ends up being a disincentive to having more kids and so what we can do structurally to help with that.

Jeff Samelson: 19:44

That's the kind of thing where we might be getting involved politically or something like that or putting ideas out there, but within the church we need to preach and teach, which includes what Bob was talking about earlier with the idea of modeling. We want to show that, hey, you know what you can survive with three, four, five, maybe even six kids, and it works just fine, but also lots of teaching. And it works just fine, and, but also lots of teaching. And that's part of what you know there's, you know, I think we can look at and learn from with the South Korea model of just saying, hey, having kids is godly, and so we need to teach and communicate that message. But at the same time, we want to, you know, put the programs in place and see what we can do with that to relieve some of the pressures on parents that are, you know, that are a disincentive to having more kids show notes as well.

Christa Potratz: 20:52

I found two things interesting.

Christa Potratz: 20:53

One was that it said that Elon Musk had fathered 11 children. I did not know that. I was like, wow, that was a lot. And the second thing, too, was just one of the approaches that they were doing in South Korea is trying to get people to sign or buy into this idea of getting married before 30 and then pledging to have three kids.

Christa Potratz: 21:11

And the guy who is leading it up, he's already gotten his children to sign the pledge or say that they'll do that, and I just I didn't know exactly what my personal thoughts were on something like that To say like, oh yeah, yeah, I'm gonna do that and have this be my plan. I feel it's almost kind of like one of those things where you say, like where you have a plan, and then God might say, oh no, no, that's not the plan, or or I don't know to be so confident and I'm gonna do this, this is the way my life's gonna go. I mean, I get the idea behind it and the commitment, but I kind of like your idea of maybe modeling a little bit more than having people sign pledges.

Bob Fleischmann: 21:57

Yeah, no, I'm not a big fan of signing those contracts. Early on at CLR I told the story about a situation I encountered where a couple came to me for pre-marriage counseling and they literally had their life laid out and she had it in a three-ring binder.

Bob Fleischmann: 22:13

She had it slip-sheeted and all sorts of things in there and I remember she was showing when they were going to finish their additional schooling and when they were going to buy a house and then get a new car and then, like at year two or three, they were going to have their first child and about almost exactly a year after I married them I baptized their first child. I mean the whole schedule. I'm sure the thing you know, the binder's collecting dust somewhere, but I mean people do that. They begin to kind of get lost in the planning and they realize it's still up to God. But part of it is just creating a positive mentality.

Bob Fleischmann: 22:47

The flip side of this and I know we touched on it in an episode we did on population, but the flip side is there's a lot of mysterious things going on in the world right now regarding infertility. You know we see rises in infertility. They claim it could be pollution-related, it could be a variety of issues just getting married too old, fertility drops and so forth. But a lot of the people with the negative population growth right now that's going on is there's a concern that in a few years, even if we're successful, even if after a generation or two we convince people oh well, maybe having more is desirable.

Bob Fleischmann: 23:31

People, oh well, maybe having more is desirable. It may not physically be possible. So that's kind of one of those things that, following God's plan of you know, let God decide might not be as dumb as people think.

Christa Potratz: 23:41

All right. Well, moving on here, we want to get in at least one more. Here we have. Louisiana requires posting 10ments in public schools. Bob, I think you had brought this one to our attention, so can you tell us a little bit about what Louisiana is doing or proposing?

Bob Fleischmann: 23:57

Well, we can throw in the mix. Oklahoma now has required the teaching of the Bible up through grade 12. And they're begging to be tested and I know the Ten Commandments thing is going to be tested. The thing that's interesting about the Ten Commandments case is the requirement that they have to post the Ten Commandments in the classrooms of a public school is there's been iterations of this throughout the last few decades. I remember again, early on in my time at CLR there was a Texas school that had hung a picture of Jesus outside of the principal's office and of course it eventually got challenged and in the challenge a lower court—I don't even know how the thing finally ended—but a lower court had ruled that the picture was permissible so long as you have pictures of other great moral leaders, and it could be Martin Luther King, it could be Gandhi, it could be anybody that they decided has that kind of influence. And it reminded me of one or two times that I've been at the Supreme Court building. They have the Ten Commandments inscribed in granite in the chamber of the Supreme Court building and they have other ethical codes.

Bob Fleischmann: 25:13

So there is, I think, a legitimate argument that this has provided a topic we'll be tackling on Christian nationalism, where people begin to think that this is a way to get God back into the classroom, get it back into people's lives and, to be quite honest and I just wrote a little LifeWire piece on this I just said, just having the Ten Commandments didn't work well for the Israelites, I think, make an argument to put John 3.16 up there or some biblical passage that points to our lost nature because of sin and salvation through Christ.

Bob Fleischmann: 25:57

That's getting to the heart of what we want. Everything else is a little bit like we're trying to use the world's tools to create a spiritual environment, and I know I have people on my staff who don't agree with me on this, but I think it was ill-advised to do this. And now it'll get played out. And my experience with history too is everything pendulum swings. So when this gets to the point where it gets, you've got to take it down. It's going to pendulum swing even further the other way and it'll become even worse.

Jeff Samelson: 26:30

Yeah, and one of the things that a lot of people are scratching their heads about with this is the Supreme Court has actually made a decision in this case already, just not in Louisiana.

Jeff Samelson: 26:40

It's like 1980, 83 or something like that. Kentucky had a similar law and it went all the way to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court said no, you can't require the posting of the Ten Commandments. And so they're like what is Louisiana doing here? They're probably, you know, I assume the thought is well, maybe a good idea, but certainly, as confessional Lutherans who understand law and gospel, you say well, if you're idea of, we might say, our Ten Commandments, god's word being taken and used for this secular purpose of trying to kind of beat people into behaving better. Certainly, I imagine there will be some Christian public school teachers who will be able to point the kids to that and put it in a gospel perspective. But that's not really what a public school teacher is supposed to be doing. It's the kind of thing that I think is going to have. Whether you talk about it as a pendulum swing, as Bob is, or just bad reaction from it, I don't see it going well.

Christa Potratz: 28:15

It's not going to have the Christianizing effect that people are hoping it will have. Yeah, I mean when you say to like, okay, maybe a Christian teacher can take it and put some gospel into it, you know, I'm just thinking, yeah, like what would the non-Christian teachers do with that? I'm just thinking, yeah, like what would the non-Christian teachers do with that? And just kind of the attitude towards it and everything, and you're putting things, or even just like wanting teachers that don't believe in God to teach something biblical too just poses a lot of problems.

Bob Fleischmann: 28:44

I feel like, and I think Jeff actually touched on this under one of the earlier stories, and that is, I think, part of kind of what's behind a lot of this is, you know, there's this idea that we've got this ideologically sympathetic Supreme Court, now We've got a majority there, and so forth, which I think, quite honestly, if I were one of the conservative justices, I would be insulted by this, because you know, even when they overturned Roe in the Dobbs decision, they did so on constitutional grounds.

Bob Fleischmann: 29:16

Alito, kind of, you know maybe, was fudging a little bit, but I mean, he also made some very good constitutional points and the other side is ideologically committed to well, we have to ignore that part of the Constitution in order to get our way. So you get that. But if you look at the Supreme Court as actually interpreting law, interpreting Constitution clarifying, they're going to look at this and say it's just not a good idea and all of a sudden people are going to question the character of the justices and all that kind of stuff and then you're going to get the extremes again. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but get into Christian nationalism. The idea is that, well then, we got to get rid of the justices, we got to get rid of all the leaders, and it just doesn't work that way. Remember, this is not our eternity, and that's the thing we've got to keep people mindful of.

Christa Potratz: 30:11

Well, thank you both for this discussion today, and we thank all of our listeners too. Anything that you come across that you'd like us to discuss, please notify us and let us know, and we'll be able to possibly add it to our lineup of current events. You can reach us at lifechallengesus, and we look forward to having you back next time. Bye.

Paul Snamiska: 30:43

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it and sharing it with friends. We're sure you have questions on today's topic or other life issues. Our goal is to help you through these tough topics and we want you to know we're here to help. You can submit your questions, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes, at lifechallengesus or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. In addition to the podcasts, we include other valuable information at lifechallengesus, so be sure to check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit ChristianLifeResourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.