Angelica Vecchiato:
Campaign Life Coalition Youth’s newest outreach endeavour, “Womb with a View,” hopes to fill the pro-life apologetics void in the podcast world.
Available for listening through Apple Podcast’s audio streaming services, listeners can tune into a 15-minute episode set to discuss “all things anti-abortion” through the lens of philosophy and apologetics. Podcast hosts CLC youth coordinator Maeve Roche and her assistant Kim Headley, as two “women (with wombs) who share the view that abortion is immoral,” said they began “Womb with a View” to educate young people on the seriousness of life issues in Canada.
“We wanted to create a show that was relatable yet informative, that would permit us to convey the pro-life position, through the lens of CLC’s principles, to Canadians. Our episodes are quite short as to not lose the attention span of young people,” Roche told The Interim.
A podcast, which offers the convenience of listening on-the-go and the advantage of shorter episodes, offered a strategic opportunity to cater to young people where they are at. Roche added that there was an especially desperate need for Canadian pro-life podcasting, since pro-life media resources were mostly oriented to an American audience. “We felt as though the podcast world was not fulfilling the Canadian pro-life youth niche,” Roche said, “so we thought we could fill that need.”
The first episode, which premiered on Nov. 10., explored the misconception that pro-life people are “bad people.” In that podcast, Roche said, “How pro-lifers are as people is not the central question. The main argument is whether abortion is moral, or should be permitted. The moral status of individuals has no bearing on the morality of abortion.” She said, “When someone speaks out against human trafficking, you don’t say ‘how many human trafficking victims do you have in your home?’ The same logic applies here.”
Although both podcast hosts admitted that “pro-lifers aren’t perfect,” they also argued that most pro-lifers genuinely care about expectant mothers, contrary to popular opinion. “At CLC, we do actually have a fundraiser to help Nunavut moms,” said Headley. “Since it is remote it often gets forgotten about in Canada. The government aggressively promotes abortion in the territories claiming it would be easier economically and socially because life is more difficult in the far North. CLC wants to provide women with resources they would need to have their babies.”
The first podcast also discussed how the conversation on abortion often becomes conflated with other social issues. Roche and Headley emphasized that the “central concern is lives being ended by abortion,” though they added, “if you are passionate about some social issue, then you should go after it, but don’t conflate abortion and other social issues.”
The second episode discussed CLC’s opposition to gestational laws, arguing that these laws don’t protect children at all, simply those “lucky fetuses who manage to slip through the cracks, becoming too old to be aborted.”
“Our position is no compromising,” they explain. “Gestational laws just narrow down the scope to target really young, small human beings because it is easier to dehumanize them.
Our goal is to amend the Criminal Code so that we have no abortions altogether. Our dream is to implement incremental legislation and elect pro-life MPs.”
In that episode, the co-hosts also commented on the abortion pill, which to the young podcaster poses a grave danger, since its widespread accessibility and lack of regulation can push women to make rash decisions in difficult circumstances.
