Most abortion “debates” are two people shouting past each other for clips. This one is built differently.
There is no real Tomi Lahren in this episode — she did not participate, and that’s the first thing you see on screen. Her side is an AI-voiced, animated character arguing the strongest pro-choice case we could assemble from positions she has actually published (“I’m pro-choice” — The View, 2017; her 2019 “pro-choice conservative” Fox News op-ed). Mike’s side is Mike — his real voice, his real argument.
The reason for the format is the argument itself. Mike didn’t want an opponent who folds. He wanted the good version of the other side: personhood, bodily autonomy, the dependent-newborn problem, burden, evictionism, consent, and the rape exception — each taken seriously, each answered, until the whole chain leads back to one question science already answered.
When does life begin scientifically — and is a fetus a person? Watch the episode above, then read every step of the reasoning below. The complete transcript is on this page — nothing is hidden behind a player.
The Episode in Nine Steps
* Is the Preborn Baby Human?
* Human vs. Person
* The Dependent Newborn Test
* Does Burden Change the Right to Life?
* The Eviction Argument
* Consent, Sex and the Car-Crash Analogy
* “Invited” — and the Rape Objection
* The Rape Exception Tested
* Same Human, Only Younger
The Complete Transcript
Is the Preborn Baby Human?
TOMI (simulated): No. It’s a potential human.
MIKE: So let me ask you this. Is a preborn baby human? Let's say the remains of two babies were found. Could science tell us which one was aborted? Would the headlines read two human babies were found, or would it read one human and one potential human were found?
TOMI (simulated): No. DNA itself could not tell which one had been aborted and which one had lived after birth. Biologically, science would identify both as human. Biologically human, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily settle the question of personhood.
Human vs. Person
MIKE: So you said personhood was a moral concept, but that's insane. Science is what it is. What you're referring to is more akin to justifying or rationalizing after the fact. That's the whole question. Personhood is a made-up concept, as I noted above.
TOMI (simulated): The distinction I would make is that biology can establish what the organism is, while philosophy and law address what moral rights follow from that fact. A sophisticated defense of abortion doesn’t actually have to deny the fetus’s humanity. I can concede that this is a living human organism and argue instead that no human has an unlimited right to another person’s body.
MIKE: If you perceive, most people wouldn't concede the personhood argument. But if you're going to, then your next point is even easier to defeat. If I ask you, could a newborn baby survive without assistance from another, you would concede the answer is no, correct?
The Dependent Newborn Test
TOMI (simulated): No.
MIKE: And if I ask you, would it be okay for a mother to sit across the room and let her infant starve because she no longer wanted it to have access to her body, what would you say?
TOMI (simulated): No. That would be morally and legally wrong. Because parents have positive obligations toward their dependent children. And there is an important distinction: a newborn can ordinarily be transferred to another caregiver. The mother doesn’t personally have to provide the care.
MIKE: Right. But because it's a hypothetical moral argument, let's say no other caretaker would help the child. We couldn't force them, right? If you can't force the mother to, you definitely can't force someone else to use their body. So the mom shouldn't have to be bothered to call anyone anyway. But if she did, and no one would help, would the mother be right to just let the baby die of neglect because she didn't want her body used for that limited period of time the infant would require it?
TOMI (simulated): No. Under that hypothetical, I would still say she cannot morally allow her newborn to starve.
Does Burden Change the Right to Life?
MIKE: So if I understand, you're now saying that the argument becomes the amount of burden that puts on a mother?
TOMI (simulated): The amount and kind of burden would become one of the remaining distinctions, yes.
MIKE: Oh, that's a bit of a strawman for exactly the point you raised. Well, what if a child is born cognitively declined? The burden of the mother caring for it around the clock could easily be greater than the burden of carrying the child to term. So does that mean it's now okay to murder post-birth babies when the burden becomes too great?
TOMI (simulated): No. That is a legitimate objection to making burden alone the decisive criterion. The stronger distinction is not necessarily the magnitude of the burden. It is the kind of bodily dependency involved. Pregnancy requires another human organism to remain physically inside and biologically integrated with the woman’s body.
The Eviction Argument
MIKE: So what you're really getting at isn't the burden. It's the eviction tenant theory, right?
TOMI (simulated): Yes. That’s much closer to the argument we’ve narrowed it down to.
MIKE: Not we. I'm debating you. So this is where you're at, right? The eviction theory?
TOMI (simulated): Yes. The strongest remaining line I would defend is bodily sovereignty or eviction. Even conceding that the unborn child is a living human being, the mother retains the right to decide whether another human may remain physically inside and use her body.
MIKE: I would argue that the human does have a right not to have another living thing inside them. No living person, no living thing, anything else. A human has a right not to have something else living inside it, and they exercise that right by not creating it. Once they've created the baby, it's not a trespasser. It didn't ask to be there. It didn't come uninvited. It was placed there. At that point, the responsibility for its care was one you have chosen. And to commit violence and even murder because you don't like the decision you've made or changed your mind is no longer any more justified than if you changed your mind after birth.
Consent, Sex and the Car-Crash Analogy
TOMI (simulated): The strongest counterargument I could make is that consenting to an act carrying a known risk isn’t necessarily consenting to every consequence of that risk. Driving a car, for example, doesn’t mean consenting to being injured in a crash. Likewise, consenting to sex needn’t necessarily mean irrevocably consenting to nine months of gestation.
MIKE: That'd be a silly argument from my seat. I mean, driving doesn't consent to a crash, sure. But turning the key does consent to starting the engine. As great as sex is, its evolutionary design is pretty clear.
TOMI (simulated): That is the weakness in my driving analogy. Pregnancy isn’t analogous to the accident in the most important causal respect. Reproduction is a biological function of sex. Crashing isn’t a biological function of driving. I would still have one counter available. Foreseeably causing a biological outcome doesn’t automatically establish an irrevocable moral obligation to allow that outcome to continue.
“Invited” — and the Rape Objection
MIKE: There's a very deliberate set of events that have to happen to create a human life. Your autonomy exists all the way up until you decide it doesn't. There's so many ways to prevent pregnancy. You can use your autonomy all the way up until you choose not to exercise any of those preventive methods. You choose. And at that point, you've invited a real-life human guest to occupy your womb for the next nine months. And though you do have the right to choose what to do with your body, you'll never have the right to choose what to do with his body. His body is not your body or hers.
TOMI (simulated): And that is the difficulty my counterargument has to answer. If I’ve already conceded the unborn child’s humanity, then I cannot answer you simply by saying, “I withdraw consent.” I would have to establish why withdrawing consent permits killing that dependent human despite the fact that its dependency resulted from the actions that created it. The strongest objection I would make is to the word “invited.” If contraception fails, the woman can plausibly say she specifically attempted not to invite conception. And there is an even more difficult case for your argument. Rape. There the woman didn’t voluntarily initiate the reproductive act at all.
The Rape Exception Tested
MIKE: I don't really feel like I have to add rape or contraception failure, because they're statistically minuscule. But if that were your last defense, and I said I'd concede that rape victims should be allowed to murder their babies if you'd concede no one else could, you'd say no, right?
TOMI (simulated): No.
MIKE: And that would prove you're grasping at straws. I would not concede that point, by the way. But I don't have to defend that yet either, because you've moved from it's not a person all the way to the most statistically minuscule defense possible. It's the appeal to emotion. But in real life, like, it's nothing.
Same Human, Only Younger
MIKE: I think it's important to circle back to the original point, though, regarding rape. If we concede the baby is human — if we concede the baby is human — and if we then try to reduce it to something unfalsifiable as an excuse to permit the taking of human life, then the burden should be on you to prove that the human you're killing isn't a person. So if you're going to invent the concept of personhood as justification to kill a human, then you should have to prove that the human you're killing isn't a person. And as we've agreed, there's no scientific way to do that. There's no test or anything we can go on to prove that. It's just a feeling. All we can do is fall back on hard science. Science tells us unequivocally — I can't say the word — that this baby is a human. So then its treatment must be measured against all other humans, or we're simply discriminating on the basis of age. If a woman was raped and carried the baby to term, and then decided that he looked just like his rapist father, and his existence was tormenting her and making her relive a traumatic event, and then she killed him, she'd be locked away for murder. No reasonable person argues that that sort of thing should be permitted. The only difference is age.
MIKE: Right. Thank you for your time.
Keep Going
* Mike vs. George Washington — the first animated debate
* You Don’t Need Conspiracy Theories: The Admitted Record Is Worse — the Season 1 full show
* No Victim, No Crime — the principle underneath this whole debate
* Consent of the Governed Is a Lie — what “consent” does and doesn’t authorize
* There Is No Such Thing as a Humanitarian War — the same moral accounting, applied to war
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