I conducted a lengthy interview with Andrew Michell, who is better known as “Pro-Life Andrew,” for my new video podcast series, “The Full Armor with David Read.” Andrew talked about his personal life and conversion story, and how he became an activist on the abortion issue. We also talked about the history of the Adventist statements on abortion, the political philosophy of abortion, and the Edward Allred story.
TRANSCRIPT:
David Read: So it's David Read, and this is “The Full Armor” with David Read, and this is episode number 2, and I have a special guest today, the man who produces videos and goes by the name of “Pro-life Andrew.” This is episode 2, and the first guest I’ve had.
Andrew, you are my first guest on “The Full Armor with David Read,” and yes, that is a reference to “putting on the full armor of God, so that you can stand against the wiles of the devil. Because we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in the high places.” [Eph. 6:12]
So . . .
Andrew Michell: Amen!
David: . . . that’s where we came up with the name.
So first, just tell me a little bit about yourself—you and I have never met before, so I don’t . . .
Andrew: No, this is our first time . . .
David: Exactly, but I have seen several of your videos. They're very effective. They're very well produced, and you have an issue, abortion, and that's been your issue.
So just tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, your history. When did you become an Adventist? When did you decide to jump with all 4 feet into this abortion thing?
Andrew: Sure. So the summary version is that I grew up in a relatively secular home. I never read the Bible at all. We didn't, we were not religious people, and we never read the Bible. I can't remember, for the first 16 years of my life, reading the Bible in our home even one time.
And then I started getting into a lot of trouble. I was kicked out of school. At the age of 16, I was arrested by the police (this was in Washington State) and initially charged with 7 kidnappings and armed robberies. We later pled guilty to—I think the final disposition was like 3 or 4 armed robberies and burglaries, with gun enhancements, and I was sentenced to prison—adult prison—from 1995 until 2008.
Because I was so young, even though I was tried as an adult, when I was sent to the adult prison I was put into solitary confinement for the first 2 years, which happened to be a fantastic blessing because that's where I began to read the Bible. And I go into more detail in other videos; there's also a book about it.
But while I was in prison, after reading the Bible I listened to a radio station that at the time, and it still exists, was in Chihalas, Washington, and it was a Seventh Day Adventist radio station, and I learned all these wonderful truths. My favorite program was every Sunday night, “Bible Answers Live,” with this guy named Doug Bachelor. But at the time, I knew nothing at all about Adventism. This was just fascinating Bible truths to me.
At the age of 18, I went to the adult prison, and you know there's a lot of stories that could be told, but suffice it to say that my life changed so much in prison that in 2005, January eleventh, I believe, was the last day in office for then Governor Gary Locke, who overturned my sentence and granted me a commutation. Gary Locke would then leave office to become the Secretary of Commerce under Obama, and then the United States Ambassador to China.
So I get out of prison in 2005. One of the first things I do is, of course, go find the Adventist Church. I get baptized I start getting involved in volunteer work, feeding the homeless, and then going to Mexico for several weeks to volunteer at an orphanage. And that worked out so well, I got invited to Venezuela for several months to do evangelism and help build some churches with some students from Atlantic Union College. And then I was invited to Costa Rica for 6 months, and then after Costa Rica to Thailand, and then other countries. And so I ended up going to do volunteer work in leper colonies, orphanages, eight hospitals, prisons, jails, for many years in East Africa, all throughout Southeast Asia.
And then . . . how I got into the abortion issue. It was around the year 2012-13. I really got interested in the history of the Sexual Revolution. You know, just the way that people talked about sexual issues just didn't make sense to me. I thought, “How could such huge changes take place from the nineteenth Century to about the mid-twentieth century,” you know, something had to have happened. So I just started reading books, it's just a personal curiosity and, you know, as I started to read more and more books, I would occasionally come across references to abortion.
And then it was the year 2015—I remember this vividly—it was the summer of 2015. I had just finished reading a book called, “The Marketing of Evil,” by David Kupelian, and there was a chapter in the book about abortion, and I had never really thought about that at all. I mean it was a brand new topic to me. I’d never really spent time learning just what is abortion, you know, what all it entails. I'd never watched any abortion videos.
And what I read was so shocking. I just couldn't believe that this is what actually happens to a child in the womb. And it just so happened that my wife is an OBGYN, and I so I said, I asked my wife “are these things true? Does this really happen?” And she said, “Yeah, that's what happens.”
And, of course, my house is filled with all these [Obstetrics/Gynecology] books, and so I started pulling them off the shelf and reading. And at that moment, when I finished reading the book, right when I finished reading the book the undercover planned parenthood videos came out. You may remember that being in the news, David Daleiden over there in California. And so now, all of a sudden, just, boom! this whole abortion issue comes to my mind, and my awareness, and I realize how terrible and horrific it is.
And my first thought was, “Thank God, I’m a Seventh-day Adventist, because we would never do something like this.” And I just remember the sense of peace and assurance, like “I'm so glad I'm an Adventist. This is crazy.”
And then a few weeks, I think it was a few weeks later, maybe a month later—this is around August, September of 2015—I was curious, I thought, “Well, I’m just curious, what does my church say about this issue?” I really thought, naïvely thought, that we probably didn't have anything on the issue, or if we did, it [abortion] was clearly [condemned as] wrong, and I remember opening up the 1992 guidelines from the official Adventist website and reading through it.
And the first thing that went through my mind was, “every paragraph is straight out of the sexual revolution.” Everything. This has nothing to do with the Bible. All the language, the euphemisms, everything just smacked to me of, “this is the language of a sexual revolutionary.”
Then I started reading and studying more, wanting to learn more, and I came across George Gainer's paper, and I read his research paper that was presented in Loma Linda in 1988 at the conference there, and I was so shocked by this history that I researched and called up George Gainer, who was then a pastor in Oregon, I said, “Is this true? Did these things really happen?” And he said, “Yeah.” And that was the end of 2015
During the year 2016, the whole year was very difficult for me, because I realized this is a serious issue, my church is wrong, and something needs to be done. But then I was troubled by, you know, what can we do about it? Something needs to be done, but nothing's happening. This needs to change.
David: Let me break in for a minute.
Andrew: Sure, sure, no problem.
David: Just give me a precis or a little summary of what is in the [George Gainer paper], because my understanding of the history is that, basically, Roe v. Wade was decided in January of 1973. But the sexual revolution was really from about ‘67 to about ‘73, and part of it was legalizing, part of it was liberalizing . . . divorce, liberalizing divorce laws, and part of it was making abortion legal.
So in several states, or in a few states, they began to legalize abortion prior to Roe v. Wade. (And really the parallels between that, what happened with the Supreme Court [with abortion] and then the same thing with same-sex marriage in the years leading up to 2015 are just the exact same thing: basically a liberalization movement started [in the states] and then the Supreme Court jumped in on it and said, “Oh, no, no, we're [not going to have multiple state laws], we're going to have one national standard—we’re going to do it nationally [with a ruling by the Court]. So the parallels there are freakish.)
But getting back to . . . so it's 1970 and Hawaii has just legalized abortion, so women are flying from the mainland of the United States to Hawaii, and they're getting abortions. And we have an Adventist hospital in Honolulu called Castle Memorial Hospital, and they want in on this bounty of women flying in from California and from the continental United States to Hawaii to have abortions.
So that’s kind of where it started—so you take it from there on with the Gainer paper.
Andrew: So, to summarize that situation when abortion was first legalized, you're correct before Roe vs. Wade and I believe the first state was Hawaii, and it would have been January 1970 or 71, I think it was 1970, and of course we have a hospital there, and the hospital has a dilemma: “We're an Adventist hospital abortion, abortion is now legalized, we have people coming to our hospital, what are we going do about this?”
And so the administrators contacted the NAD or the GC, church officials, and didn't get a really clear decision. There was a lot of back and forth, which is detailed in Gainer's paper, but eventually what the church did is they said, “Okay, we will allow abortions under specific circumstances,” and they issued a statement in 1970.
Now the, when that went to Castle Memorial, and I believe other hospitals, the feedback that the church got was, “Listen, we have non-Adventist doctors (or even Adventist doctors, I don't think that specific information is given); they’re are not happy with the 1970 statement; they want liberalization, they want freedom to perform abortion on demand, and they have said that if you don't offer it in your hospital we're going to take our patients and go somewhere else, which would have been a big problem for the hospital.
And the other problem was that one of the people who showed up that wanted an abortion was a man who had given a huge amount of money to Castle Memorial to help build the hospital. And he showed up and said, “Listen, my niece is pregnant. I want you to give her an abortion. I gave you all this money to build this hospital. You need to offer that service to my family member.”
And so this provided a lot of pressure. So, unfortunately, it's a sad documented history, that in 1971 the Adventist church issued another set of guidelines, the 1971 guidelines, that were more, far more liberal, that allowed abortion on demand. However, church leaders knew—and I hate to say this, but this is just a documented fact—they knew that church members would not accept this. They knew the problems that it would cause. So they kept it a secret.
And so for many years the Adventist church had ostensibly, or before the public, the 1970 position which appeared even somewhat conservative, although still has the health [of the mother] exception, while in practice they had the 1971 position that allowed abortion for—I forget the exact phrase—for whatever reasons it had.
So that would continue until the mid-1980s, and in the mid-1980s, there was, I believe, on the East coast, in an Adventist hospital over there, some Catholics and evangelicals began protesting the practice and support of abortion in front of an Adventist hospital. Now this got published in the Washington Post and in international news, and so now this became a big problem for the Church.
To summarize the situation, the response of the Adventist church, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was to begin claiming that abortion was not only, or necessarily, a medical issue, it was also a religious issue. It's a matter of “conscience,” or “liberty,” or “freedom.” You know, it was couched in terms of the Sexual Revolution, that women have liberty, they have the freedom, you can't tell people what to do.
And so that passes until we get the new position in 1992, known as the guidelines. So those are in place from 1992 until 2019.
Now, going back to what I was doing in 2017, I decided to start a YouTube channel. I thought, this is necessary. Someone needs to explain this history and agitate this issue. Someone has to talk about it because if we are the remnant church, we can't continue to do this, it's going to cause us a problem. We can't bear false witness on the Sixth Commandment.
So I made all these videos and people told me, “you're wrong; the church’s stance is biblical, it's never going to change.” But suffice it to say that several years later, in 2019, to the surprise of a lot of people, our Church said, we're going to “revisit” or modify or change the 1992 position. And we adopted a new position in 2019.
And when that was passed in October, at the Annual Council in October of 2019, there were a lot of people who had very warranted and legitimate concerns about Section 6, which states—you know a lot of the statement sounds really nice, but people were concerned about Section 6—which appears to give a loophole for quote, “intentional or deliberate abortions.” It says:
“In rare and extreme cases human conception may produce pregnancies with fatal prospects or life-threatening birth anomalies that present individuals with exceptional dilemmas. The decisions in such cases may be left to the conscience of individuals.”
So many people, Doug, Bachelor, and others, raised concerns of, you know, what exactly does this mean? What is a birth anomaly?—that’s not a medical term. My wife doesn't know what it means, none of her colleagues know what it means. What is a birth anomaly?
And we were told by church leaders that what would happen is we would pass the 2019 position, and then the Health Ministries, and the people that worked with them, would work on a “protocol” that would further define what this means.
Now this should have been concerning to a lot of people, because one individual, and he's on video saying this, Dr. Hart at Loma Linda, said that “we need sections 6, we need this sentence, to allow for cases like Trisomy-21, otherwise known as Down Syndrome. He didn't say Down Syndrome he said Trisomy-21. He used the technical term, which would have been very disturbing because we had people, even in the audience, like Larry Evans, who says that children with down syndrome are children made in the image of God and we need to take care of them to protect them, and so on.
Well, to the surprise of a lot of people, or maybe to the surprise of very few, in 2020, the GC Health Ministries finally published their protocol without any announcement—this was about July or August the 2020—and in the Protocol it defined “birth anomalies” to include intentional abortion for “a mother's mental health,” which is the exact same language used in previous statements, and in Roe v. Wade to allow for abortion on demand.
So this created a big problem. A lot of people were upset, and within a few weeks the General Conference had deleted that protocol and replaced it with another one. Which is really interesting, because all they do is copy and paste the same phrase.
For example, the 2019 position says that the Adventist Church only allows abortion for quote “birth anomaly.” Well, what does a birth anomaly mean? Well, if you look at the actual protocol, it just copies and paste the exact same sentence. So we don't really have a definition.
You know it’s like saying if you made up a word like “koabaja” and you ask somebody what is a koabaja? They said, a koabaja is the koabaja. That's what the Church has done, they’ve said a “birth anomaly” is a birth anomaly. But that doesn't answer the question, it doesn't help.
So as of right now in, what is this now, in July of 2022, our church is, in my opinion, not clear at all on this position . . .
David: So, in other words, they've produced a good sounding statement but there's a huge exception that you could drive a truck through. You know that according to . . .
Andrew: yeah, there’s no definition . . .
David: But according to Richard Hart at Loma Linda, that [“birth anomaly”] at least allows for aborting Down Syndrome children. So, I mean, that's according to Hart, now other people are going to say, “well, you know, there's other birth defects,” or whatever. But I mean, in other words, there's an exception that is in danger of swallowing the rule, that at least includes Down Syndrome, right?
Andrew: Correct, and on an issue like this there should not be that that vague or nebulous language. There should be no room for people to misunderstand it. You know we're clear on the sabbath, we're clear on smoking, we're clear on the alcohol, we're clear on all these other issues? Why are we so unclear on whether it's okay to kill a child in certain circumstances?
David: Well, of course, the answer is that we want a strong statement that is opposed to abortion for purposes of public relations, but we don't want to change whatever we're doing clinically in our hospitals. I mean, that’s the reason.
David: But going back to, let's go back to where you talked about the Adventist Church essentially came up with a theory of how abortion is a religious liberty issue, and the theory, as I understand it from its modern expositors, the most famous of which is Kevin Paulson but it has others, is that—and I think this originated—you may know more about this than I do—there was a Serbian immigrant whose name, his original name I don't know but he changed his name to John Stevens—and John Stevens was very influential in promoting the view that an unborn child was not really a living soul, and that a living soul was only . . . a baby that had taken a breath outside the womb, and then it was a real person. That became one of the Adventist beliefs that Stevens promoted.
But broadening out from abortion to other issues, the Kevin Paulson theory is that any law, criminal law or civil prohibition on behavior, that is motivated by a Christian impetus or a Christian world view or a Biblical worldview, is an improper imposing of your religious beliefs on the population at large.
And that's not a workable theory, because Christian motivation is behind all kinds of reforms in society: prison reforms, insane asylum reforms, outlawing slavery. Ellen White's, one of her big issues was prohibition of alcohol. And so if you say “oh, anything that has a Christian motivation is improper,” then, basically you would have to disagree with Ellen White, because she wanted Adventists to go out and vote for prohibition.
And the reason why was, this was part of the Christian worldview of alcohol, you know, it ruins families, it ruins marriages, it causes violence, it causes domestic abuse, and all these things. And so I mean, basically . . . I think there's a basic misunderstanding of what is proper legislation.
And actually, you know you, this came up in something that happened the day that Roe v. Wade was decided, and they had a big zoom call with about 6 different people that were involved in Adventist public affairs and religious liberty, and one of the current [assistant] general counsels who works in the General Counsel's [Karnik Doukmetzian’s] office, I’ve forgotten his name but you'll remember it . . .
Andrew: Todd McFarland
David: . . . yes, Todd McFarland, he forgot about the case of Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, and in that case, as you know, in that case the Adventist Church actually took the, what I call the Kevin Paulson position, which is that anything that is motivated by a biblical worldview violates the establishment of religion clause, or is an illegitimate restriction on religious liberty. So that was interesting.
Andrew: Yeah, you know. So for any of the viewers who don't know, in the 1980s, 1988, Missouri passed the law opposed to abortion, to some degree, and I think it was in the preamble to the law, or some note within the law, that affirmed that life begins at conception. And the Adventist legal [general counsel] at the time, one of them, his name was Robert Nixon, and he's listed there in the Adventist Year Book, 1989, the year that the amicus brief [friend of the court brief] was filed. He filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, together with another well-known Adventist attorney, Lee Boothby, and also with a group called Americans United [for Separation of Church and State].
So they all combined together and filed this amicus brief, making the claim that Missouri had violated the Establishment of Religion Clause [of the First Amendment] by passing a law which was by their definition, by the Adventist claim, theological in nature, or theological, it was a theological claim that cannot be substantiated in any way by science.
Which is ridiculous, because that was the year 1988-89, and 10 years previous, in the 1978, we had the world-famous test-tube children, clearly establishing the knowledge that life begins at conception. I think the earliest discovery on record, which was by the father of embryology—I forget his name, it's German [Karl Ernst von Baer]—way back in 1826. I mean the knowledge that life began at conception, that was a science that has especially developed and advanced during the mid-nineteenth century.
So here we are over 100 years later, and we are claiming in an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, that even science can't tell when a new human life begins. And so we have the Adventists making this claim, an absurd, indefensible claim before the Supreme Court, and that's on public record.
And just a few days ago, when Roe v. Wade is overturned, the Legal Counsel, Todd McFarland said that we had never, we had never filed an amicus brief, which was not true. And to his credit, to be fair, he said that he did not know anything about that, which I find hard to believe, but to be fair he said he was ignorant of that amicus. So that's a, that's a troubling part in our history that needs to be addressed, I think.
David: Well, it is probably to Todd’s credit that he doesn't remember these things, but—and the Adventist Church has been completely out to sea on this; we’ve adopted a completely wrong—it’s a wrong philosophy of church and state, of what is permissible legislation, and what’s not. And it's not workable, for many different reasons, and, you know, we've written about this on our website, Fulcrum7, quite a bit. But the idea that Christians cannot be in favor of any laws because they favor those laws because of their Christian worldview, it's just not workable.
I mean, Christianity has made the modern world in the West and within Christendom; we've made it with Christian attitudes, and that includes, you know, some liberal things, because inclusion and love and acceptance is a Christian value, as well as having Christian standards of behavior, in terms of, “don't do wrong and immoral acts.” So, it's just a completely ridiculous thing, and it's time that we came out of it, and unfortunately its just, I don’t know, its bad stuff.
And, by the way, it's not just the history of the bad, you know, public affairs/religious liberty philosophy, there's some real bad actions, I mean, there was—I wrote a column several years ago, probably 8 or 9 years ago, about a guy named Edward Allred, who was the pioneer in—you know, basically abortion quickly went from something done in a hospital to something done in an outpatient clinic that is essentially an abortion mill. And Edward Allred pioneered the abortion mill, made a bunch of money on that, gave some of it to the church; he’s given some of it to La Sierra, he’s given some of it to Loma Linda, he’s a La Sierra and a Loma Linda grad. And he . . . you know it's some dark history, I mean, he got rich off of never spending more than 5 to 8 minutes with each [pregnant] woman.
Andrew: Yeah, that's right.
Andrew: Something I thought was remarkable, because I've posted a blog (and I'll send you the link) of all the articles, known articles, that have been published about Allred, and I came across this fascinating article, I don't remember which one it was, maybe it was the article from the Fresno Bee in the 1980s or something—but Allred makes this interesting claim that the idea that a new human life begins at conception, that's a religious view. And I thought that was remarkable because he's almost, he's paraphrasing, or almost citing verbatim from what the Adventist Church has taught in our official books.
For example, in our all of our books, “Seventh-day Adventists Believe,” published by the GC, all versions--1985, 2003, and in 2018, like all of them—in the chapter the nature of man, says under the definition soul, “a new soul comes into existence whenever a child is born.” And that's also repeated in our official Adventist Encyclopedia.
And to my knowledge, the earliest, if you search that phrase in Adventist literature, the earliest occurrence of that goes back to questions on doctrine in 1957. I don't I don't know the whole history of that book, or that situation. I don't know the whole discussion you can have about that.
But Adventism, to my knowledge, has never really addressed or grappled with the nature of the unborn child. And what we have published is grossly misleading or just, not true, because the Bible affirms multiple times in both the Hebrew and the Greek, Old and New Testament, that the unborn are defined with the exact same living words, Greek and Hebrew words, used for born children. And we've never grappled with that, and I personally don't see how we are ever going to get out of this problem unless we go back and address what is the unborn child? Is it just a clump of cells? Is it some ethereal, mystical, magical, spiritual inhabitation of some, you know, living mass in the uterus? Or is it a child? Is it a baby? This has to be addressed, because once you define the unborn as a living human child, then all the theology will naturally follow. I, that's what I think, anyway.
And for Edward Allred to recite that I thought was somewhat illuminating and ironic, in a sick way. Because he would go on to become the most notorious abortionist, who boasted in his 1983 interview by that time of having performed over 250,000 abortions, and he continued at that same rate until he retired, I think it was, he retired in ‘88 or ‘89. So by the time he would have retired, he would have performed well over 300,000 abortions.
And to our great embarrassment, he is very much affiliated with the Adventist Church. And many Adventist Churches, or institutions, have no problem accepting money from him, which is also a problem because he's one of the most famous horse gamblers in the entire world. He has a horse racing track, and our position says, our official Adventist position, says our Church will not accept money from anyone involved in gambling in any way, shape, form, or whatever—that’s the bottom line of the gambling statement.
So, we have a really big problem, and it's going to need to be addressed. Because, prophetically, at some point between now and in the future, prophetically at some point the Church is going to have to take a biblical position. And I don't know that that's going to be a pleasant process, if we consider some of the resistance and attitudes that we've seen over the past 30 plus years.
David: Yeah, it's very unfortunate, because, you know, the science is clear: When an egg is fertilized, you have DNA from the mother and the father, and you have a new person who has unique DNA, and that will always be that person’s DNA, ‘til their born, until they grow up, until they die. That’s the science.