Joe Rogan has become a proxy of sorts for America’s everyman, which is an impressive feat for someone worth a quarter billion dollars. It’s hard to be fabulously wealthy and relatable, but Rogan mostly pulls it off. He shares that in common with the President, who is also routinely derided by the establishment but beloved by the disaffected. I consider that a mark in each man’s favor. Rogan has built an empire by talking to an eclectic mix of people on a wide range of topics, but they’re almost all men and almost all entertainers (or entertainer adjacent). Of his 68 guests so far this year, only three have been women. It’s no surprise, then, that Rogan’s audience is also mostly male. And those men are disproportionately young and disproportionately unmarried—which makes them disproportionately sympathetic to abortion. Not only have they been relentlessly conditioned to view any objection to abortion as misogynistic, they’ve discovered that abortion offers tremendous short-term benefits to sexually libertine men. Rogan is neither young nor single himself but firmly shares the conviction that men have no right to condemn abortion.

I wouldn’t call myself a regular listener to the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), but I’ve listened enough to hear abortion come up several times. Rogan—as I mentioned in my JD Vance article—routinely frustrates me on the subject, but he is at least willing to have a discussion and willing to admit his discomfiture with “baby killing.” His words. Like other popular comedians, Rogan sometimes says things about abortion that are surprisingly astute. I’ve written about this before. But unlike even the highest of profile comedians, Joe Rogan is listened to by more than 20 million people a week. He may well be America’s most important cultural influencer. As Joe Rogan goes, so goes the nation, which is why I’ve deemed it worthwhile to engage with him on the issue of abortion—just as I did with the Rubin Report a decade ago. Rather than limiting my scope to only the episodes I’ve already listened to, I decided to take on every one—all 2,306—which made this a much more ambitious undertaking than I’d originally envisioned.

According to tapesearch, abortion has come up in 332 episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience. That’s a lot, but still represents just 14% of the whole. Among those 332 episodes, 169 were single mentions—so nothing of real substance. An additional 80 shows mentioned abortion more than once but didn’t reveal anything of Rogan’s own thinking on the subject. So that leaves 88 episodes from which to glean Joe Rogan’s exceedingly convoluted opinion of abortion. I’ve now reviewed them all, which was both painful and revealing. What did I learn? I learned that Joe Rogan tends to say the same things about abortion over and over. The same observations, the same anecdotes, and even the same jokes. And I learned that some of those things are wildly contradictory. To illustrate, let’s play three truths and a lie. I’m going to give you four statements. Your job is to figure out which one Rogan didn’t say. Here goes:

1. [Humans are] inconsistent in a lot of the ways we look at things, but the abortion one is a crazy one. You’re literally talking about stopping a human life while it’s inside of a person.
2. When I look at the reality of what an abortion is, it disturbs me… You’re killing babies.
3. I have no business to tell anybody what they can and can’t do with their body. I have no business. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know when life begins.
4. That’s what’s driving me crazy about this abortion thing. It’s like who are you to f—ing tell people what they can and can’t do? Some people are like, (life begins) at the moment of conception [but] that’s a religious notion.

Were you able to identify which of those statements was not made by Joe Rogan? Probably not, because Rogan actually said all of them. How could the same guy make all four assertions? To some measure, it comes by following the lead of his guests—all the way down to the words he chooses. If his guest serves up a steady dose of expletives, so will Joe. But if his guest is vulgarity-averse, Rogan can (mostly) do that too. He’s such a friendly and gracious host that he rarely pushes back on anything his guests say. I’ve yet to hear him do a combative interview, let alone get heated with someone. He goes along to get along—which I can appreciate. I’m like that too. I won’t positively affirm something I disagree with, but neither am I looking for a fight. If there’s an opportunity to have a good faith conversation, I’ll take it. If not, why bother? Pearls before swine.

On the subject of abortion, Rogan sometimes derides pro-lifers and sometimes derides pro-choicers. He sometimes criticizes abortion and sometimes criticizes opposition to abortion—depending it seems on whoever is sitting across the table from him. The more supportive they are of abortion, the more supportive he is. And vice versa. It just so happens that almost all of Rogan’s guests sympathize with abortion. By my count, there were only four who I could definitively classify as pro-life. That would be Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, JD Vance, and Seth Dillon. And only Seth Dillon, of the Babylon Bee, articulated much of his opposition to abortion. With that kind of ideological disparity, it’s no wonder that Rogan’s often vacuous abortion tropes go mostly unchallenged. I’ve already given you a glimpse of his rather disjointed position. This is how I would sum it up in whole:

Abortion is ethically complex. It is a uniquely human dilemma. It kills a baby but should remain legal because men have no right to tell women what to do with their bodies. And because of rape. And because only religious people think life begins at conception. There is nothing wrong with abortion early in pregnancy. There is something wrong with abortion late in pregnancy—but politicians only care about it as a wedge issue to prevent otherwise like-minded people from finding consensus while distracting both sides from the real chicanery that’s going on.

Rogan called abortion a uniquely human problem—or something to that effect—more than a dozen times in the shows I listened to. It was one of his go-to declarations. This excerpt, from a 2021 conversation with Phil Demers is indicative of those remarks:

Abortion is a messy discussion. It’s a human discussion. I think a woman should have the right to choose. I’m a pro-choice person. I’m a left-wing, pro-choice person. It’s your body, right? Especially in rape cases, or in cases of a young girl who makes a mistake, or even a woman who just doesn’t want to have that child. But the thing about abortion, where it gets messy, is when you get to a viable fetus. Like, what do you do when it’s six months old? When it’s seven months old? When does consciousness start? When is it a murder? When does it stop being a cluster of cells and start being a human being? It’s a very human problem.

Rogan sometimes refers to the conceptus as human life and sometimes as potential human life, but it’s revealing that he consistently calls abortion a uniquely human problem. Because he’s conceding right out of the gate that human beings operate in a distinct moral realm. Animals don’t have abortions, but some of them do eat or abandon their young—with impunity. No one suggests they’re acting immorally, and even the staunchest atheist understands that human beings are intrinsically held to a higher standard than animals—who never act against their conscience or feel constrained by ethical concerns. If we’re just evolved apes—as Rogan regularly asserts, why does virtually everyone concede that humans have the capacity to act immorally? Genesis offers a perfectly reasonable explanation. Atheism does not. What is the biblical explanation? Human beings were made in the image of God, with the law of God written on our hearts but the freedom and capacity to act against it. Rogan’s repeated insistence that abortion is a uniquely human quandary is one of the things he gets right about abortion. I’ll give you a few others before dealing with what he gets wrong.

1. Abortion is against nature

“Isn’t it crazy,” Rogan asked Ari Shaffir in 2017, “(that) when you’re not trying to have a baby with a chick you’re having sex with, you’re playing like this game of trickery with nature?” And he’s right. Abortion and birth control are both efforts to game the system. They are both against nature, but Rogan recognizes that they are not moral equivalents. “I am not right wing,” he told Christopher Ryan, “but [abortion is] definitely killing a person that’s about to be born [and] whether you cut it off at three cells or three months, it’s the same thing.” When Ryan asked if masturbation doesn’t also cut off a person, Rogan rightly responded that it doesn’t. Because “[it] doesn’t ever make that connection.” The egg is never fertilized. Rogan articulated this point further to Greg Fitzsimmons when he recounted a “preposterous discussion” he’d had with someone claiming “that having an abortion is just (removing) a seed.” Rogan countered by pointing out that it’s not a seed, it’s a “baby that’s (already) started to grow.” If you don’t interfere with this process,” Rogan told Neal Brennan, “you have a human, so how can you make the argument that if you do interfere, it’s nothing?” In other words, even if you pretend that the victim of abortion isn’t human when the abortion takes place, they would have ended up that way. And their life is no less lost for the distinction.

2. "Reproductive Rights" is just a euphemism for abortion

I referenced reproductive rights in the title of this piece for its alliterative value, not because I consider it a legitimate descriptor. It is not, and Rogan recognizes this too. Talking to Chris Williamson in 2022, Rogan said that “you can call it reproductive rights, but it’s really abortion.” This euphemistic sleight of hand is part of a broader problem that Rogan routinely highlights. Namely, abortion advocates don’t want to talk about abortion—except in the most abstract and imprecise terms. Whenever possible, they don’t even mention it by name. Abortion is one of those subjects, Rogan told Greg Fitzsimmons, that for progressives is not open to debate. “There is a certain acceptable opinion,” Rogan continued, “that you’re supposed to have as an intelligent person [and] if you question it at all or deviate outside of that one opinion, you’re a bad person.” To Neal Brennan, Rogan pointed out that abortion supporters “have a deep discomfort about discussing (it).” They don’t want to “discuss the actual reality of what it is.” Instead, as he told Colin Moriarty, it’s all about “reproductive choice” or “the freedom of your body to do what you want.” Their devotion to abortion, Rogan says, is “almost like a religion.” The part they leave out is the real thing that’s happening. “And that real thing,” he articulated to Brennan, “is killing a thing that would grow up to be a person, and that’s why people freak out about it.”

3. Democrats are only pro-choice when it comes to abortion

For this point, I’m going to rely more on the words of a JRE guest than on Rogan’s own, but there are plenty of indications that Rogan shares this take. During a 2024 appearance, Dave Smith made the following observation:

It’s very interesting to me that progressive Democrats all of a sudden become radical libertarians but only on (this) one issue. I’m not even saying the libertarian position is to be pro-choice. There are libertarians who are pro-life and libertarians who are [not], but the argument [Democrats] make is a libertarian one. They’re like, listen, I own my body. It’s my body; it’s my choice. The government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare decisions. We believe in freedom. This is a basic fundamental right. It’s a very libertarian argument. And it’s just interesting that [they] only apply that to this one area. There’s not any other area where any progressive Democrat would ever go, if we’re talking about Obamacare or we’re talking about regulation, or we’re talking about taxes, hey, listen, this is my money, this is my body, this is my choice.

Rogan called that a “very good point” and noted to Hunter Maats that “Republicans are pro-choice when it comes to guns.” Democrats, of course, are not. Nor when it comes to schools, vaccines, or speech. And they certainly weren’t pro-choice in their COVID response, which Rogan has been pointing out for years.

4. Seeing is Believing

When the conversation turned to abortion in a 2016 interview with Jim Breuer, Rogan asked, “Are we cool with [baby killing]?” and then answered his own question. “As long as I don’t see the baby.” He then took on the role of an imagined abortionist. "Oh no, no. You don’t see [bleep]. We put a vacuum cleaner up there... you don’t see anything." To which Rogan responsed as the imagined woman, "Okay, cool. As long as I don’t see it." And that, in a nutshell, is exactly how America—and the world—deals with the violence of abortion. We’re cool with it as long as we don’t have to see it. During his fifteen years of public abortion conversations, Rogan has referenced the transformative power of imagery on numerous occasions. Seeing what abortion does, and seeing who the victim is, can entirely change your perception—which has been one of Abort73’s operating principles from the very beginning. Talking about the Bodies exhibition with Bridget Phetasy, which displays in utero babies “at every stage (of pregnancy),” Rogan noted that “see(ing) them at six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks... really puts [things] in perspective.” It makes it much harder to just blankly endorse “a woman’s right to choose.” Because, in Rogan’s words, it makes you “look (at) what we’re advocating for.” Upon seeing the video of Planned Parenthood selling body parts in 2015, Rogan described it to Abby Martin as a “super disturbing video” that makes you “realize what abortion really is like.” He conceded that it’s “more convenient for me to think this is a bundle of cells.” And while discussing the same video with Brian Redban, Rogan wondered what could possibly be going through the minds of the Planned Parenthood executives who casually view their transactions as “just a matter of line items [when] there’s a f-ing pile of baby parts that they sucked out of a woman’s body or a bunch of women’s bodies.” As Alex Berenson told Rogan in 2022, “anybody who’s seen [a] sonogram [knows] that abortion is murder. It’s the murder of a living child.”

5. Abortion Kills Babies

I’ve already referenced Rogan’s willingness to concede that abortion kills a baby. He says it often, which only makes his unwillingness to condemn abortion all the more maddening. I’ll get to that soon, but first I’d like to highlight Rogan’s reaction to Christina Applegate’s X Post following the election of Donald Trump. Applegate insisted that her “child [was] sobbing because her rights as a woman may be taken away.” To which Rogan offered the following response:

Could you imagine a child sobbing because their right to kill a baby inside of them might be taken away? I don’t believe [what Applegate claims is] true. I don’t believe that’s true unless you’ve distorted what we’re talking about to that child and said that someone’s gonna tell [them] what they can and can’t do with their body—in some sort of a weird dystopian way. What did you say to that kid? Did you explain what an abortion is? Did you explain how they came about? That they were in your body and then they came out? Now they’re a little tiny person that’s like super vulnerable. And you want to protect their right to kill a little tiny person inside of them?

That’s a pretty pointed analysis, right? And accurate. If children are lamenting the potential loss of abortion rights, it’s only because they’ve been given an entirely warped understanding of what abortion is. Children, left to their own devices, are the most anti-abortion segment of the population I’ve ever encountered. I’ve seen it more times than I can count. When children stumble upon a picture of an abortion victim, they never try to justify the violence or pretend that the victim is somehow less than human. They have only one question. What happened to the baby? Many of these children will be conditioned to eventually accept and celebrate abortion—but none of them go there on their own. Their moral compass is too pristine for such compromise. They can see can plainly that abortion kills a baby, and Rogan seems to see that too.

Now that I’ve laid out what Joe Rogan gets right about abortion, you may wonder what could possibly be left to criticize. Quite a lot, actually, which makes his position on abortion so infuriating. He’s willing to say all sorts of things that are both true and politically-unpopular, but the other side of Rogan’s ledger is plenty condemnable—and his efforts to play both sides may be his worst offense of all. Didn’t Jesus say something to the effect of, it’s better to be hot or cold than lukewarm? It’s better to make the wrong decision than to make no decision at all. I’ll come back to that. In the meantime, here is what Joe Rogan gets wrong about abortion.

1. It’s a religious claim to say life begins at conception

I’ve already referenced Rogan’s assertion that it is a mere “religious notion” to suggest life begins at conception, but it’s one he comes back to again and again. “We can’t have religious guidelines [controlling] secular people,” he said of state abortion restrictions in 2022. “It’s the dumbest thing,” he called Texas’ 2021 abortion ban, and “it’s clearly a religious-based law.” He warned listeners that legally prohibiting abortion would “force people to vote Democratic.” On that same theme, he told Rod Blagojevich last December that if “men, based on religious ideals” hadn’t tried to “tell women what to do with their bodies, it would’ve been an even bigger victory for Trump.” To JD Vance, Rogan stated that some people think “life begins at the moment of conception,” but “other people disagree with this,” and “a lot of it is based in religion.”

I suspect Rogan finds solace in the idea that only religious people would try to ban abortion because—as a person who is not religious, it gives him a convenient out. These “nutty Christians,” as he called us in 2011, with our “kooky ideas” about life’s beginning should not be setting public policy. That’s how Rogan sees it, and to give him his due, I too used to believe that only religious people thought life begins at conception. But I was wrong, and so is Joe. It is true that religious people are disproportionately opposed to abortion, but so what? Religious people are also disproportionately generous and disproportionately happy. And religious people were disproportionately responsible for ending the slave trade. Does that somehow taint the work of abolitionists? If anything, we should be giving more weight to the side animated by biblical conviction, not less. Unfortunately, Rogan and many of his guests demonstrate a flippant disregard for ancient wisdom—which is summed up perfectly by Tim Dillon who told Rogan the following in 2020:

We’re never going to come together 100% on [abortion] as long as you still have people with a very religious view of when life begins. Because you can’t argue with somebody who says (that) life begins the minute that you have conception... [but] the good news is people are getting smarter and realizing that they can’t legislate things based on a book that was written 2,000 years ago or whatever.

I would say it a bit differently. I would say you can’t argue with someone who is so pompous that they categorically dismiss all that has come before them. To suggest that our cultural walking away from the Bible is evidence that people are getting smarter is a rather asinine notion. Does that also account for our cultural walking away from great literature? Or are we confusing technological advance for intelligence? The Bible will survive for as long as there are people on the earth. The “wisdom” venerated by the likes of Tim Dillon will not. The irony, of course, is that it isn’t the Bible that tells us when human life begins. It’s science. You know, that infallible deity that so many on the left bow down to. Rogan calls it the “ideology of science worship,” but he gets the religion question backwards. He thinks it’s the anti-abortion position that’s dependent upon religious ideology when in fact it’s the other way around.

To say that a new life comes into being at conception is not a religious assertion. It is scientific fact, as demonstrated by the first page in Abort73’s Case Against Abortion. The evidence is legion. What does biology tell us about the entity targeted by abortion? It tells us it’s alive, it’s growing, and it’s human. And not just human like skin cells or spermatozoa. It is uniquely and independently human. Meaning, it has its own genetic code—created at the moment of conception. Different DNA than the mother. Potentially different blood type than the mother, and half the time, a different sex than the mother. Separate body; separate human being. Science can’t tell us if abortion is right or wrong, but it can tell us if the victim is human. Though Rogan likes to slip the term in, there is no such thing as a potential human being.

In his conversation with Brian Moses, Rogan assures us that the abortion industry “is not an evil organization that was created by Satan”—which immediately brought to mind an old Seinfeld bit where George insists that it’s not selfish to want one thing that’s just his and no one else’s. Jerry’s pitch-perfect response: That’s the very definition of selfish. Regarding Rogan’s insistence that Planned Parenthood is not Satanic (just because it kills tiny babies en masse), I would counter: That’s the very definition of Satanic. If we’re being honest, the religious claim is to say that life doesn’t begin at conception. Because what you’re asserting is that there is something besides biology in play. Yes, it’s alive. Yes, it’s a genetically-distinct human being, but it’s not a person. In essence, it does not yet have a soul. In his dialogue with Neal Brennan, Rogan laments our inability to know when the soul enters a body:

I don’t personally (know when life begins) I’m not a scientist. I’m not an obstetrician, but if we had, like, a soul meter in the room, and you woke up one day and your wife is pregnant, and it’s like 48 days in. “Honey, honey, look at the soul meter. There’s a new soul.” Like, whoa, no turning back now. Now it’s a new soul. Before then, it was just like a nesting area. Like they were ready. It was a prepping area for a new soul.

There is no biological basis for claiming life doesn’t being at conception, so Rogan—and a whole world of others—look for a metaphysical one. Why? Because they need a moral loophole. They need a way to justify getting rid of a problematic pregnancy—a difficulty made necessary by their having gotten rid of a problematic sex ethic. There is no such thing as a human non-person, but this is precisely the category that those with genocidal propensities must carve out—in order to justify their misdeeds. Rogan complained to Mike Baker that “evangelical Christian(s)” have “a very rigid perspective [that] life begins at conception.” But you know who else rigidly maintains that life begins at conception? Biology. It wasn’t pastors who raised a fuss about abortion in America’s infancy. It was physicians. It was the American Medical Association. You might say that the reason the AMA no longer opposes abortion is because they’re no longer guided by Christian values, and that’s a fair point, but it’s not because they suddenly discovered that abortion doesn’t kill a human being. Or that life begins at some point after conception. They’ve simply stopped fearing the judgment of God. Rogan argues that we shouldn’t be trying to “enslave people back to the old way—when these (anti-abortion) laws and ideas were first instituted.” Back then, he says, “you couldn’t have an abortion [as easily as] you could have today” and speculates that “abortions today are probably way safer than they were a hundred years ago.” But this entirely misses the point. The reason the AMA so vehemently opposed abortion a hundred years ago is the same reason it should be opposing abortion today. It’s not because it was potentially unsafe for the mother. It’s because it killed her child.

Rogan conceded to Greg Fitzsimmons in 2013 that he doesn’t know when life begins, which is concession enough to condemn abortion. Because even if abortion might kill an innocent human being, it cannot be done in good faith. Unless you can say with absolute certainty that abortion does not kill an innocent victim, there is no grounds for allowing it. The middle-ground argument doesn’t work because there is no middle ground when it comes to abortion. Yannis Pappas feigned its existence when he told Rogan, “If you believe life begins at conception, that’s fine, don’t have an abortion, but putting that on somebody else (is wrong).” Now try using that logic in the context of slavery. If you believe blacks are people, that’s fine, don’t buy a slave, but you putting that belief on somebody else is wrong. Do you see the problem? The personal conviction argument doesn’t work. “Religious laws are very strange,” Rogan told Joey Diaz after Texas’ six-week abortion ban was enacted. “Who the [bleep] are you [to set] this arbitrary number?” He’s actually right about six weeks being arbitrary. There’s no moral difference between a 6-week abortion and a 7-week abortion. Here enters Dave Smith, who told Rogan that “it’s very tough to find a line other than conception that’s not arbitrary.” Rogan’s response: “(You’re) right.”

2. Birth control is the key to eliminating abortion

“If you want people to have less abortions,” Rogan said last year, “make more birth control available.” It should be “available everywhere,” he added, along with “education.” This is such a tired pronouncement, that I barely have the patience to engage with it. But here goes. Rogan has assumed three things, all of which are false. He assumes birth control isn’t already available everywhere, he assumes that unplanned pregnancies occur because we haven’t been sufficiently educated, and he assumes that more birth control won’t lead to more risky sex—ie sex between people who are in no position to raise a child. Ironically, immediately after declaring that more birth control and education are needed, Rogan admitted that it won’t actually work. “But that’s not gonna help,” he conceded, “‘cause kids are crazy. You get horny; you go nuts.”

In a conversation with Mike Baker, Rogan mocks the idea that “abstinence is something you [can] actually teach people.” He calls it “hilarious.” But I’m going to go on record to declare that I got married as a 25-year-old virgin. Ridicule me if you must. And 24 years later, I’ve still only ever had sex with one person. So I know it’s possible—difficult though it be. But the real problem with Rogan’s assertion is that the abortion epidemic in this country is not being driven by kids. Sixty percent of American abortions are performed on women in their twenties. Another 30% are performed on women in their thirties. Plus four percent for women in their 40’s. In other words, these aren’t kids who don’t know where babies come from or can’t figure out how to put on a condom. The problem isn’t a lack of birth control, or a lack of education. It’s more likely the reverse. The fact that abortion was mainstreamed at the same time as birth control and values-free sex ed is not a coincidence. The three go hand in hand. They are partners, not combatants—which I’ve written about many times before.

“Birth control is obviously the best method (to prevent abortion),” Rogan confidently declared to Andrew Santino, but then he plowed headlong into a truth few people are willing to admit. “I’m not advocating for abortion as a method of birth control, but what I’m saying is when women take birth control pills, that [bleep] [bleeps] with their hormones; it’s not good.” A lot of women, Rogan notes “have really bad reactions to the pill.” It “changes your behavior.” To Tom Segura, he added, “the birth control pill for women is a [bleeped] up method of birth control because it does wild [bleep] to their body; it’s not healthy for them in any way, shape, or form.” Then there’s this. More than half of all U.S. abortions are performed on women who were actively using birth control when they got pregnant. How is this possible? Because birth control only works most of the time. In practice, 6-8% of pill users will still get pregnant in any given year.

By creating the illusion that consequence-free sex is possible, birth control massively increases the type of behavior that leads to crisis pregnancies and thereby increases the total number of abortions—while conditioning people to believe that sex and procreation can be neatly separated. Which they can’t, as evidenced by the million or so babies America sacrifices annually upon the altar of sexual liberation. Almost all abortions in the United States are performed on unmarried women, which means this. The best way to stop abortion is to stop having sex with someone you’re not married to—or at the very least, with someone you don’t want to have a baby with.

3. It is insane to oppose abortion in cases of rape

Like most abortion apologists, Rogan brings up the issue of rape early and often—and disingenuously. I say disingenuously because no one who bolsters their support for abortion by bringing up rape believes that abortion should only be legal in cases of rape. It’s brought up entirely for its emotional value. We know this to be true in Rogan’s case because of a statement I’ve already shared. He says that society has no right to interfere with a woman’s abortion decision “especially in rape cases, or in cases of a young girl who makes a mistake, or even a woman who just doesn’t want to have that child.” So there you have it. Rogan’s baseline position is not that abortion should only be legal in cases of rape. He believes it should be legal for any woman who doesn’t want her child.

Rogan exposes the incongruity of his position during a 2024 interview with Rod Blagojevich. “I’ve talked to very intelligent, reasonable people,” Rogan said, “that believe that life begins at the moment of conception—even in the case of rape.” The thing that jumps out at me here is that little caveat—even in the case of rape. Is Rogan under the impression that the biological process is somehow different for babies who were not conceived consensually? Does he think life begins at a later point for those who came into existence through sexual assault? Because that’s not how it works. If you oppose abortion on ethical grounds, you do so because it kills an innocent human being. And this is true no matter what the circumstances of conception.

There are people all over the world who are alive today because their father raped their mother. I’ve met some of them, and their lives are no less valuable than yours or mine. They are not the guilty party. They are not the ones deserving of death. Rogan went after Seth Dillon many times in subsequent episodes because of Dillon’s assertion that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Rogan calls him “out of [his] f—ing mind” for thinking “that rape victims should be forced to carry babies.” Doug Stanhope, who Rogan interviewed in 2022, offered an apropos counter. “That’s like saying a fetus is a living thing unless his dad was an a—hole. How is [that] the baby’s fault?” Stanhope was right, of course. We don’t kill children for the sins of their fathers, but I’m not sure Rogan got the message. This comes from a conversation he had with Duncan Trussell, to illustrate how crazy “hardcore righties” are:

What if you were raped? What if you’re a little girl, a 13-year-old girl and she was raped? You want that girl to carry her f—ing baby?! Are you crazy?! She was raped four weeks ago. We found out she’s pregnant. What do you want me to do? You want me to pray? How about f— you? My raped little girl is not going to have to carry someone’s baby, you f—ing a—hole! And the idea that there’s an invisible man in the sky that watches over everything you do, but allows rape to occur. Allows little kids to get raped. You want that little kid to carry a baby? I’ll f—ing kill you. You’re godd-mn crazy.

Reading those words on the page, or hearing me repeat them, you might easily infuse them with more rage than they actually contained. Having just listened to it again, Rogan’s remarks come off as more hypothetical than personal. It was mostly devoid of raw emotion, as if he were delivering canned arguments—which he essentially was. His inclination that fathers should be the defenders of their daughters is right, and I don’t want to downplay the transcendent angst of finding your daughter in such a situation, but he’s wrong about this. Killing the child will not make the rape any easier to bear. Or any more likely to be forgotten. But it will destroy something that might have actually brought healing and redemption. If Rogan’s daughter—or your daughter, or my daughter—was to say, “Daddy, I want to keep the baby,” is there any chance in the world that that baby wouldn’t quickly become the center of our worlds? “The subject of abortion gets really weird,” Rogan told Sam Tripoli, “when you have kids that you love more than life itself.” I suspect that’s doubly true for your kids’ kids. So even if Rogan was dead set against his daughter’s having that baby, it would only be a matter of time before he was entirely wrapped around the child’s finger. As he should be. That’s how grandfathers were designed. By the time that baby turned one, Rogan would be left to wonder how he could have ever thought it reasonable to terminate this precious child’s life. If we would just stop and think about it for more than two seconds, we’d come to realize that killing an innocent child is not the solution—and we’d stop mocking those who point this out.

4. Abortion will happen whether it’s legal or not

It would be impossible to measure the time, energy, and money that has gone into propping up this assertion over the last half century. I’ll grant that it’s true in one sense. There is no way to entirely eliminate any criminal or anti-social behavior, but it is not true in the way abortion advocates mean. And they know this. Rogan, perhaps, does not. But the argument appeals to him, no doubt, because he’s so morally conflicted. This gives him a way to take the ethical question off the table. If you make a law against abortion, Rogan told Ms. Pat in 2023, “people are just going to find other ways to get abortions—to do it illegally, (and) you’re going to create criminals out of people that just want control of their body.” He makes two assertions here, and once again, they’re both false. Most women who would get an abortion if it were legal would not get an abortion if it weren’t. Rogan’s own state has already shown this to be true. Plenty of women have left Texas to get an abortion since the state ban went into effect, but that number is nowhere near what the state abortion total was before the ban was enacted. And there hasn’t been anything like a surge in back-alley abortion deaths. In fact, I haven’t heard of a single one. And God knows, abortion advocates are desperately looking for them. Second, the “control of their body” argument is entirely bogus. Rogan should know better than to employ it. Abortion is not about whether or not a woman has the right to control her body. It’s about whether or not she has the right to kill her unborn child. Those are two entirely separate issues, and it’s dishonest to conflate them. My bodily autonomy ends where yours begins—which Rogan understands. He calls himself “a big believer in let(ting) people do whatever the [bleep] they want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.” He then admits that “the real problem that people have with abortion is [the conviction] that there’s another person involved.” And he’s exactly right.

5. Men should stay out of the abortion debate (unless they’re advocating for abortion)

Every time abortion comes up, Rogan offers the same disclaimer—lest anyone confuse his criticism of abortion for opposition to abortion. “I’m 100% pro-choice,” he told Jim Breuer in 2016. “I’m 100% a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body.” But at the end of the day, he added, “that’s a little baby, and you’re using a vacuum to suck it out.” How is Rogan able to live with this moral contradiction? By recusing himself from the jury—so to speak—for the simple fact that he is a man. After explicitly confessing to CJ Werleman that abortion is nothing less than snuffing out a person, Rogan told Christopher Ryan that he doesn’t have a problem with abortion because “again, I don’t have a vagina, I don’t have ovaries, I don’t have a womb, (and) I’m not making babies.” It’s not his place, he rationalized, “to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when [it comes] to terminat(ing) a life inside the (woman’s) body.”

While Rogan is quick to argue that men have no right to tell women not to have an abortion, he never frames it the other way. He never argues that it’s out of place for men to tell women to get an abortion. And yet this is the way plays out in practice. Abort73 has received close to a thousand stories of abortion regret. Hardly any have come from the father. If one parent wants to keep the child and the other doesn’t, ten to one it’s the man who wants the abortion. And Rogan knows this to be true. He reveals as much every time he says that “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be an app on your phone.” They’d be available everywhere, he maintains, even at the gas station. “There’d be no babies,” which simply reflects what we all know to be true. The average man is a whole lot more child-averse than the average woman—a sentiment explicitly reinforced by some of Rogan’s guests. “I’m pro-abortion if I get the girl pregnant,” Ian Edwards laughed in 2019. Neal Brennan was even more honest in noting that our beliefs about life’s beginning are often based on whatever suits our needs. “If I’ve got a girl whose period is late,” he admitted, “I’m like, I believe in abortion [through] the fifth trimester!”

There are lots of women who demand a right to abortion. I’m not denying that, but at the end of the day, it is primarily women who are holding the line against abortion. The most brilliant question Rogan ever asked on the subject is one he raised back in 2015—and seemed to stumble into. “Does a woman have a right to tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her body?” He didn’t have an answer, but what makes the question so provocative is its implication. If men don’t have the right to tell women what to do with their bodies, as Rogan maintains ad nauseam, doesn’t that mean women do have the right? Because, if so, lots of those women are saying, “Don’t have an abortion!” Do you see the fallacy? Arguments don’t have genders—and it’s a cop out to suggest they do. It would be like saying, I’m not a plantation owner, so it’s not appropriate for me to condemn slavery. Or, I’m not the parent of a gender-confused child, so it’s not appropriate for me to condemn the mutilation of minors or the inclusion of boys in girls’ sports. These are issues that go way beyond our narrow group identities.

Ironically, the only guest to take Rogan to task for his nonsensical claim that men have no right to oppose abortion was Josh Zepps—who is so committed to abortion rights that he believes abortion should be legal even after birth (at least in theory) á la Peter Singer. That may seem outrageous, but his argument is simply this. There is no moral difference between abortion and infanticide. If you’re going to allow the one, you have to allow the other. I could try to summarize his arguments, but I’d rather let them unfold just as they did on the show. Rogan is no intellectual slouch, but he was painfully overmatched in this discussion with Zepps. There were times, in fact, when he couldn’t intellectually keep up—probably because when logical fallacies go unchallenged for decades, you lose the capacity to even recognize they’re there. Here’s an excerpt from that 2017 exchange:

Zepps: I believe in abortion rights, but I don’t believe that you can find it in the Constitution of the United States... The Supreme Court said there’s a right to privacy, therefore there’s a right to abortion because we don’t want to interfere in women’s affairs. But that presupposes that the embryo isn’t a human. You don’t have the right to privacy to kill somebody, right? I mean if I go into a room, my right to privacy doesn’t extend to me being able to get away with killing a baby. The question of whether or not it’s a baby is the relevant question. That’s not addressed in Roe. So I think that [abortion] should be legal, but I think that it should be legal through the legislative process.

Rogan: Well, there’s a large amount of people that don’t want men talking about this at all. That don’t feel that you should be able to discuss this.

Zepps (who is Australia): That is one of the main problems in America as well.

Rogan: I can understand a woman being upset that a man, with no stake in the game, is stepping up and saying that a woman should or should not be able to have an abortion.

Zepps: Well, why? I mean, how do I have a stake in the game of whether or not, for example, murder should be legal?

Rogan: Well, okay, this is not that. This is something different.

Zepps: No, it’s not. It’s a moral question.

Rogan: It might be to you, but it might not be to them.

Zepps: The idea that we shouldn’t be allowed to think and talk about the moral quandary of this because we can’t have babies is silly. We have to be able to have conversations about anything, without allowing our identities to prevent us from being able to think.

Rogan: I think we both agree that you should absolutely be able to have a conversation about this. The question is, should a man be able to decide what a woman can and can’t do with her body, and should he be able to make the laws?

Zepps: But you just smuggled in the term "with her body." ... Somewhere along the way, it ceases to be just her body.

Rogan: But an unrelated male, when should that person be able to make a decision? And should a male human being be able to make a decision at all?... Why should a man be able to make that decision in the first place?

Zepps: Because he’s got a brain, as well. And we’re all invested in deciding.

Rogan: No, no, no. You’re talking about controlling someone’s body. You are talking about controlling a body.

Zepps: No, we’re talking about when a homo sapien comes into existence. That’s a philosophical and ethical question.

Rogan: No it’s not... If you’re talking about a blastocyst inside a woman’s body and you’re a man and you decide, you don’t even know this woman, you decide by your moral argument and judgment, she should not be able to terminate that blastocyst, then you are deciding what she can do with her body.

Zepps: No, you’re deciding what she can do to the blastocyst.

Rogan: It’s in her body.

Zepps: Yeah, it’s inside her body, sure. It’s also inside her body when it’s nine months old.

Rogan: So you’re saying a man, an unrelated man, should be able to have input on whether a woman should be able to terminate a blastocyst?

Zepps: I’m saying that the democratic institutions of the state should be able to decide that.

Rogan: I’m not talking about democratic institutions. We were talking very specifically about a man being able to decide.

Zepps: What are you talking about?! If it’s a dictatorship then I don’t agree with it, (but) I think this is something that people ought to be able to vote on. Yes, I personally favor abortion rights, but I don’t think that the gender of the person who is voted into power by the voting public is relevant in terms of whether or not the voting public thinks that embryos are human beings. I don’t think that embryos have a right to life, but I don’t think that it makes sense to say that an embryo is just the woman’s body.

Rogan: We’re not talking about an embryo. We’re talking about the entire process, right? The entire process of conception to birth.

Zepps: What are you arguing? Are you arguing that if there are males in positions of power in Congress that they should have to abstain from ruling? Should the male justices on the Supreme Court have to abstain from voting on abortion?

Rogan: I’m arguing that it’s problematic when a man, who cannot get pregnant, decides when a baby is actually a baby.

Zepps: So should men not be allowed to vote for candidates who are anti-abortion?

Rogan: Don’t you think it’s problematic that a guy should decide, like say if you’re a hardcore right-wing Christian?

Zepps: It looks bad.

Rogan: F— looks, man.

Zepps: But what does problematic mean other than looks?

Rogan: Well, it’s not looks; it’s a huge issue. It’s a huge issue that someone who cannot get pregnant decides that another human being, that they’re totally unrelated to, can’t make the decision that five cells that have bundled together must be brought to life.

Zepps: They think that those five cells are a person. You’re just a lot of cells. We’re all just cells.

Rogan: They don’t even know this person. Why should they have any power over this person? When are they controlling a person’s body, and when are they saving a baby?

Zepps: Well that’s precisely the question, isn’t it?

Rogan: Right, that is the question.

Zepps: Should a male have the right to determine whether or not a woman can murder her newborn baby?... (Because) where I’m coming from here is that I feel like we use identity politics to deprive other people of standing to discuss questions that are actually universal because they’re moral questions… I am pro abortion-rights. But in order for me to understand where people who detest abortion are coming from, it’s necessary for me to make the sort of leap of empathy and logic into their camp and see things from the way that they see them… [This is] a moral and ethical question that we’re all involved in because we’re all involved in what our culture is allowed to do, and who it’s allowed to kill, and how it’s allowed to kill them. So it becomes a bit more like the death penalty where you might say, well, I’m never going to be up for the death penalty because I’m never going to do anything that would put me on death row. So what standing do I have to be in favor or against the death penalty? That’s sort of a moot question. We’re all in this society together. We’ll have to figure out what’s right and wrong. And if we’ve got a brain, we should have conversations about what’s good or bad. And the fact that I’m unlikely to be in a specific scenario doesn’t actually give me less standing to have a conversation about it, or even to write laws about it, if people vote me into a position where I can write laws about it.

Josh Zepps, ladies and gentlemen, providing a MasterClass in logic and erudition—even if much of it was lost on his host. Having now reviewed more than a hundred Joe Rogan abortion conversations, I can safely say that Rogan is a mass of contradictions—which he would readily admit. “To be a human,” he told Ari Shaffir in 2018, “is to be constantly conflicted, to deal with a bunch of different contrary ideas bouncing around your head, left and right, all the time.” The real mistake, Rogan argues, is to never talk to people you disagree with, pointing out that “you’re (likely) not going to agree with yourself five years from now.” All that is to the good. There’s nothing wrong with being conflicted about something, so long as you’re seeking out the information necessary to become un-conflicted. But Rogan seems content to forever dwell in the fuzzy in-between, which is a dangerous place to remain. You risk becoming precisely the kind of person Jesus warned would be spit from his mouth. “Would that you were either cold or hot!”

At some level, the centrist position Rogan has tried to carve out—the lukewarm position—is actually more dangerous than either of the two sides he pillories. If abortion is what he says it is, then it cannot be rightly left to the discretion of individual women. But if abortion is to be left to the discretion of individual women, then it cannot be what he’s said it is. His is a logically-untenable space. An oxymoron, like an open marriage. You can’t be married and single. You can’t be for abortion and against. Rogan wants to have the conversation without the burden of reaching a conclusion. He understands, perhaps, that while society venerates those who seek for truth, it has no tolerance for those who find it. When Hotep Jesus asked him, “What would Joe Rogan do (about abortion) if [he] were the governor of Texas?” Rogan answered in the third person. “Joe Rogan does not want to be governor, first of all, because Joe Rogan does not want those kind of responsibilities.” And therein lies the problem, not that Rogan doesn’t want to be governor, but that he doesn’t want to accept any moral responsibility.

Joe Rogan has more than enough knowledge to condemn abortion, but he’s unwilling to do so. He imagines it a virtue to suppress his misgivings in deference to the supposed interests of women—ignoring the fact that abortion has been from the beginning a tool of unscrupulous men. Rogan is “terrified of both sides” in the abortion debate, he told Duncan Trussell. He’s terrified of the side “that thinks you should be able to kill a kid at six months” and terrified of the side “that says you should never be able to kill a kid.” Rogan frames it as though pro-lifers and pro-choicers are equally unhinged, but his own language betrays him. The equivocation doesn’t work. In what universe is the side that says “you should never be able to kill a kid” just as far afield as the one that says “you should (always) be able to kill a kid?” For 15 years, at the very least, Rogan has avoided committing himself on abortion. Call that brave and nuanced if you want, but at some point, keeping an open mind ceases to be commendable and becomes only cowardly. You can’t look at the menu forever. You cannot leave every option open. Eventually you have to marry the girl or walk away. You have to buy the house or yield it to another. We were not made to live in perennial limbo.

Rogan openly admits that there is “a point in time (when) [abortion] becomes morally reprehensible.” He just doesn’t know—or want to articulate—where that point is. “Very few people are going to have a problem with [abortion] if it’s like three cells,” Rogan speculates, “but when it’s three months old, people are going to have more of a problem (with it).” That may be true, but the difficulty for Rogan—and the millions of people he stands in for—is the fact that no abortions take place at the three-cell stage. It’s not even possible, and less than 10% happen in the 2nd or 3rd trimester. In other words, almost all U.S. abortions occur during that undefined stretch between three cells and three months. In his 2022 discussion with Doug Stanhope, Rogan called Texas’ six-week abortion ban a “terrible law”—because “who the [bleep] (even) knows they’re pregnant at six weeks?” But he also said that “there’s a big difference between a little clump of cells and a fetus with an eyeball and a beating heart.” The implication being that abortion is fine in the first instance but not so much in the second. It’s worth pointing out then that the heart starts beating and the eyes start to be seen around three weeks from conception—or five weeks LMP (which measures pregnancy from a woman’s last menstrual period). So if abortion doesn’t become an ethical problem until after the heart starts beating, as Rogan infers, he should take no issue with a six-week abortion ban. That’s the reason they’re often called heartbeat bills. Because they outlaw abortion once the embryo’s heart starts beating.

So if we could just inform Rogan when the human heart starts beating, everything would be good, right? He would finally be able to connect the ethical dots and come to a conclusion. Unfortunately, no, because Rogan already knows when the heart starts beating. He revealed as much while throwing shade on the nonsensical ramblings of Stacey Abrams—during an interview he had with Dave Smith. Here is the segment:

When you have people like Stacey Abrams saying that a fetal heartbeat is an illusion, (which is) established biology, this is wild ideological crazy cult talk... She said there is no such thing as a prenatal heartbeat at six weeks. (That) the sound is manufactured. That statement alone should discredit you to the point where people should never listen to anything you ever say again.

Rogan knows, you see, that the heart is already beating at six weeks. Like Pontius Pilate, he wants the probity of being pro-life and the cultural cachet of being pro-choice. Human beings, Rogan told Natasha Leggero, are “just a bundle of contradictions”—with the capacity to “think that they’re doing good [but] at the same time promote [bleep] that’s terrible and awful.” To which I say, amen and amen. It took courage for Joe Rogan to break ranks and endorse Donald Trump for president. His younger, Bernie-loving self would have been outraged. But, in Rogan’s words, his younger self was a “f—ing dumb a—.” It’s hard to say whether Rogan is more a reflection of the American mainstream or a shaper of the American mainstream, but in either case, here’s to hoping he eventually finds the moral courage to again break ranks and say on record, “Killing unborn babies is immoral and should be against the law.”