Bible Showdown Stuns CNN Crowd

A Texas Senate candidate told a national television audience that the Bible says nothing about abortion, and a Catholic woman in the crowd stood up to tell him he was wrong.

Story Snapshot

Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico told a CNN and Jubilee town hall the Bible is “silent” on abortion.
An audience member, identified as Jody Hunt, challenged him on camera by citing the Ten Commandments’ ban on killing.
Catholic Church teaching calls abortion “gravely contrary to the moral law” and traces the prohibition to the first century.
Bible scholars say the real argument is over interpretation of specific passages, not whether any verse uses the word “abortion.”

What Talarico Told The Town Hall

At an October 14 CNN and Jubilee town hall, Talarico said, “We’re both Christians, and the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion. It means you and I both have to look at different scriptures to try to come to a conclusion.” He added that “Jesus never talks about abortion” and said Christians must weigh Scripture “as a whole” rather than point to one verse.

Talarico has made a similar argument before. He has pointed to the Annunciation story in the Gospel of Luke, where Mary is asked whether she consents to carrying Jesus, arguing it shows creation “has to be done with consent” and that a single Christian position on abortion “is just not rooted in Scripture.” He has also said he would oppose abortion if he believed it violated the Ten Commandments.

The Catholic Pushback In The Room

An audience member pushed back immediately. According to the New York Post, Jody Hunt told Talarico, “The Bible is not silent on abortion. There is the Ten Commandments — thou shalt not kill.” Hunt argued that Catholics read the command against killing as covering unborn children, not just born ones, directly rejecting Talarico’s framing of the Bible as silent on the subject.

The Catholic Church backs that reading with formal doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion” and calls it “gravely contrary to the moral law”. Early Christian writings go further. The Didache, an early Christian text, instructs believers, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion,” showing the prohibition is not a modern invention.

Why Scholars Say The Fight Isn’t So Simple

Bible scholars note the Catechism itself is Church teaching, not a direct quote from Scripture, so it cannot settle what the biblical text explicitly says on its own. The sharpest scholarly disagreement centers on Exodus 21:22-25, which describes a pregnant woman struck during a fight. Scholars disagree on whether the Hebrew word used describes a miscarriage or an early birth, and whether the passage treats the fetus the same as a born person.

So you would have us believe that if someone asked Jesus, “Lord, are You okay with people killing their unborn children?” His answer would be, “Yes, because I never explicitly addressed abortion in Scripture”?

Do you genuinely believe that?

Have you read how severely God judged…

— TheWholeTruth (@Wholetruth333) October 15, 2026

That unresolved debate means both sides can claim a measure of textual support while talking past each other. Talarico’s “silent” claim focuses on the absence of an explicit modern-sounding ban. His critics focus on broader commands against killing and centuries of Christian teaching built on them. For voters trying to sort fact from spin in an election year, the honest answer is that this is an argument over interpretation, not a simple case of one side reading the Bible and the other side ignoring it.