Following the passing of Ohio's issue 1 bill last month, I've been driven to reflection upon the current state of political and moral affairs. We have, as a society, made a legal concession for the unequivocal murder of human beings in the wombs of their mothers all the way up until birth. If that statement doesn't hit you like a ton of bricks, then I can't imagine much else will. A child who is moments away from being delivered can be ripped apart, limb from torso, so long as a medical doctor says that it's okay for the "health of the mother" (which was left intentionally vague so that something as fickle as mental health can fall under this category). Fact is a mother can bring a child to full term, and then tell an abortionist (hired murderer) that she no longer wants the child as it would be difficult mentally to raise them, and it would be a fully protected action for that doctor to then kill the child. How utterly wicked.
So how did this happen? How have we gotten to a place where such unadulterated evil has been written into Ohio law? Where we have utilized our freedom to seize upon the lives of our most innocent and defenseless? The answer is incrementalism.
Incrementalism is the primary method within pro-life organizations that believe abortion can be made illegal through small legislative changes over time (i.e the heartbeat bill, or bills that don't allow termination of children for the reason of mental disorders). Pro-life organizations like incrementalism for a few reasons, namely because it allows them to keep lucrative jobs, and it doesn't require criminalization of the act of abortion which keeps them in good public standing. People like this deceive well-meaning members of the general public into believing that their methods are the way to ending abortion, all while keeping them on the hook for as long as possible. Abolition would mean the end of their jobs, and more importantly abolition would mean the total criminalization of the act.
But wait a minute, don't most pro-life organizations want abortion to be a crime? The answer is sadly, no. In fact, it has been mainly pro-life organizations who have stepped up to kill legislation seeking to completely abolish the act of abortion. Why? Besides the reasons already mentioned, Pro-life organizations don't believe in criminalizing the mother for the act of abortion.
Let's do a quick logic experiment to show you the extreme hypocrisy of this position. From the moment of conception life is created, which if left untampered with will develop into a full size child. This life is also categorically human as it shares all of the human DNA from its mother and father. The definition of murder is the forceful taking of an innocent human life. To bring a human into the hands of the person whom you know is about to commit murder against them, makes you liable for their murder also. Given all of these logical steps, a mother who has brought her child into an abortion clinic to forcefully end the innocent human life developing in the womb, is just as culpable for murder as the doctor who is performing the act, and even more so for the vast majority of women who order plan B pills to abort their child at home (which can be obtained in states where abortion clinics are illegal). If you believe in justice and human rights, then a mother who murders her child must be held accountable for such an atrocity.
You would think a statement like that would be increasingly true for a room full of Christians who believe on the word of God and his righteous judgements, right? Well recently at the Louisiana Baptist Convention, quite the opposite was true. Men who spend their time behind pulpits, and who have been entrusted the preaching of the word of God, stood in front of their peers and made concession for this grave sin. Their excuses ranged anywhere from "What about mothers who are coerced? They're the true victims. Therefore, we can't criminalize abortion!" all the way to "The legal system isn't capable of handling cases like these and will risk further traumatizing women. Therefore, we can't criminalize abortion!" or my personal favorite "God forgave Paul, so we shouldn't persecute women for the sin of abortion!"
The lack of biblical understanding and wisdom in these statements should be alarming for any Christian, and these men will stand accountable before God for making such egregious errors lest they repent. So in the spirit of 2 Corinthians 10:5, lets engage with these arguments.
Firstly, on the topic of coercion, we must define the term to understand the argument being made. Coercion is when someone compels someone else to do something under threat or use of bodily harm. In the instance of abortion, it would be an abusive man telling the woman that he would hurt, or kill her, if she doesn't go to an abortion clinic or take a plan B pill. Given the foolish use of statistics at the Louisiana Baptist Convention, it is also important for us to define what coercion is NOT. At the convention, someone had asserted that a statistical majority of women who get abortions are coerced, pressured, or eventually regretted their choice to do so. This was an underhanded tactic that was used to lump all of these vastly different circumstances together in order to make murderous women out to be victims in a vast number of scenarios. Think for a moment, how much pressure would someone need to apply for you to do something that you know is deeply wrong? If someone said "C'mon you know life would just be so much easier if your next-door neighbor were dead. Just kill them. I'll drive you to the store to get the weapon to do it, it'll be easy and painless!" No. The chances are pressure only works on someone who already has at least some existing intent to perform a crime anyway. Pressure is not a primary motivator, it’s what pushes someone over the edge of an act they were already thinking of committing. This is not a valid excuse for murder. Likewise regret is not a valid excuse for the sin of killing your child. Imagine being in front of a judge after stabbing someone to death and saying "well, judge, I regret it! So you can't possibly prosecute me!" It's utter nonsense, and to even include it in the same sentence as coercion to insinuate that they have equal weight is asinine. Even with those arguments aside, almost all bills of equal protection have diction regarding the acquittal of a woman who is found to have been coerced (in the legal sense of the word) to perform an abortion. This, however, must be determined through the court system by a jury of our peers to be the case, just like in any other murder case where someone may have been coerced into the act.
Speaking of which, lets examine the idea that the current court system isn't capable of handling these types of cases. I'd like to first point out that this statement falls flat on it's face from the get-go. The point of legislation and making something "illegal" is not for us to survey the practicality of enforcing said law. The point of legislation is to establish justice for what is morally right in the mind of our culture. Galatians 3:24 says "The law is a tutor to bring us to faith." meaning that the laws of our society inherently teach people what is moral good or moral evil; and by not punishing wickedness, evil breeds in ignorance and becomes emboldened to create more evildoers. A good example that refutes the idea of "we shouldn't legislate this because it would be too hard to enforce", is the ancient biblical law against dishonoring your father and mother (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). To dishonor ones father or mother back in ancient Israel was a crime punishable by death, but how often was this punishment ever employed? Rarely, if ever. Fact is, parents loved their children and didn't want to see them stoned to death, even if their child was being disobedient. So why then was there a law against it? The law was meant to be a tutor to young children about how seriously God felt about the act of being dishonorable to your parents. If a child doesn't respect the authorities in their life growing up, then they certainly won't respect local governing authorities, nor will they respect God's authority over them. A child raised in that manner is as good as dead, and this sentiment is reflected in the law. It didn't matter if it was enforced properly or not, children would still be raised to respect their parents and likewise fear God. Even beyond this point though, it is heinous to assert that the court system is unable to adequately punish crime. Do you not know that the state does not bear the sword in vain against those who do evil (Romans 13:4)? If we cannot trust our courts to bring justice to someone who is guilty concerning the blood of their own child, how then can we trust them to rule over any case? How could we possibly prosecute rapists, thieves, pedophiles or sex traffickers? Quite honestly, this criticism of the moderns courts is a dismissive, lazy sidestepping of justice being established for the preborn.
Lastly, the mention of Paul's forgiveness is the one lacking biblical literacy the most. Paul (then Saul) persecuted Christians and cosigned the death of Stephen in Acts 8, along with imprisoning a great multitude of early Christians for their beliefs. It was after this, Paul had a supernatural experience on the road to Damascus where he realized the weight of what he was doing and how misplaced his zeal was. Even though deeply troubled by his own actions, what Paul was doing was legal in the eyes of the Jewish overseers at the time. Paul faced no formal criminal charges for his persecution or murder of the early Christians, but we would be remiss to say that he did not face any repercussions for his transgression. Before Paul is converted in Acts 9, God tells Ananias "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name". Paul went on to be imprisoned multiple times, flogged five times (this is the punishment meant to bring someone within an inch of death), beaten with rods three times, stoned and left for dead once, and shipwrecked three times. The law had not held him, because Paul was a pharisee who was seen as blameless to the law of the time, but Christ's perfect righteousness deemed Paul's suffering necessary for the things he had done and for his greater sanctification. On top of all of this, I don't believe that we should be using Paul's repentant sin of murder as a justification for keeping an evil thing legal. I think if it were possible (and I'm just spit balling here) that Paul would have been a huge advocate for the sin of murdering Christians to be illegal. Forgiveness can be levied to anyone and everyone, but it should not preclude them from facing justice for their actions. No other crime is treated with that mentality, and we certainly shouldn't be fostering it toward the crime of murdering your child.
These arguments, and the incrementalist worldview is one apart from God, and are the very ideas that keep the sin of abortion legal. The pro-choice organizations haven't had to lift a single finger against bills of equal protection due to people like this making statements like these.
So I'm here to offer a better movement. A movement that is established firmly on scripture. A movement that is free of iniquitous and unjust decrees that the Lord hates (Isaiah 10:1). I'm not pro-life, I'm an abolitionist, and you should be too.
The word "abolitionist" goes back into the 18th century when a different form of dehumanizing oppression was legal. Men were stealing other men and enslaving them to work their land. These slaves were treated poorly, beaten often, and usually discarded after five or so years once they had outlived their usefulness to their "owners". This was a practice explicitly condemned in scripture (Exodus 21:16), and was punishable by death. Abolitionist of the time who were bible believing Christians stood up against the people of the time, and spoke out against the evil that was being perpetrated against image bearers of God. The response? "They're just religious fanatics" "My plantation, My prerogative" "You don't like slavery? Then don't own a slave!" "You'll never be able to outlaw slavery" "Don't call it man-stealing because that insinuates slave owners are guilty of death" "Slavery is too important to the economy, so we'll use it for now and abolish it later" "It's not a human, its a black man”. Do any of these arguments sound familiar? There will never stop being excuses for sin and unrighteousness, even to the point of dehumanizing the person that allows us to keep perpetrating that sin. Abolitionists hated incrementalism and saw it for what it truly was. Bills for the abolition of slavery were shot down in favor of bills that gave slaves better living conditions on the boats they were being hauled in, or for bills that made their plantation lives marginally better. These incremental changes do nothing to actually stop evil, but propagate a mindset of positive change that excuses any need for real radical change for humans who are being mistreated and abused.
These biblical ideals are no different today. Human beings, image bearers of God who are being knit together in their mother's womb (Psalm 139:13-14) are being oppressed, dehumanized, and killed for the selfishness of their "owners". As Christians, we need to fearlessly stand upon the word of God and establish his justice, because incremental justice isn't justice at all. It's iniquity. It's partiality. Satan is prowling around looking for those he may devour (1 Peter 5:8), and yet we treat his evil works like a play-thing. We have made a viper into a neck scarf and expect not to be bitten. Christians are not supposed to play around with sin, but to reach out and strike it dead where it stands. When we treat issues like these with levity, a defeatist mindset, and an incrementalist mentality, we end up with Ohio's issue 1.
Either you will crush the head of the serpent and establish justice, or the enemy will reach out to destroy you. Choose, Christian.
If the abolitionist movement interests you at all, or you want further resources to reference, check out https://abolitionistsrising.com/ as they have great videos that have been very informative in exposing the wickedness of the pro-life movement and the moral bankruptcy of the arguments against the criminalization of abortion.
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