What if someone isn’t going to grow up to be a contributing member of society?

Abolitionists do not seek to “criminalize women.” We seek to criminalize the act of abortion. That cannot be accomplished without prosecuting those who have abortions. The Pro-Life Movement, on the other hand, seeks to make sure that every abortion law contains immunity for the mother so that she cannot be prosecuted for having an abortion. This protects a woman’s right to abortion. If a woman can perform her own abortion without being prosecuted, then abortion is legal. By insisting on blanket maternal immunity, the pro-life leaders protect a woman’s right to abortion.

You can ONLY legislate morality. Every law legislates based on someone’s view of morality. Every law is an instance of those in power establishing what citizens must not do because it is wrong. Speed limit laws are based on the immorality of risking your life and that of others. Child support laws are based on the immorality of a father leaving his family. Laws are inescapably moral. The question is not whether morality will be legislated but whose morality will be legislated? In the case of abortion, the question is will pro-child sacrifice people or anti-child sacrifice people be writing the laws?

Pro-life organizations and politicians have been the primary people standing in the way of legislation to abolish abortion in more than a dozen pro-life states. In a state like Oklahoma, if we are to criticize those preventing abortion’s abolition, there is no one to criticize but pro-lifers. They do this because worldly pragmatism is their standard, not God’s Word. One of the best things that could happen for preborn children would be for National Right to Life, SBA Pro-Life America, and Americans United for Life to fold tomorrow. This podcast episode explains the various reasons why this is the case.

Rape is a terrible crime. It should be a capital crime. For some reason, the secular culture is not willing to go this far. Those who commit this heinous act should face swift justice and victims of rape should receive the support of their families and communities. But it is insane and evil to murder a child for the sins of the father.

The argument for murdering babies conceived in incest is pure eugenics. That a child has a higher likelihood of having certain disabilities does not mean we should murder them.

The body inside a pregnant mother’s body is not her body. Bodily autonomy is not an absolute license to use one’s body in any way they choose. Specific to this case, you cannot use your body or the idea of bodily freedom to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

If abortion is criminalized as murder, there will be far fewer abortions. Many expecting couples will not risk murder charges, and many other couples will be more sexually responsible and not make babies until they are prepared for babies.

But there certainly will be some who risk murder charges and get the abortion anyway. How do we know that? Because killing born people results in murder charges and people still do it. There will be men and women who violate the law possibly in back alley-type abortions. That is not the fault of people who believe that murder should be illegal and that all humans have rights. It is fault of people pursuing abortions in back-alleys.

Common IVF practice includes the fertilizing of more eggs than can be implanted, the discarding of “low grade” embryos, and selective reduction abortion if too many embryos successfully implant in the uterus. The result is 32 human beings are conceived for every one live birth.

Such practices are self-evidently wicked. Though some believe there is an ethical way to practice IVF, we believe that the creation of life should not be done by scientists in a lab, but rather through the God-ordained method for creating life: intercourse of husband and wife.

Our page on IVF delves into this topic with significant depth, and includes resources for further research and education. AbolitionistsRising.com/IVF

Can you kill a born child because they are poor? No? Then you can’t kill a preborn child because they might turn out to be poor. Help the poor, certainly, but don’t murder them. Murder is only an appropriate answer to poverty or suffering if you’re a psychopath.

5 Reasons to Embrace Immediatism and Reject Pro-Life Incrementalism

First, some definitions:

Incrementalism is advocacy of change by degrees. This means advocating for 15-week bans, heartbeat bills, clinic regulations, etc.

Immediatism is advocacy for immediate, uncompromising abolition. This means advocating for abolition bills alone.

1) Immediatism Is Biblical

Isaiah 10:1-2 tells us “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees…that they may make the fatherless their prey!” It can be argued that an incremental pro-life bill is less iniquitous than the status quo. It can’t be argued they aren’t iniquitous. As Pastor C.R. Cali puts it in his book, The Doctrine of Balaam, “Regulating abortion gives more than tacit permission; it definitionally governs, directs, and controls the killing of pre-born children through rule and law. Rather than engendering an attitude of abhorrence for this slaughter, regulations legitimize the practice by dictating where, when, and how it is acceptable. Any law which sanctions the unjust killing of a human is by nature unjust.”

2) Immediatism Is Prophetic and Gospel-Centered

Immediatism is simply the gospel applied to national sin. The nation needs to repent and calls for repentance in Scripture are never calls for gradual repentance. Imagine a man in an affair. If you tell him to reduce his adultery to once a week, then once a month, then once a year, and then to leave his mistress, you have not called him to repentance. You’ve given him a pragmatic, worldly strategy that is doomed to fail.

That is what pro-lifers are doing to the culture when they call for a heartbeat bill or 15-week ban. There is no call to repentance. And there is no coming back from where we’ve gone as a nation without national repentance.

3) Incremental Bills Undercut Abolition

An example: in 2019, the Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act (HB896) was referred to Rep. Jeff Leach’s committee. He didn’t want it to pass but he also know he would be excoriated by Christians if he killed it. So he hatched a plan. Texas has no filing deadline, so 10 days after the abolition bill was assigned to him, he introduced an incremental bill: HB16, the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. While Leach killed the abolition bill, he and his pro-life allies ensured HB16 passed into law. Leach became simultaneously the man who kept abortion legal in Texas while also being a pro-life hero. Texas Alliance for Life gave him their “Courageous Defense of Life” award. He was a headline speaker at March for Life.

This play (the legislator responsible for killing the abolition bill carrying the pro-life bill du jour and being celebrated as a hero for it) was ran in many other states including Oklahoma (Sen. Greg Treat) and Missouri (Sen. Bob Onder). In this way, incremental pro-life bills are the lifeblood of the political careers of the Republican politicians who are preventing the abolition of abortion.

This play was also run by the enemies of Wilberforce. On 4/2/1792, the House of Commons debated Wilberforce’s motion for the abolition of the slave trade. It was into the early morning hours of April 3 when incrementalist Henry Dundas motioned to amend the abolition bill: “My honourable friends… have very known that I have long entertained the same opinion with them as to the Abolition of the Slave Trade, though I have differed from them as to the mode of effecting it.”

After his speech professing agreement with the abolitionists’ end goal, Dundas successfully motioned to amend Wilberforce’s abolition bill so that it merely removed the right of slave owners to possess the children of their slaves. What a great achievement! What a step in the right direction! Nevermind the fact that Dundas literally saved the slave trade. He was an incremental pro-life hero. I wonder where Jeff Leach and Texas Alliance for Life learned their tricks? Pro-life incrementalists continue to celebrate the Henry Dundas’ of our day who put their wicked, deceptive “incremental steps” in the place of abolition bills.

Because of his experience with men like Dundas, Wilberforce wrote in “A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” that the incrementalists were the real upholders of the slave system: “Let me be forgiven if I speak strongly, where I feel so very deeply. It is not only because the gradual Abolitionists have been, in fact, the only real stay of that system of wickedness and cruelty which we wish to abolish; though that assertion is unquestionably true; but it is trying beyond expression that they should be the real maintainers of the Slave Trade.”

In this way, incremental bills and those who celebrate them make the passage of an abolition bill extremely difficult. Politicians want to compromise. They want to do the easy thing. If you celebrate them for the easy thing, they will never do the hard thing.

4) Incremental Bills Dehumanize Preborn Children

When I, Abolitionists Rising Communications Director James Silberman, lived in Ohio, he met with the office of Sen. Andrew Brenner, a pro-life stalwart. I explained to his aide what an abolition bill contained and why we needed one in Ohio. When I was done, she said, “This was very interesting, but it’s Senator Brenner’s personal religious conviction that life begins at a heartbeat.” Where did he learn that ridiculous, evil idea that humans don’t have value until their heartbeats can be detected? He learned it from the Heartbeat Bill. Brenner was one of its primary champions.

Abolitionists Rising Director T. Russell Hunter discovered the same thing while pleading with a woman going into an abortion mill in Norman, OK in 2016. She told him, “It’s okay. My baby won’t even feel any pain.” Where’d she learn it’s okay to murder a baby as long as he doesn’t feel pain? From the pro-life movement and the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act which highlights pain as the reason abortion should be illegal.

While doing activism at a college campus, a female student, intrigued by the display, approached Abolitionists Rising Media Director Sam Riley and asked whether he opposed abortion even in the case of rape. Sam explained to her that abortion is wrong for the same reason that rape is wrong – it’s a violent act of aggression against an innocent human being, and that it’s unacceptable for us to give the death penalty to a child for the sins of the father. The young woman broke down in tears. “Thank you for saying that,” she told him. “I was conceived in rape and when people talk about a rape exception for abortion, what I hear is that my life is less valuable.” Not all pro-life bills have rape exceptions, but many of them do. These bills dehumanize those conceived in rape.

5) Incremental Bills Do Not Significantly Reduce Abortion

Every incremental bill provides blanket maternal immunity which, in essence, protects a woman’s right to an abortion. Not addressing self-managed abortion is not addressing abortion at all. Brick and mortar abortion pill facilities are popping up in states that have “banned abortion.” These sites coach women in how to order abortion online and take them, which is perfectly in accordance with pro-life laws.

In 2011, T. Russell Hunter was asked by his church to give a presentation about how the body could get involved in different pro-life organizations, so Russell began reading various pro-life websites. At the same time, for his doctoral studies, Russell began reading about the history of the abolitionists of slavery.

In short order, it became clear that many of the very practices and strategies that the abolitionists blamed for the delay of the abolition of slavery were being practices and strategies being employed by the Pro-Life Movement. Russell became convinced of the need for an alternate movement, one that would bring God’s Word to bear on the subject and which would not compromise.

No. Every abolition bill applies only to crimes committed after the passage of the bill. OK SB1729, for instance, says “This act is prospective only and shall not apply to conduct committed prior to the effective date of this act.” This is consistent with American law which prohibits ex-post facto prosecution.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, essentially turning over the responsibility for abortion policy to the state governments and to Congress.

But in order to say that the States and Congress can write whatever abortion policy they want, you have to deny that the preborn child is a person. If the preborn child was a person, the Constitution mandates that they receive the rights to life and the equal protection of the law. In Dobbs, the Court ought to have recognized the humanity of preborn children and ordered that their rights be protected. The conference presentation to the right explains this in detail.

But, one might say, at least the states are now free to abolish abortion if they want to. The problem with this sentiment is that the states were always free to write whatever abortion sentiment they wanted to. From the get-go, Roe was an obvious violation of the Constitution and was therefore not binding on the states. Abolition bills prior to Dobbs contained nullification clauses directing state officials to ignore Roe and any subsequent similar court opinions.

The leaders of the Pro-Life Movement are the enemies of justice for preborn children. They have opposed abolition bills and abolitionism at every turn. They believe mothers should be free to have self-managed abortion with impunity. They teach heterodox beliefs and strategies which blatantly violate God’s Word. It is necessary to distinguish one’s self from them. It is necessary to draw a clear line between their unbiblical beliefs and our Biblical ones. Language is an important part of that.

The pro-life groups know that differentiation between us and them is key to the growth of the Abolitionist Movement and that’s why they often steal our language and pass themselves off as abolitionists. They don’t want us to be able to create a clear, category distinction between us and them. This is a clear lesson to abolitionists about the importance of linguistic differentiation.

It largely depends on the method of birth control. Barrier methods such as condoms, diaphragms, or sponges which prevent the sperm from reaching the egg do not pose any risk of causing an abortion. All forms of hormonal birth control, on the other hand, pose a risk of causing an early abortion.

Hormonal birth control has three functions which serve to prevent pregnancy.

1) Stop ovulation from occurring.

2) Thicken cervical mucus so that sperm are not able to reach the egg.

3) Thin the lining of the uterus so that a newly conceived zygote is not able to implant in the uterus.

If 1 and 2 fail while 3 succeeds, an abortion is induced and a newly conceived human being dies. The frequency with which this occurs is not known precisely, but the total number is likely high given the widespread use of hormonal birth control.

Some people will acknowledge the humanity of a human embryo but will argue that they are not worthy of protection until they have consciousness or sentience. Such people reject the notion of human rights. They believe that only a special class of humans have value. They are bigots, no different than those that perpetrated the holocaust and race-based chattel slavery.

The image of God in human beings is where we get our objective value, and we all bear the image of God equally. We thus have equal value and are equally deserving of the protection of the laws. The view that value derives from consciousness would result in those who with greater cognitive capabilities and consciousness being of more value than others. Putting human value on a sliding scale like that will always end in a atrocities.