What about children who will be born into poverty or suffering?
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.
Isn’t forced birth just like forced organ donation?
Outlawing abortion is not the same thing as forced organ donation for four reasons.
1) There is a difference between ordinary and extraordinary levels of care. Donating organs to someone in need is an extraordinary level of care that should not be mandated. Simply not murdering your child is an ordinary level of care that should be mandated.
2) Children are only in the vulnerable position of needing their parents’ care because their parents created them in that vulnerable situation. When you put someone in a vulnerable position, you have a greater obligation to care for them.
3) Giving up an organ permanently is not the same thing as allowing offspring to live for nine months in the reproductive organ that was made for them to live in. In the same way that children have a right to their mother’s milk after they is born, they have a right to their mother’s uterus before they are born.
4) Not giving up an organ permanently is not the same thing as using forceps, suction devices, or chemical to actively kill a baby.
Aren’t preborn humans just clumps of cells?
In the atheistic worldview, we’re all just clumps of cells, including the person raising this argument. But we’re not just clumps of cells. Humans are not simply the matter that makes them up. We are eternal souls. We are image bearers. And that begins at the moment we begin to exist, which is at fertilization.
Under an abolition law, would ever single aborting mother be charged with 1st degree murder?
No. An abolition bill simply makes preborn children equal under law. So all the immunities, justifications, and mitigating factors considered in all other criminal cases would also be considered when charging and trying people for abortion. Each instance would be considered on a case-by-case basis based on the facts of each case. Some men and women would get charged with first degree murder. Some would get charged with third degree murder or manslaughter. Some would not be charged at all, such as those women being coerced. It all depends on the facts of the case.
What about rape and incest?
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.
Do abolitionists want to criminalize women who have abortions?
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.
Wouldn’t an abolition bill outlaw miscarriage treatment?
Miscarriage and abortion are two completely different things. Heartless, psychopathic abortion supporters have worked to linguistically and legally link miscarriage and abortion so that they can scare people into believing that abortion bans outlaw miscarriage treatment. It’s no surprise that murderers are also liars. No abortion ban ever written would outlaw the removing of a deceased fetus from the uterus. OK SB1729, for instance, has language establishing that “This chapter shall not apply to…a spontaneous miscarriage.”
Can’t we end abortion without prosecuting mothers?
To put it simply, no. If someone is legally permitted to commit an act without any possibility of legal penalty, then that act is legal. In no way, shape, or form has abortion been abolished if mothers are permitted to self-manage an abortion with legal immunity.
The video on the right demonstrates exactly how easy self-managed abortion is.
Can You Come to My Campus/Town?
We are a small team of people located in central Oklahoma, and mainly just travel close by or do day-long activism trips. But we really want to encourage people like you to be doing the work of abolition on your own campus/in your own town.
First of all, check out the educational materials on our website and make sure you fully understand the differences between being an abolitionist and being pro-life.
Even if you don’t have any other Abolitionists around you that you know of, you can start spreading abolitionism by flyering cars in public parking lots with abolitionist materials like what we hand out on campus. This literature, t-shirts, and more are available in our online gear store. Flyering (or dropcarding) is walking from car to car to put a flyer under the driver-side windshield wiper, or sticking a dropcard in the driver-side window, held between the glass and the window gasket. In case anybody asks you, this is a federally protected first amendment activity in public parking lots.
To get connected with abolitionists near you, go to the main
page of our website and click on your state. At the bottom of your state’s individual page will be listed any abolitionists churches, groups, or organizations that signed onto the Norman Statement, which is the doctrinal statement of today’s Abolitionist Movement.
Are pro-life people the enemy of abolishing abortion?
While the pro-life leaders have dug in their heels and opposed abolition, most pro-life people are open to abolitionist ideas. Most pro-lifers who don’t have a close connection to a pro-life leader or group are persuaded by abolitionism when they encounter it. We just have to draw clear lines between pro-life and abolition, explain the unbiblical thinking and treachery on the pro-life side, and call pro-lifers to cross the line.
Was Dobbs a step in the right direction?
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.
Why do abolitionists oppose incremental, pro-life legislation?
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.
What about bodily autonomy? What about my body, my choice?
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.
How did the Abolitionist Movement start?
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.
You can’t legislate morality, right?
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?
Do abolitionists support the use of birth control?
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.