Sep
15
Countering Abolitionist Accusations of Pro-Lifers’ Moral Compromise
“Even with a bill that they believe will or could be a successful end run around the tyranny of the federal judiciary, [those who passed the Texas ‘heartbeat’ bill] still chose to violate God’s law absent any even pragmatically compelling reason to do so. This is indicative of an addiction to compromise on the part of the pro-life establishment…. This law is ungodly and Christians should not support it.” — abolitionist James Silberman
Some of my readers may remember that, shortly before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision, I posted an article citing culture blogger/pro-lifer Samuel Sey. Sey addressed many great points in his defense of incrementalism and critique of abolitionism. In this post, I will cite from The Case for Life, 2nd ed., in which Scott Klusendorf, a leading incrementalist and pro-life educator, does much the same thing. However, in the chapter I quote, Klusendorf uses two techniques that I really appreciate. First, he presents an imaginary scenario that in many ways parallels the circumstances and positions in the real-life battle against abortion. Second, he uses that scenario to help lay out six ways that the abolitionist claims are flawed and unfairly represent (incrementalist) pro-life efforts.
I hope it helps you understand the thinking of the abolitionist vs. incrementalist sides, as it helped me.
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All pro-life advocates want to abolish abortion and would do so immediately if they had the political power to do so. However, some abortion opponents, calling themselves “abolitionists” or more accurately “immediatists”, ignore cultural and political realities and insist that efforts to limit the evil of abortion incrementally are sinfully motivated attempts to regulate abortion rather than abolish it immediately and without exceptions. They assert that attempts to limit the evil of abortion via parental notification and consent laws, late-term abortion bans, or heartbeat bills are shameful sins pro-life leaders must renounce….
Imagine a world in which wife-beating is legal. Three governors — Bob, Abraham, and Caleb — all claim to oppose it. Bob has the political power to protect all women, but when the state legislature sends him a bill banning spousal abuse outright, he vetoes it and demands exceptions for men thirty-five or younger. He appeals to pragmatism: “Come on, people, we all know that younger men have difficulty controlling their emotions and may snap if their wives burn supper, fail to discipline the children, or withhold sex. That’s reality. The solution is not punitive laws, but state-funded counseling for men.
Abraham, meanwhile, wins election in a state notorious for wife-beating. Previous attempts to ban it outright failed miserably. Abraham is sickened by this lamentable state of affairs and vows to protect all women in law. Though he doesn’t yet have the votes to do it, he does what he can. He signs an executive order freeing state employees from abusive spouses. They may leave home and keep their jobs without fear of arrest. Two years later, his party — which more or less opposes wife-beating — picks up a slim majority in the legislature. True, the votes aren’t there to ban the practice outright, but the governor keeps pushing. He signs legislation that forbids hitting your wife with blunt instruments. A month later, he secures two more bills, one protecting teenage girls from forced marriages to older, abusive men and another that forbids striking women older than fifty. Those last two bills alone will protect an estimated twenty thousand women. He signs all three incremental bills and vows to do more.
Caleb governs a state where attempts to ban wife-beating have similarly failed. The state legislature scrapes together just enough votes to send Caleb identical legislation to that signed by Abraham. Caleb swiftly vetoes it on grounds that incremental legislation that regulates when, where, and how men may beat their wives is sinfully motivated and consents to the abuse of those women left unprotected.
Now suppose you’re a young woman married to an abusive husband. Which of these societies would you prefer to live in: Bob’s society, where you have no protection whatsoever? Abraham’s society, where you have limited legal protection but people are still making an effort to protect you in the best way they can, given the hand they’ve been dealt? Or Caleb’s society, where you’ll never be even marginally protected until a total and complete ban on spousal abuse makes it to his desk?
According to abolitionists, only Caleb did the right thing. But the abolitionist claims are flawed and unfairly represent pro-life efforts to limit the evil of abortion.
1) Pro-life advocates and abolitionists agree on principle: we should protect all unborn humans. They disagree on practice when you cannot immediately achieve that. For the pro-life advocate, there are two ways to practice war. If you have superior forces, you quickly crush the opposition and enforce political victory. If you do not, you fight a war of attrition, wearing the enemy out by constantly chipping away at his stronghold. When one falls, you come back for more. You never quit. From 1974 to 1983, pro-lifers advanced several human life amendments and human life bills, hoping to gain a quick and decisive victory for all unborn humans. When those efforts failed, pro-lifers began practicing a second strategy aimed at limiting the evil of abortion insofar as possible given current political realities. While not abandoning our principle of total protection for all unborn humans, we practiced incrementalism to save as many lives as we could along the way. Abolitionists insist that pro-life advocates employ a sinful means (incremental legislation) to achieve a good end (saving children). But the abolitionist claim is question-begging since the debate over incrementalism is precisely about whether compromising legislatively equals compromising morally.
2) The abolitionist claim that incrementalism is wrong in principle raises troubling questions. Abolitionists insist that incremental laws are a sinful rejection of God’s sovereignty and legitimize murder. However, if incremental pro-life laws are inherently sinful, which incremental laws currently in force do abolitionists wish to repeal right now? Incremental laws save lives. For example, when the Texas heartbeat bill took effect in 2021, abortions in Texas dropped 60 percent in the first month. We also know that incremental laws that close abortion centers save lives. The further a woman must drive to get to one, the less likely she is to abort. Meanwhile, the Charlotte Lozier Institute estimates that the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal and state matching Medicaid funds for most abortions, alone saves sixty thousand lives a year. Should we let those children die in exchange for abolitionist purity? This is a problematic question for abolitionists and one they’ve dodged in public debates with pro-life advocates. Incremental laws make it tougher to operate abortion clinics, forcing some to close. That’s why Planned Parenthood fights these laws tooth and nail. If a bill was introduced banning all abortions but did not address lives lost to IVF procedures, would abolitionists support it?
3) Pragmatic doesn’t always mean evil. True, it could be evil if I justify wrongdoing with an appeal to pragmatism, like Governor Bob. Bob is not opposing evil. Instead, he’s formally cooperating with it. He wants exceptions and intends to enshrine them as permanent law. But, “pragmatic” can also mean prudent. Consider Abraham. He lacks the votes to ban abuse outright (his true intention), but has them to protect teenage girls and women older than fifty. If he doesn’t sign the bill, twenty thousand women go to sleep that night unprotected. So, he signs the bill and pushes for more, as everyone around him — including his political enemies — knows he will do. Unlike Bob, Abraham’s overriding concern is not the justification of (or surrender to) an immoral principle, but the limiting of evil as far as possible, given current political restraints. He’s still in the fight for good, doing all he can to save as many women as possible.
Put simply, if by pragmatist you mean Abraham, I guess you could say pro-lifers are pragmatists. They refuse to let children die who can be saved with incremental legislation. Abolitionists, meanwhile, trade lives for the alleged purity of their principles. They’re willing to sacrifice children whose lives could be saved today in hopes of securing an ideal future in which all children are protected. Steve Hays sums it up well: “Abolition can only succeed on the backs of babies it relegates to the grave in the short term.”
4) Pro-life advocates are not consenting to the killing of unborn humans left unprotected by incremental legislation. Suppose I’m a prisoner of war captured by a ruthless enemy. My captors take me and hundreds of my men on an eighty-six-mile death march where those falling behind are promptly shot. As the ranking officer, I secure a concession from my captors that allows exhausted soldiers a twenty-minute reprieve to recover and get moving before they are shot. My fellow officers join me running up and down the line saving as many men as we can. As a result, four hundred men who fell behind resumed the march and after the war returned home to their families. Tragically, five hundred others could not resume the march, and were shot.
By saving some, did I consent to the killing of those left behind? Or course not! Nor was I consenting to the legitimacy of the death march. When I secured the concession from my captors, I did not say, “Give me twenty minutes, then you can kill the wounded soldier.” I gave no such consent! Rather, given the wicked hand I was dealt, I limited the evil done as far as possible, given the realities confronting me. Unlike Governor Bob, who had the power to stop evil but didn’t, I was forced to operate from a position of weakness. I didn’t choose the lesser of two evils. Rather, as Kevin James Bywater clarifies, I chose to lessen evil. True, the situation was evil, but not because I secured a concession from my captors. It was evil because my captors forced upon me an evil reality: I had to keep my men moving, or watch them die. In such a situation, it’s not evil to save those you can.
5) Abolitionists wrongly assume that pro-life advocates have the power to stop abortion but simply won’t. This is fantasy. Like Governor Abraham, pro-lifers have no such power. Prior to June 2022, the federal courts had a lock on abortion policy. They declared that no unborn humans had a right to life. With that judicial reality, pro-lifers couldn’t just wave a magic wand and make abortion go away. Abolitionists replied that laws permitting abortion were null and void and that pro-lifers who worked to limit their evil impact wrongly ceded to Caesar the ultimate authority to dictate from on high who lives and who dies. But as Steve Hays points out, the objection confuses moral authority with legal authority. Biblically understood, God is indeed the ultimate moral authority who will righteously judge all humans. Genuine Christians recognize and acknowledge that truth. However, to abolish abortion in a constitutional republic like ours, pro-lifers need legal authority, which they may not yet have in sufficient measure to protect all children. In short, declaring that abortion-permitting laws are null and void doesn’t make them null and void. Since pro-lifers lack legal authority to save all children, it’s not evil for them to protect as many as they can.
6) We are all incrementalists, even abolitionists. When abolitionists introduce a total ban on abortion in one state but not in all of them, they’re working incrementally. In doing so, they’re not saying, “We consent to killing the baby in those other states where we did not introduce a bill.” As long as there remains a political union between states that protect life and those that don’t, pro-lifers have no choice but to function incrementally, in this case, state by state.
We can’t help but function incrementally when confronting evil. It was right to end slavery in 1865 even though legally sanctioned segregation wasn’t abolished for another century. Even if we ban abortion, we still have the evil of discarded IVF embryos to contend with, not to mention other reproductive technologies that treat children as commodities. Banning those evils may take decades. But that is no excuse to ignore children we can save from abortion right now.
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I find it both very sad and frustrating that the abolitionist position is so popular in some circles, let alone the attitude that many (not all) abolitionists have regarding their fellow-Christians in the incrementalist camp. It is especially disheartening to read or hear that certain Christian leaders that I otherwise respect — even if I don’t agree with them on everything theologically — have adopted the abolitionist mindset.
I pray that the Lord softens hearts and minds as appropriate to at least eliminate the abolitionist attacks on — and questioning the character and even salvation of — incrementalists. I suspect that such behavior truly grieves the Holy Spirit.
