David French’s most recent newsletter for The Dispatch was titled, “For Abortion Abolition, Against Abortion ‘Abolitionists.'” In it, he describes a split in the pro-life movement between “incrementalists” and “abolitionists.” French writes:
If you don’t follow the pro-life movement closely, you might be puzzled by the term “abolitionist.” After all, isn’t every single member of the pro-life movement who wants to end abortion an “abolitionist”? I believe that a just society protects unborn life in law and a healthy society celebrates and protects innocent life from conception until natural death. Doesn’t that make me an abolitionist?
Not in the vernacular of today’s pro-life movement. Why? Because I believe abortion laws should protect the life of the mother, I do not believe women who obtain abortions should face criminal punishment, and I do strongly endorse state statutes that make even incremental improvements to abortion law. And if the draft Justice Alito opinion holds, the distinction between so-called “abolitionists” and incrementalists/eliminationists like me is about to become very relevant indeed.
Incrementalists aren’t in favor of slow change in abortion laws for the sake of slow change, but rather accept attainable change even when you ultimately hope for greater regulation. And the desire to “eliminate” abortion implicitly acknowledges the reality that bans alone won’t end abortion. Abortion can only truly end when American culture changes, not just its law.
As the title suggests, French argues against the “abolitionist” approach while still affirming the ordinary pro-life view that abortion ought to be abolished.
He describes how this split already began to show itself during last year’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, where messengers passed a resolution called “On Abolishing Abortion.” Again, abolishing abortion is the right goal, and Southern Baptists agree on that, but there are different ways to go about it. This was the part of the resolution that was divisive: “We reject any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of our preborn neighbors.”
That standard would mean Southern Baptists shouldn’t support fetal-heartbeat laws, the Hyde amendment, or the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs because they stop short of completely abolishing abortion.
Seven prominent Southern Baptists, all wholly committed to the pro-life cause, wrote for The Public Discourse last year about why they didn’t vote for that resolution. They noted that it goes against numerous resolutions in past annual meetings that supported pro-life laws that permit exceptions and that a resolution approving of the Hyde amendment passed the day before. They wrote:
This resolution as drafted is a total repudiation of the pro-life movement. It repudiates the legislative gains made by the pro-life movement as insufficiently pro-life. It says the thousands of laws to undo America’s culture of death have all been for nothing. Is that really what we want to communicate to those who have been working tirelessly to fight abortion in America?
Now that Roe could be overturned by the Supreme Court, these questions become newly relevant. You can read the current print issue of National Review for some perspectives on where the pro-life movement should go next if the Supreme Court does the right thing.
Another perspective was offered today by Richard Land, one of the Southern Baptists who wrote the article for The Public Discourse last year. Land was president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission from 1988 to 2013, which is the SBC entity responsible for public-policy issues. He’s responding to a controversy surrounding the acting president of the ERLC, Brent Leatherwood, who signed an open letter with other pro-life groups, including the Susan B. Anthony List, National Right to Life, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition, that urges state lawmakers not to prosecute women for getting abortions. Some Southern Baptists are calling on the ERLC to be defunded over Leatherwood’s support for the letter.
The key passage in the open letter reads:
Women are victims of abortion and require our compassion and support as well as ready access to counseling and social services in the days, weeks, months, and years following an abortion.
As national and state pro-life organizations, representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women, and children across the country, let us be clear: We state unequivocally that we do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women and we stand firmly opposed to [including] such penalties in legislation.
As Land points out in his article today, that view is in accordance with decades of pro-life advocacy. “Over and over again I have heard pro-life advocates passionately argue that in any abortion there are at least two victims — the aborted baby and his or her mother,” he writes. As president of the ERLC, Land himself was part of that advocacy.
Here’s Land’s position on abortion:
I believe that life begins at conception (Ps. 139:13-16; Jer. 1:5) and that abortion is always the taking of a human life. I believe the only morally valid reason for aborting a pre-born human being is when the pre-born baby is a direct threat to his or her mother’s continued physical existence.
I believe God is involved whenever conception takes place. We may have been a surprise to our parents, but we were not a surprise to God. Each of us was once a child, an infant, and a fetus. None of us was ever a sperm or an egg.
However, since I am not a pacifist, I believe it is morally permissible to protect a human life that is imperiled by taking a human life if that is the only lifesaving option available.
He provides an illustration that helps to understand the shortcomings of the abolition-or-nothing approach:
What if I came upon a wrecked school bus that had plunged into a river with 60 children onboard? Since I can’t save all of them, should I then do nothing? I think not. I believe God would have me plunge in and save as many as I could, going back again and again as long as there were children to be saved, rather than dithering on the bank, deciding to save none of them because I can’t save all of them.
He goes on to tell a story of a phone call he received from a pastor whose pregnant wife was in a car accident:
The doctors on duty in the hospital were in unanimous agreement that if they were not allowed to take the baby (at 12 weeks’ gestation, too young to survive outside the womb), then both mother and baby would die because of the strain on the critically injured mother’s heart. . . .
Would the abolitionists really argue that the government should tell him he could not make the decision to save his wife’s life? I fear they might, and they would be wrong.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, as it should, pro-life activists will still have lots of work to do to protect human life. To that end, they must “avoid imposing undue litmus tests on one another,” as Alexandra DeSanctis writes. She continues:
We all must agree on our goal: the abolition of abortion. But we should avoid excommunicating allies over disagreements about how quickly we get there, state by state, or over our views on adjacent issues such as the welfare state, the death penalty, or paid parental leave. There will be time enough down the road to work out these sorts of disagreements, and there is space enough in the movement for differing views.
Land’s article today is worthy pushback against those destructive litmus tests. The past decades of pro-life advocacy were not frivolous because they didn’t completely abolish abortion. The coming decades of pro-life advocacy won’t be frivolous, either, so long as we are guided by the conviction that abortion should be abolished and, above all, compassion for unborn children and their mothers.