Complicated and inconsistent: The current state of the pro-life movement and how to finally end abortion

Summary: Living up to ‘Liberty and justice for all’

Abortion is murder. Murder is wrong. Justice demands consequences for murder which the state, operating as God’s earthly arm of intervention, should mete out according to biblical principles of due process. A fair and equal justice system promotes good and punishes the evildoer, serves as a deterrent for other would-be lawbreakers, and acts as a tutor to instruct the public on what is good and what is evil by virtue of what it condones and what it punishes, all to the good of the people and the glory of God.

Abortion has long been treated with special exceptions. While the taking of life in the womb can be prosecuted if an assailant harms a pregnant woman, American law has allowed abortionists to take life in the womb without repercussions and has specifically excluded mothers from being liable for any wrongdoing in having their pre-born babies killed or killing them by ingesting the poisonous medication Mifepristone with the intent to end the life of the pre-born child. This unequal and unjust error in the American justice system must be fixed.

Every life is valuable and worthy of defense, and in America, every human, born or pre-born, wanted or unwanted, young or old, black or white, intelligent or developmentally challenged, male or female, is deserving of the Constitutionally protected right to life. True and pure justice demands that any person involved in the intentional murder of another person be held accountable for their part in that death as determined by due process of law and a jury of their peers.

This is not a call to “single out” women for prosecution but a call to consistency; Everyone should be treated equally.

The right to life should be protected for all people; Everyone should be held responsible for crimes they commit.

The punishment for murder should have no carve-outs. A lie has been told and believed in America: Abortion is the compassionate choice. This is false. Love and compassion demand that when one among us is wronged, blind justice is sought. If a 5-year-old child were killed by a mother, society would not side with the mother no matter how frazzled, how tired, or how inconvenienced she was. Public compassion would rightly be directed to the slain child, and if the women was set free with zero repercussions, public outcry would follow.

Further, it is most compassionate to design a system of laws that dissuade people from taking the life of another human being – a decision which will absolutely take a toll on the psyche, mental wellbeing and often the physical body as well. Instead, by allowing abortion to be considered acceptable, it is inherently offered up as a valid option and a decent choice. How deceptive and devious to allow people to think murdering another person is an acceptable decision to make. This is like extending an invitation to people to put burning coals into their lap knowing full well they are to be burned in excruciating pain and possibly killed if they do. How treacherous and evil is that invitation. Abortion is no different. Allowing it to be legal invites people to continue selecting it as a viable option in the buffet of life.

More than 63 million lives have been lost as a result of this flawed aspect of American law, and as many mothers have been damaged forever. As Christians, we cannot support this injustice. We must call for consistency and equality. The 14^th Amendment should protect the right to life of every person, born and pre-born, and existing laws for homicide should be equally applied to any person contributing to the demise of another person, taking into account the same considerations regarding the level of culpability as are currently applicable in other cases of criminal loss of life in the United States. We must fear God, not man, and our laws and courts should reflect that biblical commitment as intended from the foundation of our nation.

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Why has defending life become complicated and confusing?

If you feel like the pro-life movement has become complicated, you are not alone. Tragically, what should be elementary and simple has been made cloudy and convoluted. Questions of law and morality surrounding abortion should begin and end with “do not murder.” Tragically, though, abortion has become politicized, incentivized, normalized, and weaponized. Scripture says God is not the author of confusion, so we can correctly understand this muddying of the waters as the earthly manifestation of a battle waged in the heavens by the forces of evil. Busy minds easily forget how active the spiritual realm is, and people living in a tangible, touchable world naturally focus on what can be seen with the eye rather than the invisible reality that Satan roams the earth seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8).

Still, the truth remains:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” – 2 Cor. 10:3-5

Our weapons are truth and prayer. Life and hope. Joy and worship. We live in a world where abortion – the murdering of innocent children in the womb, a place where they SHOULD be the safest – is accepted as normal. As life-loving people, we absolutely MUST reject that.

But we do not fight the war on the sanctity of life with human hands or strategies. We fight with truth.

We seek God’s intervention through prayer. We invoke the powerful words of the living and active Scripture which are “sharper than any double-edged sword,” which “penetrate between joints and marrow,” and which are able to “judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). We don’t go first to what is practical and pragmatic and strategic by human standards; we seek to serve and fear God first of all and above all, hating what He hates, and loving what He loves.

God hates murder. God loves life.

God hates the shedding of innocent blood (Prov. 6:17).

God loves each person so much that He sent His only Son to die for them (John 3:16).

God’s holy Word is supernatural and in it are found the words of life. Scripture says of itself that it is more precious than silver and gold. Its wisdom is unmatched. It speaks of the mysteries of God but then also promises God will come near and will be found by those who truly seek His face, “who seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Psalm 24:6).

Like Isaiah says in Scripture, we are people with unclean lips, and we live among a people with unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5). We have seen the glory of God and we are undone. None among is perfect (“no, not one” is even good (Romans 3:10)). But those of us who know the truth must reach out to rescue those stumbling toward the slaughter (Proverbs 24:11). Rather than withholding the life-giving truth, we often opt for the more politically correct silent treatment. We hold the truth for ourselves while we watch people staggering closer to eternal suffering in hell step by step and we call it “keeping to ourselves,” so convinced are we that bothering someone is the thing to be avoided at all costs.

But we are not only to reach out with truth to those who need to hear it (including telling people plainly that abortion is murder and murder is wrong) but with a compassionate outstretched arm, we must also reach out and rescue those being unjustly harmed, especially when those people are the most vulnerable among us – infants, children, widows, orphans, and yes, babies in the womb.

Why has this become so complicated? Because Satan loves it that way. He stirs together lies, manipulation, guilt, shame, money, and self-preservation into a mixture he uses to bake a cake swirled with so many wretched ingredients that you wouldn’t know where to start picking them apart from one another even if you could. But you can’t. The cake is baked. And he has no new recipe; needs no new recipe. It’s working just fine. And the only thing – the only thing – we can do to combat this awful cake our culture swallows whole and doesn’t even recognize for the poison that it is, is to fight it with truth. So here is some straight truth. No hedging, no dodging. Just the truth.

The money, power, and pressure propping up the abortion industry

The abortion industry makes money (BIG money) from completing abortions and selling baby body parts. The medical field makes money from hospitalizing women harmed in botched abortions and in self-managed abortions gone-wrong. The pharmaceutical industry makes money from the abortion pill and from all kinds of medications required in abortions and post-abortive care – not to mention the drugs prescribed to deal with the mental health crises that arise from women depressed and anxious after going through what was deceptively promised to be as simple as having a 6-month teeth cleaning at the dentist. (This light glance at the money tied up in abortion is a faint skimming of the surface – not exhaustive by any stretch.)

Then, setting aside the money, there is politics.

Campaigns consider the polling: How well will it poll if our candidate takes a convictional (read harsh) stance in favor of life? Will it hurt their chances of winning in the primary? How about the general? What if it came to a run-off? If they get elected, can they get anything done? What compromises and concessions will have to be made in order to govern and be a leader of all the people from all the parties? What will the stakeholders expect and demand while holding donations hostage behind their backs until they hear what they want to hear? What about re-election? What lawsuits will this invite? How will litigation affect governing and public perception?

Do you see? Do you have a headache from that confusing malarky yet? This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how many evil ingredients have been baked into the cake that is the current national discussion about abortion. And Christians are not immune to it. There is significant misalignment, to put it charitably, between various lanes in Christendom. The fact that we cannot come to a clear consensus and move forward as a united front in defense of unborn life is to our shame.

How did we get so far away from a life is a life no matter how small (h/t: Dr. Suess)? So far from the simple truth that taking a life on purpose is murder and that murder is wrong? So far from the crime of homicide deserving appropriate punishment through due process of law, not coddling and “understanding where someone is coming from.”

This is how: The erosion of truth. The abandonment of courage (men without chests, C.S. Lewis would say). The attitude of mediocrity, laziness, and apathy (someone else will do it). The acceptance of losing (I mean, we tried. [Shrugs.] Let’s move on.). The abdication of this mandate from Scripture: “For him who knows the good he ought to do but does not do it, to him it is sin” (James 4:17).

SIN.

A word we have left hanging in the decades before us. Today, things are mistakes. Wrong turns. Bad choices, even. But sin? Wow, what a strong word.

“To him who knows the good he ought to do, to him it is sin.”

Making the complicated simple

To boil this all down as simply as possible, this is what we know to be true:

God is the creator of all life. He is the author of life in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:7), and He forms each new life in the secret darkness of a mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13).

God knows the days that are apportioned to each person before even one begins (Psalm 139:16).

God has a plan for each life, and His desire is to not only give them a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11), but life and life abundant (John 10:10). He also desires that every soul born into a sin-sick world and destined for eternity in hell be saved through the sacrifice of His only Son on a Roman cross (2 Peter 3:9). God loves us and desires that all might be saved.

Any attack on life is an affront to God.

From the moment Cain killed his brother Abel, God has abhorred the act of murder.

God detests the shedding of innocent blood, and He gives a model for how murder should be handled: he who sheds another human’s blood should have his life taken as well (Leviticus 24:17, Exodus 21:12, Numbers 35:16, Genesis 9:5).

God is a just God. His nature is justice. He sets the standard for ethics. He not only shows us that the payment for taking a life is to have one’s life taken from him, but he shows us that killing a person while they are in the womb is considered to Him no different than killing a person outside of the womb (Exodus 21:22-23).

God has instituted earthly government and given it the role of promoting good and punishing evil (Romans 13). We do not avenge ourselves when we are wronged (Romans 12:19), but God’s delegation of some aspects of justice to the earthly magistrates demands that government punish the evildoer. Scripture lays out the foundation for due process which America’s founders used to shape the American justice system. When people commit a crime in America, they are rightly punished. This not only upholds a biblical framework for justice, but it serves as a tutor to train people in right versus wrong and it deters people from committing crimes.

When it comes to abortion – the murder of people in the womb – we do not need a new system of justice to promote good and punish the evildoer. We simply need to employ the system we already have. Instead of making carve-outs for abortion, government should hold responsible those who take part in a homicide just as it would any other homicide that occurs outside the womb. The location of being in a womb does not change a person’s humanity, and as Scripture teaches and our U.S. Constitution reflects, all citizens are endowed with certain inalienable rights from our creator, God. Chief among those most basic rights is the right to life. It is far past time that we recognize the rights that belong to us as citizens outside the womb apply to those inside the womb. In fact, we already recognize this to some extent since current laws require punishment for harming a pregnant woman and causing the death of an unborn child.

We simply need to stop allowing abortion to be an exception to this standard and seek consistency in American law. If it is wrong for a man to hit a woman’s abdomen and kill her baby, it is also wrong for the woman to kill or ask a doctor to kill her baby. If the baby was born and then killed by the mother, we would certainly agree the mother should be punished, and no upright and reasonable person would look at that situation and feel badly for the murderous mom. They would be rightly appalled at her heinous act. We should have the exact same disdain for a mother who kills her child before he or she is born. There is not difference in fact, so we should not act as if there is.

Where do we go from here?

This swirling milieu is enough to disenchant any wholeheartedly pro-life person and leave them feeling like the mountain is too high to climb in regard to protecting unborn life. Where do you even begin? And how do normal, life-loving people begin to fight the goliath industries through which money and power flow like a rushing river? The answer is simple (but not easy). We begin like David.

David began as a humble shepherd boy that feared God. His victory over Goliath did not come from his own strength but from God’s strength and His providence. In fact, perhaps God chose an unlikely warrior in David so that the miracle would be all the more evident.

Like David, Christians today who desire to slay the abortion industry should step up boldly. Our confidence is not in having the greatest strength, the newest tools and weapons, or the best strategy. We must find our confidence in God and ask Him to work through us to bring a victory over evil, and today, there is no greater evil Goliath to fight than the one responsible for killing 63 million people in the wombs of their mothers, often at the request of those mothers.

If we truly believe in the value of every life as we say we do, and we truly fear God as we say we do, then we are left with no option but to give our all in seeking the total end of abortion in our nation. We cannot allow murder to hide any longer behind the euphemism of choice. However unpopular it may be, we must fear God and serve an audience of one in deciding that we will wholeheartedly defend the right to life for absolutely every person from the moment of fertilization to the moment of natural death.

This Danbury Institute desires to see an end, once and for all, to the acceptance of legalized abortion. It should not be tolerated in a just society, it should not be funded by taxpayer dollars, and it should be considered what it is in the most honest truth: murder.

Those who commit murder should be held responsible, and abortion should no longer be considered a special category of social ills rather than a crime punishable by due process of law. Consider how many mothers will hesitate to kill their children knowing that they risk their own life and future by intentionally having an abortion. May we be a people who fear God, who value life, who seek consistency and equality, and who willingly step up to be a David against the Goliath abortion industry and Satan himself.