This article first appeared in the Viewpoint column of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, volume 35, number 05 (2012). For further information or to subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL go to: http://www.equip.org

Should Christians vote across the board for one political party? If you have been reading the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL for a while now, you might assume that my answer would be yes, since we previously published Viewpoint articles that seemed to be arguing for something like that.¹ But the purpose of our Viewpoint department is to help Christians think through difficult issues by allowing advocates of controversial but tenable positions within the body of Christ to make their best case. This means that not everyone at CRI will agree with all Viewpoint articles, and in the case of the recent article by Scott Klusendorf, “The 2012 Elections: Five Questions for Pro-Life Advocates,” I strongly disagreed, even though I believed his position deserved a hearing. In light of my disagreement, it makes sense for me to present the other side of the debate. This should advance the discernment-sharpening purpose of the Viewpoint department all the better.

I should mention that both in Klusendorf’s article and in mine there is some overlap in the use of the words Christian and pro-life. The real concern of the debate is how Christians should vote, but since we have well established in previous articles (many written by Klusendorf himself) that the Christian position on abortion is pro-life, and since the abortion issue is key to this discussion, the terms often, but not always, are used interchangeably. But, of course, the terms are not synonymous.

The fact that this is a feature-length Viewpoint installment and not an editorial also needs to be noted. Although I am the editor-in-chief of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, what I write here is not the official position of the Christian Research Institute. It is my opinion and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of Hank Hanegraaff or anyone else associated with CRI.

I stress this particularly because, no matter how discrete I succeed at being, this topic will undoubtedly provoke strong reactions in some readers. I’m not deaf to what many evangelicals are saying concerning our current president and his party, and the tone that often accompanies the words. To some readers I suspect that merely opening for discussion the possibility of a Christian voting otherwise than Republican will seem like heresy.

It may help dampen down passions to note a principle that CRI has always both taught and followed, which is that political differences between Christians should not be considered nearly as important as theological differences (which themselves have varying degrees of importance and are usually not worthy of division). Furthermore, if some theological differences are nearly impossible to resolve from Scripture, how much more so can political differences be, which usually are not addressed in the Bible and need to be argued from principles that may be drawn from Scripture, but are often used to support strikingly different conclusions? All this should leave us with an attitude of humility and charity toward those with whom we politically disagree, but sadly this is often not the case.

We may passionately disagree with one another about global warming or “Obamacare,” but this in no way should hinder our Christian fellowship and unity. This is a truth I can honestly say I have walked as well as talked for more than four decades. I have often disagreed with even my closest brothers and sisters in Christ on political issues, but these differences have never come between us in the least, since we are citizens of a higher Kingdom, where “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither slave nor free man” (Gal. 3:28), and, we might rightly add today, there is neither Republican nor Democrat (not to mention Independents, for we are all gladly dependent on, and subservient to, the King who unites us all in Himself).

THE RATIONALE BEHIND STRAIGHT-TICKET VOTING

As I understand it, the argument for straight-ticket voting as represented by JOURNAL contributor Scott Klusendorf can be summarized as follows: while there are many issues Christians can and should care about, the right to elective abortion made possible nationally by the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling is the paramount moral issue of our time, comparable to slavery in pre–Civil War America and the Holocaust inflicted on Jews by Nazi Germany. Just as one would not have voted for candidates on the ticket of a party that endorsed slavery, so one should not vote for candidates whose party endorses elective abortion. Since abortion is the premier moral issue of our time, no matter how many concerns one may have about a pro-life party in other areas, as long as they are the only pro-life party, they should always receive the conscientious Christian’s vote.

This even applies when a congressional candidate for the “pro-abortion party” proclaims himself to be pro-life, while his opponent from the “pro-life party” is pro-choice. Strategically, the argument goes, it is more important to increase the size of the pro-life party in Congress than to add to the number of pro-life senators or congressmen, since the majority party sets the legislative agenda and has the power to move a bill through a committee and up for a vote before the entire chamber.

Straight-ticket voting is therefore, according to this view, the only moral and wise choice for pro-lifers in America today. One can study candidates’ positions and records during the primaries and choose between those seeking nomination by the pro-life party, but once the general election arrives, one should merely look at the candidates’ party affiliation and let that alone determine one’s votes. And, of course, it goes without mention (and indeed is rarely mentioned by authors, who wish to appear nonpartisan, and by pastors, who wish to maintain their church’s tax exemption) but is quite understood that the “pro-choice party” in the United States is the Democratic and the “pro-life party” is the Republican.

This strategy, it should further be noted, goes beyond individual voters. It has recently been adopted by pro-life organizations such as the National Right to Life Committee and the Susan B. Anthony List. For example, in the 2010 elections the latter organization “spent more to defeat pro-life Democrats than to support pro-life candidates,” and, as a result, five pro-life Democrats failed to win re-election to their House seats.² This extreme action was taken because the pro-life Democrats supported Obamacare (which they did only after securing an agreement from President Obama not to use the plan to fund abortions³).

PROBLEMS WITH THE STRAIGHT-TICKET VOTING POSITION

It is important to clarify that my primary objection is not to straight-ticket voting per se, although I do not agree with or practice it myself and will be expressing criticisms of it here. If you choose to vote straight ticket, however, I respect it as a decision you have thoughtfully and prayerfully made. What I strongly object to is any assertion or implication that Christians have a moral duty to vote straight ticket. I take this position because voting is a supremely personal act and should be dictated by the voter’s conscience alone.⁴

Reductio ad Absurdum

When carried to its logical conclusion, the straight-ticket-voting-as-moral-obligation position is shown to be absurd and untenable (this form of argumentation is known formally as reductio ad absurdum—reduction to absurdity). This is because it is simplistic: it does not factor in all of the issues a voter in general and a Christian in particular needs to consider when voting. As a consequence, it violates the integrity of the democratic election process. By taking a one-size-fits-all approach, the position reduces in the general elections what should be a complex, thoughtful, and prayerful process to the mechanical checking off of a single criteria: party affiliation.

The argument assumes that one political party captures biblical values sufficiently to warrant the Christian’s automatic vote. This is probably not the case, and, in any case, cannot be dictated by one Christian to another Christian. Again, in a democracy, voting is supremely a matter of individual conscience. For government by the people truly to work, each citizen needs to embrace her responsibility to be knowledgeable of the candidates and issues and to vote according to her well-formed convictions.

This democratic principle has interesting overlap with the New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of believers on which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it could be argued that the reason democracy thrived in Protestant America was because of a well-established understanding and practice of this principle.

The Protestant Reformation was launched because Martin Luther’s conscience was bound to the Word of God and to reason and he therefore would not recant his beliefs even when the Pope commanded him to. In the spirit of Luther, Protestants throughout the ages have accepted their responsibility to study Scripture carefully and prayerfully; to rationally reflect on the truths discovered therein, as well as in the general revelation of nature; and then to reach into their consciences to find the truths that they will live by and, if necessary, die for.

Of particular relevance to this article is how this principle plays out when relevant topics are not discussed or dogmatically settled in Scripture. Since the issues that drive our votes are usually in this category, they are not only analogous to, but in some respects merge into, the “disputable matters” discussed in Romans 14. Note that Paul does not tell the Romans what to believe on these issues (and if anyone could, both from knowledge and authority, it would have been him!). Instead, he instructs that “each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind” (v. 5), and one should not judge the others on the opinions they hold (vv. 4, 10–13a).

While one may believe that abortion trumps all other concerns and may freely attempt to convince others that this should be so, he should not expect that all will agree with him, nor judge those who don’t. Christians can, should, and do have deep convictions about a number of issues, including social, economic, and religious concerns. Furthermore, they are right to be concerned about the character, credentials, and competency of candidates, their political philosophy and stand on the issues, and the overall content of their party’s platform. These factors should all be weighed together and contrasted with those pertaining to competing candidates in a thoughtful and prayerful process. While straight-ticket voting may seem a natural choice to activists around a single cause such as outlawing abortion (although I will show below that even that reasoning fails), it doesn’t make sense to the Christian citizen who may indeed care most deeply about that issue but cares very deeply about several other issues as well.

Comparisons of abortion to the Holocaust and slavery are not inappropriate in terms of the moral gravity of these evils, but they fail to strengthen the straight-ticket voting argument because (1) there is no real analogy between abortion and the Holocaust in this respect, since the Holocaust was not a position on a political party’s platform that was up for vote in a representative democracy; and (2) although slavery was in fact not denounced in the Democratic Party’s platforms in the mid nineteenth century,⁵ it could be argued that Americans who found other positions of value in that party and had ideological, cultural, family, or other ties to it had the option ethically not to abandon it but rather to work from within it to change the offending elements in its platform. This does not mean they would have voted for pro-slavery candidates, but they could have chosen to support pro-abolition candidates with their votes.

The view that straight-ticket voting is a moral obligation also fails to weigh properly the following considerations:

1. A pro-life ethic should not only apply to the unborn but also to the born, including people whose lives would be lost in a frivolous war, the catastrophic loss of life that could occur from a policy that results in nuclear war, loss of life due to environmental degradation (not just apocalyptic global warming scenarios but present-day famines in Africa and elsewhere that we have the means to do something about), the lives that are being lost daily in America through the ready availability of assault weapons, and so forth. If a candidate claims to be pro-life but promotes reckless policies on some or all of these issues, that needs to be factored in. Although it has often been overstated and unfairly applied, the criticism that we social conservatives are so obsessed with abortion that we ignore other life-and-death issues (i.e., are not consistently pro-life) is not entirely undeserved, and straight-ticket voting around the abortion issue helps build the case against us.
2. Straight-ticket voting overlooks a candidate’s record on abortion issues. . If the candidate is pro-choice, has he been an activist for that cause or has he demonstrated a commitment to reducing abortions?⁶ Does the pro-life candidate have a record of standing against abortion or has he conveniently been “talking the talk” only since his campaign was launched?
3. Straight-ticket voting allows your party to get away with paying mere lip service to your issues. If your party knows they can count on your vote come November, how do you hold them accountable to deliver on their promises? This is not a merely theoretical concern but one based in observing with great frustration the Republican Party’s apathy specifically on the abortion issue for decades, until George W. Bush moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and proved to be an activist pro-life president.⁷ Your party should be on notice that your vote is something that needs to be freshly earned from election to election.
4. It does not adequately factor in pro-life Independents. If a Christian is an Independent, then she can’t vote straight ticket in the proper sense of the term because she has no party. To tell her she should always vote Republican because of a pro-life strategy is not to respect the fact that she arrived at her nonaffiliated status because neither party’s platform matches her biblical convictions satisfactorily. The absurdity of such an argument is evident.
5. It does not adequately factor in pro-life Democrats. Of course, if they followed a straight-ticket philosophy, pro-life Democrats would never cross over and vote for pro-life Republicans. Should we rather say they should always cross over and vote Republican? This is where the absurdity of the argument becomes most evident. It may seem to some evangelicals that all Christians should be Republicans, and perhaps almost all are in their experience; but in the larger world, this is not the case. A very substantial minority of Christians vote Democratic rather than Republican, ⁸ including: (1) many who emphasize social justice issues, such as those influenced by the work of Jim Wallis and Sojourners magazine, Tony Campolo, and Ron Sider; (2) some from the historic peace church traditions (Mennonite, Brethren, and Friends), especially those in the “neo-Anabaptist” movement; (3) most in the black churches; (4) many who adhere to the blend of social conservatism and fiscal progressivism advocated by the Roman Catholic church (including some non-Catholics); (5) many who were Democrats before becoming evangelicals and, despite perhaps changing their stance on some social issues such as abortion, still find themselves Democrats at heart when it comes to basic principles of government; and (6) many young adults who grew up in evangelical churches, are committed Christians, but see the world somewhat differently than their parents do (perhaps some of your own children). If, on the basis of convictions derived from his reading of the Bible, the Christian strongly agrees with the Democratic Party’s positions on a host of issues such as civil rights, health care, the role of government in matters such as regulating corporate practices and protecting the environment, gun control, and providing a social safety net for the poor, and his differences with the Democratic Party, though perhaps strong, are few, then that person more naturally fits in the Democratic Party than the Republican. It trivializes the democratic process to argue that someone whose heart is with the Democratic Party on most issues must always vote Republican, even in cases when the Democratic candidate is pro-life, let alone in cases where the Republican candidate is pro-choice!

At this point it is crucial for me to stress that I am simply trying to make a point. My purpose is not to serve as an apologist for the Democratic Party or for Left Wing causes. I am not trying to persuade you concerning any of the political positions cited above, nor should I need to for you to see the validity of my argument. For example, you do not have to accept pacifism as a biblical view of war (I don’t) to acknowledge that there is precedent within historic Christianity for reading the Bible that way (going back all the way to some of the early church fathers), and, for a Christian pacifist, voting for a president who seems bent on leading us into war would be a violation of conscience that could supersede all others. Therefore, the moral argument that Christians should vote straight-ticket Republican because of the primacy of the abortion issue fails.

It’s Strategic, All Right—but for Whom?

As for the strategic argument for voting straight-ticket Republican, there is obviously one group who would love for pro-life Democrats and Independents to accept it—Republican campaign strategists! Their priority, of course, is winning elections, not abolishing abortion, and some of them in fact are pro-choice. They will court social conservatives if they need their votes, but they will also court social progressives who are attracted to other items in the Republican package.

People vote Republican for a vast array of reasons, including (1) traditional values, (2) belief in America’s “Manifest Destiny” and/or a strong defense (often hoping that Republicans will not cut funding for the military), and (3) opposition to big government and its accompanying higher taxes (often hoping that Republicans will cut funding for everything, except perhaps the military, along with curbing government regulation of corporate practice, finance, trade, property use, gun sales and ownership, and much more). A coalition of these disparate voting blocs has been forged in the hope that their combined votes will seat Republican candidates in both the executive and legislative branches of government who will advance their several agendas.

The Republican Party therefore serves many people who do not base their values in the Bible, and it has come to be associated with many public policy positions that are not demonstrably based in the Bible as well. While many Christians believe that most or all of these Republican policies and platform positions are compatible with the Bible, others do not, some of whom strongly object to certain of these positions based on their own reading of the Bible. Furthermore, as we look to the future, the new (Millennial) generation of voters trends Democratic in their voting patterns and polls more liberal than their seniors on virtually all other social issues, but they generally track with older voters when it comes to abortion. This means many would likely be attracted to a pro-life candidate if he’s Democratic, but not if he’s Republican.⁹

Given these realities, to argue that all pro-lifers should only vote Republican is not only absurd but also short-sighted. The Democratic Party was not always as strongly pro-choice as it was in the final quarter of the twentieth century, and that feature of the party could change again. In fact, it has already been changing over the past decade, as Democratic strategists have seen the need to court pro-life voters. In 2008 they supported many pro-life (often overlapping with fiscally conservative “blue dog”) Democrats’ successful campaigns for Congress. Furthermore, the advocacy group Democrats for Life (DFLA) has thousands of members, with new people joining every day,¹⁰ despite its loss of support from the larger pro-life movement over the Obamacare flap. This year, for the first time in two decades, a pro-life Democrat, DFLA president Janet Robert, was invited to give oral testimony before the Democratic Platform Committee and suggest language for the 2012 party platform. But these gains notwithstanding, the previously mentioned successful campaign of pro-life groups to sabotage pro-life Democrats in the 2010 elections has significantly weakened the pro-life voice in the Democratic Party.

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 44 percent of Democrats believe abortion should only be legal in a few or no circumstances.¹¹ If pro-life Democrats continue to gain influence and acceptance within their party, we could find a situation where the stranglehold of pro-choice interests over the Democratic Party is broken, so that even when they are the party in power, there would be less support for pushing through pro-choice legislation. When such legislation did come to a vote, there would be more Democrats joining Republicans in voting against it.

To put all the pro-life eggs in the basket of one party, the Republican, does not in the longer view seem very strategic at all. Why tie the pro-life position to other positions that have nothing to do with the right to life and are repugnant to many people who are strongly pro-life? Why create that kind of baggage for the pro-life position?

THE PENDING COLLAPSE OF THE STATUS QUO

As you no doubt remember, the long-time political divide between Left and Right in America became much more pronounced due to the Iraq War. Since the war this breach has not been mended, as the base members in each party keep electing ideological purists to Congress who consider bipartisanship to be a betrayal of principle. The truth is, however, that compromise is essential in a two-party system if anything is to be accomplished. Thus, as I write, the dreaded “fiscal cliff” is looming in which tax increases and deep cuts in spending (including military spending) could send the nation into another recession unless Congress can find some middle ground on taxes and spending by the end of the year, something they were unable to do the two  previous years. Frustrated by years of gridlock and partisan bickering, several leading senators and representatives with reputations for reaching across the aisle have retired or announced plans to retire, while others have been voted out of office as punishment for their bipartisanship, leaving the hope for future progress even dimmer.

A recent NBC–Wall Street Journal poll found that “56% of Americans say they would vote out every single member of the House and Senate if they could. 55% of liberals, 55% of moderates, and 58% of conservatives say they want all members of Congress gone.”¹² There has been so much general dissatisfaction with Washington in recent years that the voting public has been putting a new party in office every election. With such a see-saw of power, how much can the pro-life movement reasonably hope to accomplish if it has no representatives looking out for its interests on the Democratic side? Any progress that is made in one term will likely be reversed in the next. Only when the pro-life cause transcends the political divide will there be a realistic chance of overturning Roe v. Wade.

The party system in America is to a great extent dysfunctional, and no one at present seems to have either the wisdom or the power to get it back on track. There is a reason why the number of registered Independents continues to grow and they now outnumber Republicans and Democrats by 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively.¹³ The wave of the future seems to be voting for candidates who will work for the common good rather than to stay on the right side of powerful people or to get themselves reelected.

The pro-life movement needs to rethink its partisan strategy and get ahead of this curve. I predict it will find key allies in unexpected places.

Elliot Miller is the editor-in-chief of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL.

Rebuttal Viewpoints from both Scott Klusendorf and Elliot Miller follow the footnotes below.

 NOTES

1. See Scott Klusendorf, “The 2012 Elections: Five Questions for Pro-Life Advocates,” Christian Research Journal 34, 6 (2011): 58–60 (http://www.equip.org/articles/the-2012-elections-five-questions-for-pro-life-advocates/), and Francis J. Beckwith, “Wise as Serpents: Christians, Politics, and Strategic Voting,” Christian Research Journal 27, 3 (2004): 52–53 (http://www.equip.org/articles/wise-as-serpents/). While it’s fair to say that Klusendorf argues for the general virtue and wisdom of straight-ticket voting as long as there is both a “pro-life party” and a “pro-choice party,” Beckwith does not carry it that far. He does suggest that in some cases “strategic voting” would lead the pro-life advocate to vote for a pro-choice candidate representing the “pro-life party” rather than a pro-life candidate on the ticket of the “pro-choice party.”
2. Democrats for Life of America, “The Case for Pro-Life Democrats 2012,” PowerPoint presentation prepared for the Democratic Party Platform Drafting Committee, 23–25.
3. Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) “challenged the assertions made by conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act that it provided federal funding of abortion. In a recent press release, [DFLA executive director Kristen] Day noted that, in a case brought by [former Congressman Steve] Driehaus against the Susan B. Anthony List, Judge Timothy Black ruled that the ‘express language of the [act] does not provide for taxpayer funding of abortion. That is a fact, and it is clear on its face.’” (Michael Sean Winters, “Group Brings Pro-Life Voice to Democratic Party,” National Catholic Reporter, November 30, 2011, http://ncronline.org/news/politics/group-brings-pro-life-voice-democratic-party.)
4. This is based in an understanding of the integral rights, responsibilities, and role of the citizen in a democracy. For an introduction to this topic, I recommend Charles F. Bahmueller, Michael Johnston, and Charles N. Quigley, Elements of Democracy: The Fundamental Principles, Concepts, Social Foundations, and Processes of Democracy (Calabasas, CA: Center for Civic Education, 2007).
5. The issue was instead deferred to a pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling, with the preservation of the Union given priority over the preservation of slavery.
6. In his article, p. 59, Klusendorf dismisses efforts of pro-life Democrats to work with pro-choice Democrats and pro-life Republicans to reduce abortions, suggesting that they consider this a satisfactory substitute for overturning Roe v. Wade. He is correct that reducing abortion is no substitute for legal reform, but pro-life Democrats never considered it to be so, and it is certainly a step in the right direction. The Pregnant Woman Support Act that they succeeded at making a part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is now being implemented in seventeen states with $250 million in grants to help alleviate the desperate circumstances that lead many pregnant women to think they have no option but abortion. Ultimately, even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the most we will ever be able to accomplish is to reduce abortions. Outside of the Bible belt, most states will probably keep abortion legal, and wherever it is illegal, we can expect illegal abortions to return with a vengeance. Any insistence on legal reform that leads us to pooh-pooh efforts to save preborn lives within the current legal structure is putting principle ahead of persons and leads us away from a true, practical love of our neighbor.
7. For example, in 2003 President Bush signed into law a ban on partial-birth abortion. In 2007 his two appointees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, helped create a majority that made it possible for the Court to reverse itself on partial-birth abortion and uphold the ban Bush signed.
8. This is true not just of “Christians” but of “observant evangelicals” (i.e., evangelicals who attend more than one religious service a week). In 2008 43 percent of them voted for Obama. See John C. Green, “Much Hope, Modest Change for Democrats,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, August 11, 2010, http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Much-Hope-Modest-Change-for-Democrats-Religion-in-the-2008-Presidential-Election.aspx. See also Marcia Pally, “Evangelicals: Voting Bloc or Mosaic?” Truthout, May 22, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/9187-evangelicals-voting-bloc-or-mosaic#a12.
9. See Lydia Saad, “Americans Still Split along ‘Pro-Choice,’ ‘Pro-Life’ Lines,” Gallup Politics, May 23, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/147734/Americans-Split-Along-Pro-Choice-Pro-Life-Lines.aspx.
10. Telephone interview with DFLA executive director Kristen Day, July 26, 2012.
11. Ibid. Thirty percent indicated “few circumstances” while 14 percent indicated “no circumstances.”
12. Poll Watch, The Week, February 10, 2012, 17.
13. See Jeffrey M. Jones, “Record-High 40% of Americans Identify as Independents in ‘11,” Gallup Politics, January 9, 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/151943/record-high-americansidentify-independents.aspx.

Rebuttal to Elliot Miller

Should Christians knowingly support a political party dedicated to the proposition that an entire class of human beings can be set aside to be killed? Elliot Miller’s answer to that question is unsatisfactory.

First, an appeal to individual conscience does not relieve Christians of their duty to apply their biblical worldview in a way that limits the evil of abortion insofar as possible given current political realities. At the legislative level (House and Senate races), that usually means voting for the party that, though imperfect, will best protect unborn humans against one that sanctions killing them wholesale. A Republican majority in both houses gives us the best hope of legally protecting unborn humans because the vast majority of its members will support pro-life legislation—a point Miller does not dispute. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of Senate and House Democrats reject any restrictions on the abortion license (see below) and work tirelessly to expand it. In short, reducing voting to a supremely personal act does not fly when the party you are supporting sanctions the intentional killing of innocent human beings.

Second, Miller presents no formal argument for why pro-life voters should consider other important issues—war, the environment, and foreign aid—as morally equivalent to intentionally killing 1.2 million humans per year. His response is to say that not everyone agrees that abortion is a dominant issue. So? How does the fact that people disagree mean my distinction between contingent evils, like war, and absolute ones, like abortion, is wrong? Suppose a political party is great on health care and the economy, but will fight to keep it legal for men to beat their wives. That alone should disqualify that party from leadership. Moreover, where’s the evidence that biblical truth mandates Democrat policies on foreign aid and gun control? Indeed, a very good case can be made that foreign aid harms many impoverished countries more than it helps and that violent crime continued to drop after the so-called assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Nowhere does Miller argue empirically or biblically that a Christian worldview demands his take on these disputable matters. Meanwhile, the biblical view on intentionally shedding innocent blood is not disputable. It’s strictly forbidden!

Third, Miller is mistaken if he thinks we’re going to change the Democratic Party anytime soon. While he appeals to lay signups at Democrats for Life, the political players in that party continue promoting abortion wholesale. How many lives should we sacrifice waiting for the party to reform itself? Remember: 90 percent of this party’s current House membership voted against a Republican bill protecting unborn females from sex-selection abortion. It’s a party that supports forcing religious groups to fund insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. It’s a party that says doctors must perform or refer for abortion or go out of business. If Miller is worried about individual conscience, he should look no further than the party determined to destroy it.

True, the Republicans are far from perfect. But as Greg Koukl points out, given a choice between a first-class arsonist and a second-class fireman, you go with the second-class fireman—and demand he get better. —Scott Klusendorf

Elliot Miller replies: I didn’t argue that Christians should support the Democratic Party but only that some may support it selectively.

I did implicitly present a formal argument. To pacifists, war is an absolute (not a contingent) evil, as are nuclear weapons to many additional Christians.

Parties don’t pass legislation, congressmen do. Would you vote for a congressman in an anti-wife-beating party who fights to make wife beating legal? A yes answer would be based on strategy, not principle, and my article shows the weaknesses of this approach.

There is something self-fulfilling about Klusendorf’s prediction that the Democratic Party will not soon change. He cites the 90 percent of House Democrats who voted against the sex selection bill, but fails to mention the pro-life Democrats whose House reelection bids were sabotaged by the pro-life movement in 2010.

 SYNOPSIS

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is considered a “great hero” of that organization because of her ardent pursuit of women’s health and equality issues, especially as represented by a woman’s right to control her own fertility. From the pro-choice perspective, she was a feminist advocate for underprivileged women who sought to offer them an alternative to abortion by providing a more humane method of escaping their desperate circumstances: birth control. Conversely, prolife advocates point out the negative causes to which her work contributed, namely the abortion, eugenics, and population control movements.

Both of these perspectives are incomplete, however, if they do not address ideas that went far deeper than a superficial benevolence for the plight of poor women. Sanger believed in a humanist progressivism that saw birth control as desirable in an enlightened society because it rendered infanticide invisible. Her worldview was conceived in bizarre and difficult family circumstances and fostered in the associations she formed with some of the most influential Darwinists of the twentieth century. Her extramarital love affair with H. G. Wells served to complete her direct ideological connection with Darwin himself. Sanger embraced social evolution as the driving force in the world, and followed its tenets to their logical conclusions. Though her views were once considered radical, they have become mainstream and gone global. This may be her most enduring legacy.

Among traditional, pro-life Christians, Margaret (Higgins) Sanger’s (1879–1966) name is synonymous with an objectionable brand of sexual libertinism that has led to a free-for-all in birth control methods, unrestricted abortion, and a general indifference toward issues of human sexuality and the value of human life. While each of these connections is valid, they seem to vanish for her more liberal supporters in light of the positive contributions they perceive her to have made for improving women’s health and reproductive rights. The difference in interpretation of her work lies in how we ground our ethics.

Margaret Sanger adhered to a consequentialism in which the outcomes of personal and societal choices trumped all other considerations. There are several philosophical variations of this ethical view but, in general, they each focus on achieving desired results as opposed to the moral status of an act itself or the agent who performs it. Margaret Sanger’s bent toward a consequentialist ethic began early in her life and is evident in every project in which she later became involved.

 AN EXISTENTIAL ETHIC

When she was nineteen years old, Sanger watched her mother suffer and die of tuberculosis. The pain of that experience was forever seared into Sanger’s psyche, and the circumstances leading up to it set the trajectory of her own life mission. Sanger’s mother experienced eighteen pregnancies before her death, only eleven of which went full term (Margaret was the sixth).¹ The stressful life her mother led no doubt weakened her ability to cope with the physical and emotional strain her body endured. In Sanger’s mind, this provided existential justification both for her insistence that no woman should have to endure a life like her mother’s, and for her determination to forge a society that would never tolerate the same kind of conditions for anyone else.

Sanger’s father, Michael Higgins, was a Civil War veteran and “freethinking” socialist who barely eked out a living chiseling headstones for local cemeteries. Described as “a talker, not a doer,” Higgins made up for his financial shortcomings by involving himself in a string of radical causes based on his leftist political convictions. He revered the Socialist Party organizer, Eugene V. Debs, and promoted a utopian brand of Debs’s ideology that included vehement opposition not only toward the economic establishment, but also toward the Catholic Church hierarchy he perceived as its ally.²

Margaret later described her father’s radicalism as “the spring from which [she] drank”³ and often referred to his example as her model for reform. This was not the only impression Sanger’s father made on her, however. In one of her early autobiographical writings, Sanger related an abnormal sensual experience she recalled having with him when she was only nine years old. Margaret, sick with typhoid and barely coherent, awoke to find him pressed against her in bed. She described a sense of falling that accompanied the episode and labeled it as her first “sex awakening.”⁴

Michael Higgins’ extremism was not just political. Several days after the death of her four-year-old brother, Henry, Margaret accompanied her father on a late-night mission to the cemetery where Henry had been buried. There Higgins dug up the boy’s corpse, formed a plaster of Paris form of his head and shoulders, and used the mold to create a bust of Henry for presentation to his wife. Years later, Margaret shared the remorse she felt at finding a lock of human hair in the plaster mold.⁵

The psychological ramifications of these and other experiences are apparent in the attitudes Sanger later displayed toward men. “She would eventually learn to satisfy her own erotic strivings and court the seductions of men, but she would never allow herself to be defined by them. She would fall in love and marry twice, yet never be beholden to these relationships. She would, indeed, maintain a goal of empowering women to live independent, self-fulfilled lives as her social mission.”⁶

 GIRL MEETS WORLD

Sanger’s life experiences did nothing but reinforce her youthful predispositions. After her mother’s death, Sanger returned to work as a nurse in the slums of New York City’s Lower East Side. She was repeatedly disgusted by the health and family conditions she observed there. In 1912, she was particularly struck by the plight of one poor young woman who had pleaded with her to find a way to prevent becoming pregnant, but who later died from a failed, self-induced abortion. Her later compilation of this and other stories into an anthology, Motherhood in Bondage, led Sanger to dedicate herself to “seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the skies.” She became determined that “birth control,” a term she personally coined, was the only way to combat what she believed to be a moral issue.⁷

In 1915, Sanger’s five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia. For years afterward she was haunted by dreams of infant girls and believed that she sometimes saw and spoke to Peggy through occult rituals. Peggy’s death was the trigger for Sanger’s journey into Rosicrucianism, a fashionable, cultic spiritualism that explored “the mystical principles underlying individual religious and philosophical beliefs”⁸ through meditative practices intended to connect the individual to the “god within.”⁹

This Gnostic spirituality cultivated the notion that “religion” was an experience-based, privatized system divorced from the “real” world, thereby relegating it to nothing but a personal preference. This, combined with the anti-theism she inherited from her youth, left Sanger with no objective anchor for her moral positions and thus led her to seek secular solutions in her crusade for birth control.

Sanger was one of many who believed that the Darwinian process of continuous change and adaptation was an engine of societal progress that could be directed toward majestic ends by “enlightened” state planners. This “progressive” ideology relied on a combination of faith in the scientific efficiency of Social Darwinism and an adherence to a pragmatic philosophy that championed desirable outcomes over moral reasoning. Progressives believed in a strategic combination of education, organization, and legislation as the means to initiate societal reform. Sanger simply applied progressivism to the project of managing human reproduction.

 MANAGING AN “EVOLVING” SOCIETY

During the second decade of the twentieth century, Sanger fell under the influence of several radical progressive thinkers. These included Emma Goldman, a feminist political anarchist; Havelock Ellis, a renowned British sex psychologist;¹⁰ and author H. G. Wells, one of the most influential progressives of the twentieth century.¹¹ Each of these mentors shared a devotion to Darwinism based on their common belief that “it offered secular answers to the problem of evil and death.”¹² This mindset fit perfectly with Sanger’s inspiration for reform.

In 1920, while still married to her first husband, William Sanger, Margaret began an extramarital affair with H. G. Wells. Wells was a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin’s notorious “bulldog.” Early on Wells’s writing, notoriously exemplified in War of the Worlds, projected the prospect of racial dominance as displayed in the Martians whose technological advancement was the result of their superior intellectual evolution.¹³ Later, as he focused more on the idyllic promises of Social Darwinism, his novels became more utopian. Aldous Huxley’s haunting dystopia, Brave New World, was actually inspired by, and written as a parody of, Wells’s 1923 novel, Men Like Gods. Wells’s ties to the eugenics movement and his expectation that progressives should become “enlightened Nazis” clearly follow from these ideas.¹⁴ Sanger’s connection with Wells and the extent of their mutual influence cannot be overestimated. Wells later described her as “the greatest woman in the world; the movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time in controlling man’s destiny on earth.”¹⁵

 Political Panacea

Sanger first gave her movement credibility with the launch of the magazine Woman Rebel in 1914. This publication promoted an ideology from which Sanger intended to push her progressive agenda. In its first issue she explained that she chose the title “because [she] believed that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary childrearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions,”¹⁶ all of which she yearned to upend.

On the magazine’s masthead, Sanger added the slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” a phrase she co-opted from the rallying cry of the anarchic socialist labor group, International Workers of the World. The slogan became her personal and political manifesto. Though she later disassociated herself from the socialist movement in favor of an alliance with political progressives, she did so not because her philosophy had changed, but because it became strategically impractical to be connected with radical socialist causes.¹⁷

It should also be noted that this confidence in the competency of human planners to perfect society is a politically bipartisan inclination. Though we tend to equate contemporary progressivism with the left, many have also embraced it from the right. In fact, her staunch antitheism led Sanger to reject a Democratic Party she believed to be too beholden to the Catholic Church.¹⁸ She transferred her personal political alliances to, and thereby first associated the organizations that combined to form Planned Parenthood with, the Republican Party.¹⁹

THE EVOLUTION OF BIRTH CONTROL

Understanding the worldview Sanger embraced and applying it to the existential issues that had motivated her from her youth, the solutions she offered were the logical outgrowths of her ethical philosophy. Sanger melded her compassion for her mother’s circumstances with her father’s mindset toward reform to construct a project she saw as a clear moral imperative for society. This motivation was evident in her reflection on a poor family whose plight may have in some respects reminded her of her own: “Out of this family of eleven children only two are now of any use to society…. The father has become a hopeless drunkard, of whom the mother and children live in terror….All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral….Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral.”²⁰

Though born of compassion, Sanger’s moral outrage was focused squarely on those who did not share her consequentialist ethic. In this instance, her discontent with the plight of the downtrodden was not directed at the drunkard father, or even toward a neighborly lack of charity for the family; her ire was reserved solely for the notion that any family should have to deal with these kinds of circumstances. It was the consequences Sanger wanted to eliminate. Thus, the distinctiveness of Sanger’s idea of the morality of birth control lay not in the method, but in her perception that society should evolve toward a more enlightened view of its power to eliminate similar family situations.

Sanger saw her updated adaptation of birth control as a reflection of humanity’s historical progress. On her view, primitive women worldwide had practiced infanticide as a way to express their “instinctual” desire for power. Because that desire could not be quelled, improving civilizations instituted the more advanced method of abortion, a practice that Sanger believed would allow “a woman [to fulfill] her ‘highest duty’ by invoking her choice to use ‘the surgeon’s instruments’ rather than sacrificing all that was ‘highest and holiest in her—her aspiration to freedom.’” In its final stage of progress, society would embrace contraception as the most highly evolved form of birth control.²¹

The “evolution” of killing the unborn became a methodological advancement achieved by simply moving the practice farther up the birth canal. Invisibility encouraged acceptability.

A PRO-LIFE INCLINATION?

Some defenders of Sanger have claimed that she should not be held liable for the modern pro-abortion stance of her offspring, Planned Parenthood, because her contraceptive ideas were actually opposed to abortion. To be fair, there is evidence that Sanger saw abortion as being morally repugnant.

When she opened the first birth control clinic in America in 1916, she explained to each group who visited “what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way…because life had not yet begun” (emphasis added).²² She even pronounced that “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year [were] a disgrace to civilization” (emphasis added).²³

Though Sanger’s opposition to abortion seemed obvious, the context of this last statement reveals the reason she held to it—a detail her defenders often fail to acknowledge. In the very next sentence Sanger wrote, “In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient” (emphasis added).²⁴ The patient, of course, is the woman obtaining the abortion.

In light of her philosophical motivations, it is apparent that even though she did seem to harbor moral difficulties with abortion itself, Sanger’s consequentialism led her toward solutions that effectively trumped those moral misgivings. If she mentioned the unborn at all, it was usually in reference to the consequences the baby would face if it happened to survive an abortion attempt. Sanger reserved her real hostility in the abortion debate for those “who would combat abortion and at the same time assail contraceptive measures…[they] may be likened to the person who would fight contagious disease and forbid disinfection” (emphasis added).²⁵

 GOING GLOBAL

Later, Sanger expanded the same thought process she believed would eliminate difficult family circumstances to include society at large. As early as 1918, she had affirmed her belief that birth control’s “general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.”²⁶

A “cleaner” race? The echoes of the societal “enhancement” she saw in Darwinian selective methods reverberated in the ideas that led Sanger eventually to embrace the eugenics and population control movements. Wayne House has offered an excellent synopsis of her involvement in these areas in an earlier issue of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL.²⁷ To that I can only add the observation that these commitments were nothing but the logical extension of the progressivism to which she devoted her life’s work.

Sanger’s “enlightened” view came through loud and clear in one solution she presented for the improvement of society in 1926, wherein Americans would “set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless, scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition…Ask the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feebleminded from your backs. Sterilization for these is the remedy” (emphasis in original).²⁸

Margaret Sanger did not originate the philosophies that led her to become infamous; she simply applied them to reproduction. Today Planned Parenthood boasts that it has taken Sanger’s ideology global. Though it would be difficult to make a direct connection between them and any nation’s specific governmental policies, the same ideas she championed can be seen in the forced abortions that have stemmed from China’s “one-child” policies, in sex-selective abortion policies in China, India, and Korea, and in the plunging birth rates of both Europe and the Far East.

The Results of Sanger’s Reproductive Mindset

It is sadly ironic to compare Sanger’s lofty ideals with their actual results. She began as an advocate for poor women’s “aspiration to freedom” and later extrapolated that outlook to society in general. One hundred years later, Sanger’s outlook is deeply entrenched in the culture, and her consequentialist view of birth control has gone mainstream and global.

Today in the U.S., more than eighty percent of women of childbearing age have utilized “the pill,” while half of all pregnancies remain unplanned.²⁹ This misplaced reliance on the pill’s effectiveness, combined with an uncritical acceptance of Sanger’s consequentialism, has contributed to a widespread propensity to disregard a proper moral foundation for sexual relationships. The unintended consequence is that 40.6 percent of births occur outside of marriage. Among the poorer classes, that ratio is a mind-boggling seventy-two percent, while “the upward trend in non-marital childbearing seen in the United States is matched in most developed countries, with levels at least doubling or tripling and in some cases increasing many multiples between 1980 and the mid-2000s.”³⁰

Sanger defended infanticide in China more than eighty years ago as a simple reversion to an earlier stage in the “evolution” of birth control. She deplored the arrogance of “meddling” Christian missionaries who aimed to stop the Chinese practice of drowning their children because she believed it would only lead to food shortages.³¹ Today the abhorrent sex-selective abortion practices and “one child” policies of India and China purposefully target women and the number of baby girls being eliminated is higher among the more prosperous sectors of those countries.³²

Where Sanger feared unsustainable population growth as the greatest threat to the world’s future, an adherence to her mindset has triggered a demographic emergency brought on by imploding population numbers. In Germany and Britain, the philosophical nurseries for her ideas, reproductive freedom has “evolved” into reproductive suicide. Birth rates on the continent are well below replacement level. As political commentator Mark Steyn has put it, “for a continent of ‘family friendly’ policies, Europe is remarkably short of families.”³³

 SANGER AND THE CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN

History has shown us that Sanger’s “No Gods, No Masters” manifesto is more than a clever slogan. For her philosophical descendants, and for the societies that have effectively embraced Sanger’s consequentialism, the effect has been to disregard the intrinsic value of human life by focusing on eliminating the unpleasant realities that go with living that life. The resultant body count, the cultural apathy toward the significance of that body count, and the absence of the social benefits Sanger envisioned may be her most enduring legacy.

A century after Sanger began her contraceptive crusade, the merits of various birth control methods are still up for debate among fair-minded Christians, but the lines pro-lifers must draw are clear. First, the scientific fact that life begins at conception rules out any abortifacient contraceptive that, by definition, operates after that point. Second, and more insidiously, pro-lifers cannot allow themselves to be coaxed into debating these issues on Margaret Sanger’s terms.

When pro-life Christians attempt to defend their viewpoint with arguments such as, “Abortion may have killed the person who would find the cure for cancer,” they have just stepped directly into the mire of Sanger’s consequentialism. On those shifting grounds, one can effectively rationalize any “choice” by focusing on the consequences of the choice, whether desirable or undesirable, while failing to identify why some choices are simply, and unequivocally, wrong.

Abortion and abortifacient birth control are immoral because they take the lives of unborn human beings without justification. Though she let the power of her personal experience and the false promises of a manmade utopia suppress this obvious truth, it seems that even Margaret Sanger knew that much.

Bob Perry, M.A. (Christian Apologetics) Biola University, is a speaker with the Life Training Institute. Access his Web site and blog on Christian worldview issues at http://truehorizon.org.

NOTES:

1. Carl Jensen, Ph.D., Stories That Changed America (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 65–76.
2. Ellen Chesler, Women of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 24–25.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931), 11–12. Whether the sexual nature of the memory was real or imagined is not clear, but the sensation of falling parallels a Freudian connection with sexual defilement; cf. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams(New York: Avon, 1965), 235. The account of this event is conspicuously absent from her later autobiography.
5. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 30.
6. Chesler, 28–29.
7. Jensen, 67.
8. “About The Rosicrucian Order,” http://www.rosicrucian.org/about/index.html.
9. Chesler, 134–35.
10. Ibid., 81–82, 111–12.
11. Ibid., 186–92.
12. Richard Weikart, “Eugenocide, Darwinism and the Rise of German Eugenics,” Touchstone (July/August 2004): 32.
13. “War of the Worlds,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds#cite_noteparrinder137-34.
14. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 21.
15. Jensen, 69.
16. Chesler, 98.
17. Ibid., 13.
18. Ibid., 162, 391.
19. Ramesh Ponnuru and Kate O’beirne, “The Coming Tea Party Election,” National Review, February 22, 2010, 36.
20. Margaret Sanger, “Morality and Birth Control,” February 1918, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/documents/speech_morality_and_bc.html.
21. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “Cruel Crusader,” Touchstone, January/February 2007, 45–46.
22. Sanger, An Autobiography, 217.
23. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920), 48.
24. Ibid.
25. Margaret Sanger, The Case for Birth Control (New York: Modern Art Printing Co., 1917), 194.
26. Margaret Sanger, “Morality and Birth Control,” February 1918, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/documents/speech_morality_and_bc.html.
27. H. Wayne House, “Should Christians Use Birth Control?” Christian Research Journal 18, 3 (1995), http://journal.equip.org/articles/should-christians-use-birth-control-.
28. Margaret Sanger, “The Function of Sterilization,” Birth Control Review, October, 1926, 299.
29. Rita Rubin, “The Pill Turns 50,” USA Today, May 7–9, 2010, 1A–2A.
30. National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief No. 18, May 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm.
31. Gardiner, 45.
32. Jeff Jacoby, “Choosing to Eliminate Unwanted Daughters,” Boston Globe, April 6, 2008,http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/06/choosing_to_eliminate_unwanted_daughters/.
33. Mark Steyn, “Live Free or Die,” Imprimis, April 2009, http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=04.

This article first appeared in the Viewpoint column of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, volume 34, number 06 (2011). For further information or to subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL go to: http://www.equip.org

In 2008, a handful of notable pro-life evangelicals and Catholics threw their support behind a presidential candidate sworn to uphold elective abortion as a fundamental right. They argued that doing so constituted an enlightened pro-life vote that was morally superior to the narrow party politics of religious conservatives. Instead of passing laws against abortion, so the argument went, the candidate and his party would “reduce” it by addressing its underlying causes.¹ True, he was mistaken on abortion, but he was right on other, important “whole-of-life” issues such as opposition to war, concern for the poor, and care for the environment. The candidate’s political strategy was simple: shrink the significance of abortion so it was more or less equal with other issues.² It worked. Twice as many white evangelicals age eighteen through forty-four voted for Barack Obama in 2008 than voted for John Kerry in 2004. Catholics, meanwhile, supported Obama at fifty-four percent, up seven points from what they gave Kerry four years earlier. The candidate got just enough pro-life votes from these groups to tip the election his way.³ I submit that each of these alleged pro-life votes represents a profound misunderstanding of the pro-life position. The fundamental issue before us is not merely how to reduce abortion, but who counts as one of us. How we answer will determine whether embryos and fetuses enjoy the protection of law or remain candidates for the dumpster. As Francis Beckwith points out, a society that has fewer abortions but protects the legal killing of unborn humans is still deeply immoral.⁴ Given what’s at stake, it’s vital that pro-life Christians persuasively answer five key questions before the 2012 election:

1. Are pro-life advocates focused too narrowly on abortion? After all, informed voters consider many issues, not just one.

Of course abortion isn’t the only issue-any more than the treatment of slaves wasn’t the only issue in the 1860s or the treatment of Jews the only issue in the 1940s. But both were the dominant issues of their day. Thoughtful Christians attribute different importance to different issues, and give greater weight to fundamental moral questions. For example, if a man running for president told us that men had a right to beat their wives, most people would see that as reason enough to reject him, despite his expertise on foreign policy or economic reforms. The foundational principle of our republic is that all humans are equal in their fundamental dignity. What issue could be more important than that? You might as well blame politicians like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for focusing too narrowly on defeating the Nazis, to the neglect of other issues. Given a choice, I’d rather pro-lifers focus on at least one great moral issue than waste their precious resources trying to fix all of them.⁵

2. Why don’t pro-life advocates care about social justice both here and in developing countries?

They do, which is why pro-life crisis pregnancy centers vastly outnumber abortion clinics in the U.S. and why committed evangelicals, most of whom are pro-life, give more than their secular counterparts.⁶ Nevertheless, pro-life Christians should reject the premise that because they oppose the intentional and unjustified killing of innocent human beings, they must therefore take responsibility for all of the world’s ills. Is the American Cancer Society wrong to focus on one deadly disease to the exclusion of others? It’s highly unfair to demand that local pro-life groups take their already scarce resources and spread them even thinner fighting every social injustice imaginable. This would be suicide for those opposed to abortion. As Frederick the Great once said, “He who attacks everywhere attacks nowhere.” True, as defenders of human dignity, we should care about the poor, clean water, and the rights of others everywhere. The U.S. government, however, is not going to solve those problems in developing countries the way it can solve abortion here. For example, our government can’t ban poverty or stop the sex trade of young girls in Thailand. That is the job of that nation’s citizens and government! However, the U.S. government can and should ban the killing of unborn humans within its own borders. That is why prudent pro-lifers have always sought both moral and political solutions to that problem. While poverty and the sex trade are evil, no one in America proposes legalizing them. Abortion is different. Far from reducing the practice, our government currently advocates it both here and abroad. For example, during his first week in office, President Obama restored funding to organizations that promote and perform abortion overseas. A year later, he signed a healthcare bill that subsidized insurance plans that fund it here in the U.S. At the same time, he rescinded federal regulations that protect doctors from forced participation in elective abortion and threatened to cut off Medicaid funding to any state that denied tax funding to healthcare entities that provide abortions.⁷ Finally, he nominated to the federal courts justices sympathetic to the abortion license whose rulings could set the pro-life cause back for decades to come. Because ours is a government of the people, Christians have a fundamental duty to work within the political system to limit evil and promote good. Shouldn’t social justice start in the womb?

3. Why don’t pro-lifers oppose war like they do abortion?

War can be a moral evil, but it isn’t always so. Careful thinkers make distinctions between intrinsic (absolute) moral evils and contingent ones. For example, the decision to wage war may or may not be wrong, depending on the circumstances. However, the decision to kill intentionally an unborn human being for socioeconomic reasons is an intrinsic evil and laws permitting it are scandalous. True, a general in a just war may foresee that innocent humans will die securing a lasting peace, but he does not intend their deaths. With elective abortion, the death of an innocent human fetus is not merely foreseen; it is intended. The problem is that many Catholics and left-leaning evangelicals are perfectly willing to support a political party that supports an intrinsic evil simply because its members promise to help us avoid contingent ones. This is bad moral thinking.

4. Instead of passing laws against abortion, shouldn’t pro-life Christians focus on reducing its underlying causes?

First and foremost, the abortion debate turns on the question of human equality. That is, in a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, do the unborn count as members of the human family? With that fundamental question in mind, it’s unreasonable for liberals to insist that pro-lifers surrender the legal fight to focus on underlying causes. As my colleague Steve Weimar points out, this is like saying the “underlying cause” of spousal abuse is psychological, so instead of making it illegal for husbands to beat their wives, the solution is to provide counseling for men. There are “underlying causes” for rape, murder, theft, and so on, but that in no way makes it misguided to have laws banning such actions.⁸ Moreover, why are liberals even concerned about reducing the number of abortions in the first place? If destroying a human fetus is morally no different than cutting one’s fingernails, then who cares how many abortions there are? The reason to reduce elective abortion is that human life is unjustly taken-but if that’s the case, then restricting the practice makes perfect sense. Imagine a nineteenth-century lawmaker who said that slavery was a bad idea and we ought to reduce it, but owning slaves should remain legal. If those in power adopted his thinking, would this be a good society? True, politics isn’t a sufficient answer to injustice, but it’s certainly a necessary one. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The law can’t make the white man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”⁹ Frankly, if Christians don’t think the government-sanctioned killing of unborn children merits a political response, then they not only misunderstand the moral gravity of the situation, but also their mandate to love their neighbor as themselves.

5. Should pastors challenge church members who support a political party sworn to protect elective abortion?

Yes and no. They should challenge believers and nonbelievers alike with the truth that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being-and that truth should impact which party we support. They shouldn’t claim that supporting a particular party or candidate saves us from God’s righteous wrath against sin (only the gospel does that!) or that members of the opposite party are not Christians. Nevertheless, in a nation where the people are the government, Christians have a duty to apply their biblical worldview in a way that limits evil and promotes the good insofar as possible given current political realities. At the legislative level in particular (House and Senate races), that usually means voting for the party that, though imperfect, will best protect unborn humans against one that sanctions killing them. The reason is simple: at the legislative level, political parties more than individuals determine which laws see the light of day. Consider the House of Representatives. If a party committed to elective abortion controls the chamber, it will squash pro-life bills and promote pro-abortion ones. Even if that pro-abortion party has a few pro-life members, those members will likely never get to vote on a pro-life bill unless their party is not in power! But it gets worse. These same pro-life members of that pro-abortion party almost always put party politics above moral principle when it comes to the most important vote they will cast-selection of the Speaker. Remember, the Speaker of the House ultimately determines the legislative agenda and if the party committed to elective abortion controls the chamber, its candidate for speaker will inevitably be pro-abortion. Nevertheless, these pro-life members vote for their party’s candidate for speaker, which all but guarantees that pro-life bills never see the light of day. In most cases, then, they aren’t reforming their party’s pro-abortion stance; they’re enabling it!¹⁰ If parties drive legislation, how should a pastor educate his flock on the relationship between politics and Christian morality? First, he should teach a biblical worldview affirming that all humans have value because they bear the image of their maker. Second, he should challenge church members to live out that biblical view in every area of their lives, including their political affiliations. Third, he should stress that while no political party is perfect, on the question of fundamental human value, some parties are more in line with biblical truth than others. Suppose, for example, that it’s 1860 and fifty percent of professing Christians in your church are members of a political party dedicated to the proposition that an entire class of human beings can be enslaved or killed to meet the needs of the white race. If you’re a pastor committed to applying a biblical worldview in all areas of life, is this OK? You might be sympathetic to new converts coming to grips with Christian teaching, but mature church members? Pastors can’t use church resources to endorse political candidates or parties, but they can (and must) teach that a biblical worldview informs our political behavior-including which parties we choose to empower with our vote. Saying so is not wrong-it’s leadership.

-Scott Klusendorf

Scott Klusendorf is president of Life Training Institute and holds an M.A. in Christian apologetics from Biola University.

Read Elliot Miller’s rebuttal Viewpoint article, “The Politics of Abortion: Should Christians Vote Straight Ticket?”

NOTES

1. For an evangelical example, see the interview with Donald Miller on August 25, 2008: http://burnsidewriterscollective.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-with-donald-miller.html. For a Catholic example, see Michael New, “Professors Robert George and Douglas Kmiec Debate Abortion, a Pro-Life Recap,” Life News, June 1, 2009.
2. Alex Spillius, “Barack Obama Doubles Support from Evangelical Christians,” The Telegraph, November 7, 2008.
3. “How the Faithful Voted,” Pew Research Forum, November 10, 2008.
4. Francis J. Beckwith, “Why Reducing the Number of Abortions Is Not Necessarily Pro-Life,” Moral Accountability, February 12, 2009. http://www.moralaccountability.com/2009/02/12/why-reducing-the-number-of-abortions-notnecessarily-prolife/%
5. See Randy Alcorn (EMP Blog, November 16, 2008) and Steve Hays (Triablogue, January 30, 2006) for more.
6. Helen Alvare et al., “The Lazy Slander of the Pro-Life Cause,” Public Discourse, January 17, 2011; Arthur C. Brooks, “A Nation of Givers,” The American (March/April 2008).
7. O. Carter Snead, “Protect the Weak and Vulnerable: The Primacy of the Life Issue,” Public Discourse, August 22, 2011.
8. Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 2009), 169.
9. Speech at Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963.
10. Though rare, there are exceptions to this general rule. A state representative recently explained that although he is pro-life, the political realities in his district are such that his constituents simply will not elect a member of the party that is more or less pro-life. To win, he must run as a member of the pro-abortion party, even though he always votes with the pro-life party on life issues. Given the pro-life party enjoys a commanding majority in the State House, his membership in the pro-abortion party does not put at risk the advancement of pro-life legislation.

First, it is important to note that the incidence of pregnancy as a result of rape is rare, with studies estimating that approximately 1 percent to 4.7 percent of rapes result in pregnancy. Thus lobbying for abortion on the basis of rape and incest is like lobbying for the removal of red lights because you might have to run one in order to rescue someone who is about to commit suicide. Even if we had legislation restricting abortion for all reasons other than rape or incest, we would save the vast majority of the 1.8 million preborn babies who die annually in the United States through abortion.

Furthermore, one does not obviate the real pain of rape or incest by compounding it with the murder of an innocent preborn child. Two wrongs do not make a right. The very thing that makes rape evil also makes abortion evil. In both cases, an innocent human being is brutally dehumanized.

In both cases, an innocent human being is brutally dehumanized. Finally, the real question is whether abortion is the murder of an innocent human being. If so, abortion should be avoided at all costs. In an age of scientific enlightenment we now know that the embryo even at its earliest stages fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (including metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction); that a zygote is a living human being as demonstrated by its distinct genetic code; and that human personhood does not depend on size, location, or level of dependence. Thus, abortion should be avoided even in cases of rape and incest.

For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, “Annihilating Abortion Arguments,” available through the Christian Research Institute (CRI) at www.equip.org.

Proverbs 17:15:
“Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent-the LORD detests them both.”

First, abortion is painful in that the methods employed to kill a preborn child involve burning, smothering, dismembering, and crushing. And such procedures are executed on live babies who have not been specifically anesthetized.

Furthermore, abortion involves killing. The zygote, which fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction), is indeed terminated. In Woman and the New Race, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger tacitly acknowledged this point when she wrote: “The most merciful thing a large family can do for one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Finally, abortion kills innocent human beings. The child that is terminated is the product of human parents and has a totally distinct human genetic code. Although the emerging embryo does not have a fully developed personality, it does have complete personhood from the moment of conception. Thus, far from deserving capital punishment, these innocent humans deserve care and protection. Thankfully, in God’s economy there is hope for those who have experienced the ravages of abortion. Not only can they receive God’s forgiveness in the here and now, but they can yet look forward to the ecstasy of reuniting with their unborn loved ones in eternity.

For further study, see Francis J. Beckwith, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993).

Psalm 139:13-16:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.”

For the moment—and perhaps only for the moment—health care reform legislation in at least one chamber of Congress does not allow funding for elective abortion. Thanks to pressure from a small number of pro-life Democrats and all House Republicans, the Stupak Amendment was attached to HR 3962 before initial passage on November 7. The Amendment states that the government-administered health plan (i.e., “the public option”) will not cover abortion unless it’s needed to save a woman’s life or she is a victim of rape or incest.

But that could change any day now. The Senate version of the bill does not contain the Stupak provision and if a majority of House Democrats get their way, the final House version won’t either. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DFla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, is “confident” that when the bill comes back from conference committee, the Stupak language won’t be there.¹ Meanwhile,

despite his protestations to the contrary, there’s no denying that President Obama campaigned on a promise to put “reproductive health care” that includes abortion coverage at the center of his reform plan.² In short, defenders of human life have good reason to be concerned.

Nevertheless, some critics of the pro-life view contend that those of us opposed to abortion should set aside our scruples in favor of the overall good that state-run healthcare brings. (That it will bring “good” is debatable, but I digress.) For example, Richard, an agnostic blogger and friend from my high school days, posted the following on my Facebook page during our discussion of the bill:

If you don’t like aspects of the plan, offer some comprehensive alternatives. All you are doing is promoting the status quo. If your plan is to reject the whole plan because it has something you don’t like, then no plan will ever get implemented. We will continue until the current plan collapses. There are far more indirect ways to kill people within the current situation than abortion. The unborn may be your priority, but the practical results of a stalemate will be a choice for others to die. And even if the state doesn’t pay for abortion, abortion will continue. I don’t think abortion is a good idea, but I also don’t believe legislation against it is the best way to prevent it. I think your energies would be far more effective elsewhere. To me the anti-abortion issue and the gay rights issue is [sic] simply two ways to raise outrage among Christians to raise money.

There’s no denying that biblical Christianity places a strong emphasis on caring for the poor, working for justice, and helping the oppressed. Anyone who thinks differently may want to consider how important these actions are to God. (See, e.g., Jer. 5:26-28; 9:24; Isa. 1:16-17,21,23; 58:6-7; 61:8; Ps. 94:1-23; Provo 24:1-12; Matt. 25:41-46.) However, is a legitimate concern for justice enough for pro-life Christians to set aside their scruples and throw their support behind health care legislation that funds abortion?

Perhaps, if … if what?

If the unborn are not human. Yet it’s precisely this question —Are the unborn human?—that Richard and those like him either ignore or dismiss when pitching a national health care plan that allows abortion. For this reason, their appeal to pro-lifers suffers from a number of glaring flaws.

First, notice that Richard confuses moral claims with preference ones. He writes: “If your plan is to reject the whole plan because it has something you don’t like, then no plan will ever get implemented.” The problem is, pro-life advocates like me oppose this plan not because we dislike abortion (indeed, one could like abortion and still argue it’s immoral), but because we think abortion is morally wrong. Now, if he wants to argue that we’re mistaken about that, so be it. Let him make that case. But notice he does no such thing. He simply changes the kind of claim the pro-lifer makes— “abortion is wrong” to one he likes better (paraphrase): “Hey, pro-lifer, abortion is something you just don’t like.” In short, Richard hasn’t refuted the pro-life view; he’s merely changed the terms of engagement, as if we were talking about our favorite baseball teams instead of who lives and who dies.

Second, Richard’s objection to pro-life concerns over health care legislation is question-begging. More than once, he simply assumes the unborn are not human. For example, suppose the bill in question was near perfect, but funded the destruction of two-year-olds to provide comprehensive health care for the rest of us. Can you imagine, even for a moment, Richard saying, “Well, let’s not reject the whole just because of something we don’t like.” The only reason he argues this way about a health plan that funds the destruction of the unborn is because he’s assuming, without argument, that they are not human like the rest of us. That’s precisely the point he must argue, however, for his case to succeed logically.

Third, there’s this unsupported claim: “The unborn may be your priority, but the practical results of a stalemate will be a choice for others to die.” Really? How so? Richard makes no attempt to defend what he says here. I guess we’re to take it on faith. Notice again the question-begging nature of his claim: he assumes the unborn are not human, though he has yet to offer any argument for that. For example, suppose he rejects health care legislation that cuts costs by starving disabled toddlers to death, with parental consent, of course. Suppose further I reply, “Well, toddlers may be your priority, but the practical results of a stalemate will be a choice for others to die.” I doubt that would satisfy him. He would insist that toddlers were humans with rights we can’t trample on to benefit others. I agree. So why doesn’t he argue that same way about the unborn? It’s easy: he assumes they are not human like toddlers. But again, he offers no real argument for that.

Fourth, we get this odd claim: “And even if the state doesn’t pay for abortion, abortion will continue.” Of course it will, just like alcoholism continues even though the state doesn’t provide free beer. The more precise question is: will abortion rates remain unchanged when the state pays instead of the individual? It’s logical to assume that when something desirable is free, more people will get it. Yet Richard advances no argument showing why we should doubt this.

Fifth, Richard says he “doesn’t think abortion is a good idea,” but legislation is not the best way to prevent it. He contends that pro-lifers would be far more effective spending their energies “elsewhere.” Oh? Where might that be? We’re not told. But there are bigger problems with his argument. For starters, he never says why he thinks abortion is not a good idea. That is, if abortion doesn’t take the life of a defenseless human, why be opposed at all? But if it does take the life of a human without justification, why is legislating against it a bad idea? Again, we’re given no answer. Moreover, pro-lifers are not out to merely “prevent” elective abortion. We want to make it unthinkable the way that killing toddlers is unthinkable to anyone with a functioning conscience. In other words, merely reducing abortion isn’t necessarily pro-life.³ A society that has fewer abortions, but protects the legal killing of unborn humans would still be deeply immoral. Imagine a nineteenth-century lawmaker who said that slavery was a bad idea, but owning slaves should remain legal. If those in power adopted his thinking, would this be a good society? A 1982 editorial in The Detroit News sums the problem up nicely: “President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln in the White House, opposed slavery more than 100 years ago for what we today might consider morally oblique reasons. It wasn’t that he minded the wrong done to blacks. He was concerned that slavery bred unwholesome class distinctions among whites by creating privileges for the rich. Mr. Johnson once ‘wish[ed] to God [that] every head of a family in the United States had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service off his family.”‘⁴

Again, it seems Richard can only argue that abortion is not a good idea, but that legislating against it is mistaken, because he assumes the unborn are not human, like slaves are. But that’s the question that must be resolved before trumpeting the virtues of this particular health care bill.

Richard concludes by telling us what really bugs him. “To me the anti-abortion issue and the gay rights issue is [sic] simply two ways to raise outrage among Christians to raise money.” Forget for the moment that he offers no evidence for his claim. I can reply to his charge with one word: So? Maybe we do and maybe we don’t use these issues to raise money. Either way, how does this refute pro-life claims that the unborn are human, and it’s wrong to kill them with state cash?⁵ What we have here is a classic case of the genetic fallacy—that is, faulting an idea for its origins rather than its substance. Instead of telling us why pro-lifers are wrong about the humanity of the unborn, Richard jumps right to our alleged motivation for opposing abortion. As Greg Koukl points out, this just won’t work. “Psychological motivations give you information about the one who believes, but they tell you nothing about the truth of his beliefs.”⁶

Pro-lifers should care about justice. Our Lord demands that we do. As a result, I’m willing to consider the virtues of any health care plan. But there’s one question Richard and those like him must answer before I’ll sign up.

—Scott Klusendorf

Scott Klusendorf is president of Life Training Institute and author of The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Crossway, 2009).

notes

1 Michael O’Brien, “Senior Democrat Is ‘Confident’ That Stupak Amendment Will Be Stripped,” The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room, November 9, 2009. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- room/news/66969-senior-dem-confident- stupakamendment-will-be-stripped

2 Planned Parenthood says president Obama promised to “put reproductive health care at the center” of health reform, http://www.politifact.com/truth-ometerlsratemems/2009/nov/10/planned-parenrhood/planned-parenthood-says-obama-promised-put-reprodu/.

3 See Frank Beckwith, “Why ‘Reducing the Number of Abortions’ nor Necessarily ProLife,” Moral Accountability, February 12,2009.

http://www.moralaccountability.com/abortion-reduction-debate/why-reducing-the-numberof-abortions-not-necessarily-prolife.

4 “Tax Funding for Slavery? Then Why for Abortion?” Detroit News, February 9, 1982. Reprinted at: http://www.141.org/library/tax-slav. html.

5 For more on defending pro-life views, see Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping

Christians to Engage the Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

6 Gregory Koukl, ” Is God Just an Idea?”, http://www.str.orglsite/News2 ?page=NewsArticle&id=6067.

In the midst of such casual sentiment, I’m compelled to say in no uncertain terms, “For God’s sake, evangelicals (if that word has any meaning), please wake up and consider the acres of tiny, bloody corpses that you cannot see.”

Yes, the Christian vision is holistic, and we should endeavor to restore shalom to the whole of this beleaguered planet under the Lordship of Christ (Matt. 28:18–20). That includes helping Africa, preserving the environment, combating human trafficking, and much more. The leading domestic moral issue, however, continues to be the value of helpless, unborn human life. Since Roe v. Wade, over one million unborn humans have been killed through abortion each year. That puts the total well over thirty-five million. The Russian Marxist-Totalitarian Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy. A million dead is a statistic.” Too many evangelicals are Stalinists on abortion, since the numbers apparently mean nothing to them.

The vast majority of these abortions were not done to save the life of the mother or in view of other extreme conditions. Before Roe v. Wade, abortion advocates argued that hard cases—such as rape, incest, or severe fetal deformity—justified more lenient abortion laws. But thirty-five years later, abortion is deemed simply a matter of the mother’s private, relative, subjective preference—despite the fact that two human beings are involved in this matter. Things have declined to the point where bumper stickers say, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.” How about, “Don’t like slavery? Don’t own slaves”? The two cases are exactly parallel. If slavery is not a private issue, then neither is abortion, since they both involve questions of the value of human lives.

The biblical argument against abortion is direct and powerful:

1. The fetus from conception is a human person made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27; Ps. 139:13–16).

2. Murder is the unjust killing of a person and is sinful (Exod. 20:13).

3. Abortion is the unjust killing of a person in almost every case. I believe there is an exception when life of the mother is directly endangered, but this is a condition that rarely occurs.

4. Therefore: (a) abortion is morally wrong and sinful before God.

5. Therefore: (b) abortion should be illegal and stigmatized socially (Rom. 13:1–7).

One can build a strong pro-life argument apart from the Bible as well, but I will not address that here. Robert George and Kevin Tollefsen make this case in their book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008).

Senator Obama is militantly pro-abortion, despite whatever religious beliefs he claims. He even failed to support a bill that would have saved the lives of infants born alive after a botched abortion. If he wins the U. S. Presidency, he may appoint several Supreme Court judges. If so, we can forget about overturning Roe v. Wade any time soon. If this piece of legal deconstruction were to be overturned, it would return abortion law to the discretion of the states, a much better situation.

If Obama wins, he would also fund stem-cell research on human embryos and provide as much federal funding as possible for abortion. The President also issues executive orders with tremendous power. President Bill Clinton issued four pro-choice executive orders a few days after taking office in 1993. Another Democrat would do the same.

Again, I say, “Evangelicals, for God’s sake, please wake up!”

Remember the least, the last, and the lost: the millions of unborn human beings whose lives hang in the balance (Matt. 25:31–46). This is not the only issue of moral significance, but it is a titanic issue that cannot be ignored. Rouse yourself to recover from fetus fatigue. God is watching and waiting, even as the blood of the innocent unborn cries out from the ground (Gen. 4:10).

—Douglas Groothuis

Douglas Groothuis is a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary and a frequent contributor to the Christian Research Journal.

Peter Singer- Introduction

In 1993, ethicist Peter Singer shocked many Americans by suggesting that no newborn should be considered a person until 30 days after birth and that the attending physician should kill some disabled babies on the spot. Five years later, his appointment as Decamp Professor of Bio-Ethics at Princeton University ignited a firestorm of controversy, though his ideas about abortion and infanticide were hardly new. In 1979 he wrote, “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”1

Peter Singer is not alone in these beliefs. As early as 1972, philosopher Michael Tooley bluntly declared that a human being “possess[es] a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”2 Infants do not qualify.

More recently, American University philosophy professor Jeffrey Reiman has asserted that unlike mature human beings, infants do not “possess in their own right a property that makes it wrong to kill them.” He explicitly holds that infants are not persons with a right to life and that “there will be permissible exceptions to the rule against killing infants that will not apply to the rule against killing adults and children.”3

Singer doesn’t tell us why self-awareness belongs to the concept of personhood; he merely asserts that it does. In so doing, he espouses a doctrine known as functionalism, the belief that what defines human persons is what they can and cannot do. Though laudable for its candor, Singer’s case for infanticide is seriously flawed and fails to make a number of critical distinctions. Meanwhile, his Darwinian worldview leaves us philosophically and morally bankrupt, with no reason to act ethically in any context.

PETER SINGER- NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ABORTION AND INFANTICIDE

To the dismay of popular abortion advocates, Singer rejects birth as a relevant dividing line between person and nonperson, agreeing with pro-life advocates that there is no ontologically significant difference between the fetus and a newborn. True, there are differences of size, location, dependency, and development, but these are morally irrelevant. “The liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such a right.”4

Instead of upgrading the fetus to the status of a person, however, Peter Singer downgrades the newborn to the status of nonperson because newborns, like fetuses, are incapable “of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.”5 They are not rational, self-conscious beings with a desire to live.6 Since, in Singer’s criteria, personhood hinges on these factors, killing a newborn (or fetus) is not the same as killing a person. In fact, some acts of infanticide are less problematic than killing a happy cat. If, for example, parents kill one disabled infant to make way for another baby that will be happier than the first, the total amount of happiness increases for all interested parties.7 Singer’s logic can be summed up this way: Until a baby is capable of self-awareness, there is no controlling reason not to kill it to serve the preferences of the parents.

Singer contends that a variety of nonhuman animals are rational, self-conscious beings that qualify as persons in the relevant sense of the term.8 Consequently, it is morally indefensible for humans to value their own species above other sentient animals. As for the doctrine of the “sanctity of human life,” it is nothing but “speciesism,” an irrational prejudice rooted in outdated religious traditions (e.g., Christianity). Insofar as some human beings are incapable of reasoning, remembering, and self-awareness, they cannot be considered persons. Put simply, dogs, cats, and dolphins are persons, while fetuses, newborns, and some victims of Alzheimer’s disease are not.9

PETER SINGER- DEATH WITH A HAPPY FACE

For Singer, infanticide may be wrong in some cases, but only for its impact on other interested parties. “We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”10 If the parents want the newborn, it is wrong to kill the baby because the act deprives them of happiness. On the other hand, killing a defective newborn is not morally equivalent to killing a person.11 Very often, it is not wrong at all: “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.”12 Parents, of course, need time to calculate pleasures and pains. Singer’s solution is a postbirth assessment period of a week or perhaps a month (he isn’t sure which), during which parents, in consultation with their physician, may legally kill their disabled offspring if doing so would increase the total happiness of all interested parties.13

PETER SINGER- PROBLEMS WITH SINGER’S CONSEQUENTIALISM

In the end, Singer rejects transcendent human rights as a fiction. Nonetheless, while his case for infanticide entices many academic liberals, it is seriously flawed for at least six reasons.

1. Consequences Alone Cannot Determine Right and Wrong

Singer’s ethics are thoroughly utilitarian; that is to say, only the consequences of a given act determine right and wrong. Actions are morally right if they increase happiness and decrease pain for the greatest number of people. Some crimes, however, such as rape and murder, are wrong in themselves and cannot be justified with an appeal to overall happiness. Common sense dictates that we weigh both the rational intent of an act (deontological ethics) with its foreseen consequences (utilitarian ethics). If morals are strictly consequential, as Singer argues, how do we condemn ancient Romans who tortured Christians for the public’s enjoyment? Say, for example, that killing a Christian in the Roman Coliseum enabled 50,000 people to experience pleasure at the expense of only one person experiencing pain; clearly the happiness of the thousands would exceed the pain of one Christian, but would that make the act just? If Singer replies that the pain of the Christian outweighs the pleasure of the crowd, how does he know this? What if the tortured victim were not a Christian but a suicidal masochist who actually enjoyed the perverse treatment? Given that everyone is happy, it’s difficult to imagine how Singer could condemn such an act.

2. Singer’s Functionalism Results in Savage Inequality

It is one thing to say that critical thinking distinguishes us as human persons. It is quite another to say that your right to live depends on how intelligent you are. If Singer is correct that rationality and self-consciousness define the morally significant person, then why shouldn’t greater rationality make you more of a person? Consequently, the intellectually and artistically gifted would be free to maximize their pleasure at the expense of those less intelligent. Furthermore, if Peter Singer’s functionalist view is correct, personhood could be expressed by a bell curve in which human beings move toward full personhood in their early years, reach full personhood during their middle years (when they reach their intellectual peaks), then gradually lose personhood as they age. Presumably, your rights as a person would increase, stabilize, and then decrease in this process.

Actually, we are not far from that now. Last year, I debated an attorney at a secular university who argued that until the 32d week of pregnancy, the unborn’s brain resembles a fish or amphibian in its evolutionary development; therefore, the unborn are not fully human until the final stages of pregnancy.14

In one sense, his argument was nothing new. A century ago, Darwin and his followers used it to dehumanize women. Their contention was that women were biologically and intellectually inferior because their brains were less developed than a man’s. In The Descent of Man in Relation to Sex, Darwin wrote:

[Man] attains a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, history, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive of both composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages… [that] the average mental power in man must be above that of women.15

If that weren’t bad enough, Darwin disciple and father of social psychology Gustave Le Bon used pejorative language to compare women to apes:

[Even in] the most intelligent races [there] are large numbers of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion.…Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and…are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt, there exists some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as for example, of a gorilla with two heads. Consequently, we may neglect them entirely.16

Singer’s functionalism stops short of Le Bon’s overt sexism, but there is a notable similarity: we used to discriminate on the basis of skin color and gender, but now we discriminate on the basis of brain development and intelligence. We’ve simply exchanged one form of bigotry for another.

3. Singer Equivocates on the Question of Personal Identity

Is Scott Klusendorf the fetus or newborn identical to Scott Klusendorf the adult pro-life apologist? Is he the same person, though his body has changed over time? According to Singer, the answer is no. “When we kill a newborn, there is no person whose life has begun. When I think of myself as the person I am now, I realize that I did not come into existence until sometime after my birth.”17 As Scott Rae and Paul Cox point out, however, “If I do not exist until sometime after my birth, in what sense is the birth mine? The only way for ‘my birth’ to be more than a linguistic convention is to admit that ‘I’ existed before I was born, or at least at the time of my birth.”18 Singer’s attempt to define personhood in functional terms therefore not only fails but also disqualifies many human beings as persons. Consider the person under general anesthesia. Like the early fetus, he is currently not conscious and has no concept of himself existing over time. According to the functionalist view, he is not a person! This is absurd.

One might object that unlike the fetus and the newborn, the person under anesthesia once did and likely soon will function as a self-aware entity. He is therefore still a person (i.e., retains his identity) though he currently cannot function as one. This objection is flawed, for it admits that something other than self-awareness defines personhood. To claim that a human person can be functionally self-aware, become nonself-aware, and then return to a state of self-awareness assumes there is some underlying personal unity to this individual that allows him (or her) to maintain his identity while unconscious (i.e. while he is unable to function as a person). If not, then we must make the bizarre claim that a new person pops into existence once the anesthesia wears off.

As Rae and Cox explain, the reason Scott Klusendorf the fetus is identical to Scott Klusendorf the adult is that I possess a human nature (or essence) that not only makes certain functions (abilities) possible but also allows me to retain my personal identity through change.19 For example, I may lose the ability to think critically, but as long as I am still alive, I remain myself because I have a human nature. It is therefore the underlying essence of a thing, not its functional abilities, that determines what it is.

Consider an illustration provided by Francis Beckwith.20 Suppose your Uncle Jed is in a coma after a terrible car accident, and he remains in that state (where he cannot function as a self-aware person) for two years until he awakens. Is Uncle Jed before the coma identical to Uncle Jed after? Is he the same person? To save expenses for the family, could doctors have killed him during his extended sleep simply because he was not functioning as a person? If Singer holds to the functional view of human persons, it would be difficult to say why it would be wrong to kill Uncle Jed while he is comatose; yet, it clearly would be morally wrong to kill him while in that state because although he cannot currently function as a person, he still has the inherent capacity to do so.

Again, one might object that Uncle Jed is a person during the coma because, unlike the fetus, he once functioned as one and probably will again after he wakes up. This objection fails, however, as Beckwith explains:

We can change the story a bit and say that when Uncle Jed awakens from the coma he loses nearly all his memories and knowledge including his ability to speak a language, engage in rational thought, and have a self-concept. He would then be in the exact same state as the standard fetus, for he would have the same capacities as the fetus. He would still literally be the same person he was before the coma, but would be more like he was before he had a “past.” He would have the natural inherent capacity to speak a language, engage in rational thought, and have a self-concept, but he would have to develop and learn them all over again in order for these capacities to result, as they did before, in actual abilities.21

Perhaps the abortion advocate would bite the bullet and say that there is no human nature that allows me to maintain my identity through bodily change and that personal identity is nothing more than a string of psychological experiences connected by memory. Uncle Jed before the coma is therefore not identical to Uncle Jed after, but he is a new person with new memories that we will call Uncle Jed(b); but this denial of human nature will not do. What if five years later Uncle Jed(b) suddenly regains his lost memories? Is there now another Uncle Jed(c), or are we back to Uncle Jed(a)?

Put simply, Uncle Jed before the coma is identical to Uncle Jed after. He is the same person. The only difference is one of function (ability), not essence or nature. The same is true of Scott Klusendorf the fetus and Scott Klusendorf the adult. My abilities and my body have changed as I’ve developed, but I am identical to the fetus I once was because I have a human nature that allows me to maintain my identity through time and change. My human nature is present from the moment I begin to exist. If I am wrong about this, then you are literally not the same person you were five years ago when your body was made up of different physical elements. Sure, you have changed, but it is you who changed. Your thoughts and memories cannot exist unless you first existed. You can exist without them, but they cannot exist without you.

Using an illustration taken from J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, consider a man entering a room.22 He can enter it gradually, be in halfway, and then enter it fully. During all stages of entering, the man must first exist in total to do the entering. Likewise, someone cannot be in the process of becoming a human person, since one must first exist in order to enter any process; nor can we say that the fetus becomes a person as it develops, since he or she must first exist in order to do the developing.

One’s past ability to function is, likewise, not decisive. Drawing another illustration from Moreland and Rae, imagine the case of newborn twins named Bill and Bob, both born unconscious.23 Five weeks after birth, Bill briefly attains self-awareness, but then lapses back into a coma from which he will emerge nine months later. Bob, meanwhile, did not experience a similar self-awareness, though he too will emerge from the coma at the same moment as Bill. Suppose it is one day before both will wake up. Would anyone in his right mind say it is morally permissible to kill Bob but not Bill? The only difference between the two is functional: Bill briefly attained self-awareness in the past; Bob did not. It doesn’t follow from this, however, that they have different natures or that Bill is a person while Bob is not.

To sum up, we function as persons because we are persons. Scott Klusendorf the fetus is identical to Scott Klusendorf the adult pro-life apologist because I have a human nature that grounds my personal identity in something that is not developmental. If not, then I am literally a different person than I was 20 minutes ago. Likewise, a fetus that lacks current functional ability is, nonetheless, a person because he or she has a human nature from the moment of existence.

4. Singer Cannot Reasonably Say why Anyone Ought to Act Morally

Throughout his book Practical Ethics Singer equates moral decency with a series of universal “shoulds” and “oughts.” We ought to renounce material goods and give our excess wealth to the poor. We ought to increase pleasure and minimize pain. We should treat all sentient beings equally and allow infanticide if it will make room for a healthy, happier child.

Given his atheistic worldview, how can Singer say any of this? “When we reject belief in a god,” he writes, “we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some preordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began [in] a chance combination of molecules; it then evolved through chance mutations and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen for any overall purpose.”24 That single statement precludes Singer from making any moral claims, as it absolutely precludes there being such a thing as morality. In a purely mechanistic universe, there can be no right and wrong, only what we prefer. Objective, universally binding morals cannot exist without an objective, moral lawgiver.

Singer, however, cannot acknowledge this truth without conceding some form of theism, which, of course, he will not do; hence, while he harshly ridicules those who disagree with his oughts, he absolutely vindicates them from being wrong. By comparing “acting morally” to “collecting stamps,” he admits that his moral claims are mere preferences, not obligations. Why, then, am I morally required to treat all sentient beings equally? If his atheistic premise is correct, then to ask me to put other species on equal footing with my own is ridiculous. To the contrary, nothing makes more sense in a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” universe then subjugating other species to my use. Ayn Rand is correct: If there is no God, we should live selfishly. In the final analysis, Singer provides no compelling reason to act morally. His practical ethics are “practically” worthless.25

5. If God Does Not Exist, There Can Be No Animal or Human Rights

Singer is well known for his animal rights advocacy. Sentient animals (apes, cats, pigs, etc.) deserve the same moral standing as sentient human beings. Before making this claim, however, he must answer a predicate question: Where do rights come from? Do they come from the state, in which case government is free to grant or withdraw rights (including those for animals), or are they transcendent? The problem for Singer is this: if there is no God, how can there be transcendent, universal rights that apply to animals? Singer replies with a half answer: If God does not exist, there is no justification for treating humans as inherently more valuable than other sentient beings. Perhaps so, but neither is there any justification for treating animals humanely. If the government rejects animal rights, to what can Singer the atheist appeal? Certainly not to fundamental moral rights, which by necessity are grounded in the concept of a transcendent creator who grants them. Singer’s claim for animal rights therefore exists in a vacuum.

6. Singer Cannot Live with His Own View

Throughout Practical Ethics, Singer insists that killing a newborn is not the same as killing a person; ergo, killing a newborn is morally unproblematic, right? Well, not exactly. Singer hedges with a pronouncement that we should restrict infanticide to severely disabled infants, but as Peter Berkowitz explains, the restriction derives no support from the logic of his position:

Singer is right that on the basis of his premises there is no relevant difference between abortion and the killing of “severely disabled infants.” But why does he confine the comparison to newborn infants who are severely disabled? He certainly does not confine abortion to severely disabled fetuses. If newborns, like unborn children, are not persons, and it is permissible to abort unborn children regardless of whether they are afflicted or healthy, then newborns, afflicted or healthy, should be subject to killing too, provided of course that “on balance, and taking into account the interests of everyone affected,” their killing will increase the total amount of happiness or satisfied preferences in the world. Singer certainly offers no good utilitarian reason to confine the killing to severely disabled newborns. 26

Singer is just as inconsistent when it comes to applying his ethics to family members. New Yorker Magazine reports that Singer spends considerable funds caring for his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease.27 His actions, while laudable from a theistic point of view, flagrantly violate his own moral theory. Given her incapacity to reason, recognize others, or see herself existing over time, his mother is no longer a person as defined by Singer. If he truly believes this, he should take the substantial funds spent on her behalf and use them to increase the happiness of other sentient beings, nonhuman and human, who legitimately function as persons.

Singer won’t do that. Nonetheless, his case for infanticide is hardly an abstraction. Last year 14 congressional Democrats viciously attacked a bill written to protect newborns who survive abortion procedures. The message was clear: The right to choose is not about a woman’s right to end a pregnancy; it’s about her right to a dead baby. Meanwhile, Wichita abortionist George Tiller kills fetuses in the third trimester of pregnancy (for only mildly disabling defects) and raises the issue with impunity on the Internet.²⁸ Since he’s not killing kitties, he gets away with it.

Scott Klusendorf is Director of Bio-Ethics at Stand to Reason, where he trains pro-life apologists throughout the United States and Canada to persuasively defend their views in the public square.

1 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 122–23.

2 Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” in Rights and Wrongs of Abortion, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 57.

3 Jeffrey Reiman, Critical Moral Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 121.

4 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 142.

5 Ibid., 171, 188.

6 Ibid., 169.

7 Ibid., 185–86.

8 Ibid., 110–11.

9 Ibid., 55–63, 110–17.

10 Ibid., 173.

11 Ibid., 191.

12 Ibid., 186.

13 Ibid., 172. Of course, fetuses and newborns have no “interests” according to Singer.

14 Arthur Ide makes essentially this same argument in Abortion Handbook: The History, Legal Progress, Practice and Psychology of Abortion (Las Colinas: The Liberal Press, 1986), 21–26. See also, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, “Is It Possible to Be Pro-Life and Pro-Choice?” Parade Magazine, 12 April 1990.

15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896), 564.

16 Cited in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 104–5.

17 H. Kuhse and Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 133.

18 Scott B. Rae and Paul Cox, Bio-Ethics: A Christian Perspective in a Pluralistic Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 169.

19 Ibid., 159–69.

20 Francis J. Beckwith, Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life (Joplin: MO: College Press, 2000), 73.

21 Ibid., 74.

22 J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis of Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 253.

23 Ibid., 74.

24 Practical Ethics, 331.

25 I am not suggesting that atheists such as Singer cannot act morally. They can; but why ought they act morally given their rejection of a moral lawgiver? Singer’s problem is that he cannot ground his moral claims ontologically. For an excellent discussion on this problem for atheists, see Paul Copan, “Can Michael Martin Be a Moral Realist?” Philosophia Christi, series 2, 1.2 (1999). See also Bill Weaks, “Practically Nonsense,” www.firstgen.org.

26 Peter Berkowitz, “Other People’s Mothers,” New Republic, 10 January 2000.

27 Ibid.

28 See Gregg Cunningham, “Cyberculture of Death: Abortion Online,” National Review, 10 November 1997.

“We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine, we are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth.” (Dr. Mary S. Calderone, Sex Information and Education Council of the United States — SIECUS)

Make no mistake — “pro-choice” advocates are not friends of women or babies. America’s unthinking submission to the lies and twisted arguments of the so-called pro-choice movement will move us inexorably toward social genocide of a magnitude eclipsing that of Hitler, Stalin, Somalia, the Serb-Croate conflict, or any other massacre openly denounced in our media.

The movement’s own label — “pro-choice” — is a twisted deception, covering up for a social genocide where the “right” to choose to kill one’s preborn baby reigns supreme over that baby’s human rights; over the rights of the mother to receive accurate information about fetal development and the dangerous consequences to herself from abortion; over the rights of the parents of a pregnant minor; over the rights of the preborn’s father; and over the rights of a human society to protect all its members — no matter what their social status, economic independence, physical limitations, or acceptance by their families. Those who continue to fight legislation restricting abortion are not “pro-choice,” they are “pro-abortion,” or more accurately, “pro-murder.”

Abortion is in reality the painful killing of an innocent human being. It is painful because the methods employed to snuff the life involve burning, smothering, dismembering, or crushing. There’s no doubt that it is killing because the zygote — which fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (including metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction) — is terminated. The life taken is innocent simply because he or she has done nothing worthy of capital punishment. Finally, being a product of human parents and having a unique genetic code makes the unborn life unquestionably human. In fact, Dr. Micheline Matthew-Roth, a principal research associate in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, stated, “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life.”

Recently on the Bible Answer Man program, I interviewed Dr. Francis J. Beckwith in order to demolish some of the most common pro-abortion arguments. Dr. Beckwith is the author of what I consider to be one of the best Christian resources responding to the pro-abortion movement, Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights (Baker, 1993).

To help equip you to annihilate the arguments of pro-abortion advocates, I’ve developed the acronymA-B-O-R-T-I-O-N.

A = Ad Hominem. Ad hominem arguments (i.e., arguments that appeal to the personal rather than to reason) are a trick designed to distract you from the real issue — namely, that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. Comedienne Whoopie Goldberg, a master of the ad hominem attack, recently said she would take pro-lifers’ arguments more seriously if they were willing to adopt the babies they tried to save from abortion. What her argument amounts to is, if you won’t adopt a baby, you can’t tell me not to kill one! That, of course, makes as much sense as protesting an abolitionist because he doesn’t hire all ex-slaves, or forbidding me from intervening when I see my neighbor sexually abusing a child unless I am willing to adopt that child. The argument about adoption has nothing to do with the basic morality or immorality of abortion.

B = Biblical Pretexts. Biblical pretexts are used by pro-abortionists who want to retain some semblance of religiosity while they espouse the radical planks of the abortion movement. The most common argument is that the Bible nowhere specifically condemns abortion or identifies it as the killing of an innocent human life. Such an argument, however, hides the real biblical position, which is that the preborn are fully human and alive (Ps. 139:13-16) and that killing an innocent human being (murder) is sin — a violation of the Seventh Commandment (Exod. 20:13).

O = Opium. Opium dulls the senses chemically. In much the same way, the term-twisting tactics of the pro-abortionists are an “opium of the masses” designed to mentally dull the senses of an unquestioning public that would otherwise reject legalized murder. Pro-abortion is repositioned as pro-choice; babies become products of conception; killing an unwanted child becomes exercising freedom of choice; and committed pro-lifers become social terrorists. The list of terms camouflaged by the pro-abortionists is seemingly endless. Unless we scale the language barrier of the pro-abortion lobby, the masses will continue to overdose on the opium of clever code words.

R = Rape and Incest. Rape and incest are the hard-case “what-ifs” pro-abortionists raise in almost every public forum: “How can you deny a hurting young girl safe medical care and freedom from the terror of rape or incest by forcing her to maintain a pregnancy resulting from the cruel and criminal invasion of her body?” The emotion of the argument often deflects serious examination of its merits, or how it is used as a pretext for unlimited abortion for any woman, for any reason, and at any time throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy, and regardless of the condition under which she became pregnant.

It is important to note that the incidence of pregnancy as a result of rape is extremely small (one study put it at 0.06 percent). If we had legislation restricting abortion for all reasons other than rape or incest, we would still save the vast majority of the 1.8 million preborn babies who die annually in America through abortion.

It should be patently obvious that one does not obviate the real pain of rape or incest by compounding it with the murder of an innocent preborn child. Moreover, as Dr. Beckwith points out, “To argue for abortion on demand from the hard cases of rape and incest is like trying to argue for the elimination of traffic laws from the fact that one might have to violate some of them in rare instances, such as when one’s spouse or child needs to be rushed to the hospital.”

T = Toleration. Toleration is the “great commandment” the pro-abortion movement levels against its opponents. “We’re not making you have an abortion; just be tolerant of those who choose to.” Frequently, this false tolerance commandment is supported by an appeal to religious pluralism, the American separation of church and state, or the alleged impropriety of imposing one’s morality on another.

Ironically, the pro-abortionists fail to perceive their own violation of this ridiculous standard — they’re intolerant of those of us who think tolerance is less important than preserving innocent human lives! One of the characteristics inherent in every society is the obligation to impose universal morals on its members. Toleration works in the world of expressing opinions, not in a crowded movie theater when someone chooses to yell “Fire!” We may be tolerant of one’s religious views, but not if they include enslaving grandmothers or cannibalizing teenagers. Toleration between church and state does not extend to divorcing all moral values from the state, else we would need to eliminate all legislation that has anything in common with any religious viewpoint — including the very idea of social law itself.

I = Inequality. Inequality between the sexes is one of the most bizarre arguments put forth by the pro-abortion movement. “Women who are forced to be pregnant,” they say, “can’t compete in employment with men and so cannot be truly equal unless they have an escape from unwanted pregnancy.” Translation: Women can’t be equal to men without surgery! How much more sexist can an argument become? This false equality could be stretched to include custody of born children (women usually have custody) so that a woman “encumbered” by her born children could abandon them with impunity. It could extend to government subsidies for addictive drugs so even poor addicts have equal access to them. Women will not truly be “equal” in society to men until they are accepted fully as women, with all their female potentials and attributes, not simply as an imitation of surgically constructed men.

O = Operation Rescue. Operation Rescue, the most tenaciously visible faction of the pro-life movement, has been unfairly condemned for using the same lines of argument and social protest popularized by the much-applauded civil rights movement. Moreover, it has been grossly misrepresented to dismiss any pro-life argument or activity as “extremist.” Just as abolitionists harbored escaped slaves in defiance of the laws before the Civil War; compassionate Europeans hid Jews from the legally sanctioned extermination of the Nazis; and civil rights marchers violated segregation laws; so Operation Rescue members believe their nonviolent, peaceful interventions to protect preborn babies are “obeying God rather than man.”

N = Nonpersonhood. Nonpersonhood is perhaps the trickiest of the contemporary pro-abortion arguments. Pro-abortionists once argued that the preborn baby was not fully human, or not human life. Now most concede that the “product of conception” is human life. Their argument, however, has become more sophisticated: “It may be human life, but it doesn’t possess personhood.” Even President Clinton has argued that, since learned theologians and scientists can’t agree on when “personhood” begins, abortion should remain unrestricted.

Dr. Beckwith exploded this myth when he wrote, “From a strictly scientific point of view, there is no doubt that the development of an individual human life begins at conception. Consequently, it is vital that the reader understand that she did not come from a zygote, she once was a zygote; she did not come from an embryo, she once was an embryo; she did not come from a fetus, she once was a fetus; she did not come from an adolescent, she once was an adolescent.”

Abortion, rampant in America today, is the tragic consequence of a society that no longer values individual human worth, that worships at the feet of the idol Self, and that replaces the Word of God with social relativism. One-third of the children conceived in America this year will be murdered before they are born. And yet this brutal, widespread slaughter can be stopped if those of us who value human life, who worship the true God, and who obey His Word become informed, committed, and involved.

Editor’s Note: Hank has an audiotape and small booklet that provides a more comprehensive discussion of the abortion issue. Contact CRI for details.

This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 22, number 1 (1999). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org

SYNOPSIS

The past few years have witnessed a stunning development in the pro-life movement. Many pro-life leaders now think we can make abortion rare by downplaying the moral question, “Does abortion take the life of a defenseless human being?” They favor a new strategy that appeals to the self-interests of women rather than moral truth. One leader asserts that an emphasis on unborn babies will only drive women of childbearing age away from the pro-life movement. But this new strategy is dangerous because it leaves the pro-abortion culture largely unchallenged. At the same time, it unilaterally strips the pro-life movement of its most powerful tools of persuasion. If pro-life advocates are to make abortion unthinkable, they must speak frankly about the nature of abortion.

For the past 26 years, pro-life apologists have argued that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being. The rationale for their argument is clear-cut and can be expressed in the following syllogism:

1. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a moral wrong.

2. Elective abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human person.

3. Hence, elective abortion is a moral wrong.

Despite the clarity and soundness of this argument, some pro-life leaders now question its ability to persuade. They contend that although abortion is an objective moral evil, pro-life advocates should reconsider their arguments or risk alienating women of childbearing age.

THE CHANGING PRO-LIFE FOCUS

Paul Swope, for example, calls it a “failure to communicate” when pro-lifers focus primarily on the fetus rather than the felt needs of women. “The pro-life movement,” he writes, “must show that abortion is not in a woman’s own self-interest, and that the choice of life offers hope and a positive, expanded sense of self.”¹

Swope believes pro-life advocates have won the moral and philosophical debate over the status of the fetus, but have failed to address the needs of women. He cites research indicating that even “pro-choice” women agree that abortion is killing. “The women believe that abortion is wrong, an evil, and that God will punish a woman who makes that choice.” Yet, the choice of abortion becomes one of self-preservation (at least socially), and since the woman did not intend to get pregnant, she reasons that “God will ultimately forgive her.”²

Until recently, the pro-life response was to point out that hardship did not justify homicide, but Swope thinks that a focus on babies only makes matters worse. He writes, “The pro-life movement’s own self-chosen slogans and educational presentations have tended to exacerbate the problem, as they focus almost exclusively on the unborn child, not the mother.”³

Pro-life feminist Frederica Matthews-Green agrees, “Pro-Lifers will not be able to break through this deadlock by stressing the humanity of the unborn. [T]hat is a question nobody is asking. But there is a question they are asking. It is, ‘How can we live without it?’ The problem is not moral, but practical.”⁴

There is merit to what both say. Pro-lifers must do more than stress the humanity of the unborn, especially with those facing the terror of unplanned pregnancy. This is why crisis pregnancy centers are so important. It is also true that for some abortion-minded women, appeals to self-interest may dissuade them from killing their babies.

But Swope and Matthews-Green are not saying we should reframe the debate in the narrow context of crisis counseling. Rather, they are telling the pro-life movement in general to speak less of the fetus and more to the self- interested needs of women. Although both have made important contributions to our cause, I think they are mistaken for the following reasons.

1. It is simply not true that the pro-life movement has won the debate over the status of the fetus. Both authors rightly point out that a majority of Americans support legal abortion even though most say that it is morally wrong. They interpret these contradictory findings to mean that while pro-lifers have won the moral debate over the humanity of the fetus, practical considerations keep many Americans committed to abortion.

Swope and Matthews-Green are confusing what the public says with what it truly believes. People hold contradictory and incoherent views on abortion precisely because they don’t really believe that the unborn are fully human, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. As philosopher Francis Beckwith points out, why do women only kill their fetuses when confronted with practical difficulties, rather than their already born children, if they truly believe their fetuses are fully human?⁵

Put differently; is there any reasonable person in America today who would argue that while he personally opposed the enslavement of blacks, he wouldn’t oppose the legal right of his neighbor to own one if he so chose? In fact, when people tell me they personally oppose abortion but think it should be legal anyway, I ask a simple question to audit their core beliefs about the unborn. I ask why they personally oppose abortion. Nearly always, the response is, “I oppose it because it kills a baby,” at which point I merely repeat their own words. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight: You say you oppose abortion because it kills a baby, but you think it should be legal to kill babies?” Those who are intellectually honest respond with stunned silence before conceding, “Gee, I never thought of it like that.” But many others reply glibly, “Well, it’s not the same thing.”

People who talk like this cannot possibly have thought much about the status of the fetus, let alone have resolved the issue in our favor. When it comes to first trimester abortion, polling data suggests the public has indeed resolved the issue, but it hardly agrees with us. A whopping 62 percent support the practice precisely because they don’t think the unborn at that stage of development are human persons.⁶ This is not a practical problem, but a deeply moral and intellectual one.

2. A strategy centered primarily on the self-interest of the woman sets a dangerous precedent for the pro-life movement. As Dr. Beckwith points out, even if appeals to self-interest temporarily reduce the number of abortions, it does not follow that our culture is becoming pro-life.

Say, for example, that Planned Parenthood releases a study demonstrating that women who abort live on average 10 years longer than those who don’t. Or, take an exact case from Boston where the National Abortion Access Project is running ads (soon to be released nationally) depicting abortion as “the responsible choice” for women who don’t want to “pay the price and have the baby.”

What principled argument against abortion can Swope or Matthews-Green make in either case? Beckwith writes, “Nurturing an unprincipled, self-interested culture may have the unfortunate con­sequence of increasing the number of people who think that unless their needs are pacified they are perfectly justified in performing homicide on the most vulnerable of our population.”⁷

Swope replies that moral persuasion simply does not work with many women. Consequently, he produces pro-life television ads that speak to the self-interest of women rather than the morality of abortion. He claims to have data proving the ads not only save babies, but change public opinion as well. “A 30 second ad with the objective of reaching women of childbearing age is simply not the place to teach about abstract moral obligations,” he writes.⁸

Perhaps so, but we shouldn’t then claim that these ads genuinely convert people to the pro-life view. True conversion on any ethical issue requires moral and intellectual assent. How can there be moral and intellectual assent if nothing in the ads speaks to moral or intellectual issues? What you get in this case are not true converts to the pro-life position, but self-interested converts who may readily abandon their newly found pro-life views. As one abortion rights leader put it, “The overwhelming majority of Americans are against abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and their own personal circumstances.” That is the heart of the issue.

Data from the pregnancy care profession seems to confirm this. Pro-life crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) outnumber abortion clinics nearly two to one, but there are still 1.3 million abortions annually. In fact Care Net, the nation’s largest affiliate of CPCs, reports that 80 percent of clients seen by its centers are not abortion minded.¹⁰ That means the vast majority of women considering abortion blow right by the local CPC on their way to Planned Parenthood. This is true despite Care Net’s laudable 1993 goal of making pregnancy care centers “so accessible and so effective in serving women that we put abortionists virtually out of business by the end of the decade.”¹¹

Four years ago, I visited a well-funded midwestern CPC whose staff took me through comfortably furnished residential quarters that can house 40 pregnant women, most in their own private rooms. Residents enjoy impressive meals and round-the-clock medical care. The CPC also has a large, well-stocked library, classrooms in which clients pursue various courses of study, and an impressive list of services offered to women not in need of residency. The facility has the capacity to care for hundreds of nonresident clients as well. It’s hard to imagine a crisis pregnancy center that is more caring and more in tune with the self-interested needs of its clients.

Despite this CPC’s effective management and comprehensive services, it saved 80 babies that year in a metro area in which some ten thousand were killed! At times, the facility was less than half full. When pregnant women reject help from one of the best-run CPCs in the country, we don’t have practical problems; we have moral and philosophical problems. We struggle in the practical realm precisely because the culture does not agree with us that abortion is a serious moral wrong. But this center is hardly alone.

According to research presented by the Family Research Council (FRC) at a 1998 Focus on the Family conference for crisis pregnancy center staff the number of abortion-minded clients visiting CPCs is declining nationwide. For example, 10 CPCs, noted for their size and strong leadership, were asked to report their statistics for 1994 to 1996. The number of abortion-minded clients increased in four centers, but decreased in six. The number of “service only” clients (those coming in for diapers, clothing, etc., but not at risk for abortion) increased in seven, remained unchanged in one, and decreased in two. The FRC report warns that if these trends continue throughout the CPC movement, it could “threaten the primary mission of centers — to reach women at risk for abortion.”¹²

It’s not that women at risk are unaware that CPCs can help. According to a 1997 survey by the Wirthlin Group, 66 percent of American women were aware of crisis pregnancy centers and the services they provide, while 49 percent knew of their local center. Most important, 87 percent of those aware of CPCs believed they have a positive impact on the women they serve.¹³ Despite excellent services and high approval ratings, these centers are failing to reach the women most at risk.

Crisis pregnancy centers are vital to the pro-life movement, but even if there were one on every street corner in America, it would never “put abortionists virtually out of business,” much less by the end of the decade. “I’m glad that some women can be loved into loving their babies,” writes Gregg Cunningham of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. “But I won’t let that fact blind me to the reality that there are many others who will kill their babies if they are not made more horrified of abortion than they are terrified of their own crisis pregnancies.”¹⁴

3. Downplaying the truth about abortion patronizes the very women we are trying to help. Speaking of pro-choice women facing a crisis pregnancy, Swope writes, an “emphasis on babies, whether dismembered fetuses or happy newborns, will tend to deepen the woman’s sense of denial, isolation, and despair, the very emotions that will lead her to choose abortion.”¹⁵

Swope is right that pro-lifers must address the woman’s emotional concerns but wrong to say that we must downplay the truth about abortion in order to do this. Are we to conclude that women can’t look at abortion objectively? As feminist author and abortion advocate, Naomi Wolf, points out, this view is condescending to women:

The pro-choice movement often treats with contempt the pro-lifers’ practice of holding up to our faces their disturbing graphics….[But] how can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making a judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view is unworthy of feminism.¹⁶

Some (though thankfully not all) CPCs have a policy forbidding the use of abortion pictures in counseling sessions, even when the client may consent to viewing them. As unpleasant as it seems, breaking people’s hearts over abortion is often an indispensable predicate to changing their minds. Pictures change the way they feel, and facts change the way they think. Both are vital. “I wish it weren’t so, but whatever might be a CPCs reasons for categorically rejecting the use of graphic depictions of abortion, those reasons had better be more important than the lives of the babies who will die because of that policy,” writes Cunningham.¹⁷

4. Downplaying the truth about abortion is totally unnecessary and strips the pro-life movement of its most powerful tools of persuasion. We can win if we force abortion advocates to defend killing babies. The national debate over partial-birth abortion (PBA) is a case in point. Though President Clinton has twice vetoed legislation banning the procedure, the debate has helped pro-lifers in at least five ways.

First, public opinion has shifted modestly in our favor. Although Swope disputes that this has anything to do with PBA, the evidence is compelling.¹⁸ Since the partial-birth issue was first raised in 1995, the percentage of those who think abortion should be legal under any circumstances has dropped on average from 33 percent to 22 percent.¹⁹ The trend among women 18 and over is also encouraging. According to a 1999 study by The Center for Gender Equity, more women oppose abortion than support it. Fifty-three percent now say abortion should be illegal altogether or allowed only in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment of the mother’s life.²⁰ That’s an eight-percent shift away from abortion rights compared to a poll taken two years prior.

Why the shift? For the first time in 25 years, the debate is about the abortion act itself and how it affects the unborn.²¹ “When someone holds up a model of a six-month-old fetus and a pair of surgical scissors, we say ‘choice’ and we lose,” writes Naomi Wolf.²²

At a National Abortion Federation meeting in 1996, Kathryn Kohlbert cautioned delegates that if the debate over partial-birth abortion focuses on what happens to the unborn, their side will get “creamed.” She urged focusing exclusively on the woman:

If the debate is whether or not the fetus feels pain, we lose. If the debate in the public arena is what’s the effect of anesthesia. [on the fetus], we’ll lose. If the debate is on whether or not women ought to be entitled to late abortion, we will probably lose. But if the debate is on the circumstances of individual women, and [how] the government shouldn’t be making those decisions, then I think we can win these fights.²³

We have yet to convince many of the inhumanity of abortion in the first trimester. But graphic depictions of abortion have put our opponents on the defensive.

Second, the shift in public opinion has led to legislative progress. Despite recent setbacks in the states of Washington and Colorado, where ballot initiatives banning PBA suffered narrow defeats, the trend has been remarkably positive for the pro-life movement. For instance, New Jersey legislators — including many liberal Democrats — are supporting limits on abortion. According to The New York Times, the New Jersey experience is typical of the national trend where 31 states have now passed measures restricting access to abortion. Pro-lifers are forcing liberals to defend the abortion act itself. In New Jersey; lawmakers were actually shown videos of abortion procedures prior to a committee vote on PBA.²⁴

Mary Balch, director of the National Right to Life State Legislative Department, explains her success with liberal lawmakers: “All we had done was to say to them, ‘Pro-abortionists support removing a large, living unborn baby almost entirely from her mother’s womb, stabbing her in the head with scissors, and sucking out her brains. Are you willing to support that?”²⁵

Swope replies that his strategy does not necessarily apply to legislative or political change, but only to reaching the general public. This misses the point entirely. Politicians will restrict abortion precisely because public opinion demands it. Most legislators, especially those who are pro-abortion, are not going to support pro-life legislation in the absence of intense pressure from constituents. What changed the minds of constituents in this case was not concern for the self-interest of women, but the brutal reality of abortion.

Third, both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have issued reports condemning partial-birth abortion.²⁶ The AMA has gone even further, stating that late-term abortions are rarely, if ever, needed to save the mother’s life or physical health.²⁷ Though abortion advocates within the AMA have protested that the reports were politically motivated, they’ve presented no evidence to challenge the fact that partial-birth abortion procedures are nearly always performed on healthy women carrying healthy babies. Both organizations have a history of supporting abortion-on-demand, yet the debate over PBA forced each to issue statements questioning the morality of some abortions.

Fourth, PBA legislation has raised the issue of fetal pain, further calling into question the morality of abortion. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association states, “It is beyond ironic that the pain management practiced for an intact D&X on a human fetus would not meet the federal standards for the humane care of animals used in medical research.”²⁸ Other medical journals have raised similar concerns.²⁹

Fifth, the PBA debate has undermined the credibility of abortion advocates in general. Simply put they were caught lying, and even their staunchest supporters in the media felt cheated. Pro-abortion columnist Richard Cohen writes, “I was led to believe that these late-term abortions were extremely rare and performed only when the life of the mother was in danger or the fetus irreparably deformed. I was wrong.”³⁰ A short time later, Ron Fitzimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted that he and others intentionally lied to the public when they said only four-hundred of these grisly procedures were done each year. He confessed that thousands of these procedures are performed annually on perfectly healthy mothers carrying perfectly healthy babies.³¹

The partial birth debate damaged the pro-abortion side because it focused on what abortion does to the unborn. Pro-lifers did two things right. First, we forced abortion advocates to defend the indefensible. Second, we marshaled factual evidence to show that our opponents were lying. That’s the essence of effective pro-life apologetics as we approach the twenty-first century.

CHANGING OUR BEHAVIOR, NOT OUR MESSAGE

The primary challenge confronting the pro-life movement is not persuading the public that our position is practical, but that our position is true. Public revulsion over partial-birth abortion has given us a rare opportunity to frame the debate in moral terms. But we are doing precious little to press our advantage.

This past January, I conducted a state-by-state survey of major pro-life events around the country. State pro-life groups were eager to send me their list of activities, as January is their most active month due to the anniversary of Roe. v. Wade. Listed were numerous banquets, rallies, Christian rock concerts, potluck suppers, golf tournaments, marches, candlelight vigils, prayer services, and religious events. Shocking was the fact that not one of the events I surveyed remotely related to impacting the culture at the idea level or equipping our people to think and defend their views persuasively.³²

The American public is confused and holds contradictory positions on abortion because people think the issue is morally complex. This confusion can be cleared up if pro-life apologists frame the debate around one question, as Gregory Koukl, president of Stand to Reason, explains: “Imagine that your child walks up when your back is turned and asks, ‘Daddy, can I kill this? What is the first thing you must find out before you can answer him? You can never answer the question “Can I kill this?” unless you’ve answered a prior question: What is it?”³³

The answer to the question “What is the unborn?” trumps all other considerations. It is key to answering virtually every objection to the pro-life view. The following dialogue illustrates why there is only one issue to resolve, not many:

Abortion Advocate: Abortion is a private choice between a woman and her doctor.

Pro-Lifer: Do we allow parents to mistreat their children if done in private?

Abortion Advocate: Of course not. Those children are human beings.

Pro-Lifer: Then the issue isn’t privacy. It’s “What is the unborn?”

Abortion Advocate: But many poor women cannot afford to raise another child.

Pro-Lifer: When human beings get expensive, may we kill them?

Abortion Advocate: Well, no, but aborting a fetus is not the same as killing a person.

Pro-Lifer: So, once again, the issue is “What is the unborn? Is the fetus a human person?”

Abortion Advocate: But you’re being too simplistic. This is a very complex issue involving women who must make agonizing decisions.

Pro-Lifer: The decision may be psychologically complex for the mother, but morally it is not complex at all. When blacks are mistreated in a certain society; do we spin a tale about com­plex, agonizing decisions for the whites in power or do we condemn the evil of racism?

Abortion Advocate: Aborting a fetus that is not a person is one thing, discriminating against black persons is quite another.

Pro-Lifer: So we’re agreed: If abortion kills a defenseless human being, then the issue wouldn’t be complex at all. The question is, “What is the unborn?”

Abortion Advocate: Enough with your abstract philosophy. Let’s talk about real life. Do you really think a woman should be forced to bring an unwanted child into the world?

Pro-Lifer: The homeless are unwanted, may we kill them?

Abortion Advocate: But it’s not the same.

Pro-Lifer: That’s the issue, isn’t it? Are they the same? If the unborn are human like the homeless, then we can’t kill them to get them out of the way. We’re back to my first question, “What is the unborn?”

Abortion Advocate: But you still shouldn’t force your morality on women.

Pro-Lifer: You don’t really believe what you just said. You’d feel very comfortable forcing your morality on a mother who was physically abusing her two-year-old, wouldn’t you?

Abortion Advocate: But the two cases are not the same.

Pro-Lifer: Oh? Why is that?

Abortion Advocate: Because you’re assuming the unborn are human, like the two-year-old.

Pro-Lifer: And you’re assuming they’re not. So the issue is quite simple, isn’t it? It’s not forcing morality; it’s not privacy; it’s not economic hardship; it’s not unwantedness; it’s “What is the unborn?”

What we must change is not our message, but our behavior. Babies are dying whose lives could be saved if pro-life advocates were equipped to argue their case persuasively. We can win if we force abortion advocates to defend killing babies. The battle over partial-birth abortion indicates this.

When the pro-life debate has faltered, it’s because the focus has been shifted from the real issue: What is the unborn? The reluctance of some pro-lifers to advance moral arguments is a tacit admission they either don’t have a moral case to offer or lack the courage to proclaim it. Either way, these pro-lifers have not merely failed to communicate, they’ve abandoned the fight altogether. This we cannot do.

notes

1. Paul Swope, “Abortion: A Failure to Communicate,” First Things, April 1998.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Frederica Matthews-Green, Real Choices (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1994), 32.

5. Francis J. Beckwith, letter to the editor, First Things (October, 1998).

6. Susan Yoachum, “California Pro-Choice — Early-on Poll Says Late-Term Abortions Opposed,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 March 1997, and The New York Times/CBS poll (January 1998).

7. Francis J. Beckwith, “Taking Abortion Seriously,” unpublished paper, 1999. This paper will be presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Danvers, Massachusetts, 17-19 November 1999.

8. Reply to Francis J. Beckwith’s letter to the editor, First Things, October1998.

9. David Shaw, “Abortion Bias Seeps into News,” The Los Angeles Times, 1-4 July 1990.

10. Care Net Volunteer Training Manual, 1995, 24.

11. “Action Line” (the former newsletter of the Christian Action Council, the group now known as Care Net), January 1993; see also Kim Lawton, “20 Years after Roe, Christianity Today, 11 January 1993, 38.

12. Kurt Young, “Assessing Center Impact Increasing Center Effectiveness,” Family Outreach Council, February 1998. This paper was presented at a Focus on the Family conference specifically to address the decline in abortion-minded clients.

13. Poll cited in National Rights to Life News, 7 May 1998.

14. 12 April 1993 letter from Gregg Cunningham to Scott Klusendorf.

15. Swope.

16. Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, 16 October 1996.

17. 12 April 1993 letter from Cunningham to Klusendorf. I have letters on file from CPCs that have responsibly used graphic visual aids to deter women from abortion.

18. Swope credits his ads (in states where they run) rather than PBA for the shift, but this flies in the face of nearly every opinion poll taken since 1997. Pollsters consistently cite PBA for the change in public attitudes. See also n. 21.

19. USA Today/CNN poll, 1997; cited in Ruth Padawer, “Partial Birth Battle Changing Public Views,” USA Today, 17 November 1997.

20. Study conducted by the Center for Gender Equality, January 1999. Cited in John Leo, “The Joy of Sexual Values,” U.S. News and World Report, 1 March 1999. Another sign of slippage in support for legal abortion is UCLA’s annual survey of college freshman, where in 1998 only 50.9 percent favored the practice, down front 65 percent in 1990.

21. Even pro-abortion feminists concede this. Faye Wattleton, Executive Director of the Center for Gender Equity said the debate over PBA has affected women’s overall views on abortion. “We’ve been seeing an erosion of support [for abortion], and that probably grows out of the late-term abortion debate.” (Cited in The Boston Herald, 4 February 1999.)

22. Naomi Wolf, “Pro-Choice and Pro-Life,” The New York Time’s, 3 April 1997.

23. Diane Gianelli, “Abortion Rights Leader Urges End to Half-Truths.” American Medical News, 3 March 1997.

24. Abby Goodnough, “Trenton Turning from Its longtime Support of Abortion Rights,” The New York Times, 22 February 1998.

25. “The Untold Story of Partial-Birth Abortion,” National Right to Life News, 15 March 1999.

26. On the AMA, see M. L. Sprang and M. G. Neerhof, “Rationale for Banning Abortions Late in Pregnancy,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 26 August 1998. On the ACOG, see Diane Gianelli, “AMA Report: Third Trimester Abortions Rarely Necessary” American Medical News, 26 May 1997.

27. Gianelli, “AMA Report.”

28. Sprang and Neerhof.

29. Xenophon Giannakoulopoulos, et al, “Fetal Plasma Cortisol and B-Endorphin Response to Intrauterine Needling,” The Lancet (July 9, 1994): See also Diane Gianelli, “Anesthesiologists Question Claims in Abortion Debate,” American Medical News, 1 January 1996.

30. Richard Cohen, “Late Abortions Can Transcend the Issue of Choice,” The New York Times, 26 September 1996.

31. David Stout, “An Abortion Advocate Says He Lied about Procedure,” The New York Times, 26 February 1997. See also Gianelli, “Abortion Rights Leader Urges End to Half-Truths.”

32. I am speaking here only of major events as advertised by pro-life groups. I do not mean to imply that local pro-life groups or individuals did nothing to persuade the public.

33. Gregory P. Koukl, Precious Human Unborn Persons (San Pedro, CA: Stand to Reason, 1997), 4-5.