“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
-2 Timothy 3:16
Powerful movements are not created by organizations or clever individuals; powerful movements are grounded in powerful ideas. The most powerful idea in the universe is that God Himself took on flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate (John 1).
We believe that the Bible is the word of God, and as such it should govern everything we think, say, and do as Christians (2 Tim 3:16-17, Acts 17:11). This is especially true for the way we go about removing evils from society. If the Bible is God’s revelation to man, and if it is an account of what God is doing to abolish wickedness from our world, then any efforts for the kingdom of God should reflect what we see Him do in that revelation. The principles of abolitionism are justified and grounded in the conviction that God’s word alone must be the foundation for all of life.
Two particular theological propositions undergird every abolitionist movement in history. The first is that all human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27, 9:6), and the second is that God Himself became a man to redeem man from his sins (John 1:14, Is 9:6). As American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said, the image of God in man “is a death-blow to all claims of superiority, to all charges of inferiority, to all usurpation, to all oppressive dominion.” Modern abolitionist T. Russell Hunter updated Garrison’s claim in 2013: “The incarnation of Christ is the death knell to abortion.”
This tenet stands in stark contradiction to the Pro-Life Movement’s leading apologists who intentionally exclude God’s word from their argumentation. One pro-life outreach organization even makes their volunteers sign a form promising not to bring up religion unless the unbeliever brings it up first. The pro-life leaders believe they must downplay their Christianity to appeal to unbelievers, and the result is that they’ve given up the only objective standard by which abortion can be adequately rebuked as evil.

“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold,
I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
– Matthew 28:19-20

Abortion is sin, and the cure to sin is the gospel. When we say “the gospel,” we don’t exclusively mean the justification of man through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to those who believe. That’s a foundational aspect of the gospel to be sure, but there’s more to the gospel than that.
In the opening of his book on Christ’s ministry, Mark refers to the entire document as, “the gospel” (Mar 1:1). This includes more than just chapters 14-16 which cover the death and resurrection of Christ. It includes Jesus’ life, His miracles, His law, His coming judgment, the example that He set for us to follow, and His teaching on numerous other topics. The apostle John gave a broad description of Christ’s purpose in coming to the earth, stating that He appeared “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). The Devil and all his works will be vanquished, and one of the primary means God has ordained for accomplishing this task is His Church (Matt 16:18).

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, but he then turns to the reign of Christ – the gospel of the kingdom. He quotes from Psalm 110, saying, “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
Abolitionists bring the gospel into conflict with the culture of death, as is necessary for our faith to be a living one (James 2:14-26). Garrison, capturing well the spirit of the abolitionist, wrote, “My fanaticism is to make Christianity the enemy of all that is sinful.” By this conflict, the kingdom is advanced.

Abortion is a work of the devil, the shedding of innocent blood. Thus, Jesus came to destroy it. This is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through His death on the cross, Jesus abolished death (2 Tim 1:10), and through our union with Him, we are commissioned to do likewise (Eph 5:8-14, Rom 16:20, Luke 10:25-37). The abolition of abortion must be gospel-centered, and the gospel must progressively extend as far as the curse is found.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.”
– Luke 10:30-34

Two important concepts are involved with this third tenet of abolitionism. First, if the cure for abortion and other evils is the gospel of Jesus Christ, then abolition can only be carried out by those to whom the gospel has been entrusted (Matt 28:19-20): the Church.
The body and bride of Christ alone is empowered to be salt and light in a dark world (Matt 5:13-16); we alone expose evil by our light (Eph 5:6-11); we alone destroy the ungodly thinking that defends evil (2 Co 10:3-5); we alone can carry out the work of abolition. While unbelievers operating with common grace are, of course, welcome and encouraged to support just laws and candidates, this movement is unavoidably a Christian one. No one else has the cure.

The second concept contained in this tenet is that abolition is the duty of every Christian. We reject the prevalent, attractive, conscience-soothing idea that interposing on behalf of innocent people is a task given only to Christians with a special gift or calling.
In the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), Jesus demonstrates that religious people will often pass by a neighbor in need, and that this is an example of sin — the neglect of a universal duty that transcends any particular gifts, skills, or callings that individual Christians may have. In the very next chapter, Jesus rebukes the pharisees, saying, “‘Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God.’ (Luke 11:42)”

In the modern American context, there is almost no one who does not pass by the places of murder on a daily basis. If there is not an abortion mill in your area, there’s a hospital or OBGYN office that performs abortions, or a pharmacy that sells abortifacient drugs. Child sacrifice is all around us. We must utilize our spheres of influence to expose this evil in all of its horror and point people to the cure. We must go to the murder mills and plead for the lives of the children being taken away to death, while offering spiritual and physical help to the mothers and fathers going in. We must bring the gospel into conflict with the sins of abortion, abortion apathy, and compromise with abortion – which brings us to the fourth tenet of abolitionism.

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that
they might make the fatherless their prey!”
-Isaiah 10:1

The pro-life political strategy for nearly five decades has been to compromise by regulating abortion within the confines of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) with the hope that these decisions will be one day overturned, and more regulations will progressively be allowed by the courts. There are six reasons abolitionists reject this strategy.

A) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Violate God’s Standard

Because Christ is Lord over everything and His word is the standard for all of our beliefs, the strategies we pursue must likewise conform to His Word. As He says through the prophet Isaiah, “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,” any prospect of compromising with child sacrifice and regulating abortion is immediately off the table. What could be more iniquitous than a law establishing the acceptability of murdering human beings? You can argue that these laws are less iniquitous than the status quo, but Isaiah 1 doesn’t say “Woe to those who decree iniquity unless the iniquity is less iniquitous than something else.” It says, “Woe to those who decree iniquity.”

As abolitionist Pastor C.R. Cali writes in his book, The Doctrine of Balaam, “Regulating abortion gives more than tacit permission; it definitionally governs, directs, and controls the killing of preborn children through rule and law. Rather than engendering an attitude of abhorrence for this slaughter, regulations legitimize the practice by dictating where, when and how it is acceptable. Any law that sanctions the unjust killing of a human is by nature unjust.”The idea that it is okay to pass a law allowing some murder as long it allows less murder than the status quo is a form of moral relativism. From this perspective, a ban on abortion at 24 weeks would be a good or just law in California (because it is better than the California status quo) while simultaneously being a bad or unjust law in Oklahoma (because it is worse than the Oklahoma status quo). This is not a Christian approach to ethics. This is a relativistic and decidedly anti- Christian approach to ethics.

B) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Violate the US Constitution

While the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are not our ultimate foundation, they contain some good and just concepts that should be included in the case against abortion, such as the unalienable rights to life and the equal protection of the law. Any law which allows for certain human beings to be murdered is a denial of the unalienable rights to life and equal protection, as recognized and affirmed by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. By regulating abortion, we have given up our ultimate foundation, and our secondary foundation. A 20-week ban or heartbeat bill cannot be argued for from God’s word or the Constitution. To argue for compromised legislation is to give up your two most powerful weapons and to weaken the power that truth and justice hold over the abortion debate.

C) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Dehumanize Preborn Children

Incremental pro-life bills dehumanize children who do not meet arbitrary requirements for legal protection. A member of our staff was meeting with the aide of a pro-life Ohio State Senator in 2019. The aide was given a presentation about what an abolition bill looks like and why one was needed in Ohio. Afterward, the aide responded, “This was very interesting, but it’s Senator Brenner’s personal religious conviction that life begins at a heartbeat.” Where did he learn that ridiculous and evil idea that humans do not have value until their heartbeats can be detected? He learned it from the Heartbeat Bill. Brenner was one of its primary champions.

Another member of our staff was outside the murder mill in Norman, OK in 2016 when he was told by a mother going in for an abortion, “It’s okay. My baby won’t feel any pain.” Where did she learn that? From the Pro-Life Movement and the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act which highlights pain-capability as the reason abortion should be illegal. This is the consequence of supporting bills which violate our foundations. People are dehumanized and the culture is miseducated.

D) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Entrench Judicial Supremacy

In an 1857 speech, Fredrick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” For as long as pro-lifers write and support bills which submit to Roe, the court will know they are fully in the driver’s seat. They have not conceded anything in 48 years, and are unlikely to do so going forward unless we actively resist them through defiance. Despite having 38 opportunities to overturn Roe and a majority of Republican appointees for all but four months of the last 48 years, the supreme court has conceded not one iota, not even in 1992 when the court was made up of eight Republican-appointed justices and a pro-life Democrat.

These murderous decisions are enabled by the pro-life lobby which takes a posture of unconditional submission to Roe and Casey. Pro-life laws are written explicitly in submission to the federal courts because pro-lifers either don’t think they can stand up to the courts or lack the courage to. This mindset and these bills further entrench the idea that the court’s authority is unassailable.
Tragically, that is the belief pro-life politicians and lobbyists operate from. Their submission to the federal courts is unconditional. Lest anyone think that’s an exaggeration, Texas Alliance for Life Director Joe Pojman told The Austin Chronicle in April 2019 that, “We could no sooner ignore SCOTUS than the force of gravity.” For Pojman and the pro-life leaders, we are subject to the supreme court and Roe v. Wade in the same way we are subject to the laws of nature. This belief is anathema to the ideas and documents upon which the U.S. was founded, but more importantly, it is rooted in another decidedly anti-Christian ethic. Our only unconditional submission is to God, and when forced to choose between obedience to God or obedience to a human institution, we obey God (Acts 5:29).

We must not continue to enable the court’s tyranny with submissive legislation. We must check the power of the tyrant court by ignoring their obviously evil and obviously unconstitutional abortion jurisprudence. Because judicial supremacy is so engrained in the culture, people often react to this suggestion as if it were a radical idea. But it is not. The other branches and the states are supposed to be a check on the power of a branch that becomes tyrannical, and the courts have clearly become tyrannical. The only checks on the power of the courts at our disposal are defiance and impeachment. It is high time we start implementing both. If we are not willing to implement either, then the courts have assumed unchecked, unconditional, and ultimate power.

The abolitionist position is that the supreme court’s permission is not necessary to abolish abortion, but our position is also more likely to bring about Roe’s reversal. A state challenging the court’s self-appointed authority to legalize murder signals to judges and justices that the people will no longer put up with judicial activism and legislation from the bench. The supreme court has no enforcement power meaning their authority is contingent upon the degree to which it respects the constitution and the respect it commands from the other branches, from the states, and from the people. If the Supreme Court senses that the people will no longer accept their ignoring the constitution, inventing rights, and legalizing murder, they will be more likely to correct those wrongs.

E) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Are Substitutes for Abolition

The 1833 abolitionist Declaration of Sentiments stated, “We regard as delusive, cruel and dangerous any scheme of expatriation which pretends to aid, either directly or indirectly, in the emancipation of the slaves, or to be a substitute for the immediate and total abolition of slavery” (emphasis ours).

In the 2019 and 2020 Oklahoma legislative sessions, when the pro-life politicians refused to hear the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act, there was an outcry against them. Their response was to rush through pro-life bills that gave the appearance of fighting abortion to quell the outrage. Incremental pro-life bills are being used by pro-life politicians as a substitute for the immediate and total abolition of abortion. The same thing occurred in Texas, where State Rep. Jeff Leach, the man who prevented abortion from being abolished, filed an incremental pro-life bill just days after the Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act was assigned to his committee. Despite being primarily responsible for keeping abortion legal in Texas, Leach was awarded Texas Alliance for Life’s 2019 Courageous Defense of Life award because his incremental bill was signed into law. This is how the cozy arrangement between pro-life lobbyists and pro-life politicians operates.

Abortion will only be abolished when we take the option to compromise off the table for pro-life politicians. For as long as we tolerate compromise, they will compromise. The day pro-life politicians know that Christians will no longer tolerate incremental pro-life bills being used as substitutes for abolition, abortion will be abolished in many conservative states.

F) Incremental Pro-Life Bills Do Not Significantly Reduce Abortion

Even if pro-life bills did significantly reduce abortion rates, all of the above points against incrementalism would stand. However, they do not actually have any significant effect on the abortion rate. In defense of their strategy, pro-life incrementalists sometimes cite the decreasing abortion rate since the early 90s, but the rate is decreasing at comparable rates in pro-abortion states and pro-life states, meaning that factors other than incremental pro-life laws (such as the proliferation of abortifacient birth controls and self-induced abortions) are causing the decline in reported abortions.

As referred to at the beginning of this section, the incremental strategy entails passing regulations which can be upheld by the courts within the framework of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This means writing laws which dictate where, when, and how a baby can be murdered, but without passing any law which would put an “undue burden” on the mother’s ability to murder her child. The courts will not allow any law which would reduce abortion numbers, because if a law prevents mothers from having abortions when they otherwise would have, the law is an “undue burden” upon them. So pro-life laws which are upheld do not have any significant effect on abortion, something which pro-life lobbyists will admit in court.

While defending TX SB8, a 2017 law which purported to ban live dismemberment (D&E) abortions, Texas State attorney Darren McCarty admitted in court that the bill would not save a single life: “SB8 is not a ban on D&E. SB8 is measured piece of legislation that does not require nor is it intended to create a substantial obstacle to second trimester abortion. In fact, the plaintiffs, despite submitting evidence, despite waiting to file their case until later, have not presented any evidence in the record that SB8 would bar a single woman in Texas from receiving an abortion. Not one… SB8 is designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to end the particularly brutal, gruesome, and inhumane practice of killing a second trimester, essentially fully formed fetus by tearing it apart limb from limb. Texas has decided that these unborn children are entitled to more dignity. SB8 reflects the ethos of a humane and civilized society. SB8 would require one thing, a humane termination of an unborn child’s life before it is dismembered and evacuated.” Having a humane and civilized society is all about murdering children in the right ways, according to the incremental pro-life strategy. “Humane and civilized” societies make child murderers “humanely terminate” the children before dismembering them. SB8 would have had no effect on abortion, and it has been struck down anyway, first by a U.S. judge and then a fifth circuit panel. The case is now before the full fifth circuit.

It is impossible to overstate the stupidity and futility of the incremental pro-life strategy. Pro-life politicians and lobbyists pass laws that do nothing because that is all the courts said they would allow, and then the courts strike down many of those worthless laws anyway. Tragically, most pro-life leaders will not budge from this colossal failure of a strategy because they will not entertain the possibility of standing up to the courts, among other reasons.

5) Abolitionism is Providential

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.”
-Psalms 20:7

Some of the greatest military assets in the ancient world were chariots and horses. Yet the psalmist views them as insufficient unless he has the true and living God on his side. In the same way, we choose to trust God’s word while making war with the kingdom of darkness, even when such trust appears misplaced to worldly thinkers.

Abolitionists rely on the wisdom and providence of God, not on the worldly wisdom and pragmatism of man. As John Quincy Adams put it when asked why he was not discouraged at the lack of progress in Congress regarding the abolition of slavery, “Duty is ours, results belong to God.” We have a responsibility to be faithful to His commands, which, as detailed in earlier sections, is for justice to be established and iniquity to be stamped out in full.

The prevailing worldly political wisdom is that compromise is the key to progress, even on the issue of child sacrifice. While predicting outcomes is not how we make Biblical decisions, it is ultimately more practical, pragmatic, and wise to obey His word, no matter how impractical it may seem, because one man with God on his side is greater than a thousand men without Him. Those who have followed the worldly wisdom of compromise and incrementalism in an attempt to appeal to political moderates for 48 years have very little if anything to show for their efforts, as detailed in the previous section.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (1 Cor 1:25-27).”
A pollster may read this pamphlet or our website and see a thousand different things which you are not supposed to say. So be it. Our moral compass is fixed according to the revealed word of God, and the sin-sick culture around us needs the message of the gospel of the kingdom, even if they tell a pollster they do not want to hear it. We will declare these truths unflinchingly and make the culture move to us.