No one wants to put victims in jail.
We certainly don’t.
Yet some claim that abolition bills would send countless victims to jail.
These accusations are not true.
In fact, abolition bills that provide the equal protection of the laws for babies are actually the most loving and compassionate laws we can pass to protect both babies AND their mothers.
Let me explain…
Pro-Life leaders say that ALL women are victims
For decades, the leading Pro-Life organizations have tried to tell us that ALL women who seek abortion are victims. And for decades nearly all Pro-Life laws have deliberately included explicit exemptions to ensure that abortion laws never apply to women who abort their children.
Not only that, there is a specific provision in the Texas homicide code to ensure that women are immune from prosecution even when they deliberately kill their own preborn babies.
As far as the law is concerned in Texas and virtually every other state, women have a license to kill their own children as long as they do it before they are born.
Even women who knowingly, willingly, and deliberately abort their own children do so with legal immunity.
And Pro-Life leaders promote these laws as compassionate and loving toward women.
But are these laws actually good for women?
This topic came up on Twitter recently in a post by Ginna Cross, who is a pregnancy center director, Registered Nurse sonographer, and mom of 6. Ginna made a post pointing out the inconsistency of saying that abortion is murder while also maintaining that mothers who seek abortion should never be prosecuted.
It is incoherent to say that:
1. Abortion is murder
2. Mothers who seek out an abortion for their child should not be prosecuted.If you believe #2, you do not actually believe #1.
— Ginna Cross (@GinnaCross) February 3, 2023
Ginna received many replies on that post.
One of the most instructive comments came from anti-abortion advocate and post-abortive mother, Emily Rarick, who replied that allowing mothers to be prosecuted would stop abortion faster than anything else. 😲
Even more powerfully, she then said that if it had been illegal for her to get an abortion, she never would have had one.
If a woman hired someone to rip her toddler apart limb from limb or poisoned their chicken noodle soup, we would ask that justice be served. Human rights need to be FULLY recognized for the unborn. If abortion had been illegal for me to obtain, I would have never had one.
— Emily Rarick (@_emilyrarick) February 4, 2023
Emily expresses the same thing I have heard from numerous women who have had abortions in the past. Post-abortive women often thank us for the work we do trying to put laws of equal protection in place. They say they wish it would have been a criminal offense for them to get an abortion, because then they never would have done it.
I praise God that many of these women have found forgiveness in Christ and left their sin at the cross! But they still grieve the fact that the law did not restrain them from their abortions. If it had, they would have their children with them now.
Emily talks very openly about her grief as well as her forgiveness in Christ.
I appreciate the love, y’all. I always try and reiterate this whenever I share tweets like this. I know that I am saved and forgiven, and I forgive myself for the choices that I made. That doesn’t change the fact that I will always grieve for my babies.
— Emily Rarick (@_emilyrarick) February 8, 2023
Women confirm it over and over again, that good laws would have been good for them when they were making the decision to abort.
Good Laws are a Deterrent
Deterring women from EVER killing their babies is exactly what we want.
Why would we EVER allow it to remain legal for them to murder their children? That only sends the wrong message and encourages it.
The primary function of the law is to restrain evil.
The Bible teaches that when “the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” (Ecc. 8:11).
This shows the active role our laws play in tutoring the hearts of men and women to understand the difference between good and evil.
We don’t want the hearts of women or men to be set to do evil. That isn’t good for women and it certainly isn’t good for their babies. We want laws in place that protect babies from abortion and protect women from participating in murder.
The Justice System
And after laws of equal protection are in place and someone knowingly and willingly breaks the law, we want to provide justice for preborn babies in the same way we provide justice for born people.
We have a very robust justice system of investigation, prosecution, judges, and juries. We trust this system to adjudicate homicide cases for born people and we have for a long time.
That’s one of the reasons the equal protection bills that we draft don’t create a new system of law to govern the prosecution of prenatal homicide. Instead they simply extend the same legal protections that have been protecting born people from homicide for centuries to preborn people also.
This system already accounts for things like duress if someone is forced into an illegal act against their will. There are defenses for things like mistake of fact if a person did not know what they were doing. And there is opportunity for any mitigating circumstances to be brought out during trial.
I explain a lot more about this in this video. If you haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to watch it now 👇
The point of all this is that just, impartial laws are good for everyone.
The most loving thing we can do for both moms and babies is to put righteous, God-honoring laws in place that will protect the innocent, deter many people from doing evil, and provide justice.
God loves justice and we should too.
For life, for justice, and for the glory of God,
Bradley Pierce
President
Abolish Abortion Texas
Foundation to Abolish Abortion