For several decades, leftists have advocated for more aggressive gun control on the basis that restricting firearms would decrease violence in our nation. In response to these tired assertions, conservatives have rightly retorted that “guns do not kill people, people kill people.”
This truth is a simple recognition of the reality that murder arises from the sinful heart of man and not from any particular means of committing murder. Humans have been murdering each other since the days of Cain and Abel, who lived long before firearms were invented, and countless murders are still committed today without the aid of firearms.
But conservatives in much of the pro-life movement appear to lose this mindset with respect to abortion, which is the most common form of murder in our nation and is even protected by our laws.
Members of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled last month against the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an organization of doctors who challenged the official Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a substance commonly used alongside misoprostol to murder babies with chemical abortion pills. Students for Life, a pro-life organization which filed an amicus brief based on the notion that mifepristone is harmful to the environment, swiftly denounced the decision from the Supreme Court. Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, vowed to continue fighting against the legality of mifepristone in the court system.
Despite the prevalence of abortion pills, which now account for two-thirds of abortions in our nation, mifepristone still remains one of several methods one can use to murder a preborn baby.
Even if Students for Life and other organizations succeed in banning mifepristone, a process that will take months or years to continue working through the courts, parents who want to murder their babies can simply use misoprostol without mifepristone, a method endorsed by the World Health Organization and actively promoted by Planned Parenthood on their website.
Even if Students for Life files a second lawsuit to fully ban misoprostol as well, the preborn will continue to be murdered. There will arise some other new cocktail of substances to meet the demand. Just as shamans throughout the ages have devised many potions and brews to murder the preborn, our modern pharmaceutical high priests could easily bring another method to market. Even beyond our medical establishment and regulatory system, there are already activists sharing recipes online for homemade herbal mixtures that induce abortion.
The reason why abortion occurs is not the mere existence of any specific method of committing abortion, in the same way that other forms of murder do not occur because of the mere existence of firearms. The root cause of abortion is the desire of a mother and father to be unburdened by the responsibility of raising a child, to continue their party lifestyles, to advance in their careers, to have more financial resources, or to serve some other motive driven by a selfish craving for convenience or prosperity. This demand will always be met by some supplier as long as the act of murdering a preborn baby remains protected by our laws.
This approach toward endlessly regulating abortion has already been proven to be ineffective. The pro-life movement for decades emphasized passing laws that restrict surgical abortion facilities, such as enacting more stringent health code regulations for abortion mills or banning specific methods of surgical abortion, while largely neglecting the advent of the abortion pill.
The actual solution to legal abortion is criminalizing the act of abortion, for all parties involved, without exception or compromise. The lawmakers and lobbyists involved in the pro-life movement, rather than fixating on any specific form of abortion, should be enacting equal protection of the laws for all preborn babies, providing image-bearers of God inside the womb with the exact same protections already provided to image-bearers of God outside the womb.
In the same way that murdering a born human being is prosecuted as homicide, whether that murder happens to be committed with a pistol, a knife, or a stone, murdering a preborn human being should be prosecutable as homicide, whether that murder happens to be committed with suction aspiration, dilation and curettage, or mifepristone and misoprostol.
The specific method of committing murder is not what matters. The status of the victim as an image-bearer of God is what matters. Our laws should reflect that truth equally for both born and preborn humans.
Sorrowfully pro-life organizations have opposed such laws rather than advanced them. Two years ago, more than seventy pro-life groups sent a letter to every state lawmaker in the nation on the same day that the Louisiana House was to vote on equal protection for preborn babies, urging them to instead vote against the bill. Their concern was that the law would permit the prosecution of mothers for the murder of their preborn children, even if the mothers in question willfully choose to murder their children without assistance or coercion from any other party.
Just as the method of murder does not matter, the identity of the individual who happens to be behind that willful taking of innocent life does not matter. Anyone who sheds innocent blood should be penalized accordingly, no matter if they are male or female. We believe this for all other types of murder except when that murder happens to be destroying a preborn baby.
If the current pro-life approach driven by abortion regulationism is allowed to continue, our society will never see the end of legal abortion. We must devote ourselves to the full abolition of abortion, establishing equal protection of the laws for all humans made in the image of God, whether inside or outside the womb, for the glory of God and the love of our preborn neighbors.
