Brent Leatherwood, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, provoked controversy on Wednesday after he dodged a pastor’s question about his stance on protecting preborn babies from abortion.

The public policy entity faced criticism last year for opposing a bill in Louisiana that would have enacted criminal penalties for all parties involved in abortion, including mothers who willfully participate in the decision. Brian Gunter, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Livingston, Louisiana, pressed Leatherwood at the denomination’s annual meeting on whether he believes penalties against murder should be equally applied to babies outside and inside the womb.

“You have said that you believe a mother should not be criminalized if she willfully chooses to have an abortion while her child is in the womb,” the minister asked during an official question-and-answer period. “Do you believe that same mother should be criminalized if she willfully chooses to murder her child after that child is born?”

Leatherwood responded that the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission believes “abortion is murder” but insisted that “there is a preborn child that is vulnerable, and there is a mother that is vulnerable, too, and she has been preyed upon by a culture of death.”

“We should go after, with the full force of law, the people who actually take the life of that child: the abortionist, the abortion mills, and the drug manufacturers who make the chemicals that take life,” the official continued. “We have to make sure that we’re not doing the bidding of Planned Parenthood, of achieving their goal of casting the pro-life movement and our churches, with our gospel convictions, as anti-woman rather than being about saving babies and supporting mothers.”

The response aligned with a letter endorsed last year by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and several dozen other pro-life entities as the bill in Louisiana faced a floor vote. The letter, addressed to all state legislators in the nation, claimed that “women are victims of abortion” and asserted that “turning women who have abortions into criminals is not the way.”

Gunter said in a statement on social media that Leatherwood “totally avoided” his inquiry and thereby showed his contradictory stance with respect to equal protection under the law.

“My question exposes his inconsistency. If a mother should only be criminalized for murdering her child after that child is born, then the preborn child does not have the same right to life as the born child,” he contended. “All children should be protected from murder. There is no biblical or moral basis to discriminate against preborn children.”

Gunter also noted that the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has prompted more mothers to use abortion pills rather than solicit surgical abortions, particularly in states which have implemented new restrictions on the lethal procedure. “Self-managed abortion is easily accessible for any mother who orders an abortion pill online, has it shipped to her home, and has a self-managed abortion at home,” he observed. “Abortion clinics are illegal in some states, but abortion is still legal for women in all fifty states.”

Drew Byers, the lead pastor of Creekside Fellowship in Castalian Springs, Tennessee, said in comments to The Sentinel that the response from Leatherwood was “very disheartening” and avoided the original question. “I would expect this kind of response from an uninformed, unprepared messenger,” he remarked. “To see it from an entity head was disappointing.”

The exchange between Leatherwood and Gunter occurred on the last day of an annual meeting marked by debate over the allowance of female pastors in Southern Baptist churches. Messengers overwhelmingly voted in favor of decisions to disfellowship Saddleback Church, the congregation founded by Rick Warren which recently installed a number of female pastors, as well as Fern Creek Baptist Church, which has had a female pastor for more than three decades.

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