A friend recently sent me a debate about abortion abolition and incremental legislation. Beneath the competing labels was a question Christians cannot afford to answer carelessly: when we cannot yet secure legal protection for every unborn child, may we extend protection by restricting existing permission to kill, without creating a new injustice?
My answer is yes. More than that: where the protection is real, the means are lawful, and fuller protection is presently beyond our reach, refusing to protect those children requires a moral defense. Announcing “no compromise” does not supply one.
The unborn child bears God’s image from fertilization. His worth does not begin when his heartbeat becomes detectable, when he can feel pain, when he reaches a particular size, or when somebody decides he is wanted. The deliberate killing of an innocent unborn child is murder. A parliamentary exception can never make it righteous. Every child deserves protection. Every unjust exception must go.
That is the conviction. Here is the legislative position that follows from it:
I will not create an exception to the child’s right to live. I will not call an existing exception just. But I will not make removing every existing exception the price of protecting a child I can protect today.
Keep that distinction in view. The argument depends on it.
What I Am Defending
The labels are troublesome. “Abolitionist” names an end I wholeheartedly embrace. “Incrementalist” names a method that can serve that end or become an excuse for never reaching it. Neither label tells us enough about what a person will actually do.
I want abortion abolished completely, and I want it abolished immediately. If comprehensive protection can be enacted now, enact it now. A politician who obstructs that protection to preserve a comfortable career in perpetual pro-life campaigning deserves to be confronted, not congratulated.
But wanting total abolition immediately does not give one legislator the votes to enact it. A declaration is not a parliamentary majority. We must answer the question that remains when the fuller measure cannot presently pass.
By scope prohibitions, I mean prohibitions whose legal reach is defined. The killing they reach is forbidden. That boundary limits the law’s present protection; it does not qualify the humanity of the children beyond it. This includes packages expressly retaining existing unjust exceptions. Their continued presence does not, by itself, make my vote a moral endorsement of them.
Suppose the existing law leaves ten children exposed to deliberate killing. A proposed measure would extend effective protection to seven. It would remove no protection from the other three, create no new permission to kill them, and leave the campaign for their protection open. Those numbers are an illustration, not a statistical claim about any particular abortion bill.
I would support that measure. I would also continue demanding protection for the remaining three. They have not become less human because I can presently reach their neighbors.
The objection I am answering is that the measure must nevertheless be rejected because it leaves some children without the protection owed to all. Some people who call themselves abolitionists support certain limited prohibitions and would not make that objection in every case. Good. Then we should identify the actual disagreement rather than use movement labels as substitutes for argument.
My position is that removing part of an existing injustice does not, merely because it is incomplete, amount to authorizing the remainder.
The injustice may predate the bill. The legislator may oppose its continued existence, have tried to remove it, and presently lack the votes to defeat it. His inability to abolish all of it does not automatically make his action against some of it unjust.
Otherwise, the children he can protect become hostages to the parliamentary votes he does not possess.
Existing Exceptions and New Injustice
This distinction needs more than a slogan, because legislation does more than register a politician’s intentions.
An existing law may permit the killing of children under wholly unjust exceptions. A reform may narrow that permission without eliminating every exception. I do not demand that every existing exception be removed in the same enactment before I will support the protection it adds.
That is different from agreeing to create a new unjust exception as the purchase price of a prohibition. It is also different from stripping protection from one group of children to obtain protection for another. Those actions require a defense that “the bill saves lives” cannot provide.
Nor can a legislator wash his hands by saying somebody else drafted the offending clause. A vote helps enact a law. The relevant question is what the law does, not whose fingers were on the keyboard.
We therefore have to read the provisions. Does the proposal actually narrow existing permission? Does it create a new entitlement, broaden an old exception, remove another available protection, or make the remaining injustice harder to challenge? An old exception can acquire a new and more damaging legal force. Calling it “already there” will not answer that objection if the bill strengthens it.
Equally, the appearance of an existing exception in an amended statute does not, by itself, establish that a new liberty to kill has been created. A provision can define the limits of a newly extended prohibition without expanding what the law previously permitted. Whether that is what has happened requires examining the legal change in context.
My position therefore includes supporting a reform package whose text expressly retains an already-existing unjust exception. It is not limited to a clean amendment that leaves the exception untouched elsewhere. I can vote for the package when it withdraws existing permission elsewhere, and the retained exception merely continues its previous legal effect, without creating or strengthening an unjust permission, removing protection, or obstructing further abolition. That exception remains unjust. Its presence in the package does not, by that fact alone, make the protection added elsewhere unlawful.
I am defending a genuine withdrawal of permission and extension of protection. I am not offering blanket approval to anything wearing a pro-life label.
The moral question cannot be settled by the word “exception” alone. Nor can it be settled by the words “saves babies” alone. We need to establish whether the legislator is restricting an inherited injustice or participating in a fresh one.
Once that is established, the remaining wrong must still be named. The resulting legal order remains unjust towards the children it fails to protect. I do not have to pronounce that order righteous to support a measure that makes it less unjust.
I am voting to remove permission where I can remove it. I am not declaring the permission I cannot yet remove morally legitimate.
Romans 3:8 Means What It Says
The strongest objection deserves to be stated properly. The Christian may not do evil so that good may come. Romans 3:8 rules out that reasoning. A desirable outcome cannot turn a wicked act into obedience.
I agree without qualification. There is no escape clause for sufficiently moving photographs, sufficiently large numbers, or sufficiently sincere politicians. We may not deliberately kill one innocent person to save seven others. We may not manufacture injustice and baptize it with the benefits we expect to follow.
But that is precisely why we must identify the act under discussion. Extending protection to seven previously unprotected children, without taking anything from the other three or creating a fresh injustice against them, is not the act of killing three children to save seven.
The three remain exposed to an evil already operating against them. Their danger is real. Our obligation to them is real. Neither fact establishes that the protection extended to the seven is itself an evil means.
“Some injustice remains” and “you have committed an injustice” are different claims. The second needs an argument the first does not supply.
This is also the proper answer to Uzzah. When he touched the ark, his apparently helpful intention did not excuse disobedience to God’s command (2 Sam. 6:6–7; Num. 4:15). We should accept the warning. Good intentions do not sanctify forbidden conduct.
Then identify the forbidden conduct. Where does God prohibit extending protection because the legislator cannot yet extend it universally? That is the point requiring proof. Repeating Uzzah's story does not prove it.
My argument does not depend on a willingness to sin for a good cause. If the proposed vote itself commits an injustice, that is a reason to reject it. But pointing to an injustice the vote does not yet remove is not enough to establish that charge.
There is no need to weaken Romans 3:8. There is a need to stop assuming the very thing under dispute.
The Sin of Leaving the Rescuable Unrescued
The prohibition against doing evil is not the whole of Christian ethics. God also commands us to do good.
James does not permit the man who knows the good he ought to do to hide behind his inactivity: “to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin” (Jas. 4:17). The sixth commandment forbids murder, but its demand reaches beyond keeping our own hands off the weapon. Our neighbor’s life makes a claim upon us.
This is why the burning-building illustration has force. If I can rescue a child without committing a wrong against another, I do not acquire a duty to leave him inside because somebody else is beyond my present reach. My obligation to the child I cannot reach does not cancel my obligation to the child I can.
Of course, an illustration cannot decide whether a particular statute is lawful. If the rescue requires me to push another child into the fire, the case has changed. If the supposed rescue is a publicity stunt that saves nobody, it has changed again. Establish that the protection is genuine and the means lawful. Then the illustration brings the remaining question into focus.
Why must this child wait?
The answer cannot simply be that other children deserve the same protection. They do. That is why I am fighting for them. Their equal worth is a reason to extend protection further, not a reason to withhold it where it can already be extended.
Nor should we pretend that a dissenting legislator necessarily wants children to die. He may sincerely believe the vote would be sinful. Sincerity matters when we assess a person’s intentions. It does not settle whether his moral judgment is correct, or whether an avoidable failure to protect life is harmless.
Refusing a bill is not automatically equivalent to committing the killings it fails to prevent. But neither is refusal automatically innocent. Where a legislator can help secure a lawful and effective protection, his decision to withhold that help also needs examination.
He may have a sound objection to the bill’s wording, effects, enforceability, or consequences for a stronger measure. Let him make it. Those are serious arguments. They belong in the discussion.
“It does not protect everyone” is not, by itself, an answer.
Faithfulness Inside a Fallen Polity
Scripture repeatedly places faithful people inside governments they did not create and could not wholly reform. Joseph served in Egypt. Daniel served under pagan kings. Esther sought deliverance from within a Persian court whose power had been turned against her people.
Their presence does not certify every act of those governments. It does establish that holding office or obtaining protection within an unjust order need not amount to endorsing the whole order.
Daniel’s example contains both participation and refusal. He served, and he would not cease praying when the king’s decree forbade it (Dan. 6). His faithfulness did not consist in blessing Babylon’s institutions or in treating every involvement with them as contamination. He obeyed God within the responsibilities and constraints actually before him.
Esther gives us an especially striking instance. In the narrative, the king’s sealed decree could not simply be revoked. The response was a further decree authorizing Jewish defense (Esth. 8:8–13). The original threat had not vanished from the statute book. Yet obtaining a means of deliverance within that hostile arrangement was meaningful action on behalf of the threatened people.
That is not a parliamentary instruction manual, and it does not resolve every question about an abortion bill. It does challenge the assumption that faithful rescue must wait until the whole governing framework has been repaired.
Rahab and the Hebrew midwives belong in this discussion for the same reason. They acted against murderous purposes and on behalf of threatened lives. Hebrews commends Rahab’s faith and reception of the spies; James names her reception and redirection of the messengers. Exodus explicitly grounds the midwives’ conduct and God’s blessing in their fear of Him (Heb. 11:31; Jas. 2:25; Ex. 1:17–21).
The separate question of deception under murderous authority should not be made to carry this legislative argument. The passages do not require us to construct a doctrine that God commends sin as sin. Still less do they require us to call a protective vote sinful before we can defend casting it.
The relevant pattern is active fidelity to God in the face of threatened killing. The saints did not possess sovereign power over the circumstances. They were nevertheless responsible for what they could faithfully do within them.
Christ reigns now. That conviction gives me reason to labor for the obedience of nations, not an excuse to imagine that their parliaments are already obedient. The kingdom’s advance does not eliminate the difference between the justice we demand and the votes presently available to enact it.
A Christian legislator must never lower God’s moral standard to match his majority. But neither should he confuse the limits of his majority with the limits of his duty to act.
Isaiah Still Condemns Unjust Laws
“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees” is a warning we need, not an obstacle to be explained away (Isa. 10:1–2).
Isaiah’s condemnation cannot be confined to the first person who invented an injustice. An official can renew, strengthen, or enforce oppression he inherited. Nor does the moral force of the passage expire when we leave ancient Israel. Babylon does not receive permission to oppress because it is Babylon.
The question is whether the proposed enactment does that oppressive work. Does it deprive someone of justice or add protection against an existing wrong? Does it establish a new injustice or restrict an old one while leaving work still to be done?
The demand for equal protection is right. A child conceived through rape is no less human than a child conceived within marriage. The father’s crime cannot become the child’s capital offense. A diagnosis does not erase a human being. Neither age nor dependency supplies a moral license to kill.
I will say all of that while supporting a measure that removes other existing permissions to kill. I will continue saying it when the politicians would prefer everyone to celebrate and go home.
The objector may insist that any remaining distinction in protection makes the reform itself discriminatory. But he must distinguish an unjust refusal to extend protection that is within our power from a partial extension obtained against opposition that prevents a fuller one. The fact that the resulting law remains unequal does not by itself establish that the member who worked to reduce that inequality has enacted a new wrong.
I will not settle for less when full protection is within reach. I will not buy protection for one child by stripping it from another. If I surrendered somebody’s existing protection, it would require a different defense. Neither is the case I am defending.
This is also why legislative analogies must be handled honestly. A law conferring a new entitlement to exploit one child cannot be defended merely because it prohibits exploiting several. But a measure withdrawing some previously existing permission to exploit children raises a different question. We cannot settle it by silently moving between granting permission and withdrawing it.
That movement is the very confusion this argument is intended to expose.
What the Reformed Tradition Actually Gives Us
We do not need to pretend that Calvin wrote about modern abortion bills. We have something more useful than an imaginary endorsement: principles by which an actual bill can be judged.
The Westminster Larger Catechism’s treatment of the sixth commandment is particularly direct. Question 135 includes “protecting and defending the innocent” among our duties. Question 136 condemns “the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life”. The standard includes both restraint from killing and positive responsibility to preserve life through lawful means. Westminster Larger Catechism, questions 135–136.
Both parts matter. “Lawful” prevents us from turning rescue into a justification for any means we please. The duty to preserve life prevents us from treating a refusal to act as morally sufficient merely because it is a refusal.
Calvin likewise describes protecting and delivering the oppressed as work belonging to the magistrate. He also warns magistrates against subscribing to impious decrees. Both belong to his argument; neither may be suppressed to make him sound like a convenient member of our debate team. Calvin, Institutes, IV.20.6, 9.
These principles bring us back to the substance of the vote: is it a lawful act of protection, or an enactment of injustice? The fact that the surrounding order remains corrupt does not decide the question. Neither does the legislator’s good intention.
Aquinas’s account of human law adds a useful distinction. Civil law does not punish every vice or exhaust the demands of divine righteousness. But he expressly includes murder among the grave injuries human law prohibits. His argument therefore cannot be used as a ready-made permission to tolerate abortion. It establishes the limited reach of civil legislation; it does not decide which particular limits are just. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, question 96, article 2.
The tradition deserves to be read, not recruited by ventriloquism. We do not strengthen the case by announcing that every major Christian thinker would have voted with us. We strengthen it by showing that the act we defend obeys the principles they actually taught.
The principle at issue here is neither mysterious nor novel: pursue the lawful preservation of innocent life. Do not commit injustice. Do not assume that leaving an inherited injustice partly unrepealed is necessarily the same act as committing it.
Wilberforce Without the Mythology
William Wilberforce belongs in this argument. But he must be allowed to bring his actual record with him.
As early as 1793, he pursued a prohibition directed at part of the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson, his fellow campaigner, records that on 14 May Wilberforce sought leave to introduce a bill prohibiting British merchants from supplying foreigners with enslaved people. He renewed that effort in 1794. His commitment to abolition did not prevent him from seeking a narrower prohibition when the wider objective remained unachieved. Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, chapters XXVIII–XXIX.
The 1806 legislation belongs within that longer history. It restricted British participation in supplying foreign territories with enslaved people, strengthened restrictions concerning conquered colonies, and restricted the fitting out of foreign slave ships from British ports. Its reach extended beyond French colonies. But it was not an immediate, exception-free prohibition within a perfectly sealed category. Several principal prohibitions commenced on 1 January 1807, and the statute preserved expressly defined exceptions and licensed traffic. The text will not submit to a tidier story. Slave Trade Act 1806, sections I–IX.
Nor should Wilberforce’s demand for immediate abolition be erased. In June 1806 he opposed a scheme relying on progressively increasing duties and colonial co-operation. He preferred introducing an abolition bill immediately. Nevertheless, he accepted his colleagues’ judgment that there was insufficient time that session and supported a resolution to proceed with abolition. Urgency and practical judgment operated together in the same man. Wilberforce’s parliamentary speech, 10 June 1806.
The celebrated 1807 Act also needs accurate description. It prohibited the trade within British jurisdiction; it did not generally emancipate the existing enslaved population. Nor was it free of express qualifications. Section VI preserved trading connected with vessels lawfully cleared from Great Britain by the specified deadline, subject to conditions concerning the landing of their captives. Section VII authorized compulsory apprenticeships for certain people seized under the Act. Continued coercion was not simply something about which the statute remained silent. Slave Trade Act 1807, sections I, VI–VII.
Here is a further fact that a tidy distinction between scope prohibitions and gradual reform cannot accommodate. In his reported speech of 15 May 1823, Wilberforce defended Buxton’s aim of “a gradual but total extinction of slavery”. He favored a gradual transition to a free peasantry while insisting that slavery should not continue longer than necessary. This concerned emancipation from slavery itself, not merely prohibiting another category of slave trading. His position cannot be reduced to opposition to every staged reform. Wilberforce’s reported speech, 15 May 1823, columns 287–292.
Necessary implementation and culpable postponement require different judgments. A timetable does not establish which one we are looking at. Wilberforce’s criticism of delaying abolition of the trade cannot be made to condemn every staged approach to emancipation that he later supported. Nor does his support make every such arrangement just. The proposal, its object, and the reasons for its timing have to be examined.
These facts prevent both sides from treating Wilberforce as a mascot. His opposition to postponement cannot honestly be turned into opposition to every partial restriction. His participation in a campaign that secured imperfect statutes cannot honestly be turned into a certificate of righteousness for every provision those statutes contained.
What the record establishes is substantial: commitment to abolition and pursuit of partial reform coexisted in the historical campaign. We cannot claim its moral inheritance while deleting the inconvenient parts of its legislative history.
What the record does not establish is that every concession was permissible. I do not need to defend every provision in an abolition statute to recognize the justice of the abolition it advanced. Neither do I need to pretend that those statutes conform exactly to the limits I have set out here.
Wilberforce helps expose the false claim that taking partial ground necessarily means surrendering the ultimate objective. The morality of a particular modern vote still depends on what that vote enacts. History informs that judgment; it does not replace it.
The Law Teaches, So Tell the Truth
One objection to scope prohibitions deserves particular care. Laws teach. A law protecting children after a developmental threshold can encourage the public to treat that threshold as the beginning of human worth.
That danger should not be dismissed. Law and culture influence each other. A politician can shape public opinion through the categories he includes in legislation and how he explains what he has done.
If he says a heartbeat makes a child human, he is wrong. If he treats the capacity to feel pain as the source of a child’s right to live, he is wrong. If he tells the electorate that abortion before his chosen threshold is therefore morally acceptable, he is teaching a falsehood.
He should tell the truth instead. The child’s humanity precedes this law’s protection. The threshold marks the present reach of the prohibition, not the beginning of the child’s worth. The children still outside that protection remain our neighbors, and the next demand is already being made on their behalf.
Words alone will not cure a badly drafted statute. Both the legal text and its public explanation matter. A measure that entrenches a false entitlement cannot be repaired by a stirring speech outside Parliament. But the possibility of misunderstanding does not mean we must reject every limited prohibition.
We must also ask what the alternative teaches. Leaving a broader permission untouched does not produce a morally neutral public message. The existing law continues to operate and to teach while we debate the possible defects of changing it.
Partial reform can become a resting place. It can also become ground from which further reform is pursued. Neither outcome is guaranteed by the word “incremental”. The conduct of the movement matters.
The answer to a partial victory becoming the final settlement is to refuse to make it the final settlement.
Take the Ground and Keep Fighting
This is what I mean by the posture commonly called smash-mouth incrementalism. Its discipline must be as demanding towards pro-life politicians as towards their opponents.
We press for full protection now. We do not accept a claim that it “cannot pass” merely because an establishment figure finds the fight inconvenient. We test that claim, organize, persuade, expose obstruction, and insist on the strongest lawful protection that can actually be secured.
Where a partial measure is the protection genuinely available, we scrutinize it. A title is not evidence. An announcement is not enforcement. A prohibition on paper is not automatically a saved life. We ask what the measure changes, whom it protects, whether it can operate effectively, and whether it damages another available route to fuller protection.
When it genuinely extends protection without committing a new injustice, we take it. Then we keep fighting for those it leaves exposed.
We do not manufacture exceptions. We do not bless the existing ones. We do not trade away children already protected. We do not promise to stop campaigning in exchange for a smaller victory. And we do not let politicians use yesterday’s vote as a lifetime exemption from tomorrow’s duty.
That last point matters. Incrementalism can be corrupted. It can become a machine for producing speeches, donations, and careers while the promised end retreats indefinitely. I have no interest in defending that machine. A movement claiming to advance by steps must be willing to ask whether it is actually advancing.
But corrupt incrementalism does not establish that every incremental protection is corrupt. It establishes that the people claiming the name must be held to their professed objective.
The same scrutiny applies to those who reject partial protection. They must explain why the lawful good presently available should be refused. They cannot answer every objection by pointing to the purity of the end they proclaim. We proclaim that end too.
Where I Land
The vote I have defended is righteous. Under the precise conditions I have set out, it withdraws permission to kill and extends protection without creating a fresh injustice. I will cast it. An existing exception, even when expressly retained in the package, will not make me abandon the children that measure protects. I will keep fighting until the exception is gone too.
But there is something personal I will not tidy away.
Paul opens Romans 9 with a threefold solemn attestation. He affirms his truthfulness in Christ, expressly denies deceit, and invokes his conscience’s witness in the Holy Spirit. Then he exposes the anguish beneath those assurances:
“For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”
He contemplates bearing exclusion himself for his people’s sake. He cannot accomplish that exchange. Yet he speaks the willingness aloud. His own blessedness does not silence his anguish over their destruction. We should feel the weight of that disclosure before rushing to make it less disturbing. Romans 9:1–3, KJV.
I claim nothing of his stature. But I recognize the anguish that cannot look upon another’s destruction with composure merely because one’s own position is secure. And here is my own exposed confession. I have argued that this vote is lawful, and I believe it. But if I am wrong, if the vote is sin after all, I would cast it anyway. I will not pretend I never said it. I would rather carry a real stain to the foot of the cross than stand before God with my conscience intact and my arms empty because I refused the children I could have protected.
That is my confession, and I must answer for it. If I am wrong, I need forgiveness, not an ethical exemption. Paul’s words give me language for the anguish; they do not make my judgment infallible. I am not asking my vulnerability to prove the argument. I am refusing to conceal it behind the argument.
The argument still stands before my opponent. Show me the new injustice this vote creates. Show me the existing protection it removes. Show me the fuller protection within reach that it obstructs. But do not point to the evil I am still fighting and call it proof that I have sinned by restraining the evil I can reach.
I will take the ground. I will protect the child. I will return for everyone the law still abandons. They are not an acceptable remainder. They are people to whom justice is still owed.
And the child I can protect today will not be required to die to prove that I care about the child I cannot yet protect.
Every child - Every lawful means - Every opportunity - Until the killing ends.
Abolitionism simply cannot defeat this principle: it is always better to save //who// you can //when// you can, always hoping for outright abolition //if the opportunity presents itself//.
Now...how can you explain what happened to 2022 LA HB 813 and Roe v Wade footnote 54?