Pro-Life Voting: Beyond Anti-Abortion, Protecting All Lives

Newborn Baby being held by hands in the shape of a womb. What makes the baby different when it is outside the mother’s body? Image: Isaac Quesada

Single-issue abortion voting is outdated and pointless. There are the other issues Christians should vote on.

In the USA Christians often vote on the single issue of who they think will advance the cause of banning abortion the most. This is perhaps THE major reason why Trump won his first election. Evangelicals believed he would appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court and overturn Roe vs Wade in the process. And, unlike any Republican president before him he did deliver on exactly that. As a result he is seen by many as the champion of the Church, and they turn a blind eye to all the things about him that are very much against Christian values. However, whilst legal changes do have some affect on abortion rates, this is less than you might think due to travel. There is evidence that making social policy decisions may be even more important. Whilst the data is debated (as is often the case) there is some support for the idea that under democratic presidents, who try to look after the poor, abortion rates have fallen faster than under republicans.

If you are reading this and have had an abortion yourself, please know that this it is NOT an unforgivable sin. The gospel offer of forgiveness at great cost to Jesus extends to everyone, no matter what we have done. Just run to him.

Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30, NLT)

A post that did the rounds on Facebook made the following claim:

“Neither party wants to see abortions increase. The difference is in strategy: the Republicans approach of ‘Make it illegal’ vs. the Democrats approach of ‘Make it unnecessary.’ Which is more effective? The numbers speak for themselves.A graphic on U.S. abortion rates shows larger declines during recent Democratic presidential administrations, and says its due to the party’s approach of making abortions unnecessary, rather than the Republican Party’s approach of making the procedure illegal.” Politifact

The post graphic states that the abortion rate (per 1,000 women ages 15-44) declined by the following percentages: Reagan (Rep): 4%, George H. W. Bush (Rep): 4%, Clinton (Dem): 30%, George W. Bush (Rep): 3%, Obama (Dem): 26%. Politifact stated these figures are broadly accurate and said they thought Obamacare health improvements which were associated with with increased access to contraceptives had been responsible for the largest drop. They did acknowledge, however, other factors may be at play here so could not 100% confirm that the party in the White House would have a similar effect going forward. But demolishing Obamacare as per Trump’s planis surely not going to help!

Kamala’s policy of giving new parents financial support, and better access to healthcare including contraception may save many more lives than recent legal changes.

See also my roundup Trump vs Harris article

Trump has in any case now said he will NOT be enacting any more anti abortion policies, and would actually veto any national ban he was presented with. Trump was pro abortion before he was anti it and is now trying to say he is anti making any decisions on it as president. Electing him will therefore make precisely zero difference on this issue. Except that he plans to make getting medical help more difficult, contraception more difficult, and the financial environment for poor people more difficult. All of which may increase the rate of abortions. Policies like that have in the past.

A recent opinion piece in The Hill says,

The most reliable way to reduce the abortion rate is to make life less difficult for people who have babies . . . Harris has strongly supported the expanded child tax credit, which briefly pulled millions of children out of poverty . . . The tax credit increases educational attainment and lifetime earnings, with no discernible negative effect on employment. Harris has long advocated for paid family leave and subsidized child care.

The government policy that has had the most dramatic impact on lowering the abortion rate is Obamacare, which requires health insurers to cover the cost of contraception. Fewer unintended pregnancies means fewer abortions. Republicans remain unenthusiastic about Obamacare, and Trump did what he could to sabotage it.” Read the rest

Meanwhile America’s children will continue to be murdered with assault rifles that are essentially machine guns and those deaths chalked up to being an acceptable cost for the benefit of animal hunters who surely only need a single shot to kill a deer. Kamala Harris will save lives by bringing in sensible gun control laws. Why do Christians not care about that? Or about the risk of escalating war leading to more deaths in other countries in Europe by surrendering to Trump’s good friend, Putin? And of course if you want to be pro life for the whole of life then you need decent free healthcare and Kamala wants to make steps that way whilst Trump wants to allow insurance companies to refuse to insure people like me who have pre existing conditions. This is why I say you are now at the point where American Christians need to accept that there are other pro-life issues to consider than only abortion.

In Roman times abortion and infantacide were common. The early church didn’t try and find a pro life strong man to replace Caesar. They demonstrated and shared the love of Christ and turned the world upside down. Let’s do that. This is the way.

— Adrian Warnock (@adrianwarnock) November 5, 2024

I also believe that there are many aspects of Trumps personality and values that are incredibly unhelpful, and that he has contaminated the USA church with a false religion. So all that that, together with many major policy issues for me actually trumps the abortion issue (pun intended).

In my Trump vs Kamala Harris roundup post I embedded a few podcasts and the links are set to auto update to the latest episode. One of them popped up later that day with an episode all about abortion. To be honest I think it is important for Christians to listen to that episode for two reasons:

It is vital for us to understand how we are being perceived nowadays, and it is not pretty
Some of the things being done in the name of God concerning harassing women who are having abortions bring shame to the name of Christ.

More of all that later in this article. You might want to listen to the podcast now before carrying on reading, but I interact with some of the key points below.

The News Agents: SPECIAL REPORT: A war on women – Florida’s abortion crisis, Nov 1, 2024

As a result of seeing it on my site, someone asked me if my support for Harris meant that I had now become pro abortion, I want to be clear that is NOT the case. However, if I was in the USA I would not vote for Trump.

I still believe a baby inside the womb immediately before birth is no different from the baby when it is outside the womb. I also believe that in most circumstances abortion is morally no different to murder. If you wouldn’t “abort” a baby after birth why would you do so before birth? This lack of a moral distinction between a baby immediately before it is born and immediately after it is born has led some ethicists to say that there should be a woman’s choice to do with what just came out of her body, in exactly the same way as she could do so before the birth. There is no serious evidence of “post birth abortion” actually happening in the US or anywhere else I am aware of. However, more than ten years ago ethicists in the BMJ Medical Ethics Journal seriously and chillingly argued that what they call after birth abortions should be legal whenever an abortion in the womb would have been. The Daily Mail commented on this:

“Doctors should have the right to kill newborn babies because they are disabled, too expensive or simply unwanted by their mothers” Mail Online.

The Mail article goes on to point out how this argument fatally undermines the case for abortion itself:

“I’ll come to why her argument is so important in a moment. First, the facts steel yourself – this is grim. Francesca Minerva, from Melbourne University and sometime of our very own Oxford, and her colleague Alberto Giubilini, argue in the British Medical Journal that after-birth abortion should be permissable in all cases that abortion is. As potential persons, newborn babies share the same moral status as foetuses, which are not actual persons, in that they have no sense of their own existence.It follows that infanticide should be legalised for babies with abnormalities not detected during pregnancy, which would otherwise have qualified for abortion, and by the same token for those which would have been aborted because their parents could not materially or psychologically cope with a child.I suggest that most people reading the previous paragraphs will resile from that proposition in disgust and disbelief. But why? If newborn babies havent developed any material consciousness beyond what they had in the womb, why not dispose of them in the same way? In this context, the term-limits for abortion of foetuses seem entirely arbitrary, based on the squeamishness of we who are born rather than the actual or potential humanity of the unborn.”

via Killing newborn babies is perfectly logical – thats the problem | Mail Online.

As I said it earlier we need to understand that society as a whole is guilty for setting conditions that leave women feeling they have no choice but to have an abortion. We need to make it easier for women to choose NOT to abort their child. Social conditions need to be changed. Judgement needs to be reduced. If you attend a church that would kick out of its membership a young woman who gave birth before being married then do not be surprised if even church kids choose to abort any pregnancies. Why do so many Christians condemn single mothers? You are condemning the parent who stayed, the parent who chose to make sacrifices for another life not just during pregnancy but for the rest of their lives. We need to celebrate motherhood in all its forms, and understand that life is not always as tidy as we want it to be.

In Roman times abortion and infantacide were common. The early church didn’t try and find a pro life strong man to replace Caesar. They demonstrated and shared the love of Christ and turned the world upside down. Let’s do that. This is the way.

— Adrian Warnock (@adrianwarnock) November 5, 2024

As I said earlier, I am not in favor of abortions. Like most people I do have some excemptions to that, one obvious one being when a woman’s life is at risk from an unviable pregnancy. As an example, a pregnancy can develop in a fallopian tube rather than the womb itself. Without surgery to remove the developing baby, that tube will burst and the mother and baby will both die. It would be immoral to not act in such a situation, as you are simply terminating a life that would otherwise die alongside a second life that your intervention has saved. Once you have made that allowance, of course there are then important medical questions about just how bad does the mother’s health need to be before you can act? These dilemmas are facing doctors in the USA right now as some states seem to have somewhat bodged the job of passing laws about exactly when they will and will not allow abortion to take place. There have been deaths caused by indecision related to legal jeapody under the new legal climate. This is tragic.

As one Floridian explained on the podcast episode I mentioned earlier abortion is almost completely illegal in Florida now:

“There are exceptions, but they’re very narrow and very limited. It’s to create this environment where doctors are uncomfortable providing care, even when a woman’s life is at risk. So we’ve had situations where patients have had to become more sick, where the doctor will provide them care, and situations where patients have had to leave the state of Florida in order to access that care that they need . . . And we had a situation with a woman in Brevard County, which is a very conservative county here in Florida, and she had an ectopic pregnancy that no doctor was comfortable diagnosing because they were fearful of being wrong in their diagnosis. And she was forced to travel to New York to access this termination. And those stories are becoming ever more common . . .And so doctors are not going to risk it. They’re just going to pass the patient to a different doctor. They’re going to maybe send the patient back home to bleed out before they’ll provide them with abortion care . . . We’re seeing women die from infection and hemorrhage. Recently, there was a case in Georgia where a woman spent 20 hours in the hospital and died without getting the DNC that would have saved her life.” The News Agents: SPECIAL REPORT: A war on women

There are lots of other exceptions that some people who are in general pro-life and anti-abortion position might add. I could debate each and every one here, but that would be a long . I am increasingly convinced that we need to learn from the other side says and how they see the issue. I wish that Harris would say something like “we want there to be the need for as few abortions as possible and we aim to make it so that a woman doesn’t feel forced to do this“. Is it really pro choice when abortions are done for financial reasons because the support is not there? What about when disadvantaged groups feel they cone under even more under pressure, and when planned parenthood is widely understood to have begun as an explicitly race cleansing exercise?

It was good for me to listen to a podcast from the other side and see how Christians come across on this issue.

These quotes from how they introduced the episode are quite punchy:

Journalist: “You’re saying that if your brother has sex with his sister and impregnates her, that that woman, and that that woman should be forced to bring that child to term and bring up that child . . .And that woman should live with the trauma of that day after day, bringing up that child. But shouldn’t that be her choice? Okay, maybe she’ll want to do that. Who the XXX are you to tell a woman who has been abused, sexually abused by her father or her brother or her uncle that she must, why would you punish that innocent woman by making her have that child?”

Guest: “It’s awful. But the child is a gift. He deserves to go to jail. But that child is a gift. The child’s value is not dependent on whether his father is a rapist.”

Journalist: “That is the sound of zeal. The sound of a small man, like many small men who have had an outsized power over women’s lives . . . We came to Florida and it became clear very quickly that there is one issue above all which is shaping politics here. The right to choose. The right for women to have autonomy over their own bodies in the land of the free. What you’re about to hear is shocking. Abortion casts the darkest pall over the Sunshine State.

But as big as it is, it is itself part of something even bigger. A redesign of social life in this state from the radical right. A set of ideas which are transforming American life, which could be a harbinger of a politics to come. Something close to a theocracy in all but name. Welcome to this special episode of The News Agents.”

The podcast episode is well structured and is a piece that is far from neutral. But they do a good job of exempting the background, all the time revealing their own progressive biases:

“The repeal of Roe was to become the holy grail of Christian conservatism, a litmus test for right-wing credentials. It would slowly consume and transform the Republican Party. It became one of the central axes of American politics, a dividing line between Democrat and Republican.”

One area where I agree with them is the rather deceptive role of some “Crisis Pregnancy Centers”. By all means offer something to help women feel able to proceed with their pregnancies and gives them support. But let’s not lie for the sake of trying to prevent abortions from happening. They explained:

“Crisis Pregnancy Centers, also known as fake abortion clinics, according to critics, or Pregnancy Resource Centers, are these often predatory facilities that are run by church groups or religious nonprofits that exist solely to convince pregnant people not to seek abortion care or to otherwise offer so-called alternatives to abortion. But they often pose as actual abortion clinics, and at least one-third of them in Florida, there’s about 160 compared to 50 licensed abortion clinics. About a third of these fake clinics receive state taxpayer funds . . . And a couple of ways they do that is by using very sophisticated marketing tactics online. Or they will specifically choose locations that are nearby actual abortion clinics to confuse people. Or they will have terms in their name, in the name of the facility, like choice or choices, leading people to believe that if they go to this facility, they will actually be offered choices when that’s not the case . . . it’s important to mention too that these fake abortion clinics are not licensed by the state as medical facilities, which means they are not regulated as medical facilities in the state. They are not required to have licensed medical professionals on staff. Despite often offering services such as ultrasounds or pregnancy tests or STI testing. So, you could be going into one of these facilities and getting an ultrasound from somebody who does not know how to actually properly handle that equipment. . . .I know this sounds unbelievable, incredible, but it is true. These centres’ websites really do look as much as if they are offering medical services relating to pregnancy. They’ll have names like Choices or Women’s Centre and there are lots of people who say they’ve been fooled by them and claim these organisations have tried to shame them, giving up their personal information, something which is denied by the organisations themselves.” The News Agents: SPECIAL REPORT: A war on women

Since when is it acceptable for Christians to do harm so that good may result?

Another disgraceful thing going on is these clinics often offer the so-called “abortion pill reversal treatment” to be taken if a woman regrets taking the first of two pills for medical abortion. This is unproven, unlicensed, and known to be dangerous:

“That means that the literal state is paying for these clinics to provide an untested, experimental, potentially dangerous treatment, which could result in harm or worse to women or children born with birth defects. Something that we’ve been pretty disturbed by when looking into this is this situation that you have with these sort of what their opponents at least call sort of fake abortion clinics . . . So the state of Florida has empowered these extremists to lie to women, to share misinformation, and not just in the context of reproductive care, but also in the context of vaccines, in the context of LGBTQ plus identity. It has just become a cesspool of fanatics committed to spreading as many lies as they can to divide us, to distract us, and to make life harder for people in these situations. . . It’s not just that it’s bad speech and dangerous speech and leading to really risky health outcomes, but it’s publicly backed. It’s publicly endorsed. Many politicians serve on the boards of crisis pregnancy centers. So it’s been embedded into our political system, and it’s disgusting . . . It’s truly disgusting. And the challenge is that we’re dealing with a state that prides itself in spreading misinformation. As we’re talking right now, the state of Florida has spent more than $17 million on anti-abortion television ads.” The News Agents: SPECIAL REPORT: A war on women ”

It is obvious that the journalists reporting on this issue live in a different world than many US Evangelical Christians, even as they tried to qualify their criticism it was clear how deep the divide was. And that divide is getting deeper in the USA as they come to vote tomorrow.

“Again, it isn’t that people are pro-life. That is a perfectly legitimate point of view. I respect it.

We all respect it. But that is separate to what we’re dealing with here. Because what we’re dealing with here can only be described as a deeply misogynistic ideology, which has taken root among a minority of the US population with massive consequences for the majority.

And that misogyny, that casual willingness to make women walking wombs, basically, with no regard for their will or their welfare, has become embedded in the organs of the state itself. It feels like an inquisition. It feels like a theocracy in a republic which was founded on liberty.

And I didn’t think that anything could make the election itself feel small. But somehow, though deeply connected to the election, this issue does. Because whoever wins, whatever happens, that thinking, that zealotry, that energy, for want of a better word, built over decades, that isn’t going anywhere.”