How to be pro-life when a 12 year old is pregnant
Arming ourselves to be able to defend the pro-life position effectively necessarily involves facing tough questions, especially those relating to the “hard cases”. These are some of the toughest situations to deal with, not just because they elicit strong emotional reactions but also because they can seem, on the surface, to raise serious moral complexities. This emotional weight and perceived sophistication make them formidable as criticisms to anyone who would care to disassemble the pro-life position. Consider, for instance, a heightened circumstance that one of our recent letter writers recently depicted: an 11 or 12-year-old girl who is pregnant, most likely the victim of some horrific crime. How can the pro-life position offer a principled but compassionate response to such a sorrowful circumstance, one so often used to destabilize the very principle that it is morally reprehensible to deliberately kill an innocent human person? This article examines how to approach the perceived difficulty and respond suitably to such powerful objections.
Initial Thoughts: The Inquirer vs. The Crusader
Whenever we are faced with a challenging case question or objection, it is always wise to begin with initial thoughts regarding the person questioning. Not a question of their name, but a question of who is questioning – that is, whether he is an inquirer or a crusader – is extremely crucial, as the way we respond to him will be entirely different.
An enquirer is someone genuinely in the process of arriving at the pro-life view and on the brink of being able to appreciate its moral basis. They recognize that it is morally wrong to intentionally take an innocent human person’s life and that abortion does precisely that. But they are engaging in an inner psychological conflict in applying this moral basis to a hardcase case. They can perceive an nuance they are struggling to reconcile with their initial emotional response.
A crusader works under a completely different dynamic. They have no interest in the subtlety or the differences of your argument. They are not trying to understand. Their only aim in bringing up the hard case of the pregnant 12-year-old is to make you appear bad and win the debate by making you out to be an extremist. They use the hard case as a form of argument to try to put you in an impossible position or to elicit an uncompassionate response.
Distinguishing Complexity: Psychological vs. Moral
This brings us to a key distinction we must make: the distinction between psychological and moral complexity.
Psychological depth occurs when we know a right and wrong, like the wrongness of knowingly killing innocent human beings, but can’t get the truth of it into synch with the strong emotional feelings provoked by a hard case. Learning about a 12-year-old pregnant girl, especially one who is an assault victim, should shatter your heart. And if it does not, something is seriously amiss. We empathize and sympathize with her pain and with the pain that her family would necessarily also endure. This is completely just; it is recognition of pain and hardship. This emotional response creates psychological complexity due to the fact that we struggle with the moral truth and our intense feelings of sympathy.
Moral complexity, on the other hand, differs. It occurs when there are two real ethical values which clash and we must choose whose value is morally more important under these given circumstances. The given example of it is if you are secreting Jews in Poland during World War II when Nazis arrive at the door inquiring if you possess them. You have a moral obligation to respond truthfully but also have a moral obligation to save innocent lives. While this specific historical context is less complicated than it appears to be, it does capture the type of situation in which moral ideals would seem to clash.
Most importantly, merely because we feel sympathy for the 11 or 12-year-old girl does not mean that there is no objective moral principle operating. Psychological subtlety, developed out of our natural and appropriate emotional response to suffering, doesn’t undermine or alter fundamental moral facts.
Shaping the Hard Case Question: Does Misfortune Make Homicide Justifiable
When we arrive at the issue of the hard case of abortion, that is one like the pregnant 12-year-old, we can bring the moral image into clarity by posing one simple fundamental question: Is this a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human person?
Applied to this specific case, the question is: Is difficulty an excuse for murder? Is the fact that this pregnancy will definitely cause severe difficulty to the 12-year-old girl an excuse to intentionally kill the innocent human life in her womb?
When stated in this straightforward way, as a defense of actively killing an innocent human being, the alleged moral delicacy which is generally asserted in favor of this practice tends to dissolve. We may see clearly to the right conclusion. Stating the question in this way forces us to confront the fact of what abortion is: the deliberate killing of a human child.
Think of the analogy: Would it ever occur to us that it’s okay to intentionally kill a toddler who is making it tough for someone? We wouldn’t say, “You can kill your six-year-old as long as it simplifies your life.” We wouldn’t think it right to “put out the life” of a newborn baby whose 13-year-old mother is struggling to care for the child just in order to make her life easier. The same fundamental ethical logic applies. We do not have a moral green light to actively destroy an innocent human life in order to make our lives easier. The principle still applies even when the circumstances are irrefutably difficult and cause vast psychological distress. Willfully killing an innocent human life just because the mother is young and the pregnancy is a burden, as long as that burden is not threatening to life, is poor moral argumentation.
Hard Cases Involving Threatening to Life
And then there is the question of threatening to life that does arise in hard case arguments. Assume that the pregnancy truly is threatening to end the life of the 12-year-old? That would require scrutiny. If, in fact, pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, we handle this question case by case as we would handle any pregnant woman. There are, in fact, situations in which pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, and one instance is ectopic pregnancy. In those instances, two human beings will typically be lost if the pregnancy is not ended. The child cannot be saved because of the site of the implantation, and the mother will die from internal bleeding.
A good doctor, of course, wishes to save both patients – mother and child. But consider, in a genuinely life-or-death case, only one can be saved and that is the mother. There, by the above pro-life syllogism (Premise 1: It is wrong to deliberately kill an innocent human; Premise 2: Abortion deliberately kills an innocent human; Conclusion: Abortion is therefore wrong), we are not referring to abortion as defined. The difference lies in the adverb “deliberately.”. When a doctor acts to preserve the mother’s life in a highly life-critical case where the child cannot live (as in an ectopic pregnancy), he does not act with intent to kill the child. He can foresee that the child will be killed, as the child cannot be preserved by current technology and will die nonetheless, but his purpose is to preserve the mother, the only life he can preserve. This is the highest moral good he can do in the circumstances.
This is the line of demarcation between intending death and foreseeing death. In abortion, the intention is to bring about the death of the human child. In a medical procedure to save a life where the death of the child is an unintended but inevitable by-product of saving the life of the mother, the intention is different.
Going back to the case of the 12-year-old girl, we have to consider: is the threat to her life, or to her health? “Health” has been defined so loosely that it can be used to justify nearly any abortion, including psychological health, economic health, or family health. These do not justify killing an innocent human being intentionally. But what of a real threat to the mother’s life?
Other than ectopic pregnancy, we can also reason that the 11 or 12-year-old’s body is too immature to carry a full-term child, or that it would be too traumatic to move a full-term child through her pelvic canal. The second argument is that abortion in such a case is morally justifiable. Do we have to kill the fetus deliberately, however, to save the mother today in medicine? There are other medical options available, such as a C-section to remove the child prematurely before their growth actively puts the mother’s life in jeopardy. While still potentially risky to the mother, premature delivery of the child via C-section is an option that does not involve actively killing the child. We should seek out such options that end the pregnancy without active killing.
A questioner, upon hearing these differences – between moral and psychological nuance, between suffering and threat to life, and between intending and foreseeing death – would necessarily begin to see and to think about them. They would come to understand the moral reasoning that you can’t just deliberately kill an innocent human person to prevent suffering.
Handling the Crusader’s Objection: Using Hard Cases as a Tactic
A crusader, on the other hand, works under an entirely different set of dynamics when making the hard case. They don’t care about your argument’s distinctions or nuances. They don’t want understanding. Their only concern in making the hard case of the pregnant 12-year-old is to make you appear bad and win the argument by portraying you as an extremist. They use the hard case as a rationale to try to place you in a position you can’t maintain or an uncompassionate response.
The way to handle the crusader is to bluff call. Glare them in the eye and say: “Okay, let us suppose that we allow abortion for any 12-year-old who is pregnant regardless of the reason. If we agree on that, will you now sign on to oppose all the other abortions that have nothing to do with 12-year-olds?”
By experience, the speaker describes how 100 percent of the time the crusader will respond with no. Their “no” assures their real position: that abortion is an intrinsic right which must be accessible for any reason. They weren’t actually upset at the pregnant 12-year-old; they were using her situation to hide behind their more extreme view that abortion shouldn’t be limited at all. They were hiding behind the victim to make you appear uncharitable. By calling their bluff, you expose their true position and demonstrate that the hard case was not actually a question but a rhetorical ploy.
The general question we are left with, either for the inquire or the crusader (although the crusader avoids it), remains: Would this be a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being?
Standing Firm on Pro-Life Principles in Challenging Instances
That speaks to a broader question of distinguishing between fundamental principles and issues of prudence. That we may disagree on the wisest legislative strategies or the best timing of particular bills, particularly in a challenging political environment, these are credential questions we can debate with one another in good faith. The principle that it is always morally wrong to take the life of an innocent human life in the womb, however, is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate away this core truth. The crusader attempts to employ the hard case to push us toward compromise on this very principle.
It is necessary to prepare ourselves to grapple with these hard questions and hard objections. It requires learning to be able to distinguish psychological and moral nuance, seeing through the delicacy of medical care as opposed to outright killing, and aware of the tactics of the most difficult situations not taken to seek truth but to score a point. It allows us to present the pro-life position persuasively without being unprovoked and intolerant. We must be firm in insisting on the reality that the life of the unborn, like that of any innocent human, must be preserved, even under the most hardcase of circumstances.
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.
Hi friends, delighted to have you with us today on The Case for Life program where we aim to equip you to defend your pro-life views persuasively, whether in discussions in the public square, online, or with friends over the water cooler. Today, I’m going to jump right to the mailbag because we got a very good question from Jay. And Jay writes the following. Scott, I have a burning question for you to answer on your show. How do you respond when someone asks about abortion for a pregnant 11 or 12year-old girl?
I understand there should be consequences for whoever is responsible for that pregnancy, but should the child be expected to carry the pregnancy to term? Fantastic question, Jay. Thank you for submitting that. I always like to begin these questions with a couple of preliminaries. And the first question I ask myself is this. Who is asking the question and by who I don’t mean the name of the person but what I mean is it’s going to be one of two people that raises this question either an inquirer or a crusader and how you answer them will be entirely different based on which type of person you’re talking to so an inquirer is someone who genuinely is trying to learn what you think about abortion and they’re trying to understand your position and they’re actually starting to grasp the moral logic of the pro-life view.
They’re getting it that, hey, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. They’re grasping the moral logic of the pro-life view. That’s the inquirer. However, the inquirer is having a psychological difficulty applying her pro-life logic to a hardcase scenario. And so she’s finding a complexity there. Now I want to distinguish a second question here and that is we need to distinguish between moral complexity and psychological complexity. If you hear about a 12-year-old girl who’s pregnant, let’s say she got raped, she’s pregnant.
If your heart doesn’t break, something is wrong with you. I question your humanity. Of course your heart breaks for that girl. Of course you want the best for her. And of course, you feel deeply the pain she would undoubtedly feel on this. You at least sympathize with it. Even if you can’t obviously fully experience her pain, at least you can have empathy for what she’s going through and what her family’s going through. In that case, we have what’s called psychological complexity.
You have a moral principle in play here that we shouldn’t intentionally kill innocent human beings, including those in the womb. But you’re struggling to reconcile that moral truth with the emotional feelings you feel as you psychologically connect with this girl and give her the empathy she deserves. Okay, that’s psychological complexity. Moral complexity is different. That’s where we have two moral principles colliding and we have to decide which of the two gets greater moral weight. For example, you live in World War II.
You live in Poland. The Nazis knock at your door and they say, “Are you hiding Jews?” And you’ve got a Jewish family hiding under the rug beneath your table. If you tell them the truth, which is something we ought to do normally, the Jews are going to die. If you don’t tell them the truth, the Jews live, but you’ve misled the Nazis. And the question becomes, how do you resolve that? It’s a complex moral dilemma. It seems it’s actually not, but at least that’s the framework for it.
So, of course, what you would do, as I would do, is you’re not going to tell the Nazis the truth because they don’t deserve it. They’re going to use the truth to commit evil against innocent people. And when two moral principles collide, that of being truthful, which we ought to do in almost every case, and saving the lives of innocent human people that will be solved or excuse me, will be sacrificed if we tell the truth. We give greater moral weight to the principle of saving innocent lives than we do telling the truth to evil men who will use it to perpetrate evil.
Okay? So that’s the difference between moral complexity and psychological complexity. Just because we feel sympathy for this 11 or 12 year old girl does not mean that there’s no objective moral principle in play. And every time we come to an issue of the hard case on abortion, we can simplify the moral logic in play by asking this question. Is this a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being in this case? Does hardship justify homicide? Does the fact that this will be a hardship for the 12-year-old girl justify intentionally killing an innocent human being?
And once you frame it expressly as a justification for intentionally killing an innocent human being, the moral the alleged moral complexity tends to evaporate. And we can see through to what the right conclusion should be. And in this case, is it okay to intentionally kill an innocent human fetus simply because he will provoke a psychological pain on someone? And the answer is, of course, no. We wouldn’t kill a toddler who is causing someone to face hardship. We wouldn’t say, “Okay, you can kill your six-year-old if it makes your life easier.” Now, there could be a case where you say, “Okay, but wait a minute.
In this case, what if the 12year-old is facing a lifethreatening situation by being pregnant?” Okay, now we need to look at this a little deeper. If that were the truth, if the pregnancy is indeed threatening her life, notice I didn’t say health, which has become broadly defined to where you can drive a Mac truck through it. Psychological health counts, economic health counts, family health counts. I mean, the list goes on and on by those willing to perform the abortion to justify a health related abortion.
But what about a genuine threat to the mother’s life, in this case, the 12-year-old? Well, we’re going to handle that question as the way we would any other pregnant woman. And we would say that there are indeed times where the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. Ectopic pregnancy being one example. If you don’t end the pregnancy in most of these cases, you will lose two human beings. You will lose the child who we can’t save anyway because he has implanted himself on the inner wall of the fallopian tube rather than the uterine wall and then you will lose the mother who will die from an internal hemorrhaging as that pregnancy grows in her fallopian tube and that narrow tube bursts.
Now a good doctor will of course try to treat both mother and child in this case. Treat both his patients. But suppose he can’t. Suppose the only life he can save is the mothers. In that case, we’re not dealing with abortion. And here’s why. Remember our definition of abortion that we put forward when we gave you our pro-life syllogism in episodes past. Premise one, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Premise two, abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
Conclusion, therefore, abortion is wrong. Now, notice in premise one, we have very carefully defined abortion as the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Actually, we do that in premises one and two. And the point you need to grasp here is this. When a doctor intervenes to save the only life he can, in this case where the mother’s life is threatened by the pregnancy, he is not performing an abortion because he does not intend the death of the child in the womb.
He can foresee that death, but he doesn’t intend it. And by the way, in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example, he doesn’t have an option of saving the life of the child. We don’t have the technology to do that. He only has the ability to save the life of the mother, which is the greatest moral good he can do given the circumstance he’s been dealt with. Now, let’s go back to the case of the 12year-old in this situation. Is the threat to the mother life or is it health?
If it’s health, the physician should manage the pregnancy. If it’s life, we need to ask this question. I get ending the pregnancy to save the mother’s life where the death of the child is foreseen but not intended. But is there a case medically where we have to kill the fetus to save the mother? How many cases in medi in medicine today is it necessary to intentionally kill the fetus to save the mother? Now what usually happens in this case is people bring up well as that 11 or 12 year old girl gets late into pregnancy her uterus can’t sustain the child growing into the final stages and certainly that’s going to be a very traumatic event for that child to pass through her pelvic cavity.
Therefore abortion is justified. Well, wait a minute. We do have other options such as a C-section to remove the child early before the growth of the child directly threatens the mother’s life. Why would we have to intentionally kill the child to save the life of the mother when there could be an option of ending the pregnancy that does not involve intentionally killing the child? So that needs to be looked at. This is not a simple easy thing. Oh, yeah. Abortion’s just fine because the 11 or 12 year old girl can’t sustain the pregnancy.
Well, even if that were true, there could be options of a C-section birth, delivering the child early so that we don’t subject the mother’s body to a risky birthing process that would come if the child went full term. I get all that. Now, if you answer this way to the inquirer, she is at least understanding the moral logic you’re putting in place that you can’t just intentionally kill an innocent human being to avoid hardship. But if we’re talking about ending a pregnancy to save the mother’s life, even early in the pregnancy when the child can’t survive, by the way, the child isn’t going to survive anyway in the case of ectopic pregnancy.
So removing the child does not subject the child to any more of a risky environment than he would have had had he stayed in there. He’ll die in the womb. He’ll die if we remove him. But at least in this case, we save the life of the mother in the process. The death of the child is foreseen but not intended. With abortion, we both foresee the death of the child and we intend it. That’s the point of the abortion, to intentionally kill the human offspring of the mother.
So, what we want to do here is say the inquirer would begin to recognize these distinctions and would at least be able to make sense of them and ponder them. But when you’re dealing with a crusader, a whole another dynamic is in place. The crusader is not interested in the nuances of your argument. He is not interested in listening to how you might adjudicate between a good option, a morally acceptable option in this case and one that is not. His only concern in raising this case of the 12-year-old being pregnant is to make you look bad.
He wants to win the argument by painting you as an extremist. So, you’re going to take that away from him by calling his bluff. And here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to look him square in the eye and say, “Okay, let’s say that we allow abortion for any 12-year-old that’s pregnant.” And whether it’s a health threat, life threat, doesn’t matter. Any 12year-old girl who’s pregnant, either through forcible assault, or through consensual sex, whatever it might be. Although, we could make a good argument that there is no such thing as consensual sex with a 12-year-old.
But let’s play along for the moment. We’ll grant that any 12-year-old that’s pregnant can have an abortion. Will you now join me in opposing all other abortions that have nothing to do with 12 year olds? Let me tell you what’s going to happen when you call their bluff. 100% of the time, and I do mean 100%. 100% of the time the crusader is going to look at you and say, “No, I won’t help you oppose other abortions because abortion is a fundamental right that should be available for any reason the woman wants.” Okay, stop right there.
If your real position is that abortion is a fundamental right, that means it can never be infringed upon. There can be no restrictions on it at all. Why don’t you argue for that extreme position rather than hiding behind pregnant 12-year-olds who are victims and trying to disguise what you really believe by hiding behind them? Call their bluff. And remember, the thing you always want to do is ask this question. Would this work as a good justification for intentionally killing an innocent human being?
Suppose we’re talking about six-year-olds who are a stress on a 12-year-old parent. Would it be okay to or I should say a let’s say we had a toddler, a one-year-old who had a 13-year-old mother? That’s a better way of putting this because 12-year-olds typically don’t have six-year-old children. I need more coffee today. But you do not you do not think it’s okay to kill a one-year-old whose mother happens to be 13 is and is having a hard time raising the child.
We don’t think it’d be okay to snuff out the life of her newborn in order to make her life easier. And the same moral logic would apply here. We do not have a moral green light to intentionally kill an innocent human being to make our lives easier. So, that’s how I would answer that. I think that 12-year-old pregnant girl deserves the finest medical care we can give her. She deserves to have a great medical team in place to help her through this as well as support that can come from pro-life Christians at pregnancy centers and physicians that are Christian who care about loving their neighbor, including this 12-year-old girl, I think that’s all very important.
But to say it’s okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being simply because the mother is young and simply because the pregnancy will represent a hardship to her that is non-life-threatening. I don’t think that’s good moral logic and so the life of the unborn should be protected even in those cases. Well, Jay, thank you for that question. That’s excellent. Thank you for raising it. We’re going to take a break on this episode of the Case for Life Show. When we come back, I want to talk about something troubling that happened this week and the lesson that pro-life leaders and activists need to learn from it.
I’ll look forward to seeing you right on the other side of that break.
Hello friends, welcome back. Great to have you with us. If you haven’t already done so, please visit our websites. We have a pro-life course there called Prolife 101. And in just one week, 7 days or seven sessions, however you want to do it, you can master the fundamentals of the pro-life position and learn how to answer the tough questions like what we deal with on this show. I encourage you to go do that. Again, look for the Prolife 101 course and sign up and take that.
It’ll equip you to make a good case for your pro-life views wherever God opens a door for you to do so. All right. Before the break, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about something that was troubling that happened this week. And let me just say upfront, I’m not going to name names because it doesn’t matter in this case, but a situation came out in the news. And if you know who I’m talking about, I’m not going to direct my comments at this person directly.
Instead, I want us to learn a lesson here. But it came out that a particular Christian leader who had had some influence in pro-life circles, principally among the abolitionist types that think there should be no exceptions except a bill that bans all abortions outright and anything else is compromise. This particular Christian leader was removed from leadership for ethical violations. And that’s all I’m going to say about it. Because my interest here is not about piling on him. He has repented. He has said that he recognizes the gravity of the sin he committed and I believe him and I believe the biblical injunction in this case is very very clear.
You restore such a one to fellowship once they have confessed their sins. Whether they are restored to ministry. That’s a question for his leadership team to take up and the elders of his church that he’s working with. I don’t have any comment on that. But I want to talk about this. We want to be gentle in not judging people who sin because all of us are very close to falling ourselves. And quite frankly, if we’re honest, if every thought we’ve ever had was laid bare publicly, none of us would be qualified for ministry.
So my point here is not to pile on, but I do want to point something out. This particular Christian leader had been a friend of mine. In fact, I had been involved in events that he had orchestrated pro-life events. And I thought we had a good relationship until about 3 years ago or so when he sent me a message asking me to support a piece of legislation that I had credential reasons for opposing. And this particular piece of legislation was crafted in such a way that I knew the press and hostile politicians and our adversaries on the other side would be able to exploit against pro-lifers and would harm our efforts to actually save children from abortion.
It was a piece of legislation that made it very clear that we were to prosecute women for murder who had abortions. Now, we’ve talked on this show about laws and consequences, and yes, there should be consequences for intentionally killing an innocent human being, but there is a credential question that comes into play about how we ought to structure penalties in a in a post Roie Wade culture, in a culture that has for 50 plus years been told that abortion is a positive good and that women who choose it are doing what’s best for themselves and their families and their society. As journalist Kathis once pointed out, abortion is good for everyone.
It helps families, it helps communities, it helps women. And that has been the mindset of our culture. Abortion is not only permissible, it’s a positive good. And millions of our fellow citizens believe that. And they believe that pro-lifers want to see women die or if not die rot in jail being charged with murder. Now, I’m not here to argue that there should be no consequences. I think I’ve already made that point. But there’s a credential question to be asked. I think it’s a very good thing to pass laws right now that protect all unborn humans from conception forward.
Absolutely, let’s do that. But prudence is required when we talk about what should be the penalties legally for having an abortion once it’s restricted in a state. And is it prudent for pro-lifers to push legislation that will be presented to the public as bills designed to incarcerate women for murder and maybe even give them the death penalty. I mean, after all, a murderer could be subjected to the death penalty. And the press is going to spin this in ways that are very harmful to our efforts to save children.
And if our primary goal is to save kids, pardon me, if our primary goal is to save kids in the womb, we don’t want to do things that are going to present pro-life efforts in a bad light and harm our efforts to save those children. Now what happened was this particular Christian individual who we who I had been friends with and I thought we had a solid relationship with did not take kindly to me trying to explain that now may not be the right moment to in introduce a bill like he was proposing. And I pointed out to him some historical examples.
For example, William Wilburforce withheld his abolition bill on slavery during the beginning stages of the French Revolution where many members of the British public thought that abolitionists like William Wilburforce were behind the insurrections going on and were actually siding with the French and therefore abolitionists were painted in very bad light and Wilburforce prudently pulled back his abolition bill when he saw that it had zero chance of passing parliament and actually to introduce it at that point would have only harmed their longerterm efforts to free all slaves. So Wilburforce was prudent. He wasn’t compromising his principle that all slaves deserve to be free, but he was willing to take an incremental step of saying, “I’m going to pull back my view and hold it for more favorable times, when it will get a more fair hearing.” And I think there’s room for pro-lifers to disagree and have vigorous debates over when is it appropriate to introduce a particular bill, when is when is the best time to do that, where it has the best chance of passing and helping efforts in other states.
There’s a good faith to a good faith discussion or debate if you will to be had among pro-lifers and I’m all for that. And I am thankful for friends of mine. I have some friends in the abolitionist movement who have been very even-handed, very fair-minded, and they have brought points of view to the table that I have not initially agreed with, but maybe tempered my views a little be because of their input, and maybe they’ve tempered their views a bit because of mine.
And I think that’s all good and healthy. We can have that debate and that strengthens the movement. But this particular leader did not go that route. He did not propose a good faith discussion. He instead questioned if I really believed in the sufficiency of scripture and did I really trust God or was I trusting on man’s logic. In fact, he even went so far as to say, “You’re just using human reasoning rather than biblical truth.” And I just found that very strange.
It poisons the well because it doesn’t engage the argument I was making. It just attacks me for not being a biblically grounded Christian. And I would say to us as pro-lifers, we’re going to have to learn to do what theologian Carl F. Henry talked about. We need to learn to triage our beliefs. There are some things we need to divide over as Christians. For example, a so-called Christian who denies the divinity of Christ, denies that Jesus is the only way to salvation, denies that he rose from the dead, is not a Christian I can fellowship with because they’ve given up too much.
They aren’t Christian in what they believe. They’re now something else. A so-called pro-lifer who says, “I want to protect some children in the womb, but not all of them. I want there to be abortion services available for women who face health threats or maybe were impregnated through rape. I don’t think we should protect rape children. Okay, that’s someone compromising on principle. But a pro-lifer who says I want to protect all children, but I realize the political environment we’re in right now may not allow me to do so.
So, I’m going to work to limit the evil done as much as I can and promote the good as much as I can while I remain committed to protecting all children. That’s not compromise. That’s prudence. And I think we as pro-lifers need to be very careful. And I hope the lesson learned from this tragic fall of this Christian leader I’m talking about right now. I hope the lesson learned is not that we gloat over someone who we disagreed with running into a buzzsaw.
That’s a very unbiblical and uncharitable and an uncrist uncristian way to look at this. Instead, we need to examine our own hearts. Am I blowing people off just because they disagree with me on a matter of prudence rather than principle? And we need to become adept at distinguishing the difference between credential questions we should have a good faith debate about and principles that we can’t compromise on. I can’t compromise on the principle that it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being in the womb.
I’m not going to compromise on that. However, I may compromise legislatively if I don’t have a favorable political environment to advance protection for all unborn humans. These are things we as Christians need to become more comfortable at doing. We need to let iron sharpen iron and attribute to our the people we’re debating and conversing with good motives, not the worst possible motives. Thanks for joining us today. Let’s go out there and together love our fellow pro-lifers. Let’s debate them. Let’s not aim to destroy them.
We’re on the same team. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you for joining us today.