There is a great deal of noise in the pro-life movement at present, and some observers have concluded that the movement is splitting in two. That diagnosis is mistaken. What exists is not a division so much as a distraction — a small number of very loud voices insisting that any legislation short of immediate, total prohibition is a betrayal of unborn children. The disagreement is real, but it is narrower than it appears: it concerns not whether unborn humans deserve protection, but how a Christian citizen ought to pursue that protection under real political conditions.
Scott Klusendorf, author of The Case for Life, took up that question with Jojo Ruba, a Canadian apologist trained in political science at Carleton University, whose graduate work examined the pro-life movement in Canada, and whose career with the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform and, more recently, Students for Life of America has centered on the integration of law, culture, and public persuasion. What follows is the case they made together.
The Christian’s Political Duty
The argument has to begin theologically, because the loudest critics of incremental legislation frame their objections in explicitly Christian terms. Answering them requires the movement to articulate why it does what it does in both the practical and the theological register — not only for the sake of the critics, but for the sake of supporters and friends who may be swayed by arguments they have not yet learned to evaluate.
The foundational text is Jeremiah 29 — not the verse everyone misquotes about the plans God has for you, which was addressed to the exiles in Babylon, but the political principle that surrounds it. Jeremiah tells a conquered people who despise their captors that they will be in Babylon for seventy years, and that in the meantime they are to seek the peace and prosperity of the city, because as it prospers, so will they. The instruction is not to withdraw, and not to seize power, but to labor for the common good of a society that is not one’s own.
That principle governs Christian political engagement. The Christian’s task is to want the best for the people around him, and to demonstrate that the values he holds genuinely benefit everyone. This is not a program for a theocratic state. It is a program for a society in which ideas can be exchanged and disagreements resolved peacefully — which is precisely what a biblical worldview makes possible. True tolerance and genuine democracy are its fruits, not its casualties.
“You Don’t Trust the Risen Christ”
The most common theological objection runs like this: Christians possess the power of the gospel and the resurrection power that raised Jesus from the dead. If pro-lifers refuse to press for equal protection immediately, it is because they do not trust that power.
The reply is a question. Does the objector have a lock on his front door? If so, does he not trust God to protect his house? Is there a fire extinguisher at his church? If so, does he not trust God to protect his church?
Scripture is full of practical measures that God does not merely permit but commands. Paul instructs the church to conduct its worship in an orderly manner — God could certainly produce an orderly service without human planning, yet the instruction stands. God sends Abraham to the promised land by a route he must actually travel. God brings Israel out of Egypt in stages. God gives Joshua the land through a campaign that moves south to north over years. The pattern is unmistakable, which makes it strange that the objection is applied to the saving of children and to nothing else in the objector’s own life.
The real question is not whether Christians trust God. It is whether they obey Him. Proverbs commands that good not be withheld from a neighbor when it lies within one’s power to do it. A political strategy that consists of waiting for God to act, while declining to use the gifts, talents, and opportunities He has already provided, does not honor Him. It is a theological evasion — one its advocates apply nowhere else.
Who Is Actually Making Babies Wait?
The practical cost of that evasion is severe. Immediatists are prepared to forgo saving children now, through legislation that is achievable, in hope of an idealized future that may be decades away or may never arrive. That is playing poker chips with children’s lives.
Equal protection advocates level the reverse charge: that pro-lifers are making babies wait for protection. The record suggests otherwise. It is the immediatists who refuse to support bills that would protect children today, on the grounds that those bills contain no provision for prosecuting women for murder. The delay is theirs.
Canada demonstrates where that logic ends. The Canadian government was once willing to return abortion to the criminal code. The proposed bill was gravely deficient — it criminalized only late-term abortions and permitted exceptions for gestational and health reasons. But the country’s pro-life political leadership opposed it, in part because it would still have permitted the state to prosecute some abortions, and the bill was defeated in the unelected Senate — not by elected officials, but by two senators. For nearly thirty-nine years since, Canada has had no fetal protections whatsoever. Abortion is publicly funded. At least three of the largest provinces do not record or publish how many abortions they perform or how late those abortions occur. And the one federal party potentially open to pro-life legislators operates under a platform that forbids them from raising the subject at all.
That is the fruit of abolitionist strategy, and it is why the more accurate label is premature abolitionism. Its bills are overturned by courts or repealed by subsequent legislatures because they were never thought through. What pro-lifers should be pursuing instead is permanent abolition: clear strategy, pro-life legislators, and pro-life majorities in the public to sustain them. That is the approach that saves the most children in the shortest time.
The Misuse of History
Immediatists frequently answer that one simply does the right thing and does not worry about timing, and they reach for historical precedent to prove it. The precedents rarely survive inspection. One argued that a small party of patriots pushed the American Revolution forward against an overwhelmingly opposed colonial population — the reverse of the truth, since substantial support for war with England already existed and men like John Adams were working to restrain the zealots from moving too fast. Another claimed the early church fathers demanded legal prosecution of women for murder; in fact they proposed ecclesiastical penalties, not criminal ones. The haste to make the point produces sloppy history.
The broader historical record cuts the other way. Every successful campaign against a great injustice has advanced incrementally — not because God is indifferent to the injustice, but because He works through incremental steps. Why did God use ten plagues to free Israel rather than three, or five? Scripture answers plainly: to display His glory over Egypt and its gods, and to teach a slave people to trust Him. Why did He instruct Moses to ask Pharaoh merely for a three days’ journey to sacrifice, knowing Pharaoh would refuse? Because there are purposes served by the increments themselves.
God could end abortion tomorrow, and any pro-lifer would rejoice if He did. Christians should pray for it. But in the meantime, the duty to help the neighbor one is able to help remains in force.
Triage, Not Consent
The clearest way to see this is through triage. A military medic is trained to save whom he can, when he can. He is not morally responsible for the soldier who dies while he is treating another who is more likely to survive — the wound killed that soldier, not the medic. Yet the immediatist position amounts to standing over that medic, under fire, and berating him for failing to save both.
Klusendorf pressed the point further: immediatists blame pro-lifers not merely for failing to save everyone, but for children they were never in a position to save at all, on the theory that supporting a partial bill constitutes consent to the deaths of those left unprotected.
Consider the Bataan Death March. American forces captured in the Philippines were marched eighty-six miles through stifling heat, and men who collapsed were shot where they fell. Suppose an American officer secured a concession from his captors: ten minutes to get a fallen man moving again before he is shot. Suppose he and his fellow officers then ran the length of the column and got four hundred men back on their feet, while five hundred others were killed. Did those officers consent to five hundred deaths? Plainly not. An evil situation was imposed on them. They were morally accountable for the men they could reach, not for the men they could not.
Ruba’s own family lived inside that history. His grandparents endured the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, their mountain village bombed though it held no military target, and their five-month-old son — his uncle — did not survive the war. The Allies had chosen a Europe-first strategy, concentrating force against Germany while merely containing Japan. That decision extended the suffering of Asians and of Allied prisoners in the Pacific by years. But it was not a judgment about the comparative worth of Asian and European lives. It was a strategic judgment about how to end the war fastest.
All human beings have an equal right to life. No one has an equal right to be rescued at the moment he would choose. This is why “equal protection” is a misnomer as applied to these bills: pro-lifers affirm equal protection without reservation. The dispute concerns the practical realities of a fallen world, not the value of the children in it.
The Charge of Pragmatism
The remaining objection is that all of this is mere pragmatism dressed up as prudence — that the immediatists are the biblical party and everyone else has capitulated.
Self-righteousness is difficult to reach, and the posture is familiar: it resembles nothing so much as the abortion-rights and LGBT activists who refuse to engage anyone outside their own circle of affirmation. The wiser course is to spend one’s effort on those still willing to think, and to press them with a question.
Why did God permit Moses to include provisions for divorce in the law? Jesus answers directly: not because God endorses divorce — He says He hates it — but because of the hardness of human hearts. God legislated into the reality of the people He was governing. If that is not evil when God does it, then accommodating reality is not intrinsically evil. God Himself takes incremental steps.
Pro-lifers want abortion abolished. But permanent abolition has to be built in the world that exists rather than the one imagined. Unless God intervenes miraculously, there is work to do.
The Consequences Nobody Has Costed
If it could be shown that equal protection bills will result in more dead children rather than fewer, would an immediatist be willing to hear the argument? An honest one would have to say yes, because the stated goal is ending the killing — which means the movement is obligated to adopt whichever method actually saves the most lives.
Canada is the testimony. Because its political pro-life arm adopted an abolitionist posture, the country has no abortion law, publicly funded abortion, and more dead children than it would otherwise have. The warning to American pro-lifers is not theoretical.
Then there are the consequences of these bills that their drafters appear not to have traced. In debate, one abolitionist conceded that under his state’s third-party self-defense statute, passage of an equal protection bill would give private citizens the right to shoot abortionists. Few state legislators voting on such bills have considered that. Nor have they considered that public advocacy for abortion might constitute a criminal threat, making arrest of every pro-abortion politician the logical next step. Nor whether retroactive application would require arresting every woman who has had an abortion and every man involved — or whether any state has the budget to do it.
Enforcement has also been overtaken by chemistry. Nearly eighty percent of abortions are now chemical. A natural miscarriage presents medically the same way as a drug-induced one; the drugs cannot be traced in the woman’s body afterward. Prosecuting homicide under those conditions would require locating remains that have already been flushed away. None of this settles whether there should ever be consequences for procuring an abortion. It does establish that the movement has not thought its strategy through.
Prudence in Every Successful Reform
Rushing out ahead of the line has a long and unhappy military history. At Gettysburg, Dan Sickles advanced his corps well forward of the main Union position into the Peach Orchard, was annihilated, and nearly cost the army Cemetery Ridge; only the sacrifice of the First Minnesota saved the day. Foolish gallantry is still foolish.
Successful reformers behaved differently. William Wilberforce repeatedly withheld his general abolition bills between 1800 and 1805 because the war with France had turned public sentiment against abolitionists and the moment was wrong. Lincoln understood that in 1860 there was no appetite even in the North for a war to free the slaves, and he built the support that did not yet exist — carefully, and to the considerable frustration of the abolitionists. It was Frederick Douglass, no moderate, who credited Lincoln with freeing the slaves: not by rash action, but by plotting his steps so that abolition, when it came, would last.
The zealots are never the ones who finish the work. Jesus dealt with the zealots of His own day, men convinced they could overthrow Rome and hold Jerusalem against an empire spanning thousands of miles. They succeeded for perhaps five or six years. Then they were wiped out, the temple was destroyed, the survivors crucified or enslaved, and their people were set back for generations. The theology and temperament of today’s premature abolitionists match that pattern, as they match the zealotry of later figures like Malcolm X — and the result, then as now, is more casualties, not fewer.
The Worst Possible Timing
The American situation makes the point urgent. Deeply red states — Ohio, Missouri, and others — have written abortion rights into their state constitutions. In some of those contests, abolitionists and pro-lifers stood together in opposition and still lost. Two conclusions follow. The movement is not as strong as it believes, which is a real-world constraint that cannot be wished away. And equal protection bills actively feed the narrative that is defeating pro-lifers in these campaigns.
The abortion-rights argument in every one of those ballot fights is that without a constitutional amendment, women will be jailed and denied medical care. To lead, at this precise moment, with bills proposing to prosecute women for murder is to hand the opposition its closing argument. Worse, every state that enshrines abortion in its constitution becomes a state where an equal protection bill is dead on arrival, facing more obstacles than before. This was the abortion-rights movement’s plan for decades: if Roe ever fell, the fight would move to state ballot initiatives. Pro-lifers were watching Washington. Their opponents were building in the states.
Harnessed Passion
There is a better model available, and it comes from Jesus Himself. Among the twelve He called was Simon the Zealot — a man whose hatred of injustice was real, and whom Jesus did not extinguish but equipped, giving him better tools than the ones he had brought.
That is the pattern the movement needs. The culture requires Christians to be good neighbors, because that is how good news travels. To refuse that work out of the conviction that one’s own method is the only permissible method is not zeal for the unborn. It is a failure to love one’s neighbor as God commands.