The accusation arrives in a familiar form. You make the case that it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being, that abortion does precisely that, and that abortion is therefore wrong. You defend each premise with science and philosophy. And then a fellow pro-lifer informs you that you are not serious, because you never used the word murder.
Scott Klusendorf has been on the receiving end of that charge, leveled online by a pastor who supports equal protection legislation. So has Jay Watts, who spent nearly eight years as a speaker at Life Training Institute before founding Merely Human Ministries. Neither man uses the term in his case for life. Both have reasons that have nothing to do with cowardice and everything to do with the job an advocate is actually there to do.
An Atheist Who Changed His Mind
Watts came to the issue from the other side. Through college he was an atheist, and closer to nihilism than to any belief system — he did not think objective moral values existed, only power dynamics acted out politically and in communities. On that view, human beings were merely material, and there were no real rights and wrongs.
His conversion to Christianity came through reasonable investigation rather than emotional decision, and its implications reached abortion immediately. If there were intention and design behind human life, if there were a creator interested in it, then human beings were more than merely human — a phrase that would eventually name his ministry. On the night he became a Christian, one of the first things that occurred to him was that he had been wrong about abortion.
His second thought was that he wanted nothing further to do with the subject. Conversations about abortion, in his experience, brought out the worst versions of everyone involved. The topic carries an identity charge — people can be offended over an insulted movie, let alone a deeply held belief — and it carries enormous moral weight on top of it. He asked God, if requests were being taken, to be spared ever having to discuss it again.
What followed was not a man dragged kicking and screaming into pro-life work, but a slow transition from being positionally pro-life to being convicted. The gap between what he believed and what he did — a few animated remarks at the water cooler, in the face of destruction on that scale — became an oppressive guilt. That conviction sent him to his local pregnancy center, where the first thing he did was plan a banquet with Klusendorf as the speaker.
Klusendorf’s own story runs on a parallel track. He was attitudinally pro-life as far back as he can remember, and did nothing about it until he saw an abortion video that Greg Cunningham played. It ripped him to the core, and he changed vocations because he could not live with himself if he stayed silent.
Abortion remains the most pressing life issue in Watts’s work for a straightforward reason: something like fifty percent of the population of the United States approves of it. Asked once at a school why he does not spend his time on child sex trafficking instead, he pointed out that fifty percent of Americans do not defend child sex trafficking. On that, everyone agrees. Abortion has to be fought at every level available precisely because a significant number of people think it is a good thing.
Three Questions for Every Word
Greg Koukl’s Tactics opens with the most useful question in any difficult conversation: what do you mean by that? Watts turns it back on himself before he ever reaches the podium. If he uses the word murder, what does he mean by it? How will the audience receive it? What will it mean for the rest of the conversation? There is no way to know in advance — which is itself the problem.
So he applies three tests to any term he introduces. Does it clarify? Does it confuse? Does it complicate?
Clarity is the whole point of definition. Two people cannot have a true disagreement until both sides agree on what the terms mean, and a good word cuts through the mess of the discussion to a point where the disagreement is real. Confusion is the opposite: the audience hears one thing while the speaker means another. Complication is subtler — the word may be understood correctly and still drag in a set of other issues that were not on the agenda.
By that measure, murder fails twice.
Homicide, Yes. Murder, Complicated.
Watts does not soften the description of what abortion is. One human being causing the death of another human being is unavoidably homicide — there are only four ways to die, and suicide, accident, and natural death are not among the options here. He does not shy away from killing, and he does not shy away from homicide.
Murder is different because it straddles two categories at once. It has a moral meaning and a legal meaning, and one of the most common mistakes in the abortion debate is confusing the moral with the legal. What is morally clear in a biblical sense becomes considerably less clear once the legal machinery is switched on: first degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, felony murder, intentional homicide. Those distinctions matter, and audiences already struggle to keep the two categories apart. Introducing a term that bridges both invites the confusion rather than resolving it.
Then there is the audience itself. Something like one in five or one in four women will have an abortion during the course of her lifetime, which means seventy-five to eighty percent will not — an encouraging fact in its own right, and a reminder that support for the practice runs well ahead of participation in it. It also means that in any room, people know someone who has had an abortion, and more likely than not, they love someone who has.
An advocate has perhaps thirty or forty-five minutes and a Q&A. He can use them to make a strong case for the objective evil of abortion. Or he can use them to make that case and ask the audience to accept, in the same sitting, that their mother, their sister, or the friend they drove to the clinic is a murderer. That is a heavy load to introduce, and it will not help anyone persuade.
Klusendorf’s version of the argument is more economical. He would rather establish facts than shout conclusions. Defending the claim that abortion is murder is extra work; making the case that abortion is wrong puts the burden back where it belongs, on the other side.
He put the scenario to his pastor critic directly. Two speakers address a hostile audience. The first shows images of abortion, presents a syllogism, and defends it with science and philosophy. The second takes the podium and shouts that abortion is murder. Who moved the room? The answer he received was that the second man did, because he followed God.
The Gospel and the Job at Hand
That answer points to the deeper disagreement, which is not really about vocabulary. A certain kind of critic holds that unless an advocate leads with the gospel, he cannot change hearts, because the unregenerate cannot recognize morality — and that the culture must be converted evangelistically before it can be converted on abortion.
Both Watts and Klusendorf preach the gospel at every opportunity, and neither makes any secret of being a Christian. But when a pregnancy center or a campus group brings Watts in, evangelizing is not the assignment. His job is to communicate the truth about abortion as cleanly and clearly as he can, in order to move people from one position to another — or at least to open them to the possibility that the pro-life view is reasonable and that they are less settled than they thought.
He is not much troubled by whether the audience is upset. He expects to offend; there is no inoffensive way to tell people that abortion is a great moral evil, and when images are involved the intent is to prick the heart and disrupt the pattern by which listeners have been seeing the world. A young woman in Michigan told him that when listeners get upset, she sees an opening for pastoral care. That is fine, he told her — but that is a different job.
Sometimes the person across the table is genuinely unmovable. That is not a wasted exchange, because the room is watching, and the exchange itself can show that the other side cannot account for the human experience, particularly for equal human dignity. Prudence means knowing who the customer is: not the stubborn opponent, but the audience observing the argument.
As for whether unbelievers can recognize right and wrong, the evidence keeps arriving unbidden. Tina Whittington of Students for Life of America once described the abortion discussion as a gateway drug to the gospel, and both men have watched it work. They speak to a largely secular student body for forty-five minutes, take an hour of questions, and afterward a teacher brings over the sharpest and most difficult students in the school. Almost every time, what those students want to talk about is not abortion. It is God.
The mechanism is not complicated. The students know the speaker is a Christian, because he told them so plainly even though he never argued from Scripture. They also heard him argue in a way that was respectful, rational, and — as they frequently say afterward — not at all what they expected. Having found the view defensible, they become curious about the man defending it.
Staying in Your Lane
One more discipline governs all of this, and it applies well beyond terminology. Watts once advised a rising young speaker that he did not need to comment on everything on social media, and that it is entirely acceptable to stay where you actually know something.
He applies the same standard to critics. He finds Texas legislator James Talarico particularly frustrating, not merely for arguing that abortion is compatible with Christian faith, but for offering supposed biblical support — Numbers 5 among the passages routinely tortured into service — while simultaneously disclaiming any expertise or serious research on the subject. If someone has not bothered to become informed on one of the most morally important issues of the age, they should not speak publicly about it as a moral authority.
That is not a high bar. It is roughly the same bar Watts sets for himself before he opens his mouth on a platform: know the audience, know the goal, know what each word will do once it leaves the podium.
The charge that refusing to say murder is a failure of nerve gets the situation exactly backwards. Shouting a conclusion is the easy thing; it costs nothing, persuades no one, and leaves the advocate feeling better about the strength of his language. Establishing the facts and forcing the other side to defend the killing is harder work, and it is the work that actually rescues children. The word is a personal privilege. The case is the job.
Watts writes an Ethical Apologetics column for the Christian Research Journal, with recent pieces ranging from Reinhold Niebuhr to artificial intelligence to Yuval Noah Harari, and his ministry work is at merelyhumanministries.org. He was also one of the reviewers of the second edition of The Case for Life — a shrewd set of eyes on the manuscript, and one of the people who helped refine it.