Abolitionists and equal protection advocates hold that the law’s real teaching runs through the statute itself. Get the right words on the books and the nation learns the right lesson. On this account, a bill that protects some children while leaving others unprotected writes a lie into the public conscience, and the need for legislative victories is beside the point.

The opposite claim is that the law’s real teaching runs through its victories. Which of those is true settles most of the rest of this argument. If law teaches the way the first claim requires, then the content of a bill matters more than its effect, and refusing to sign a partial protection is an act of integrity. If it does not, the position loses its floor.

The Schoolmaster Is Not the Statute Book

The argument arrives in various iterations, and it usually leans on the phrase from Galatians that the law is a schoolmaster, a pedagogy, an instructor. Part of the trouble is hermeneutical confusion. Paul is referencing the law of Moses, the law that brings the revelation of sin and brings us to Christ. Nobody thinks the right legislation in a nation results in the conversion of that nation, so the principle cannot be applied that way in the first place.

The second problem is that pastors and good Christians are teaching all the time, through their action, their love, and their grace. A bruised and broken woman comes to a pastor and says she needs to receive Jesus, and then says that she has had abortions. He can find a delicate way, truthfully yet graciously, to tell her that the act was a sin against God, a horrific and hideous thing, and that grace is sufficient to cover the worst of sins and sufficient to cover the worst of sinners. That is pedagogy, and no statute performed it.

So the abolitionist overstates the case, and he overstates it on a presumption: that any law which is not perfectly the law of Moses, not perfectly the law of God enshrined and codified in Torah, amounts to national failure. That is never going to be functional. It is never going to be actualized in a modern secular nation, or even in one as Christianized as we might want ours to be. Until Christ comes and reigns perfectly, presently, and directly, we do not live in that kind of state enforced Christendom, and political ideologies that assume otherwise create a great deal of dissonance in the conversation.

Whose Covenant Are We Legislating Under

Abolitionists want to bring the law of God, by which they mean the Mosaic law, to bear on the current secular state. That is a confusion of covenants almost entirely. We do not legislate under Sinai. We legislate under Romans 13.

Scripture keeps giving us godly people in compromised situations who are blessed rather than rebuked. Rahab in Jericho. The midwives in Egypt. They are encouraged and complimented on their godliness, and in compromising circumstances they make sure they are honoring God as they ought to honor God. Esther is the clearest case. We all believe our Bible says that marrying an unbeliever is a sin, that it is being unequally yoked, and yet you find nothing in the record of Esther that chastises her for marrying Ahasuerus. Nothing at all. The story simply presumes that God elevated her to that position of queenship, rule, power, and influence in order to preserve the remnant of Israel in Persia, and most people accept that as a prima facie reading.

When excessive moralizing overtakes the hermeneutic, we lose the ability to read that nuance. What is it like to be a midwife in Egypt? What does that compromised scenario require of me in order to honor God’s will and his grace and preserve the lives I can preserve today? Those are the questions in front of us, rather than the ones that assume we live in a glorified Christendom and are re-establishing the theocracy of Israel in the modern day.

The Bill on the Desk

Put a question to an equal protection advocate. If we could end abortion in twenty years with a smashmouth approach, or in a hundred years with an abolitionist strategy, which should we choose? The answer comes back without hesitation: the abolitionist one, even though it takes eighty more years. Press him. You would let these children die for an additional eighty years? Yes, because the results are not up to me. The results are up to God. I have to promote the biblical justice principle.

Now rephrase it. You are the governor of a state that has passed a bill banning abortion from conception. A federal law is in place making chemical abortion pills controlled substances, available only by prescription from a pharmacy after a medical visit. The bill bans abortion from conception but does not stipulate that you can prosecute women for murder. Do you sign the bill and save the babies, or do you refuse because you cannot prosecute the women? Again no hesitation: I am not signing the bill to save the children, because ultimately my goal is justice, biblical justice, not saving the children.

There is a distinction worth making carefully here. A legislator, a parliamentarian, anyone in that kind of leadership authority should not sign a bill that codifies lawlessness or codifies sin. That is not what is being defended. But if the offer is a bill that outlaws all abortion from conception and simply does not yet carry the stipulation that those who commit abortions are criminalized as murderers, you sign it, and you say that the one signed today is the wedge to achieve the second. That is how laws work. That is how legislation works.

Refuse, and it is not only counterintuitive. You do not get to achieve the outcome you set out to achieve. There is almost a fatalism in it, a sense of not really believing you can effect any change at all, so you posture the change you think you ought to be actualizing and tell God you will wait a hundred years for ultimate abolition while the millions of babies who die every year on the way there are a worthy sacrifice. You were the moral upstanding person. You held the moral high ground. And it resulted in dead babies.

The other position wants babies saved. It wants all humans saved from murder, from dismemberment, from destruction, and it will fight worthily to get as many as it can today with no allowances. It does not say that only so many babies may be saved while the law codifies the killing of the rest. But if there are babies who can be saved now, they get saved now, and you come back for the rest tomorrow. Legislation snowballs. Once one law is in place it brings the next bill, the next order, the next debate to the parliamentary floor.

Are You Israel?

The biblical objections come next. What you are advocating is Uzzah touching the ark when God forbade it. It defies Isaiah 10. It defies the equal weights and measures that Scripture demands.

The response is a question. Are you Israel? Are you Judah? Are you reenacting Judah? Are you re-establishing the old covenant as the theonomic law of the land? Is that what you are doing?

Obviously what Uzzah did was sin. He profaned the cultic restriction around how God is to be approached, and God allows no negotiation or improvisation in the way he asks us to approach his throne. The only reason we Christians have any right to approach it with confidence is that Christ is the perfect mediator. But when Christians read their Bible, especially the Old Testament, and start reading themselves into the text as though they are the characters, the heroes, the personalities, they fail to recognize that they are in exile. You are in Egypt, a slave. You are in Persia. You are in Babylon. You are not in Judah.

Unequal weights and measures are immoral everywhere, and that is an easy thing to concede. But the way in which I correct unequal weights and measures differs with where I stand. A prophet in Judah can articulate that truth with the glory and the will of the Lord behind him. In Persia I have to move through the stated apparatus available to me.

What Isaiah 10 Actually Condemns

Here is the text. “Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, who write misfortune, which they have prescribed, to rob the needy of justice, and to take what is right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.”

The initial context is speaking to “my people.” The identification is already there in the text. This is Isaiah speaking as a prophet to the people of Judah, who had begun to indulge in the lasciviousness of the nations around them. Good reformed Christians who love their Bible will have a laugh at the more superficial Christian types who want to apply Jeremiah 29:11 to everything, and this is not much different. It is the same move: overinterpreting, and assuming a role in the text.

On the substance there is agreement. No bill should be voted in that says we kill babies. The bill to sign is the one that says we save the babies who are available to be saved today, and that is a different thing. That is not decreeing unrighteousness. The objection that unrighteousness implicitly flows from it runs into the fact that they are already dying. A certain scope is available to be saved today, and the rest are what tomorrow is for.

The evil structure was inherited. It was not written by the man signing the bill. What Isaiah condemns is those who write evil into law, not those who work to regulate or limit an evil they are powerless to abolish.

Moses Regulated What He Did Not Abolish

The Mosaic law did not in every case abolish evil. In many cases it regulated it. Divorce and remarriage is the most explicit example, because Jesus says Moses wrote it knowing the hardness of his audience’s heart. The word of God is very clear that God hates divorce, and that has to be said knowing that some who hear it have been through that horrible experience. But Jesus also says that what the Mosaic law came and did was to mitigate its own ferocity against that immorality in order to accommodate hardness of heart. That is his account, not a layer of eisegesis. In that instance the Mosaic law was plainly not there to exhibit the perfect will of God in every circumstance.

Other examples run the same direction. The Mosaic law would clearly regard slavery as evil, and it regulated it: Hebrew men could take slaves of foreign nations, just not Jewish citizens. It regulated prostitution, where a Jewish woman could not be hired but a foreign one apparently could. None of that makes the practices right. It shows a law that tolerated and regulated them.

Those examples are sufficient to show that the idea that there is no room for limiting evil, and that we must wait until perfection is achievable before we regulate anything, is deeply problematic.

Gradualism Is Not Scope Incrementalism

This is where the biggest confusion in the debate sits. People apply the label gradualist, and it needs refusing. Gradualism, even as Wilberforce articulated it, was clearly an acceptance of an extended deadline pushed indefinitely into the future. That was not Wilberforce’s policy. His policy was to take what he could get today and be back before dawn tomorrow for whatever else he could get. There is a tacit acknowledgement in that of how slowly the wheels of a political establishment turn.

A gradualist bakes the delay in. He hardwires it into the approach and grows content with the slow moving wheels. He gives ground here, takes ground there, concedes in one place and advances in another, and calls the trade progress. That is definitional of compromise, and Christians do not need to be that way.

Scope incrementalism, or the smashmouth approach, takes what is on the table today, comes back and fights hard tomorrow and every day after, and never settles into the belief that gradual is optimal. In countries like Australia and America, with legal systems built the way theirs are, real battles can be fought with voting power, lobbying power, legislative power, and the courts, and real victories can be won. The alternative accepts a process that pushes change off as far as the eye can see and further.

Prudence Is Not Consent

Between 1800 and 1805 Wilberforce pulled back his general abolition bills because political conditions were not right for them to be received favorably. Britain was at war with France, abolitionists were viewed as being in cahoots with the French, and pushing then would have had a detrimental effect. So he held them back. Ask abolitionists whether that was compromise and no answer comes, only a restatement that we need to be biblical.

Lincoln did the same. He withheld the Emancipation Proclamation until the Army of the Potomac won a partial victory at Antietam in 1862. Forget the South. Northerners were not on board with abolishing slavery, and he had to work incrementally and prudently to bring it about. No less an abolitionist than Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln, in memorializing him, that were it not for the president’s prudence in carefully bringing along his fellow countrymen to support abolition it would never have happened. He had to bring along the majority of his fellow citizens or the thing was dead in the water.

None of this requires believing that Lincoln was satisfied with that approach. It requires only recognizing that the situation he was in called for that kind of diligence. The wars with France, which spilled over into another American war in 1812, mystified and convoluted the circumstances and gave Wilberforce a sense of pause. He was still grieved that people were shackled in slavery, still grieved that the trade was making a roaring killing for the companies that indulged in it.

Set against that the alternative, which is to prove at the end of the day that your hands were clean, unlike Rahab, unlike the midwives, who did have to offer some degree of compromise in the compromised circumstances they were in. Every day of the week and twice on Sunday, do what Rahab did, given her courage by God’s will. Do what the midwives in Egypt did, given theirs. All of these people were complimented in Scripture, blessed, granted grace. The midwives in Egypt were given houses by God. There is a blessing for those who engage the warfare in front of them, fight valiantly, take the victories available, and press on.

The indolent alternative leans back and says that if the perfect outcome is not on offer, if Jerusalem is not coming down from above to recreate the nation in the image of the heavenly city, then discontent is the only honest posture. No nation becomes the heavenly city until Jesus comes back and revival sweeps the land. Until then there are babies to save.

Lincoln and Wilberforce can both be understood as absolutely committed in principle to full abolition while practicing incrementalism to limit the evil on the road to it. There is no need to choose one strategy or the other. Both can be practiced at once.

Partial Bills and What a Law Can Actually Do

Equal protection advocates insist that partial bills, heartbeat bills, parental consent and the rest, teach bad lessons and put premises into law that affirm evil. Some of them do. Some are poorly drafted. Some include caveats and nuances that should not be agreed to, and nobody should be asked to defend all of them. What can be defended is saving whatever category of lives is available to be saved right now.

Consider how much the way legislation is written actually accomplishes. Some Australian states had anti-abortion laws, completely anti-abortion laws, until very recently, and you will struggle to find a case where anyone was prosecuted going back to the seventies or eighties. Queensland is one, and it is a conservative state, the Australian equivalent of Texas. New South Wales has a similar story. Those are two of the biggest states in the country, full of people who consider themselves willing to stand for what is right and virtuous.

You have nothing from a law unless you have police with investigative powers, prosecutorial effort, and judges willing to hand down sentences that begin to curtail behavior. There is an overassumption about what the power of law can do. When someone claims that the law is a teaching device and that people will learn the wrong lesson from a partial bill, ask him how many laws he knows by heart, and then how many of the ones he knows are the quirky ones. Australia has plenty. Some states still have strange rules about behavior around horses in the middle of the street, and there have been no horses in the middle of the street since 1910. American books carry the same residue from the eighteen hundreds, never repealed because nobody sees them as relevant.

The goal is all abortion illegal, police forces equipped and funded to investigate, prosecutors bringing cases, judges handing down sentences. But those stages have to be worked through incrementally, because the stages are themselves incremental by nature. Abolitionists have built a utopia in their minds that they believe is only a few years off, and that idealism hinders progress rather than helping it.

You Have to Bring People With You

Political defeats teach lessons too. Bills that continually get voted down because the culture will not support them do not teach the right lesson either.

The charge that comes back is that this is a seeker friendly pro-life position, waiting for popular opinion to break your way before doing anything courageous. What it denies is that you have to bring the culture along with you at some level to have sustainable, enforceable laws.

In any constitutional democracy, any democratic republic, the majority vote swings real power. Most of the Western world does not get a sense of how dramatic it is to live in the United States under competing ideologies at both the federal and the state level. Texas and New York sit about as far apart culturally as either sits from Australia. These nations were established to hear the voice of the people and to give the people their will, and that apparatus has a process to it. If you are not bringing the people along to understand the virtue and the morality of preserving life in the womb, the most innocent and vulnerable human life there could possibly be, then you have a major cultural problem, and it deserves some of the energy currently going elsewhere.