The argument between abolitionists and incrementalists has become one of the loudest fights in the pro-life world, and one of the least careful. It runs hot online, where the production values are excellent and the legal understanding is thin, and it has been recruiting young reformed Christians who are told there are two camps: the people who want abortion ended and the people who are content to manage it. That is not what the disagreement is about. Everyone in this conversation wants every child in the womb protected in law. The question is what Christians are supposed to do on a Tuesday morning in a fallen country with a legislature, a court system, and a police force that were not built with the image of God in mind.

Two Words That Need Defining

Smashmouth incrementalism is the phrase that has caught on, borrowed from American football and popularized in the blogosphere. Scope incrementalism is the better term, because it says what is actually being claimed. We take whatever ground is available today. We do not retreat from ground already taken. We come back tomorrow for the next yard, and the next, until there is nothing left to take.

That is not the classical incrementalism that gets criticized, and the distinction matters. Classical incrementalism is a posture of trade: concede here to gain there, write the exception into the bill, accept a statute that codifies protection for some children by naming in law the children who may still be killed. Scope incrementalism drives a wedge into an opening and then widens it. It never writes the exception as a permanent settlement. It treats every gain as a floor rather than a ceiling.

Criminalization Is Not Abolition

Here is the sleight of hand that needs naming. Abolition is promised. Criminalization is what gets delivered, and the two are not the same thing.

Suppose the most ambitious version of the plan succeeded tomorrow and abortion were criminalized in every state in the union. The morning after, pills still arrive in the mail. Women still travel. Suppliers still ship from jurisdictions that have no interest in American statutes. The illegality of heroin has not removed heroin from America. Australia maintains some of the strictest border and quarantine controls in the Western world, an island nation that inspects everything crossing its perimeter and spends enormous public money doing it, and drugs still come in from Thailand and Indonesia and India. A law is a statement about what a society will punish. It is not a force field.

None of that is an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument against promising something no legislature can deliver. When advocates tell Christians to stop giving to pro-life organizations because only their approach will produce true abolition, they are asking people to fund a guarantee that cannot be honored this side of Christ reigning over every heart. That overpromise is a large part of why the movement has not gained the following in evangelicalism that its advocates believe it deserves.

Everyone Is an Incrementalist

This is the point that irritates people most, and it is simply true. Even total legal protection in one country leaves the practice untouched across most of the world. Protecting every child in every Australian womb would be worth celebrating, and we would celebrate it, but calling it abolition would be a category error.

Wilberforce understood the difference, which is why he is quoted so often by people who have not looked closely at what he actually did. After his absolutist bills failed again and again, the measure that finally passed barred British participation in the slave trade with foreign territories. It liberated no one directly. It was a wedge, and it was the wedge that made the following year’s momentum possible. He knew the rules of the game he was required to play. He built coalitions. He was honest about where he was going and honest about how far the current bill would get him.

Whose Country Are We Legislating In

Underneath the strategy dispute is a hermeneutical one, and it explains more of the disagreement than either side usually admits. When an advocate quotes the prophets against a modern parliament, he is assuming that his nation stands where Israel stood before the exile. It does not. The posture that fits our situation looks more like Daniel in Babylon, Mordecai and Esther in Persia, a Christian citizen in first century Rome who wants the best for an empire he does not control.

This changes nothing about morality. Context does not determine right and wrong, and nothing here is situational ethics. What changes is which promises we may claim and how we engage systems that are already evil, already entrenched, already responsible for millions of dead image bearers. Augustine had this settled long ago. Our citizenship is in the city of God. Our daily negotiation is in the city of man, a place of sin and licentiousness that we push back against wherever we are given the chance to stand up.

A Statute Can Die Standing Up

A law on paper achieves nothing without a police force willing to investigate, a prosecutorial body willing to assemble evidence, and a magistrate willing to hold someone accountable. There are Australian states where abortion is on the books as illegal, and finding a prosecutor or a judge who will act on it is another matter entirely. Precedent based systems in Australia, Canada, and North America run on case law and prosecutorial discretion, not on the text alone.

Now add the practical problem. Roughly eight in ten abortions in the United States are now chemical. The drugs arrive by mail. In the woman’s body they present exactly as a natural miscarriage does, and they cannot be traced afterward. Ask an advocate how a homicide statute would be enforced against that, and the answer that comes back is that we do not need to answer the question, we only need to be faithful to Scripture. That is a disappointing response from people who are otherwise serious. Faithfulness to Scripture is the shared premise, not the disputed one. The disputed one is whether a bill that cannot be investigated, prosecuted, or adjudicated moves the needle at all.

There is a prudential judgment here as well. Pressing bills that expose women to homicide prosecution is premature while deep red states such as Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Montana are still writing abortion into their own constitutions. The North Star can be shared while the roadmap is not.

Outcomes Are Not Optional

The most surprising development in this debate is having to defend the claim that saving children matters. Told that the goal is not more babies saved but the glory of God and the establishment of His justice, one hardly knows where to start. Every Christian can say that about everything, which is exactly why it settles nothing here. Morality has outputs. It has consequences. A person who says he is indifferent to whether children survive his strategy has removed himself from the abortion debate and entered a different conversation, one about texts and hermeneutics that can be had another day.

Notice too that nobody lives this way anywhere else. The same people insure their cars, lock their doors, set a PIN on their phones, and do not leave a bank card sitting on the checkout counter. They employ means to secure ends all day long. It is only when the outcome in question is the survival of the unborn that the pietistic reflex appears and results are declared beneath us.

That is the honest definition of pragmatism, and by that definition every effective person is a pragmatist, including the preachers who rail against the word. Choosing means suited to a real world in order to obtain a predictable good is not a compromise of principle. It is stewardship.

Whose Child Pays for Clean Hands

The charge is that incrementalists play God by deciding which children live and which die. The charge does not survive contact with the actual choice. We are not selecting who is available to be saved. We walk into the situation as it exists, rescue everyone within reach, and come back at the earliest possible moment for the rest. Allied soldiers moving through Europe did not leave the first camp locked because the others were still standing. They opened the gate in front of them, fed those prisoners, treated the wounded, and kept marching. Nehemiah built with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.

Here is the moral accounting as plainly as it can be put. The incrementalist tolerates an evil he presently cannot prevent. The immediatist refuses to prevent an evil he could prevent. The second man has not preserved his innocence by refusing partial protection. He has purchased it, and someone else’s child paid. Treating living children as chips wagered on an idealized future that may be decades away, if it arrives at all, is the compromise in this debate, and it deserves to be named and rebuked with the wisdom of Scripture and with grace.

The Coalition Problem

There is a strategic verdict here as well, and it is being delivered at the ballot box. Ask around a typical congregation what an equal protection advocate is and you will get blank looks. The movement is loud online and largely absent from the pews. Its candidates keep losing. The reason is not persecution or the cowardice of the pro-life establishment. It is that the movement alienates rather than assembles, and a faction that cannot persuade committed pro-lifers has no realistic path to persuading the moderate voting blocs it will need to change any law at all.

We want what abolitionists want. If their approach could sustain real legislative change, we would be its loudest advocates. What we see instead is a movement built for momentum and clicks that has not converted attention into durable law, while the machinery it dismisses grinds slowly forward and children who could be protected this session are left on the table. Argue the approach, by all means. Argue it carefully, with the legal system as it actually operates and with a clear account of what the bill will and will not accomplish. Neither side in this debate holds the moral high ground by assertion. It has to be earned in the argument.

Read Craig’s article: https://craigireland.substack.com/p/clean-hands-dead-children
For Craig’s Substack: https://craigireland.substack.com/