The pro-life movement currently finds itself at a philosophical and strategic crossroads, navigating internal debates that could redefine its mission for decades to come. A significant “dust-up” has recently emerged regarding a growing sentiment within the movement known as the “pro-abundant life” (PAL) model. While the proponents of this shift are characterized as well-intentioned, committed Christians who are certainly not the enemies of the cause, their ideological framework presents a potential crisis for the movement’s efficacy and focus. The core of the concern lies in the demand that the pro-life movement move beyond the specific goal of ending abortion to take on a vast, holistic array of social and spiritual responsibilities.
Defining the Pro-Abundant Life Shift
According to its own literature, the pro-abundant life movement seeks to rhetorically and programmatically link the saving of unborn lives with the building of strong families, healthy marriages, improved parenting, and thriving faith lives. The proponents of this view argue that the traditional goal of the pro-life movement—saving babies and ending abortion—is “not sufficient”. They contend that unless the movement adopts a broader mission encompassing fatherhood initiatives and marriage counseling, it lacks legitimacy.
This represents a radical departure from the historical focus of the movement. PAL advocates question whether the goal of the movement should even be to overturn Roe v. Wade or defund Planned Parenthood. Instead, they submit that while saving lives is necessary, it should not be the primary goal of the movement as a whole. This shift is not merely a suggestion for how individual pregnancy centers might expand their care, but a demand for how the pro-life movement in its entirety must change its programmatic focus.
The Danger of a “Backbreaking” Job Description
The most immediate concern regarding the pro-abundant life mandate is the sheer logistical and financial impossibility of its requirements. When a movement is told it must “programmatically” take on new tasks, it means that organizations must devote limited resources—money, staff, and time—to these additional causes. In the real world of non-profit advocacy, most pro-life organizations operate on thin budgets and tight perimeters. They are not overflowing with the capital necessary to address the host of issues PAL demands.
For an organization focused on pro-life apologetics, a shift toward PAL would mean diverting efforts away from defending the unborn in the public square to engage in marriage counseling or discipleship. Such a job description is described as “backbreaking,” requiring a level of output that “not even Superman can pull off”. This brings to mind the military adage: “He who fights everywhere fights nowhere”. By trying to solve every societal ill associated with the family unit, the movement risks losing its ability to fight the specific injustice of abortion.
Furthermore, this programmatic expansion ignores the economic reality of donor intent. Donors who give money specifically to save children from abortion would likely be justified in redirecting their support if they discovered their funds were being used for general marriage counseling or parenting classes. They would rightly expect that those tasks be handled by entities better suited for them, primarily the local church.
The Role of the Church versus the Movement
A fundamental critique of the pro-abundant life model is that it conflates the mission of a specific social movement with the Great Commission of the church. Jesus commanded the church to go and make disciples; He did not give that specific mandate to pro-life non-profits or pregnancy centers. While it is commendable for a pregnancy center to partner with a church to ensure a woman is plugged into a fellowship where she can grow as a Christian, it is an entirely different matter to suggest the pro-life movement must take on these ecclesiastical responsibilities to be “legitimately” pro-life.
The church already possesses the mandate, the theological training, and often the larger budgets required for marriage counseling, parenting classes, and spiritual discipleship. To demand that pro-life organizations—which are already struggling to save children from a culture “hellbent on killing those kids”—take on the church’s role is to invite burnout and bankruptcy. The movement does not need “additional causes”; it needs “additional support” for the primary mission of protecting the innocent.
Rebutting the Historical Analogy of Abolition
Pro-abundant life advocates frequently attempt to justify their position by drawing parallels to the abolition of slavery. Some claim that the efforts of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists were “largely a failure” because they did not simultaneously take on the broader task of ensuring total social and legal equality for Black Americans at the moment of emancipation.
However, this argument is criticized for projecting modern cultural expectations back onto the mid-19th century. At the time of the Civil War, the immediate and urgent goal was the preservation of the Union and the end of the institution of slavery. Lincoln understood that there were incremental steps to be taken; he realized that one had to save the Union first to have any hope of freeing the slaves.
Similarly, in a modern culture that does not value children as intrinsically valuable image-bearers, the most immediate danger is the physical destruction of the child in the womb. While Christians should certainly have a broader agenda—supporting efforts to end poverty, hunger, and sex trafficking—the specific mission of the pro-life movement must remain focused on the “immediate danger”. One can support multiple good causes as an individual Christian without demanding that every pro-life organization programmatically adopt all of them.
The Ad Hominem Trap and Internalized Critics
Perhaps the most subtle danger of the pro-abundant life movement is its accidental adoption of the premises used by the political left. For years, pro-abortion activists have used a distraction tactic: attacking pro-lifers for not doing enough about poverty, immigration, or capital punishment. This is a classic ad hominem fallacy, attacking the person or their perceived lack of “consistency” rather than addressing the moral status of the unborn.
The left uses these issues as a distraction because they have no logical argument to justify the “tearing a baby apart in the womb”. When well-intentioned people on the right begin to say it is “not enough” to save the baby, they are subtly absorbing these fallacious premises. They are essentially agreeing with the critics that the pro-life position is illegitimate unless it solves every other social problem simultaneously. This validates a “probirth” slur that is intentionally designed to silence pro-life advocacy.
Real-World Application: The “Less is More” Strategy
When PAL proponents are asked what their vision looks like in the real world for a typical pro-life speaker or advocate, the response is often described as “crickets”. In a practical sense, it is absurd to expect an advocate to spend one day on abortion, the next on fatherhood, another on marriage counseling, and the remainder on discipleship. This lack of focus dilutes the message and makes the advocate less effective at any single task.
Conversely, the “less is more” philosophy has shown significant results in the field. For example, a pregnancy center in San Antonio, Texas, led by David McCall, reports saving nearly 300 babies in a single year. When asked for the “secret” to such high success, the answer was a singular, unwavering focus on saving the child as the sole objective. While they provide boutiques and support for mothers, their programmatic resources are not spread thin across a dozen different social initiatives. They focus on their mission and leave the church to do its job.
Conclusion: Maintaining the Syllogism
The pro-life movement’s strength lies in its moral and logical clarity. The foundational argument is a simple syllogism: It is wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings; abortion does this; therefore, abortion is wrong. The mission is to teach people how to defend this view and to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
Those who advocate for the pro-abundant life model are not the enemy, but their ideas represent a “backbreaking” departure from reality that threatens to bankrupt and exhaust the movement. A pro-life organization that remains committed to saving children in the womb against a hostile culture has nothing to apologize for. By keeping the main thing the main thing, the movement ensures it remains in the “hot seat” for the right reasons, rather than being distracted by a job description that no one can realistically fulfill.
Analogy to solidify understanding: The pro-abundant life movement is like a lifeguard being told that it is “not enough” to pull a drowning child out of the ocean. Instead, the lifeguard is told they must also programmatically ensure the child has a college fund, a stable home life, and a healthy diet before their rescue can be considered “legitimate.” While all those things are vital for the child’s flourishing, if the lifeguard tries to coordinate them all while the child is underwater, the child will drown. The lifeguard’s unique, urgent mission is to save the life; the rest of society—and the family—must step in once the child is back on solid ground.
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.
Hello friends. I sparked some controversy this last week with a few statements I made. I’ll tell you about them on this edition of The Case for Life program. Hey, before we get started, I want to remind you of something. If you’ve not yet looked at our new course, Prolife 101, which will equip you to make a case for the pro-life view, please see our sites and sign up for that. It’ll help you make a persuasive case for what you believe. Okay.
I mentioned that this week I kind of caused a dust up if you want to put it that way. And here’s what happened. I wrote a piece on social media that I was troubled by a movement within pro-life circles known as pro-abundant life. And let me tell you what that movement is. It’s well-intentioned. The people behind it are not bad people. I don’t think they’re the enemies by any means that we face daily in the media, academia, and in culture at large.
These are pro-life individuals who think that being pro-life is not enough. So, let me define what pro-abundant life is. And I want to I’ll just do it by reading what they say on their own website. Here’s what they say on their own website. Pro-abundant life is about creating and linking both rhetorically and programmatically the need not only to save lives but to help build strong families, have healthy marriages, be better parents, and have thriving faith lives. All right. So to summarize, pro-abundant life is this.
We shift from being pro-life, which is about saving the babies, ending abortion, and we take on instead a larger mission that can include saving babies. But we don’t want to think that’s sufficient. It is not sufficient enough to save lives according to pro-abundant life. Instead, the pro-life movement as a whole, not just pregnancy centers, but the movement as a whole must take on building stronger families, helping families thrive, helping people thrive in their faith lives and things like fatherhood initiatives. And we’ve also got to build stronger marriages.
So, we’ve got to take on more than just saving children in order to be a legitimate pro-life movement. And the authors are arguing that if we shift from pro-life to pro-abundant life, we’ll save more lives. The culture will like us better. We’ll have a better time making our case. And as you can imagine, I am troubled by this. And let me read a few more things that are said here. The author says, “What is the goal of the pro-life movement? This is a critical question because pursuing the wrong goal can lead to dire consequences for any movement.
The most common answer I’ve heard to what is the goal of the pro-life movement is overturn Roie Wade. Others have said the goal should be to defund Planned Parenthood or to save babies. While these answers s what these answers suggest is the generally held belief that the goal of the pro-life movement should be to end abortion. Now listen to what he says next. While these are certainly necessary and urgent strate and urgent strategies and tactics especially since unborn lives are at stake as well as fine goals for individual organizations.
I submit that none of them should be the goal of the pro-life movement. All right. Now, notice what’s happening here. This is not a piece talking about, hey, pregnancy centers, we need to think about being as holistically possible to our clients as we can. For example, a woman comes in, the man she’s been involved with is pressuring her for abortion. Well, we ought to think about how can we reach that man to convince him to be a responsible father. I have no problem with that.
Or someone may say, you know, our pregnancy centers need to help single moms with parenting classes. Okay, I get that. Or somebody says, you know, a pregnancy center should work with a local church to plug that woman into fellowship where she can be discipled and grow as a Christian. Or perhaps a sinner says, “Listen, we not only want to save children, we want to present the gospel to clients.” I’m fine with that. I have no issue with any of that. But notice what’s being done here with the pro-abundant life twist.
The issue here is not what our individual pregnancy centers doing. Rather, the issue is what should the goal of the pro-life movement as a whole be? And the language here is really quite interesting. The language reads that pro-life, the pro-life movement as a whole here must programmatically take on these other tasks. Now, let me define what that means. When you start using language like programmatically, you’re saying that pro-life organizations must devote resources to these additional tasks. Now, let me ask you this.
What pro-life organization do you know that is just overflowing in money and can afford to spread its resources very broadly across a host of issues? I don’t know of one. Maybe you do, but I don’t. I know my organization isn’t so situated. We have a thin budget. We operate on a very tight perimeter about what we can and can’t do. And for us, less is more. We target very narrowly on getting a pro-life case out there at the apologetics level. We teach people how to make a case for the pro-life view and we defend that view in the public square.
That’s what we’re about. Now, imagine saying to a pro-life group like mine. Well, you’ve really got to shift from being about pro-life apologetics and you need to take on all these other things. Discipling believers, building strong marriages, helping parents thrive, helping families develop in a healthy and strong way. I mean, you get the idea here. This would be backbreaking for my organization. And I’ll be honest with you, not even Superman can pull off that job description. It’s the old adage you hear in military circles.
He who fights everywhere fights nowhere. And you know, the question I’ve asked people who come from this line of persuasion that we’ve got to be pro-abundant life and that we have to take on more of these other tasks to be legitimately pro-life. Here’s what I ask them. And never once have they given me a good answer to the question. Here’s the question. Tell me what this looks like in the real world. There’s a tendency in pro-life circles to sit around, whether it’s our ivory towers or boardrooms or offices somewhere and think up things in the ideal world that just don’t work in the real world we’ve all got to function in.
Okay, how does it work in the real world for a pro-life organization? And again, keep in mind this is not aimed only at pregnancy centers. In fact, one of the titles of an article that this individual wrote is how the pro-life movement must change. Okay, this is aimed at the movement as a whole, not merely pregnancy centers that I understand have a duty and a necessity to be more holistic in their approach. I am not speaking to that. I’m speaking to the demand that the pro-life movement as a whole must programmatically take on these other issues.
Not just rhetorically mention them, but rather programmatically devote resources to them. So take an organization like mine. Does that mean then in the real world I get to spend Monday talking about abortion, but on Tuesday I talk about fatherhood initiatives, on Wednesdays I talk about building strong families. On Thursdays, I talk about discipling believers so they can have thriving faith lives. And then the final day of the week, I focus on building strong marriages and couple counseling. I mean, you can see how absurd this is.
What would my donors think if I wrote them a letter and said, “You know what? Saving babies is not enough. The real goal needs to be that we take on making families function at an ideal level. The real goal needs to be that we make sure that family families and marriages have thriving faith lives. We need to help people be better parents. So we’re going to take a good percentage of the money you’ve given us to save children from abortion and we’re now going to devote it to these other issues.
I can tell you right now what my donors would say and they would be absolutely right. They’d be like, “Dude, all right, fine. But we’re going to direct our dollars elsewhere to people who actually want to focus exclusively on saving children.” And they would be right to point out that the job of doing those other tasks really belongs to the local church. It is the local church who has a great commission responsibility to go make disciples. Jesus did not tell pregnancy centers, you go make disciples.
He told the church to do that. Now, I think it’s great if a church partners with a local pregnancy center and they work to not only save that child, but to plug that woman into Christian fellowship. I’m all for that. But why must it become the responsibility of the pro-life movement as a whole to do all these other things that other groups are already doing and have bigger budgets to accomplish. And what we end up with is a bunch of worn out and burned out proifers with no money, no budget because they’ve spread themselves so thinly taking on all these other issues, which by the way are all noble endeavors.
Don’t hear me critiquing that. The question is though, who ought to do this? And every time I ask a pro-abundant life person, tell me what this looks like in the real world for me, I get crickets. They can’t answer it. Now, when I’ve pointed out the absurdity I just pointed out to you about, you know, what does that mean? Monday I got to do I can do abortion, but the rest of the week I got to talk about all these other issues.
They say, “Oh, that’s just you being absurd.” No, you need to answer the question. If you are going to tell the pro-life movement that it must programmatically take on all these other issues, then you have an obligation to tell me what that looks like in the real world where I function. You can’t just say, “Oh, you’re being ridiculous.” No, you made the claim that we must programmatically take on these other causes. Well, all right, then tell me what that looks like.
How much time do I get to spend in a typical pro-life talk talking about abortion before I got to shift over to marriages and building disciples and parenting and helping people thrive in their faith lives? I mean, this all sounds really good in the boardroom, but it does not work in the real world. Now, it was interesting on the comment thread on my page, and we’ll probably include a link to that in the show notes here, so you can go chase down those threads if you want to.
It was interesting. There were several pro-life pregnancy center directors who weighed in on this and said, “Thank you for saying what needed to be stated. For too long, we’ve been given job descriptions that we cannot possibly fulfill. And thank you for saying what needed to be said. And I’m glad they weighed in. There was one person who weighed in and by the way, she’s not a bad person. I know this director. She’s a good director and u she’s doing a good job at her center.
But her response was, “Why are you attacking pregnancy centers?” Can I be clear about something? I did not attack pregnancy centers. I attacked an idea put forward by those who were promoting pro-abundant life who by the way I’m not even naming here. I’m simply going after the idea and I chose not to name them because I didn’t want this to be about them. I wanted it to be about the idea. As you know on this show, we always tell you arguments stand or fall on their merits apart from the person making them.
I have no interest in attacking these people personally. They are committed pro-lifers. They mean well. As I have said all along, they’re well-intentioned, but I think their ideas will hurt the movement. So, I’m going to critique their ideas. I’m not going after them personally. And no, I was not attacking pregnancy centers. In fact, I speak at pregnancy center banquetss all the time. I help them raise money so they can do the vital work that they do. I don’t know how many banquetss I did last year, but some years I do as many as 30.
It doesn’t at all mean that I oppose pregnancy centers because I challenge an idea that some from within that movement who I don’t think are grounded in the real world experience that a lot of us have dealing with this at the apologetics level. I don’t think they understand the real world we live in. And so I challenge their ideas. This is not about attacking centers in general. Now, one of the things that this leader says that I found really interesting and I don’t know where he studied his history, but he goes on to make a comparison.
He says, “It would help if we thought about the freeing of the slaves.” And he cites the example of the Civil War. And his basic argument is this. The case for abolition, the campaigns of Abraham Lincoln to put slavery on a path to extinction, the efforts of abolitionists to end slavery were largely a failure. And why does he think that? Because they didn’t take on the broader task, the larger task of making sure that blacks were respected in law, that their families were cared for, that they had equal opportunity to pursue everything the white man did.
And because the Civil War did not take on those additional causes, we can argue that the case against slavery back then was largely a failure. I don’t know how anybody can say that in the face of 350,000 dead Union soldiers at Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antidum, Manasses, and a bunch of other battlefields throughout the Civil War arena. But it’s absurd to say that we can project what we know today back on the culture of that day. Let’s think about this for a moment.
During the Civil War, nobody thought that blacks should have the same rights as whites. It just was unthinkable. It wasn’t even in the culture. Now, there was a movement and Lincoln tapped into it very skillfully and he did so with incremental wisdom that even Frederick Douglas acknowledged later in life. Lincoln understood that if you did not preserve the Union by abolishing slavery, you would have no union. But you first had to save the Union to free the slaves. He understood there were incremental steps you had to take that did not mean you wouldn’t come back for more later, but it did mean at that particular time the goal had to be to end slavery.
All right? Now think about our culture today. We do not have a lifeaffirming culture. We do not have a culture that sees children as a gift. We do not have a culture that values them as intrinsically valuable image bearsers. We have a culture that thinks of children as a product of parental desire. If the parents want the kid, then okay, go ahead and have the kid. But if the kid is a nuisance to you, ending its life through abortion is not a big deal.
Okay? In that kind of culture where that mindset has been institutionalized in every single thing you think about today, not just politics but the music industry, the film industry, the entertainment industry as a whole, education, the legal system, law schools, graduate schools throughout the nation, and the list goes on and on. Not to mention a large number of mainline liberal denominations. Okay? In that kind of culture, I would say our first goal is to save the child. That’s the more immediate danger.
We can always come back and work as Christians and do these other things. Now, again, I want to make something clear here. I’m not saying that Christians shouldn’t have broader areas of focus. Of course, we will. For example, as a Christian, my wife and I give to organizations that help with hunger, help with poverty. We would certainly support through our church an effort to end sex trafficking. We would certainly support and do support efforts to make sure that inner city kids have a fair shake at life.
Okay, all of that is good. And by the way, we give a substantial amount of our money to our local church, which then uses it for disciplehip efforts, uses it for counseling couples who are struggling in their marriage, who use it to help parents raise better kids and have thriving families. We’re all on board with that. As a Christian, of course, I’ll have a broader agenda than just saving a child. But the argument here from the pro-abundant life camp is not that you as a Christian ought to have a broader agenda.
It’s that pro-life organizations, the pro-life movement as a whole must programmatically devote resources to these other things. And my question is very simple. Why? Why is it our mission? And why is that not the mission of the church? Now, if you want to partner with the church to, as it were, hand off a client that you’ve helped her save her child, and now you hand her off to a local church for discipling, for helping her build relationships, for a future strong marriage, to help her with her faith thriving, I’m all for that.
That’s great. That’s the ideal partnership. But to say the pro-life movement as a whole must programmatically take on these other issues, I’m sorry. I’m not going to go there. In fact, if I were to classify right now, the two things that I think I will be known for, if anybody remembers me at all. But if anybody’s read my works or heard me speak, they know I’m going to be known for two things. Number one, teaching a pro-life apologetic that you can use to defend the pro-life view in the real world of ideas.
Okay? So, we’re going to teach people our syllogism. We’re going to teach people that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings, that abortion does that, therefore it’s wrong. We’re going to teach people how to handle the common objections. This is what our courses do. This is what my books do. It’s been the focus of my career in vocation. But there’s another thing that I think I could be known for. And if I am known for this, I’m okay with it.
That I was one who raised my voice and alarm and said, “Hey, pro-lifers, less is more. Don’t let people give you a backbreaking job description that not even Superman can take on.” And you know, we get this from both the left and the right. The political left says, “Oh, you’re pro-life. Well, what are you doing about poverty? What are you doing about immigration? What are you doing about capital punishment? What are you doing about refugees? Oh, nothing. You’re not pro-life. You’re just prob birth.
You don’t give a rip about kids once they’re born. So, that’s the attack we get on the left. The one we’re getting from the right is is different because it’s coming from well-intentioned people. The people on the left are not well-intentioned. And you can find that out very easily. All you got to do is ask one question to them. Tell me, if I take on all these other causes you’re demanding I take on, will you join me in opposing abortion? 100% of the time the answer will be no.
Women have a fundamental right to an abortion. Well, then why did you bring up all these other issues? If your real position is that abortion should be legal for any reason whatsoever with no restrictions, why did you bring up all these other issues as a distraction? And the answer is really quite simple. They have no argument to justify tearing a baby apart in the womb or poisoning him chemically. So what they do is they attack you the person. This is called the ad hominemum fallacy and it’s facious and it doesn’t fly with anybody who understands the logic of morals.
But what’s happening on the right side of us, if you want to put it that way, is people who are well-intentioned, who in many cases love Jesus, who are committed Christians, are now saying, “Look, it’s not enough for us to save the baby because we’ve got to do all these other things.” and they have subtly absorbed the premises of our critics in saying pro-lifers got to do more than save a child. Well, you’re going to bankrupt pro-life organizations if you put this kind of workload on them. You will bankrupt them.
Again, I don’t know a pro-life organization anywhere in the country that has the budget to programmatically do all these things that the pro-abundant life movement is saying we have to do to move beyond being just people who save a child to being legitimately pro-life. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to go for that. And I said, my message to pro-life organizations is this. If you are committed to saving a child in the womb against a culture hellbent on killing those kids, you have nothing to apologize for.
You don’t need additional causes. You need additional support. Now, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, I want to say a couple of more things about this and then we’ll let you go for this episode of the Case for Life. But again, I am not attacking pregnancy centers. I am trying to prevent the pro-life movement as a whole from taking on a backbreaking job description. I have no ill will toward anybody who is advocating this, but I am going to challenge their ideas and that’s what we’re doing here.
All right, let’s take a break. I’ll see you on the other side.
Hello friends, welcome back. All right, we’ve been talking about this idea that the pro-life movement as a whole, not just pregnancy centers, should shift from being pro-life to pro-abundant life by which we are told that proifers must take on other issues besides just saving the child or ending abortion. Instead, we’ve got to take on discipling believers, helping families thrive in their faith lives, helping parents do a better job, helping fathers, and there’s a list of things that are often associated with this.
And of course, my argument is it is enough to save the child, and we want to avoid taking on a backbreaking job description nobody can realistically fulfill in the world we are forced to live in. Now there’s one other aspect of this that I have not talked about and that is this. Is it true that pregnancy centers as a whole, now I’m shifting here from the pro-life movement to the pregnancy center. Is it true that a pregnancy center must take on other issues or it will not be effective in saving children or doing its mission?
And I question that too. And I’ll give you an anecdotal piece here. Again, do not interpret this as an attack on pregnancy centers. It is not. I am asking a question here. Must a center take on all these other issues to do a good job ministering to its clients. I guess a further question would be how do we judge a pregnancy center? If a pregnancy center has statistics that say, “Hey, listen. Last year we discipled 300 women in their Christian faith.” of those 300 women, 200 got baptized.
And, in addition to that, we gave out 400 parenting courses and we helped 38 fathers be better dads. Okay, great. I’m not saying that’s those are bad goals, but let’s say that same center saved 30 babies instead of, you know, a higher number. Are you impressed? Or what about this? Like a center I’m aware of in San Antonio, Texas, pastor or I should say led by my good friend David McCall. And their number this year of babies saved is approaching 300 as of this day.
In fact, I think they’ll probably cross over before the year end. This is incredible. And I asked Dave when I did their banquet earlier this year. Tell me what your secret is. And he said, “Our secret is this. Less is more. We focus on saving that child.” And saving that child is our sole objective. He said, “That doesn’t mean we don’t provide for mothers who need things. We certainly have a clothing boutique. We certainly are willing to help them out with the things they need, but our focus is saving children.
And that’s why our numbers are so high. My suggestion, the pro-life movement needs to focus on saving children. Let’s let the church do its job. We’ll do ours.