Micah Kunkle is one of the brightest pro-life leaders in the country. He is not up and coming; he already is one. He is doing great work defending the unborn in the public square, and he has some very good thoughts on where the movement is.
You may have seen him in the Jubilee debates, including the Surrounded series. He is fearless. He makes a very good case, and he wins.
A Third of My Generation Is Dead
Micah has done about ten Jubilee videos, maybe a few more. In the Surrounded format, he is usually not the lone voice. One person sits in the middle and disagrees with everyone, and Micah is one of the twenty surrounding him. But the format still gives him one-on-one debates.
One of those exchanges went viral. His opponent was waxing eloquent about why society needs abortion and why we should care about the people who are already here, all while assuming the unborn aren’t human. Micah looked at him and said, “A third of my generation is dead.” It was a showstopper.
What the Debates Reveal
The biggest lesson from these exchanges is that a lot of people have not thought through this issue very deeply.
The opponent in that viral exchange was Tim Miller, who has been in politics for a long time. What the cameras don’t show is that he was hesitant to debate abortion at all. He looked around at the Jubilee producers as if to say, “I don’t know if this is my best topic. I don’t know if I should do this.” Here is a man who has been in politics for years, and he did not have an argument on abortion. Yet he still holds pro-choice views.
The same thing shows up among conservatives and Republicans. Being pro-life in the full sense, wanting abortion completely abolished with no exceptions, puts you in the minority even in conservative circles. Plenty of conservatives hold exceptions for rape and incest and do not believe the unborn should be protected from the moment of fertilization. Even in Republican circles, that is unfortunately changing.
Conservative colleagues on other issues say the same kind of thing: “I’m generally pro-life, but I always think there should be exceptions for rape, for fetal anomalies, whatever.” That is different from a politician who wants to protect all children but simply does not have the votes. These are people committed in principle to the exceptions, not politicians who tolerate an evil they are powerless to stop. That is troubling, and it is why we need more people out there educating the public on what this issue is.
Why Pro-Lifers Need Debate Training
Many young pro-lifers say, “I could never do debates.” They should go forward anyway, and they should get trained.
Debate is one of the instruments of change in a culture. Go back to slavery and look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They were part of how slavery got abolished. If you want pro-life laws enacted, debate and convincing people are a huge part of that.
But debates work the other way around too. If you are not ready and trained, and your opponent dog-walks you, you have lost not just that person but the audience as well. That can be very damaging to the movement. So get trained, especially if you plan to do something as public as Jubilee.
It is shocking how many people show up to these debates completely unprepared. They have never debated before. They have only had conversations with friends. They have never done a practice debate. They haven’t prepped the prompts; they just look them over without doing any research. You can tell, when you have done the research yourself, that ten minutes of prep would have given them the point they needed. They didn’t put the work in, and they make the conservative side, or the pro-life side, look foolish.
We have to prepare, because debates are always a minefield. You can lose in one of two ways. You can lose on the argument because you did not prepare well, and you can lose rhetorically.
Take a debate about fourteen years ago at an Episcopal high school outside Philadelphia, in front of the liberal audience you would imagine, against a state representative from Pennsylvania. The research was done. Every argument he was going to make was known in advance, the preparation was there, and it wasn’t close. His arguments were crushed. But he recovered quite well at the end. The pro-life side had the last statement, and when he asked to make a final comment, the moderator said no. So he asked, “Well, can I at least do smoke signals?” It got a big laugh. It did not mean the debate was lost, but it shows how little things can turn an exchange. You have to be prepared for that.
Where Young Men Are Going
Among young conservatives in general, and especially young men, there is a lot of angst about politics, about this country, and about its future. Some of it is justified. But a lot of them take it way too far. They go to extreme people and extreme routes without thinking through the implications of their views or what they are doing.
On the right, that has looked like young men going to people like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson, figures who are more extreme on the right. In the pro-life movement, among young men who are fiercely pro-life, it looks like abolitionism. To their credit, the abolitionists have done a good job of meeting young men where they are and appealing to them in a certain way. That is not necessarily a good thing, but they have done it.
Young women are usually in a totally different place. The polls show young men and young women heading in opposite directions politically, and young conservative women are usually more moderate and less extreme than their male counterparts.
How Equal Protection Advocates Lost Me
That brings us to the whole abolition and equal protection debate, and to an article Micah is publishing called “How Equal Protection Advocates Have Lost Me.”
There are three reasons, and each one comes down to a failure in the conversations surrounding this issue.
Failure One: No Compelling Biblical Case
The first is a failure to present a compelling biblical or theological case.
It helps to separate equal protection from abolitionism for a moment, because some people support equal protection without identifying as abolitionists. From that side, there does not seem to be a single article or argument making the biblical case for why we need equal protection now. On the abolitionist side, the biblical arguments are not very compelling at all.
Take the verse in Romans 3 about doing evil so that good may come. Abolitionists apply it to a politician who does not have every option available. He has this terrible bill or that terrible bill, and one does more evil than the other. But the Romans passage is not talking about lawmakers in that position. It is talking about the person trying to justify evil, doing evil acts because of the good that may come, not someone who would refrain from those acts if he could. Are these bills wrong? Yes, of course. But when you are choosing the lesser of two evils, you choose the lesser of two evils, and you work your way toward God’s perfect justice.
Many of the other verses abolitionists cite talk about doing justice. Everyone agrees with those. But simply citing them almost begs the question, because the question is how you do justice and how you achieve it. They are assuming the very thing they are trying to prove. In fact, abolitionism does less justice than incrementalism.
Craig Ireland makes the point well. The smash-mouth incrementalist gets all he can. He saves all the children he can, then keeps coming back until he gets them all. He is in the position of not being able to end all evil, so he does the best he can to save as many as he can. The abolitionist, or more accurately the immediatist, is in the position of having the power to save some children and refusing to do it. He is willing to sacrifice, say, seventy percent of the children because he cannot get the other thirty percent, and he will be held accountable for that.
Romans 3 is sometimes paired with Isaiah 10, on partiality. But neither passage speaks to someone trying to limit evil or lessen it. They speak about the drivers, the originators, who intend evil and create policies and contexts where the poor are exploited. They do not speak to the person who is powerless to get rid of all the evil and so does the best he can to mitigate it. Those verses do not apply.
Look closely at Isaiah 10. When it talks about those who keep writing oppression, the writers who keep writing oppression, it describes a repeated action. It is talking about lawmakers who repeatedly try to do evil, not lawmakers who repeatedly try to do good, which is what many pro-life lawmakers are trying to do. That verse does not apply to this debate at all.
Failure Three: Not Reading the Cultural Room
The third reason in the article is a failure to show how these bills are practical and prudent. There is a major failure to read the cultural room.
Look around, and unfortunately, pro-lifers are losing almost everywhere. There are wins here and there in different states, but we are losing a whole lot. That means we need to take back ground, and we will not do that by pushing bills our culture considers even more radical. Poll after poll shows people becoming less pro-life. More abortions have been done. Florida, a huge red state, came within a couple of points of enshrining abortion in its constitution. It is hard to see how it is practical or prudent to even enact these bills.
There is cultural work you have to do. And that position is often misconstrued as fear, as though we are afraid to advance anything unpopular or afraid of what pro-aborts might think. It is not fear of pro-aborts. Thirty-six years of debating them publicly has never been frightening. The worry is what these bills do right now to further marginalize the partially pro-life voting blocs we need to advance real legislation, and we desperately need to stop state ballot initiatives from continuing to take root in red states.
Right now we are looking at red state after red state. Montana, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, and recently Arizona have written abortion into their state constitutions. Unless God intervenes, it is going to happen again in Idaho and other states, with Virginia coming up in November. We are losing red states to voters who vote abortion into the state constitution.
So here is the question for equal protection advocates. If we can’t even stop red states from voting abortion into their constitutions, what makes us think now is the time to lead with bills that allow women to be prosecuted for murder? Those bills will be used against us. They will be used to tell the public that pro-lifers hate women, want them incarcerated, and want them to die, because pro-lifers won’t give them the medical treatment they need for an ectopic pregnancy.
The concern is not popularity. Being disliked comes with the work. The concern is cultural sustainability. Like it or not, you cannot just pass a statute and expect it to hold up without some measure of cultural foundation for it. You can pretend that is not the case, but think about it even biblically. Josiah was arguably the most righteous king in all of Judah’s history, and he banned child sacrifice by royal decree. Within a generation of his death, child sacrifice roared back. The royal decree banned the practice, but it did not change the hearts and motivations of the people, who remained wicked. So the practice came roaring back.
We can see the same thing in our own day, in countries like Australia. Queensland had a law on the books that every abolitionist would love. It banned all abortion. It made abortion illegal, with no exceptions, everything we want. And yet the statute died standing up, because no one would enforce it. The courts would not enforce it and prosecutors would not bring cases. That is the fear.
This is not opposition to abolition. We are for it. It is not even opposition to prosecuting women for having abortions. Some pro-lifers say we should never prosecute them. We can, and we ought to. But prudence comes into play when we talk about penalties.
They Are Functioning Incrementally
Going forward, these bills are going to keep failing. Most of them are not even getting voted on, and in Louisiana the governor vowed to veto the one there. None of them look viable.
The advocates themselves share some agreement on cultural sustainability. Otherwise, why aren’t they pursuing something federal? Why worry about the states at all? Go for the main one. Go for the federal government and a federal abortion ban. But they realize that is not practical. In other words, they are functioning incrementally. They can’t achieve a federal ban, so they are trying to do it through the states.
The article returns to this point several times. If you were truly an abolitionist, and if you were not “taken by fear,” as they put it, you would pursue a federal abortion ban and abolition all the way. But it is not practical, and it is not going to happen in this cultural moment. That is all incrementalists are arguing. On principle, equal protection advocates should actually agree.
Failure Two: No Answer to History
There is something else worth noticing: the way equal protection advocates tend to misconstrue the incrementalist position. They fail to interact with the argument, and that is the second point in the article. It is a failure to refute the historical examples of social reform.
There is no deep interaction with them. Advocates may make a point here or there, but press them on it and they back away: “Well, actually that wasn’t a great example,” or “Actually, I wouldn’t have agreed with Wilberforce doing that in this case.” They fail to interact deeply with the argument.
In debate, that is called clash. You have your case and they have their case, and when the cases meet, that creates clash. As soon as abolitionists start clashing with someone who knows the arguments, they lose, and their arguments fall apart.
What shows up again and again is an utter ignorance of the history of social reform. In a number of recent hostile interviews, some two-on-one and some one-on-one, the lack of knowledge about how social reform actually happens has been shocking. Whether the subject is Lincoln or Wilberforce or anyone else, there is no understanding of it. That says something about why their case is not rooted in the real world we are forced to live in as Christians, where we aim to limit evil and promote the good as much as we can.
They Have Failed to Make the Case
That is the whole argument of Micah’s piece. Equal protection advocates have failed to provide a case, whether biblical and theological, historical, or practical and prudent in this moment. For those three reasons they have lost him, and he still wants to pursue an incremental approach. It is the only way to win.
Look at the left and at how they have done what they have done. Carl Trueman has written a great book on this, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and it shows that this has been a long time coming. It was slow and incremental. It came through academia and Hollywood and was pushed through other outlets long before any legislation hit any floor. We need to take a page out of their book, because they have been successful.
They have also jumped the gun on transgender issues, and they are now losing people. People are starting to wonder, and to realize, “Actually, this started a long time ago, with Obergefell and with contraception.” They are starting to rethink these things. That is the problem when you jump the gun.