A Correction
Two episodes ago, in a conversation with Mark Newman about equal protection laws, the discussion turned to pregnancy centers and abortion pill reversal, the treatment some call APR. In that exchange, an equal protection advocate was represented as having said that very few pro-life pregnancy centers even offer APR. She was not named, but she recognized herself, got in touch, and pointed out that she had been misstated. A second look at the tape confirmed it.
What she actually said was that very few people are using abortion pill reversal, and by people she meant abortion-minded women, not pregnancy centers. On first viewing it sounded like a claim about the centers. It was not.
One point stands. She did not satisfactorily answer the question that prompted the exchange: if an equal protection bill passes, should pregnancy centers report women who come in for APR, as the law would require? But the claim attributed to her was wrong. A retraction was posted on the clip, and the correction belongs here as well. She is welcome to come on the show and clarify any misconceptions about her position. A show that asks others to be accurate and truthful in everything they say has to hold itself to the same standard.
A Debate Over Abolitionism
Jojo Ruba is no stranger to The Case for Life. He is Canadian, with a background in political science and journalism, and he is one of the finest pro-life apologists and spokespeople working today. He serves as staff apologist for Students for Life of America, and he is representing them in a debate on abolitionism in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-third of this month.
Abolitionism, as he frames it, is the belief that abortion can be ended simply by passing a state abortion ban, and that once the ban passes, all manner of good things will follow. Students for Life is hosting the debate in front of a group of pro-life leaders from across the United States, because the question is critical to mapping how the movement moves forward: how it fights abortion, and how it protects pre-born children.
Why Many Pro-Life Groups Will Not Prosecute Women
One of the sharpest points of friction in this debate is whether women who have abortions should be prosecuted. Many pro-life groups have said they do not want to prosecute or criminalize women. There should be consequences for intentionally killing an innocent human being, so their reasons deserve a careful hearing.
Their reasons begin with history. Many of these groups say they have never advocated prosecuting women and that their focus is the pre-born child. They also point out that before Roe v. Wade, many states had laws on the books allowing women to be prosecuted for abortion, and yet only two women were ever prosecuted for having one. Most of the time, a woman’s testimony was needed to go after the abortion provider, so prosecutors made deals, committing not to prosecute her in exchange for testimony that could stop the abortionist.
The second reason is practical. Prosecuting a woman requires proving, through the legal process, that she actually had an abortion, and that is difficult to do.
The Second Victim
The main thrust of the argument, though, is that the woman is a second victim. That language raises a real question, because it seems to convey that she is not a full moral agent in the decision to have an abortion.
Pro-life groups, especially those who work with women, use the language of the second victim often, and it has been one of the main arguments from that branch of the movement. Women are coerced or forced into abortion, or they feel it is their only option. Afterward they feel immense guilt, and that guilt is punishment enough. Jailing them would only double down on it. On this view there is no need to prosecute women who have abortions, because they have already victimized themselves by having one. The argument has been very persuasive, especially among those in pregnancy center care and those who counsel women directly.
A Letter That Said Never
There should be consequences for intentionally killing an innocent human being. What those consequences should be must be prudently considered, in time, to work with the cultural realities of where we live today.
That is a different position from the one set out in a letter signed by a number of pro-life leaders. The letter made a commitment, forever, that no woman who has had an abortion, or who will have one, should ever be punished, even if there are laws abolishing or criminalizing abortion. Abortion doctors, the people who make chemical abortion pills, and those who promote abortion could potentially be jailed. The women themselves, because they are second victims, should not be punished.
The letter was written in response to people who were advocating at the time for jailing women, and it was started by National Right to Life, which is public knowledge. Many other groups, Susan B. Anthony List among them, are still listed publicly as signers, and the letter is still being passed around. It was a defining letter for many pro-life groups about fifteen years ago, when many of them could not see any future in which prosecuting women would actually be discussed.
Louisiana brought that future closer. An equal protection bill advanced there that its advocates say was likely to become law, and as the story goes, pro-life groups came in and sabotaged it with the letter. The letter was part of the justification, though there are different parts of the story and not every detail is clear. What is clear is that many pro-life groups put pressure on state legislators with a simple question: do you realize this bill would jail women who have had abortions, and do you realize the consequences of that?
Abolitionist bills are usually written very simply. They say that equal protection should apply. The consequences of equal protection, jailing women among them, often go undiscussed with the people elected at the state level, and it takes pro-life groups to come and explain what the bill would do and ask whether legislators really want it. Most of those legislators, it turned out, did not want that, and they reversed their support.
Why Never?
Equal protection advocates say again and again that pro-lifers cast women as victims for the sake of sabotaging these criminal bills. It is hard to believe that is the main driver. But it is also troubling that pro-life groups would simply say, as a matter of principle, that they will never, ever prosecute a woman for having an abortion. What if the culture were to change? Suppose we actually got a pro-life culture that would support a law like that, the courts upheld it, and it was culturally enforced so that it could be sustained. It is hard to say we should never, ever do that.
Understanding why a pro-life group would say never begins with who these people are. Most second victim advocates in the pro-life movement are very compassionate, kind people. Many have worked with women who have had abortions, or had abortions themselves, and they struggle with the idea that being jailed would have helped them overcome the grief they faced afterward. At a recent pro-life event, a Christian woman who had two abortions before she came to faith said that before believing in Jesus, she had no idea what she was really doing. She did not support jailing women, because she did not believe it would have helped her in that situation.
There are also many pro-life men who are second victim advocates, and they want to defend women. They see proposals to jail women as an attack on femininity and womanhood. Rather than protecting women as a Christian man should, they see those proposals as a way to practice something like sexism against women and to put women down. Part of the reason is that many abolitionists themselves use rhetoric saying that women should not be involved in the pro-life movement or should not be leaders in the church, and so the argument becomes that there is no compassion for women on that side. If women are also victimized by abortion, the reasoning goes, we should also recognize that punishing them for the abortion is not necessarily going to keep them from having further abortions, and it will not help them heal from the first one.
The equal protection side would answer that criminalizing the act functions as a deterrent that keeps other women from having abortions. There is some truth to that. There could also be other consequences.
The question of punishing women is almost certain to be one of the central themes in Washington. The opponent is Bradley Pierce of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, one of the top lawyers on the abolitionist side. He has written many of the state abolition bills, filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, and has been a constitutional lawyer for some fifteen to eighteen years. He knows his stuff, and he is worth hearing. Prayers for the debate are welcome.
O Canada
There is a lot of garbage happening in Canada, and the national anthem fits the moment: O Canada, what are you doing? Americans ought to care about it.
Jojo Ruba recently received a text from the French-speaking representative for his work in Quebec, the most liberal province in Canada, which is in the middle of a provincial election. She sent him a headline from one of the biggest newspapers in Montreal. It amounted to a warning that the conservative party has a candidate who is a former pastor, who is pro-life, and who supports the traditional family. The headline’s words for that were anti-abortion and homophobic.
A journalist reads a headline by asking what it is actually saying. The implication here is that if you are a Christian, or even an orthodox Muslim or an orthodox Jew, who does not believe killing babies is a good thing and does not support same-sex marriage, you should not be allowed to participate in the democratic process by running for office. That is perfectly normal dialogue in Quebec, and it is spreading all across Canada. There have been similar situations federally. Someone who is simply pro-life, or who simply supports traditional marriage as the foundation for civilization and has written about it, can be in trouble.
Fined for Saying There Are Two Genders
In British Columbia, on the West Coast, a retired Christian school board trustee has been fined $750,000 by a human rights tribunal, which is not even a legal body but a semi-legal, quasi-legal one. His offense was advocating the idea that there are only two genders and that we are sexualizing children when we try to transition them. For that, the tribunal decided, he deserves to be fined three quarters of a million dollars.
This tribunal is not run by lawyers. It is run by LGBTQ activists. Worse, in its decision the tribunal said, in effect, that it knew the decision would touch on religious freedoms in Canada, that it would ignore those religious freedoms for now, and that it would fine him anyway, knowing the case would go further up in the courts.
The trustee’s lawyer happens to be Jojo Ruba’s lawyer and a friend, so there is a bit of a bias there. His assessment is that the Court of Appeal is a fifty-fifty chance to side with the Christian, but that the Supreme Court of Canada will almost certainly not side with him. Within five or six years, it could be a hate crime in Canada to say there are only two genders.
Censorship, One Bill at a Time
Add to that broad definition of hate a government using many of the same tactics as the government of the United Kingdom to censor free speech. Rather than passing one large bill, as the UK Parliament did, the Canadian Parliament is doing it piecemeal.
One bill, for example, wants age verification so that children under sixteen cannot use social media. The problem is that everyone has to sign on through age verification, so the government will be able to track where adults go online through that software. Another piece of legislation empowers the government to create an agency, or add to an existing one, most likely the CRTC, where Jojo once worked. The CRTC is Canada’s equivalent of the FCC, the federal communications regulator. It regulates the internet and it regulates broadcasting, and now the government wants to empower it to track hate speech on the internet and shut you down virtually without due process.
The ones saying this are free speech and human rights advocates who are not Christians. They point out that the broadness of the legislation allows the government to shut you down, just as it did during COVID, without any kind of due process. Someone accuses you of hate. The government investigates, without necessarily even having to talk to you, and finds it hateful, as it might find the statement that there are only two genders. Then it removes you from the internet and erases you completely.
The Canary in the Coal Mine
Americans need to pay attention because the same ideology that is governing Canada is in the conversation within the Democratic Party in the United States. Canada’s government will be in power for at least another three and a half years and will probably do much more damage. If the Democrats get into power, they will follow the same steps. Canada is the canary in the coal mine. Watch Canada, and if you see that it is dead because of this woke censorship ideology, take that as a warning that the same thing will happen in the United States.
That is not far-fetched. New York City appears to now have a law under which a city worker who misgenders somebody can be horrendously fined, and they appear to be trying to remove mom and dad as well. When you censor an idea like there being only two genders, the rest is not hard. The Montreal headline shows it. It combined pro-life work with the fight for traditional marriage and treated all of it as hate speech, all of it as unwelcome.
Quebec has produced one victory worth mentioning, though the case itself shows how far the discussion has gone. A former Quebec minister of culture prevented a charismatic Christian group from holding a conference at the local convention center in Quebec City, because on their website they said they were pro-life. The conference itself was about something like the end times, a subject the charismatic church cares about, and the group should be free to hold it. That is who they are. But because they were pro-life on their website, the minister banned them from using any public spaces in the province of Quebec. The charismatics were banned based on the content of what they believed, and the minister was not being ironic about what she was doing.
Medical Aid in Dying, or Something Else
Canada’s so-called Medical Aid in Dying, known by the acronym MAID, is running full throttle right now, and there are states in the U.S. experimenting with the same thing. Is it medical aid? No. It is definitely something else.
To begin with, it was never democratically brought in. No party said it was going to kill people through euthanasia. It was forced on the country by the Supreme Court of Canada. There was no vote and no decision to do it. The elites run Canada, and the country is not as democratic as it might appear. Canadians do not have many of the same chances Americans do for referenda or for overturning bills and court decisions. MAID was forced on the country on the basis of equal access: the courts ruled that equal access for disabled people to kill themselves trumps the right of people to be protected from being killed by the medical community.
Probably within the next couple of months, after about two and a half years, Canada will be nearing more than a hundred thousand people euthanized. Frankly, who they are is no surprise. About ninety percent of them are probably well-to-do, white, and probably liberal. Brown Canadians are not the ones killing themselves, because in their communities it is culturally unacceptable. It ends up being people who are well-to-do, who have lots of resources, and who do not want to “suffer” anymore, who are accessing MAID and being euthanized.
The Slope Already Happened
Pro-lifers and Christians warned that if Canada allowed MAID for the most difficult cases, for people who are dying and about to die anyway and feeling terrible pain, it would not stop there. That is not a slippery slope argument anymore. It happened almost instantaneously. People who are not dying are able to kill themselves now. People who still have a long life ahead of them, but have some degenerative disease they do not want to “suffer” through, qualify.
And probably within the year, Canada is going to allow euthanasia for the mentally ill. It is still voluntary, for now. But these are people, some of whom do not have the capacity to make this decision because they do not understand what is going on. That is why pro-lifers have always been against it. As a culture we have always wanted to protect the mentally ill and the depressed. Canada spends a great deal of money helping people out of depression so that they will not commit suicide, and now it spends money helping people commit suicide. It does not make sense.
Cheaper to Kill
The CBC published an article listing the millions of dollars saved because all of these sick people are no longer in the public healthcare system. That is how MAID is being measured, and that is why the pressure from the elites was there. It frees up money from healthcare, and it is a lot cheaper to kill people.
There have been several high-profile cases. A veteran who was waiting for a wheelchair was on a call with someone from Health Canada, asking where her wheelchair was. The person on the other end of the call said, “Why don’t you just commit MAID anyway? You’ll save time.” It would be laughable if it were not so real, and it is not the end of it. Canada is not only expanding euthanasia to the mentally ill. The medical association in Quebec, that same very liberal province, is openly asking to euthanize babies who are born disabled, on the spot.
“Medical aid in dying” is a euphemism. The thing itself is euthanasia.
A Desire to Die Is Not a Right to Die
Underneath all of this sits a worldview assumption: if I have a desire to die, I therefore have a right to die. Ultimately it is about control. Greg Koukl has answered it well. You are assuming, with your worldview, that you do not suffer after you die. If the biblical worldview is correct, you will be suffering for eternity when you commit the sin of euthanasia.
Pray for Canada, and for the debate in Washington. Jojo Ruba’s new organization is Cornerstone Institute, at cornerstoneinstitute.ca, and more of his podcasts and blogs are at redeemingconversations.ca. It is dot ca because he is Canadian. And as Greg Koukl says, go out there and give them heaven.