Pleading Kansas

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Abortion abolitionists.

Kansas has become an abortion destination in the Midwest as nearby states enact stronger protections for the unborn. Just last year, the number of women getting an abortion in Kansas shot up 50 percent over the previous year. Women from out-of-state accounted for most of last year’s abortions.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Some pro-lifers say things could have been different in Kansas this year if voters had passed a pro-life amendment last August.

The Value Them Both Amendment, as it’s known, would have declared there is no right to abortion in the state constitution. That would’ve effectively reversed a decision of the state Supreme Court that declared a right to abortion and invalidated existing pro-life laws.

REICHARD, HOST: But the amendment went down by a huge margin.

Surprisingly, a small percentage of voters who oppose abortion voted against the amendment as well, probably not so many that it would’ve changed the outcome. But their position is making a difference in the way Christians think about and talk about the pro-life issue.

WORLD’s Leah Savas reports.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: To many Christians, supporting the Value Them Both Amendment was a no-brainer. But the elders at Heartland Community Church in Wichita, Kansas, recognized it wasn’t that simple.

JONATHAN WHITLEY: We were deciding as a church—our session, our elders—whether or not we were going to support the Value Them Both or not.

That’s Jonathan Whitley, senior pastor at Heartland. He and the other elders were in a unique position. One member of their church is pro-life state
Representative Susan Humphries. She supported efforts in the Kansas legislature to put the Value Them Both Amendment on the ballot.

WHITLEY: We allowed her to come and speak to the merits of the bill, from her perspective, as a church member and as a state representative.

But the elders ultimately decided not to take a position on the amendment.

WHITLEY: We tried our best not to impress upon our congregation that they they needed to feel compelled to be faithful to the Lord to vote one way or the other. Because the Value Them Both Amendment had some exception clauses in it, there were some whose consciences were, were binding them against voting in favor of it.

Whitley thinks it was around the time of those discussions that he became familiar with the abolitionist movement, Christians who oppose abortion but don’t accept the pro-life label. Abolitionists opposed the amendment in Kansas. Jared Burdick is leader of the abolitionist group Abortion Is Murder Kansas. Here he is reading the amendment.

JARED BURDICK: “Because Kansas values both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion.” Now, if it stopped right there, I would probably have been okay with it.

But the amendment didn’t stop there.

BURDICK: It’s the next part that was the problem.

It went on to say that state lawmakers could pass laws regarding abortion, including—quote—“laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.”

BURDICK: We don't treat any other crime that way. It's not a proper response to abortion. And it fundamentally has to start with how does God view murder? And how does God view murderers should be prosecuted? It was not a just law, it was an attempt to regulate when you can kill people. And that's not biblical, that's not constitutional.

Whitley and the elders at Heartland Community Church recognized that some people in their own congregation might have similar objections to the amendment. But to Burdick and other abolitionists, how to vote on this amendment was more than just a conscience issue.

BURDICK: Ultimately, you're responsible for what you support. And so I do believe, for legislators, especially it would have been sinful to vote for the Value Them Both Amendment. Apathy is a sin. Compromise is a sin. You see this all throughout the Bible, all throughout Scripture.

Burdick pointed to the passage in James 2 that condemns partiality. To abolitionists, any law that allows for abortions at all shows partiality to a woman over her baby. So does exempting mothers who know what they were doing from punishment, as most pro-life laws do.

But Whitley sees the issue differently.

WHITLEY: I would also encourage them and maybe caution them, though, against calling another brother or sister who votes differently as a sinner, or in sin for voting for that, because of the complexities of the way that we operate in this society in terms of how we have to come to the table.

Sometimes in society that is made up of believers and unbelievers, we sometimes have to make compromises.

Whitley said the pro-life movement still has some important lessons to learn from abolitionists: one of them, keeping the end goal in mind.

He referenced recent comments from former President Donald Trump, who told NBC’s “Meet the Press” he’d push for a week limit on abortion that everyone could be happy with.

WHITLEY: If that's your pro-life approach, and that's the end, is just finding a middle of the road, let's let's all agree upon a certain number of weeks, then I think the pro-life movement has forgotten the end, which is the complete abolition of it.

But fundamentally, I believe, pro-lifers and abolitionists have in common the ending of abortion. And I think it's important for Christian pro-lifers to remember that.

But as the Value Them Both campaign revealed, abolitionists and pro-lifers have very different ideas of what “ending abortion” should look like. That conflict will continue to affect efforts to protect unborn babies.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leah Savas.

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