The new abolitionists

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 13th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: abolishing abortion.

There’s a growing subset of Christians who used to call themselves pro-life but now refuse the label even though they still oppose abortion. Instead, they call themselves abortion abolitionists.

BROWN: This spring, WORLD reporters Leah Savas and Lauren Dunn met with some of these self-proclaimed abolitionists to hear why they left the pro-life movement and what sets their position apart.

Here’s Leah with our story.

JEREMY BROWN: They're human beings. They're made in God's image and likeness.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: On a crisp Friday morning, a middle-aged man with a backpack and puffy brown coat preaches into an amplifier outside of Heritage Clinic. It’s an abortion facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The man’s name is Jeremy Brown.

JEREMY BROWN: We want you to be able to live freely. And to be able to not be under condemnation and to be able to walk with the Lord.

Brown is a Christian. He’s against abortion. But he’s hesitant to call himself pro-life. He would have called himself that in the past, and he says he still agrees with the sentiment of the term. Yet he doesn’t agree with the strategies of the movement itself.

The mainstream pro-life movement largely uses an incremental strategy to pass legal protections for unborn babies—like 15-week bills, heartbeat bills, or regulations for distributing abortion pills.

Brown considers himself an abortion abolitionist. He wants laws that will classify abortion as homicide. Abolitionists consider anything less unjust.

JEREMY BROWN: And if you're killing that baby, and it's murder, then the mother and the father and everybody else involved should be held accountable for murder.

Mainstream pro-lifers oppose that because it would include penalties for a woman who aborts her baby. But Brown points to Bible verses condemning partiality as a Scriptural basis for this position. Abolitionists say current pro-life laws are partial by favoring mothers over their babies.

Brown learned about abolitionism online through materials from leaders like Arizona Pastor Jeff Durbin and T. Russell Hunter at Free the States. Like these abolitionist leaders, Brown believes women usually aren’t victims of abortion.

JEREMY BROWN: Without being too crude. We've heard women say, I'm gonna kill this baby. I know it's a baby. When you see it, that narrative of this is just some poor little woman who has been duped and she doesn't know what's going on and she's a victim and if if she did she surely wouldn't do this evil thing—you know?—that goes right out the window.

Brown has another issue with mainstream pro-lifers: he thinks they don’t emphasize the gospel enough. Some pro-life groups avoid spiritual topics and focus on scientific arguments to change peoples’ minds about abortion. But Brown leads with the gospel in his sidewalk ministry.

JEREMY BROWN: The gospel is the way that people are saved and the gospel is the way that you see a culture turn to Christ, and people actually love their neighbor. Right. And so if we withhold that, then we don't have anything to offer these people that that's of any significant value.

Brown is just one man in one state. But others share his beef with the current pro-life movement. Earlier this year, fellow WORLD reporter Lauren Dunn talked to attendees at an abortion abolitionist conference in Wichita, Kansas.

LAUREN DUNN: So before that, you would have called yourself pro-life.

HEATHER GULLEY: Yeah.

DUNN: Would you call yourself that now?

GULLEY: Absolutely not.

DUNN: Would you consider yourself pro-life?

MAGDALIZA SANTOS: Um, well, not anymore. Not anymore. Because I like I don't agree with, you know, incrementalis—incrementalism. I don't agree with it.

DUNN: And so what made you go from the pro-life to the abolitionists?

AMANDA SIMS: Seeing these pro-life bills that claim to save lives that pick and choose the life they save.

Many people in the pro-life movement say women shouldn’t be punished because they are the second victims of abortion. Some of the people Lauren interviewed critiqued that idea.

JELAINE FONDREN: It's not like we want women to be punished for abortion, and we want them just to not have abortions, but in order to seek justice for the preborn, that necessitates criminalizing the act and all who are involved in it, and that includes mothers who want to kill their babies.

Instead of pushing for laws to make abortion homicide, pro-life groups target the abortion industry by limiting how, when, and where abortions can happen. That frustrates abolitionists.

GULLEY: Why are we lobbying and pushing for safer abortions or bigger hallways or, you know, more medical staff, because abortion always ends in the death of somebody, and we don't want to push for that to be safer. Unfortunately, the pro-life movement from what we've learned, is keeping abortion alive and well. And we don't want our names associated with that whatsoever.

That’s a common view among abolitionists: that the pro-life movement, not pro-abortion groups, are keeping abortion legal.

It’s true that mainstream pro-life organizations oppose abolitionist bills… laws that would classify abortion as homicide. Most conservative lawmakers in majority pro-life states vote against that kind of legislation. But the strategy of these groups is to avoid laws that the culture at large is not ready for. They think any penalties for women would give everyday people the view that pro-lifers hate women, leading to the undoing of all protections for unborn babies. They see recent pro-abortion victories at the ballot box as reason for concern.

But many abolitionists are still optimistic.

BOB GRAY: I think there's momentum growing behind the abolition movement.

That’s Bob Gray. I met him with a handful of other abolitionists outside of Camelback Family Planning—an abortion facility in Phoenix, Arizona.

GRAY: You know, I see a lot of people out here that weren't involved in this a year or two ago. And there's more and more states there, people are popping up and, you know, being willing to sponsor bills.

He’s a part of Apologia Church, the congregation under abolitionist pastor Jeff Durbin. Gray said biblical arguments brought him and his wife out of the pro-life movement and into the abolitionist camp. Scriptural arguments make him, and many other abolitionists, optimistic about their future success.

GRAY: If we believe that God's will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Then, you know, his will is not to have babies murdered. So I have 100% confidence it will. When it—when it will happen. You know, only God knows. But abortion will be abolished.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leah Savas in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Phoenix, Arizona.

MYRNA BROWN: To read more about the abortion abolitionist movement, check out Leah’s article “Ideological Enemies” in the latest issue of WORLD Magazine.

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