As best as I can recall, abortion first became a real issue for me when New York legalized the practice, three years prior to Roe. That happened in 1970, but my recollection of my anger and dismay is somehow located during my time in the Navy, sometime in 1971 or 1972—so I don’t know what the occasion for that was. Perhaps it had something to do with the New York action being allowed to stand after challenges, I am not sure. What I vividly recall is my anger over the fact that we were on the precipice of a terrible apostasy.
Then came Roe, and the carnage really began in earnest. I was opposed it all from the beginning, meaning that I was pro-life, from the very beginning. But at the same time, there was very little organized resistance, particularly among evangelicals. Many evangelicals didn’t know what to think about it, and did not have a firmly established worldview that would enable them to reason their way to a pro-life conclusion. Things were pretty scattered early on.
When Roe was first decided, what should have happened is that multiple governors should have teamed up together, and informed the federal government that abortion would continue to be against the law in their states, and that penalties would continue being applied. But that did not happen, and all fifty states simply rolled over. A number of them didn’t like it, but they nevertheless acquiesced. In effect, what this meant was that they would rather have the babies die than to have a constitutional crisis and/or showdown. The reality of such stark trade-offs underlies a lot of our debates, down to the present actually.
A lot of this inept response was the result of having all our traditional Western values about human life operating on cruise control. We valued human life in the womb because that we what we used to do, meaning it was largely because of inertia. But when called upon to explain ourselves, we had nothing. Christians were part and parcel of this unhappy situation.
Francis Schaeffer was the one largely responsible for bringing evangelical Christians solidly around into the pro-life camp. In 1983, he teamed up with Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon-General, a man named C. Everett Koop, and they released a book and a movie series called Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It was not successful in overturning legalized abortion, obviously, but it was successful in consolidating evangelical opposition to the ghoulish practice, bringing evangelicals into the fray, alongside the Catholics.
In this era, some time in the early eighties, Nancy and I founded the Open Door Crisis Pregnancy Center (now Care Net of the Palouse), and were very involved in those start up years. A blessed part of that work was placing babies for adoption.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, there was a lot of activity in Congress that meant to deal with the abortion issue, but an unfortunate divide soon split the pro-life forces. Two different approaches were put forward in the Senate, one from Jesse Helms and the other from Orrin Hatch. Helms put forward a bill defining life as beginning at conception, thus granting the fetus civil rights. This would have had the effect of outlawing abortion everywhere, and it also had the advantage of only requiring 50 votes in the Senate to pass, with 60 votes required to shut down a filibuster. From a different angle, Hatch proposed a constitutional amendment that would give either Congress or the states the right to regulate abortion by law. But as it was constitutional amendment, it would require 67 votes, and would then take years as the states voted to ratify. Thus the political side of the pro-life movement stalled out at the federal level.
A story is told—I don’t know how reliable—that there was a summit meeting of pro-life leaders at the White House. And when dissension broke out between the two factions, Reagan then left, saying, “When you guys figure it out, let me know.” A real opportunity was lost.
Between the two options, I would favor the Helms approach because it would have brought everything to a head. The Hatch plan would burn too much time, and would leave open the option of abortion continuing if Congress or the states did not exercise their authority under this new provision. But one fear with the Helms approach was that Congress could pass the law, and the president could sign it, and then the Supreme Court could just rule the measure unconstitutional. We would be back to the question of brinkmanship and trade-offs.
There was one measure that was not seriously pursued, however, and it really should have been. Article 3 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to limit jurisdiction of the courts. Had Congress passed the Helms measure, coupled with a measure that said that the courts had no jurisdiction over abortion laws, the thing would have been done. But that means we would have had our constitutional crisis right then and there. This is the reason that most pro-lifers have historically flinched, and this includes, not incidentally, the abolitionists. More on this later.
In 1986, Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue. Their guiding theme was that if pro-lifers believed abortion was murder, then they should start acting like it was murder. Their central tactic was conducting sit-ins at abortion clinics, thus shutting them down. At this point, Roe had only been in place for 13 years, and there were high hopes that large numbers of clinic sit-ins around the country would successfully force the issue. I participated in one rescue in Spokane in 1989, and was arrested there. There was a real feeling that we were almost to a tipping point, but that proved to be a false hope . . . which led to some additional pent-up frustrations.
So in 1993, Paul Hill shot and killed an abortionist in Florida, wanting to become the John Brown of a pro-life uprising. He was executed by lethal injection over a decade later. While he was in prison, he corresponded with our magazine Credenda, registering his objection to an editorial we had published entitled Moving Beyond Pro-Life (now included in Mother Kirk, pp. 260-264). One of the reasons for publishing the notorious booklet, Southern Slavery as It Was, was to spike this particular form of anti-abortion radicalism that was starting to take shape. John Brown was not a good guy, not at all, not even close.
As the years went by, frustration continued to build within the pro-life movement. For example, in 1992, the Supreme Court delivered another abortion decision in Casey. This was a law that required informed consent, a waiting period before getting an abortion, the permission of a parent or guardian where applicable, spousal notification, and so on. The case presented an opportunity to overturn Roe. The thing that was striking about this decision is that 8 of the 9 justices were Republican appointees. To be fair to the Republicans, Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist voted in the minority (along with one Democrat appointee, Byron White). In other words, 75% of the minority votes were Republican appointees, and 100% of the votes to continue the carnage were Republican appointees. It is not hard to see why some started to question and/or oppose the long game strategy of electing Republican presidents. That didn’t seem to be doing the trick.
Part of the reason for this is that a dogma had developed that insisted that nominees be allowed to be coy when it came to questions about abortion during their confirmation hearings. Such questions were deemed to be a “litmus test,” and it would be bad for a nominee to signal which way he might vote on a particular case. But this was a magnificent charade, and everybody knew it. What on earth could possibly be wrong with a litmus test question on an issue like abortion?
A little over forty years after Roe, Donald Trump was elected president, much to the surprise of all kinds of people. As a result, he had the opportunity to appoint three new justices to the Supreme Court. He had made a bargain with evangelical leaders, saying that if they supported his candidacy, he would in return appoint conservative judges. He had a list of names from which he would draw his nomination. The evangelicals agreed. For some evangelical leaders, this was a bargain with the devil—some thinking this because they were pietists, and others thinking this because they already had a bargain with another devil, one they intended to keep and fight for.
As a result of this deal, that monstrosity Roe was finally overturned with the Dobbs decision in 2022. The evangelical leaders who had been derided by the cool-kid-eva-leaders as faithless compromisers were used by God to bring about the first great pro-life victory in a generation.
I had my first encounter with the rising abolitionist movement around ten years ago, probably. This was prior to Dobbs, and the encounter was alarming and instructive. But before telling that tale, I need to take a moment to distinguish two sorts of abolitionists. There are a number of abolitionists that I have a good relationship with—I respect them and they respect me. I think they understand that anyone who believes that our ultimate goal in this fight is the eradication of all legalized forms of human abortion is in spirit an abolitionist together with them.
But there are other abolitionists who not only do not have a dimmer switch, but they also don’t seem to have any idea of what a dimmer switch might be. Someone emailed me the text of a bill to be submitted to the Idaho legislature, and asked if I could support it. I read through it and agreed with it, but had concerns about how penalties might be applied. I do believe that penalties are appropriate for the mothers involved (and not just the doctors), but wanted to be sure that the same range of standards that we have for post-born murder cases would be applied in the same way (e.g. manslaughter up to first degree). The response to this was that some folks came unstuck, and attempted to organize a protest at our church, with abolitionists picketing our worship service. That attempt came to nothing, but the fact that it was even attempted revealed to me that some people would rather fight fellow pro-lifers than abortion.
Now a reasonable abolitionist might explain that if we simply grant the unborn child full legal status, then all the usual standards of evidence would of course apply. And I would be entirely good with that. But the people trying to picket our church would not be people I would trust to make those sorts of distinctions when testifying in the legislature in favor of such a bill. They did not strike me as “distinction” people.
So I began using the phrase smashmouth incrementalism in 2017. I did this because I was not entirely on board with abolitionism, at least the kind that I was seeing, while at the same time I wanted to acknowledge plainly that the abolitionist critique of some sectors of the pro-life movement was entirely justified. There were pro-life organizations that had lost their way. For example, prior to the Dobbs ruling, National Right to Life filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging them to remand the case back to Mississippi, instead of doing what they actually did.
And this brings us down to the present. What the Dobbs ruling has done has been to make abolition at the state level a foreseeable possibility. At the same time, and for the same reason, it has made the prospect of abolition at the federal level much less likely—but it should be recognized that this was already not likely. What Dobbs did was turn the great big war into fifty smaller battles. Some of those battles can be won.