It did not take long for Big Eva to go from celebrating the imminent overturn of Roe v. Wade to fighting the most pro-life people in the anti-abortion movement. The failure of the Louisiana Bill to label abortion a homicide was, in part, the result of an industrial complex known as Big Baby. The National Right To Life, and their state chapters have notoriously opposed efforts to pass bills that would lead to the overturn of Roe, instead anchoring the movement so that they could profit and raise money for Republican candidates. Now these same people are coming out against treating abortion as murder and therefore mothers who kill there own babies as murderers.
The frontrunner candidate for the Southern Baptist Convention, Bart Barber, said that when women go to an abortion clinic they are never the ones doing the killing. Big Eva’s Denny Burk, perhaps a true believer in the Kevin DeYoung vein, wrote an article that ultimately perverts God’s standard by stating it is not “morally clear” the role a women plays in abortion. this guy teaches at a seminary! Yet he wrote “Why Pro-Lifers Support Laws to Punish Abortionists but Not Mothers” to defend this inconsistency in the leadership of the pro-life movement.
Morally, it is not always clear what level of culpability should be assigned to the mother. That is not to say that she has no moral culpability in the act. She certainly does have moral agency and culpability in seeking out an abortion. Having said that, it is not always straightforward to what degree she is morally implicated in the act.
If a man hires a hitman to kill his wife, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” it is rightly understood that the man conspired to commit murder. Thus, even if he did not pull the trigger, her is equally culpable in the act. Yet with abortion, there is a great obfuscation of what takes place by those who believe life begins at conception.
The issue is whether there has been a true “meeting of the minds” in which the woman contracting the abortion has the same understanding of the act and same moral proximity to it as the abortionist. Does she know that abortion involves the killing of a human being? Was she coerced? Etc. To be sure, many women know exactly what they are doing when they get an abortion. But many others have imbibed the lie that they are simply having an inhuman clump of cells removed. Both women have moral agency and culpability, but do they really have equal culpability regardless of whether there has been a true “meeting of the minds”? What specific public policy would take account of both kinds of situations?
Taking out the issues of coercions, an issue largely fueled by the convenience that would increase the number of people morally culpable, the fact that a woman walks into an abortion mill is evidence she knows what she is doing.
Denny Burk operates on an outdated paradigm. Firstly, majority of abortions are performed chemically, not surgically. Meaning, there is no abortionist in the traditional sense. According to the CDC, in 2019, 42.3% of all abortions were early medical abortions. Use of early medical abortion increased 10% from 2018 to 2019 and 123% from 2010 to 2019. In these instances, a doctor prescribes mifepristone and the woman takes it at home on her own volition. There is no abortionist in the traditional imagery. This is the direction of the abortion industry because prescribing drugs is a lot cheaper than employing butchers, hence the massive increase in this practice.
In a substantial and growing proportion of abortions performed, the women is the person pulling the proverbial trigger. The abortionist is only dealing the murder weapon.
Moreover, to argue that women do not understand what pregnancy is goes against human biology and anthropology. Humans have always known that sex leads to pregnancy and that an unborn baby is a human being. The Romans 1 level of self deception is not an excuse, and is an argument unbecoming of a Christian.
I highly recommend that you read the whole thing. But here’s a relevant excerpt:
Why did the states target abortionists and treat women as a victim of the abortionist?
It was based on three policy judgments: the point of abortion law is effective enforcement against abortionists, the woman is the second victim of the abortionist, and prosecuting women is counterproductive to the goal of effective enforcement of the law against abortionists.
The irony is that, instead of states prosecuting women, the exact opposite is true. To protect their own hide, it was abortionists (like the cult hero and abortionist Ruth Barnett when Oregon last prosecuted her in 1968), who, when they were prosecuted, sought to haul the women they aborted into court. As a matter of criminal evidentiary law, if the court treated the woman as an accomplice, she could not testify against the abortionist, and the case against the abortionist would be thrown out.
In short, as a matter of policy, prosecuting mothers would likely undermine the ability to prosecute abortionists. There is evidence that this was likely the reason why state laws prohibiting abortion before Roe didn’t seek to punish the mother.
Effectively, Denny Burk believes the criminal justice system should treat abortion as it treats the war on drugs. It treats the mothers like they are Bubbles from The Wire and the abortionist like they are Avon Barksdale. Get the junkies and the low level criminals to squeal on the higher echelons of the criminal syndicate.
But this is not justice, nor can we argue that it is being done in the pursuit of justice. It’s understandable that the justice system makes concessions to lower level offenders in organized crime because it is pursuing a kingpin strategy. However, this approach is not done out of the viewpoint that the lower levels snitching on the higher levels are victims. That’s the key difference here.
Citing an example of injustice or incomplete justice as Denny Burk did does not substantiate a biblical case. God takes murder very seriously.
He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.
Genesis 4:10
When David murdered Uriah, he had others do it, but God held him to account. Are we really so gullible to believe that women who kill their own children are less culpable, even as 42% carry out the executions themselves, and that’s without getting into the ability to purchase abortifacients on Amazon or the “whorsepaste” the liberal media is promoting.
There is a great inconsistency at the top of the pro-life movement that perverts God’s justice by calling women who murder their own children victims and wanting the law of the land to reflect their internalized feminism rather than God’s prescription for murder on earth.
One Response
“Instead anchoring the movement so that they could profit and raise money for Republican candidates.” Just like immigration and a host of other hotbutton issues. Congress WILL NOT solve problems that raise them a lot of money and attention. There are so few honest actors left anywhere near government its almost enough to give up. I still have my doubts Roe will be overturned politically. But, if it is God’s arm in this then it will be.