The Pro-Lifer's Borrowed Capital

Few convictions run deeper in the pro-life movement than its care for the mother. It has built pregnancy centers, staffed the hotlines, and opened its homes, and it has insisted, rightly, that a woman in crisis is someone to be loved. That care shapes its laws as well, and in one particular place it shapes them in a way few in the movement have examined closely enough.

The movement holds two convictions about the mother, and it holds them both with a good conscience. The first is that a woman who ends the life of her child has murdered her child. The second is that a woman who conceives a child should carry that child to birth. Both flow from a single certainty, that the child is real and the child is hers. Take the first conviction at its word and a plain question follows. If a woman who aborts her child has in fact murdered her child, should she be treated as a murderer or not? The movement flinches from the question, and it has rarely stopped to ask why.

I do not raise this to make anyone's work harder or to question anyone's heart. I raise it because a movement that means to speak for the voiceless has to be willing to hear itself. The tension is real, and beneath it lies something the movement has spent years condemning in the world without noticing that it had carried the same thing home.

Two Verdicts on the Same Woman

Start with the immunity, and hold it up to the light, since a movement ought to test its own traditions rather than assume they are as good and loving as it believes them to be. Nearly every pro-life law names abortion as the killing of an innocent child and then shields the mother from any penalty for it. The instinct behind that shield deserves a fair hearing. The people who drafted those laws know how many mothers are frightened, pressured, deceived, and abandoned, and they do not want the law to fall on a woman already crushed. The church should be the last place a broken woman meets a cold sentence.

But the movement holds a second conviction just as firmly, and it runs headlong into the first. When a woman says that her body is hers and the child may be discarded, the pro-lifer answers that she is not free to walk away from what she has done, that having conceived a life she is now bound to it, that the pregnancy is hers to carry and the birth hers to bear. There the movement insists that a woman must live with the consequences of her choices. In the matter of the abortion it insists that she must be spared them. It is the same woman. Yet the moment the abortion is finished, the movement abandons the conviction it began with and changes sides in the middle of its own argument.

So the movement speaks with two voices that cannot both be true. Should a woman live with the consequences of what she has done, or should she not? On the question that matters most it has no settled answer, because it does not agree with itself. It has told the same woman, about the same act and in the same breath, that she must bear what she chose and that she must be spared it.

Whose Argument the Pro-Lifer Borrows

There are three positions in this debate, and it is worth seeing clearly which one the movement takes. The abolitionist argues that if the unborn is a person, the law must guard that person the way it guards everyone else, which means the mother is treated as any other human being accused of taking a human life, no better and no worse. Her case is weighed in court like any other. Where malice is proven, the law answers it. Where she acted under coercion or duress or the other conditions the law already recognizes, the same defenses that would shield anyone else shield her. The point is not that every mother is punished. The point is a single standard applied to everyone, the child included.

The abortionist argues the opposite, that the woman must face no penalty at all, because the choice was hers and hers alone. Pressed between the two, the pro-life movement sides, on this one point, with the abortionist. It tells the abolitionist that the mother must be the exception. It has adopted the abortionist's own conclusion and dressed it in the language of mercy.

Follow that one step further and the ground gives way entirely. Many pro-life laws would punish the man who procures or coerces the abortion, and the physician who performs it, while leaving the mother herself untouched. The act is the same act. The child is just as dead. What separates the one who is charged from the one who is excused is not what was done but who did it. Guilt fastens on the man and lifts from the woman, and the deciding factor is not her conduct but her identity.

That is Woke Marxism, and it does not become something else because pro-life hands are the ones using it. Two people share in one killing. The law charges the one it casts as the powerful party and excuses the one it casts as the powerless one, and it does so before either has been weighed as a person in her own right. Guilt and innocence are read off the category, not the act. Few pro-lifers would ever call themselves woke, and most would be stung by the word. But follow the evidence to its end and the verdict holds. They have taken a woke framework and laid it over the pregnant woman.

The Same Verdict

Charged with borrowing the other side's logic, the movement pleads necessity. It is only saving whom it can. The defense reaches, as it always does, for a hero. In a recent interview a prominent pro-life leader did exactly that, sounding more anxious about how the movement would look than about what its laws actually secure, and he reached, as many do, for William Wilberforce. Wilberforce did accept concessions on the road to abolition, and the appeal to him is meant to end the conversation. It ends nothing. It assumes, first, that every concession he made was right, which is a claim to be argued rather than borrowed. And it passes over the difference that decides everything. Wilberforce's compromises left some men and women still in chains. They did not leave them dead. A slave not yet freed could be freed the next year. A child not yet protected is buried, and no later year gives him back. To compromise so that some remain enslaved is one thing. To compromise so that some are killed is another, and no borrowed name makes the two the same.

The question is narrower than the movement has been willing to admit. Either the mother who takes her child's life has done a grave and answerable thing, as any person would who takes a human life, or she has not. If she has not, then the pro-lifer has agreed with the abortionist after all. The abortionist tells the woman she owes no one an answer for the death. At the decisive point, so does the pro-lifer. Lay the two outcomes side by side and they are one outcome. In the abortionist's world the child is dead and the mother walks free. In the pro-lifer's world the child is dead and the mother walks free. On the one thing that finally matters, whether a person has died and whether anyone must answer for it, the abortionist and the pro-lifer hold the same sense of justice, and more than a few of the movement's leaders hold it now without a second thought. A child lies dead, and the woman who willed that death owes no one anything. There the two sides agree. The only difference left between them is the mood. One grieves the outcome and the other celebrates it, and to the child in the grave it is the very same verdict. Only one position refuses that ending, the one that will not fall into the trap of identity politics and exempt the mother on the ground that she is a woman. That is the abolitionist's position, and at the decisive moment it is the only one that is not also the abortionist's.

None of this forbids mercy. Mercy is exactly right. But the mercy a guilty woman needs is not a law that calls her a murderer and then treats her as though she were innocent. That is not mercy. It is the abortionist's verdict wearing a kinder face, and it leaves her alone with a guilt the statute only pretended away. Real mercy does count the guilty guiltless, but never arbitrarily. She is declared righteous only because her guilt has been carried by another. It was purchased at a cross, not waived by a court. And that pardon belongs to God's tribunal, not the state's. A nation of laws is charged to carry out justice, and it cannot hand down from the bench what only the cross can give. A movement that names the act murder and then exempts the one who committed it has not shown her mercy. It has borrowed the argument of the people it set out to oppose, and called the loan compassion.