Is Making Abortion Illegal Legislating a Religious Viewpoint? [Clinton Wilcox]

The pro-life position entails that since unborn human beings are full human persons at fertilization, if you kill an unborn human being at any point in his/her development, you are committing an act of unjustified homicide which should be forbidden by law. Of course, many pro-choice people believe, not having actually listened very closely to the pro-life argument, that the pro-life view is grounded only in a religious belief. So they respond that we cannot legislate a religious point of view into law.

Of course, they are correct. But what they miss is that we are not trying to force people to become Christians, or worship Yahweh, or pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day. If the pro-life argument is correct, that human beings are full human persons from fertilization, then the law of the land can reflect that. As I've heard LTI's president Scott Klusendorf mention in a debate against Malcolm Potts, the law does not have to take a position on the soul to make murder illegal. If the unborn are full human persons as adults are full human persons, then the law is justified in making abortion illegal, just like it makes infanticide illegal, and just like it makes murder of older people illegal.

Consider a Venn diagram with two circles that intersect (hopefully my mathematical friends will be proud of me). In the left circle is the set "God's laws," and in the right circle is the set "humanity's laws." In the middle is the intersection between the two. We are not trying to legislate something that is merely God's law into the law of the land (again, we are not trying to make people follow Christian rituals or worship Yahweh). We are legislating one of God's laws into the law of the land, both of which intersect. Murder, rape, and theft also oppose God's laws, but they are laws that we should also institute into the laws of the land. Abortion is no different, as it is the intentional killing of an innocent human person.

The pro-life position naturally entails that abortion should be illegal. If the pro-life position is correct, then our government has no moral choice but to make the act illegal.

Must We Convert the Culture to Christianity to End Abortion?

It seems every so often I run across someone on Facebook (rarely in personal activism) who asserts that we must convert people to Christianity in order to end abortion, or that we must share the Gospel at all times with people, whether or not we make pro-life converts. To do anything less goes against God's teachings.

This may sound super spiritual on the face of it, until you stop and consider that, as Augustine said, "wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his master" (On Christian Doctrine, II.18.28). Or as it is commonly paraphrased, all truth is God's truth. Whenever we share the truth about abortion, that it is the unjustified killing of an innocent human person, we are sharing God's truth. Now, it's possible that someone would only be converted after you share the Gospel with them and they come to understand the universe as God does. But it's also very likely that someone will not take the Gospel seriously until they hear a Christian give a reasoned defense of one of their positions in another sphere of knowledge.

I, myself, have met people who said they did not come to Christ until after they became pro-life. In fact, this is true of Bernard Nathanson, an atheist physician who founded NARAL. He became pro-life while still an atheist, then converted to Catholicism later in life.

I have been attending the Clarkson Academy in Battle East Sussex, England. At this conference Michael Sherrard gave a presentation. He is the pastor of a church, and one of the members of his church asked a friend from college if he'd like to attend church with her one Sunday morning. The parishoner's friend was an atheist who agreed to go to church with her because it was important to her. While there, Mike gave a presentation on the pro-life position. The friend was highly impressed with Mike's rational defense of the pro-life position, so the rest of the time the parishoner had with the friend while the friend was in town, he spent time asking important questions about Christianity. His parishoner's friend's interest in Christianity was only piqued because he heard Mike give a reasoned defense of the pro-life position.

The cold reality is that if we want abortion to end, but we think we have to always share the Gospel in order to do it, we're going to turn many people off. We'll never end abortion that way. Scott Klusendorf, in another presentation, reminded us that even the Bible says this: narrow is the way and there are few who find it. We could never possibly hope to end abortion if our only goal is to share the Gospel. If we really want to save babies, we have to be intentional about when we give a reasoned defense of the pro-life position, and when we share the Gospel. Many of my conversations on abortion naturally lead into discussions of ultimate reality, where morality comes from, and so on. But if that was my only goal, I'd never see an end to abortion.

Book Review: The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution by Jenna Ellis [Aaron Brake]

It has been over one year since the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, a decision which granted legal recognition and moral validation to same-sex “marriage” in the United States. While this decision was just one of many abuses fueled by the judicial activism of nine unelected judges, it was also a culmination of sorts in our culture’s ever-increasing slide into secular humanism over the last several decades. Many Christians marvel at how we have come to such a place in a nation originally founded on objective moral and biblical principles. More importantly, they wonder if there is still a way back. Enter Jenna Ellis and her book The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.

Ellis is an attorney, professor, and legal analyst who uses her expertise in these areas to make a persuasive historical and legal case that grounds the authority of our nation’s Founding Documents in Divine Law, i.e., the discoverable, objective, unchanging law of God that includes both science and morality. As she explains, proper constitutional interpretation will be based on reading the U.S. Constitution in context, interpreting and applying the text correctly, while taking into account the original intent of the Founding Fathers. This of course assumes an objective, fixed meaning to the text, a belief many secular humanists want to replace with the idea of a fluid, changing Constitutional document possessing no authority higher than man himself. In so doing, secular humanists undermine their own position by ridding themselves of any adequate grounding for objective meaning and value judgments, the very things they seemingly wish to celebrate after the Obergefell decision. With no universal authority from God, all that is left is man-made government, and what the government giveth the government can taketh away. Secular humanists cannot have their cake and eat it too. This is why our Founding Fathers appealed to Divine Law in securing our inalienable rights, not a social contract.

If that’s the case, does this mean Christians should argue for a moral constitution based solely on the “personal faith” of the Founders? As Ellis convincingly argues, that would be a mistake. What we need is an objective, legal basis and attempting to establish Constitutional intent on personal beliefs does not get to the most important interpretative question when determining meaning: What does the text say? Unfortunately, this question has taken a back seat in recent decades due to judicial activism and the misapplication of judicial review (Marbury v. Madison), whereby the Supreme Court has usurped power and effectively elevated itself beyond its originally intended authority and scope into the unchecked, final arbitrator regarding the interpretation, application, and constitutionality of laws. With doctrines like judicial review governing our country, appealing to the “personal faith” of the Founders simply will not win the debate. We need to get back to the authoritative basis and correct interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and this begins by recognizing “that nearly all of the most prominent and influential Founders were lawyers.”[1]

Is Consent to Sex Consent to Pregnancy? [Clinton Wilcox]

In her book Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent, sociologist Eileen McDonagh argued that pro-choice people should move the debate from being about choice to consent. In other words, instead of arguing a woman has a "right to choose" abortion, they should be arguing that an embryo only has the right to a woman's uterus if she grants consent to the uterus, and only if consent is ongoing. She argued that sex doesn't make a woman pregnant, sex only creates the embryo, and it's the embryo that makes the woman pregnant. Since the embryo occupies the woman's uterus against her will, the embryo is essentially a rapist, or a parasite (or perhaps one of the aliens from Alien). Since the embryo is essentially a rapist, the state has an obligation to protect her from this invader in the same way the state would use the police to protect her from an actual rapist.

That's the thesis of her book, essentially. McDonagh has succeeded to some degree in changing the abortion debate to be about consent. I don't encounter this argument when I'm talking to a pro-abortion-choice advocate in person. But I occasionally encounter this argument in on-line discussions. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and it's not an argument that is seriously defended by most pro-abortion-choice people. It's more of an argument pro-abortion-choice people keep in their quiver as a backup.

The argument fails for a few reasons, mainly because it has a wrong idea of where to place responsibility for the pregnancy. It's true that sex creates the embryo, but what is missed is not simply that the embryo is too young to have any rational idea of what is going on so he/she is not morally responsible for implanting in the uterus, but the embryo also is not causally responsible for implanting in the uterus. The woman's body is. Once the embryo is conceived from the sperm and the ovum, tiny hairs in the fallopian tube, called cilia, then pick up the newly conceived embryo and transport it into the uterus, where it then implants. It is the act of sex, itself, that not only conceives the embryo but also causes the embryo to implant in the uterus since it starts a chain reaction of causes and effects that results in pregnancy. Any woman who consensually engages in sex is responsible, morally and causally, for her pregnancy (of course, the man is responsible, too, but I am focusing on the woman for the purposes of this discussion). Since she engages in an act that is intrinsically ordered toward procreation, she is, then, morally responsible for caring for any embryo that results from this union.

On top of tacitly granting consent to the use of her uterus by virtue of the fact she consented to the act that created the embryo and placed the embryo in a state of dependence upon her, this consent cannot be revoked. If the only way to remove someone from your property is to kill them, you cannot evict them. By way of analogy, if I allow someone the use of my house, I can revoke consent at any time. However, if I have granted that person consent to use my storm cellar during a tornado, I cannot then revoke consent until the tornado is gone and there is no danger. Even the idea of tacit consent can be seen here. Suppose "Weird Al" Yankovic's in town. I go to where he is appearing, then I drug his drink and take him back to my home, refusing to let him leave until he signs all of my CD's. But suppose I live in Kansas and in the midst of trying to get his autograph, a tornado touches down near my house. I can't, then, turn him out and say "tough luck, pal. You refused to polka with me, so my storm cellar, my choice." I now have a tacit obligation to protect him in my storm cellar because I have placed him in a state of dependence on me for protection.

Another argument sometimes invoked to make this point is if you get into a car and get into an accident, you consented to drive but you did not consent to being in an accident. The doctor will still heal the person, even though they consented to get behind the wheel.

This is, of course, true. But driving is not an act that intrinsically leads to getting in an accident in the same way that sex intrinsically leads to getting pregnant. If everything works as it is intended, then having sex will conceive a child. However, in driving, getting in an accident is an abuse of the intended function of the car. The intended function is to transport people and objects.

To reiterate, this argument is not a very good one. It is also easy to show why the argument doesn't work. It requires denial of the metaphysical reality of cause and effect, namely that sex causes pregnancy; it doesn't just cause the embryo. The embryo would not exist if the man and woman did not have sex in the first place.

Book Review: Love Unleashes Life: Abortion and the Art of Communicating Truth by Stephanie Gray [Clinton Wilcox]

(Full disclosure: Stephanie is a friend and I have had the pleasure of engaging in pro-life activism with her. As such, I'll be referring to her by her first name because it feels weird to me to call her Gray. Additionally, even though she's a friend, these are still my honest thoughts on her book.)

Love Unleashes Life is the newest book from pro-life advocate Stephanie Gray. It's a book that covers some of the intellectual and emotional arguments for abortion and how to respond to them, but the main focus of the book is in teaching people not just how to respond to these arguments, but also in how to engage in a more human way, by recognizing when emotional hang-ups and past trauma are undergirding someone's arguments.

This book should be on every pro-life advocate's bookshelf. There are a lot of books you can pick up to help respond to pro-abortion-choice arguments, but precious few books that help engaging pro-abortion-choice people in a way that cuts to the heart and responds not just to concerns people have but in responding to the trauma they have experienced in the past. Few books, if any, do that as well as Steph's book here.

This book seems to be largely intended for Christian readers. It's neither a pro nor a con, but I think worth pointing out, since I have nonreligious readers, as well. I do think nonreligious people can find a lot of value in this book, if they can overlook the Scripture references. And of course, the arguments she gives against these pro-abortion-choice arguments are nonreligious so as to appeal to the largest number of people possible and change more hearts and minds on the issue.

Aside from the aforementioned, one of the things that stood out in particular is the fact that it's an excellent primer on communicating a controversial message. If you want to be a good communicator you will do well to pick up this book. On top of that, it has good focus on how to use language well (for a couple of examples, she talks about avoiding the word "but" because it can sound dismissive, and about using personal pronouns, such as "he" and "she" when referring to the unborn).

I really enjoyed her discussion of double effect reasoning (pp. 64-65). Usually in discussions about abortions in the case of the woman's life being in jeopardy, the intentionality criterion is emphasized (e.g. that the unborn child's death is foreseen but unintended), but the other criteria for when double effect permits saving the woman's life in a life-threatening pregnancy aren't really discussed. Stephanie discusses all four criteria in some detail, to show what kinds of procedures double effect reasoning justifies. Her discussion even helped clarify my thinking a bit on this issue.

As great as this book is, there are still some areas I feel could use improvement (perhaps for consideration in a second edition sometime in the future), and they're mainly along the philosophical side of things.

Her book was mainly geared toward helping people like me talk more humanly about abortion, so it's not meant as a primer on the intellectual arguments for abortion choice. However, there were some arguments that were conspicuously missing.

In her discussion of rape, she trots out the toddler to show that since we would not kill a toddler who was conceived in rape, if the unborn are fully human we should not kill the unborn for this reason. That's true as far as it goes, but most pro-abortion-choice people argue the reason abortion is permissible in rape is because she has been made pregnant against her will, so we should not force her to use her body for this child because she did not consent to having sex. Steph did address bodily rights arguments, but didn't address them in the context of the rape discussion.

Another thing was her constant use of the term pre-born. I understand why she is using it, and I know many pro-life people who insist on using it (over the term "unborn"). The problem is that many pro-abortion-choice people consider the term "pre-born" to be a propagandistic term. It can lead to irrelevant debates over terminology if you use that term rather than unborn. It's possible that Steph's experience has shown her otherwise, but in my experience using "pre-born" instead of "unborn" can derail the conversation. At the very least, I thought the book could have used a brief section talking about why she opted to use "pre-born" instead of "unborn".

Her section about personhood is good, but I feel it didn't go far enough. Most of the way Steph responds to the question of personhood is by driving home the point that it's ageism -- the reason the unborn aren't conscious or self-aware is because they're too young to be conscious or self-aware, but will be in time. However, in our current age we are defending what has come to be considered a controversial proposition -- that there are such things as natures, and that numerical identity is retained even in the absence of psychological connectedness. Again, I realize the point of the book was not to go too deep into these arguments (and there are other books one can read to learn how to respond to these arguments), but I feel that we'd encounter a number of people who might actually answer "yes" to the question of whether or not age is a relevant factor in one's value, especially considering that euthanasia is becoming more accepted. So I would have liked to see addressed why consciousness or self-awareness are not relevant factors in determining one's value, since there are a number of people we'll have to respond to who hold to these types of arguments.

My final con was regarding her section of the teleological view of the uterus. This is a view I wholeheartedly endorse, and she's really the only person in the abortion literature I've seen defend this specific view (other thinkers defend teleological views, but it usually has to do with the personhood discussion and whether or not we're persons from fertilization). I like her argument, but there were a few counterarguments I came up with in my head that I wish she would have addressed. So basically this comes down to I really wish she would have responded to potential criticisms of her views because I'm very much interested in how she would respond to them.

The missing arguments aren't a huge deal, since it's not really the point of the book to give a full primer on these arguments. This book is an invaluable resource to a pro-life advocate's arsenal.

Book Review: Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams [Clinton Wilcox]

Special thanks to Oxford University Press for the free copy to review.

Daniel Williams has done a great service to the pro-life field by researching and compiling this volume regarding the history of the pro-life movement. There are now two books on abortion history that I would suggest grace every pro-life advocate's bookshelves: Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History by Joseph Dellapenna, and now Defenders of the Unborn by Daniel K. Williams.

This book is meticulously researched and sourced. It tells the historical tale of how a movement of pro-life advocates, who were largely Catholic and Democrat, tried to work against the liberalization of abortion laws, which eventually culminated in Roe v. Wade, ending the ultimate safety of unborn children in the womb. It recounts not just how they fought against these bills, but also the progression of their arguments, from making Natural Law arguments, to Constitutional rights-based arguments, to showing abortion victim photography, to arguing that women are victims of the abortion culture. It shows how, even though the movement started as mainly Catholic Democrats, eventually it became a much more diverse movement.

I've been doing work in the abortion field for a long time now, and there's a lot of false information regarding abortion history and the history of the pro-life movement out there. I've heard much of it over and over again. One glaring historical error I hear is that there was no pro-life movement until after Roe v. Wade was passed. Williams shows that it simply isn't the case. There was much pro-life work being done before Roe v. Wade, in order to ensure that unborn human lives were protected.

It's also worth noting that Williams is very even-handed in his approach. He doesn't insult either side; in fact, he uses language that both sides use in the course of writing his book. So even though this book is written by a pro-life person, a pro-abortion-choice person can read this as a history book without getting offended by inflammatory language.

If there is one negative point to this book, it would just be that it's very matter-of-factly written, with a lot of information given to you, so it's pretty dry reading. It's not the kind of book you'd just sit down and finish in one or two sittings. But if you read it through, study it, and take notes, it will greatly benefit you, especially with all the false information regarding abortion history and the history of the pro-life movement is out there.

Why Rachel Held Evans is Wrong to Tell Christians to Vote for Hillary Clinton, Part III [Seth Gruber]

(This is the third part in a three-part series responding to an article by Rachel Held Evans, which you can read here. This series is a joint effort between Seth Gruber and Clinton Wilcox. For part one in this series, go here. For part two in this series, go here.)

In our previous article, we responded to Evans' first two points. In this article, we'll respond to her last two points and wrap up with some concluding thoughts. The two points we'll be responding to are as follows:

3. Pro-life advocates should support, rather than oppose, efforts to help low-income families care for their children.
4. If we want to dramatically reduce the abortion rate in this country, we must support efforts to make contraception more accessible and affordable.

3.  Pro-life advocates should support, rather than oppose, efforts to help low-income families care for their children

Besides saying that “many” conservatives have opposed such bills, highlighting conservative opposition to Obama’s “initiative aimed at improving the distribution of free or low-cost diapers to poor families struggling to care for their babies”, Evans provides no proof or evidence that pro-life advocates oppose efforts to help low-income families care for their children. If she is going to make such a claim, she needs to provide proof that such a dubious claim is in fact true.

Evans has often written about the importance of being consistently pro-life in all areas and living a life that reflects our belief in the importance and sacredness of all life! Evans, it seems, is working to expand the culturally accepted term “pro-life” from its “anti-abortion” meaning to include affordable health care, poverty alleviation, paid family and medical leave, helping families of special needs children, racial reconciliation, etc., but she does so at the expense of pro-lifers' central conviction. Jay Hobbs, editor in chief of PregnancyHelpNews.com, writes in his article responding to Rachel Evans entitled “No, Rachel Held Evans, voting for Hillary Clinton is not Pro-Life” that:

A pro-life conviction comes from recognizing the inherent value and dignity of every human life. That is why we oppose abortion in all cases. We can argue a bigger tent, but never at the expense of that central conviction. Here’s where Held Evans gets in the weeds, and it’s where she stays. In trying to expand the definition of “pro-life,” she’s doing the very opposite, redefining the term to exclude the one issue on which we “pro-lifers” unanimously agree.

By refocusing the issue on the importance of poverty, health-care, racial issues, etc., Evans compromises the very central conviction that unites pro-lifers (that abortion is an indefensible act of violence which takes the life of a defenseless unborn human person). She does this by encouraging us to vote for Hillary, who has shown her commitment to such issues. “Hillary Clinton has devoted much of her life to tackling these very issues, and she’s made them a centerpiece of her campaign” Evans says. The message Evans is sending to the Church is this:

If you are truly and consistently pro-life, you should vote for Hillary Clinton because she is committed to addressing issues that will enable us to care for families and children once they are born. Such a vote will help our country address the underlying causes that lead to unwanted pregnancies so that we can continue to decrease the abortion rate in America.

And our message for Rachel Held Evans and her like-minded friends is this:

Pro-lifers CAN’T support efforts to help low-income families care for their (born) children when it comes at the cost of electing a candidate to the highest office in the land who has also promised to fight for the “rights” of low-income families to take their unborn children to a clinic where a “doctor” will slaughter that child through dismemberment and use your tax-dollars to help pay for it.

Would we consider voting for Hillary Clinton if, while retaining all of her good policies to help low-income families, provide affordable health care, alleviate poverty, and bring racial reconciliation, she also promised to work tirelessly to secure and defend the rights of men to practice their bodily autonomy (without government interference) in how they choose to interact with their wives, be it physically abusive or not? I think not.

The bottom line is this: Pro-life advocates do support efforts to help low-income families care for their children, both before and after birth. The prominence of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in America is proof of this. Time magazine reported in 2010 that “recent estimates indicate there are now more than five times as many CPCs in the U.S. as there are abortion clinics”. Given that pro-life laws have shut down many abortion clinics over the last several years, it is likely that the ratio of CPCs to abortion clinics is even higher now. So while pro-life advocates care for and support efforts to help low-income families care for their children, we cannot vote for a candidate whose policies and promises to care for such families and children only begin at birth.

4.  If we want to dramatically reduce the abortion rate in this country, we must support efforts to make contraception more accessible and affordable

We have only one question for Rachel Held Evans on this point: What type of contraception are you referring to? Preventative or abortifacient? While there are many who oppose the usage of contraceptives on moral grounds, contraception is in a different camp than abortion because contraception is meant to prevent the conception of a human being, whereas abortifacients take the life of an unborn human being after it has begun. So even if someone has moral issues with contraception, we should not enforce that moral position in law. We should enforce the moral position that abortion is wrong and should be illegal in law because taking a life is still wrong, even if someone doesn’t believe they are actually taking a life (by way of analogy, we should still make infanticide illegal even though there are those who believe infanticide is morally licit and may want to take the life of their infant under certain conditions). Such non-abortifacient contraceptive methods should be accessible and affordable. And we agree with Rachel Evans that these methods do play a part in decreasing the abortion rate since many of the couples who would get pregnant without preventative contraceptives would most likely seek out abortion.

However, abortifacient drugs such as RU-486, Norplant, Depo-Provera, Methotrexate & Misoprostol, and others, all have an abortifacient mechanism built into them. Let’s be clear: conception, not implantation, is the beginning of a new individual, a human person with intrinsic value and an inherent, natural ordering towards rationality. Abortifacient drugs are taken with the intent of causing an early abortion, and contraceptives are taken with the intent of stopping ovulation and blocking the sperm (thereby preventing conception).

If Rachel Held Evans is including abortifacients in her category of “contraception” when she says, “we must support efforts to make contraception more accessible and affordable”, then this is tantamount to saying:

If we want to dramatically reduce the abortion rate in this country, we must support efforts to make early-medication abortions more accessible and affordable.

Such a statement is clearly ludicrous because it is self-refuting. It can’t live by its own rules. We can’t reduce the abortion rate in America by supporting efforts to make early-medication abortion methods more accessible and affordable. Doing so only increases the abortion rate and makes it more difficult to track since many of these abortifacient drugs are available over the counter.

Rachel Evans has not specified what type of contraception she means, but there is good reason to believe that she is not opposed to at least some forms of abortifacients. We know this based off her admissions that she “believes the sacred personhood of an individual begins before birth” (no mention of conception), her statement that the “fact that a woman’s body naturally rejects dozens of fertilized eggs in her lifetime raises questions about where we draw the line regarding the personhood of a zygote”, and her questioning of whether we should count the loss of early embryonic life through natural miscarriages as deaths.

So yes, pro-life advocates should support efforts to make contraception accessible and affordable, but we already have a situation in which it is widely accessible and affordable. If you mean we should force the taxpayer to pay for it, that’s where we run into issues. Not getting it without paying for it is not the same thing as not being accessible and affordable.

Now, it is reasonable to believe that the use of such contraceptives will help decrease the abortion rate in America if the contraception we are discussing is purely preventative. If it is an abortifacient or has the potential to be abortifacient, then increasing the accessibility and affordability of such methods will only lead to the loss of more unborn life and raise the abortion rate in America.

A final word to Rachel Held Evans and like-minded progressive evangelicals…

We have posed the question multiple times.

If you believe that you can be pro-life while voting for a pro-choice candidate because you believe they will help keep the abortion rate lower and address the underlying causes that lead women to choose abortion in the first place, then would you consistently apply that same ethic if the social justice issue in question was spousal abuse?

Would you proudly blog about and encourage believers by saying:

So even though I think wife-beating is morally wrong in most cases, and support more legal restrictions around it, I often vote for candidates who promise to fight to keep wife-beating legal, when I think their policies will do the most to address the health and economic concerns that drive men to beat their wives in the first place. For me, it’s not just about being pro-wife; it’s about being pro-life.

If not, then we demand a response explaining the fundamental difference between the two scenarios that makes the argument reasonable in the former, but not in the latter, case.

The only difference we can see is that if anything, our example doesn’t go far enough. Spousal abuse, while a horrific and morally disgusting practice, is not taking the lives of over one million wives each year in the United States. Abortion, however, is taking the lives of over one million precious unborn human persons each year in the United States alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and well over fifty-three million abortions have been performed in the U.S. since the legalization of Roe v. Wade in 1973.

If Clinton gets elected, as Evans hopes, she and the rest of the evangelical-left who voted for her will be in the difficult position of having to explain:

1. How you can claim God’s love for kids while voting for a woman who says that “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights” ,
2. How you can claim to care for the defenseless and those on the fringes of society while voting for a woman who opposed the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have made abortion illegal after 20 weeks, at which point substantial medical evidence proves that the unborn can feel the pain of dismemberment, while also accusing said bill of “not being based on sound science” ,
   
3. How you can claim to be for women’s rights while supporting a woman who champions and promises to continue protecting the rights of women to take their unborn baby girls to be slaughtered by abortionists,
   
4. How you can vote for a woman who defended Planned Parenthood after videos exposed the organization’s trafficking of aborted baby body parts by saying, “I think it is unfortunate that Planned Parenthood has been the object of such a concentrated attack for so many years”,
   
5. How you can quote Bible verses like “love your neighbor” while voting for a woman who wants to continue defending and protecting the rights of women to abort their unborn children through dismemberment; children who are the most vulnerable members of the human family, and most in need of being treated as “neighbors”,
   
6. How you can support a woman who said about racist, eugenicist Margaret Sanger, “I admire her enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision… I am really in awe of her, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life”,
   
7. How you can claim to be pro-life and vote for a woman who said in a video addressing the American people, “I’m proud to stand with Planned Parenthood, I’ll never stop fighting to protect the ability and right of every woman in this country to make her own health decisions”, when we all know that when Hillary says “health decisions”, this is what she really means,
   
8. How you can claim to want improved health-care options for all people, while voting for a woman who said, “When politicians talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, they’re talking about blocking millions of women, men and young people from life-saving, preventive care.” You know that “life-saving, preventive care" includes the option for pregnant mothers to pay an abortionist to slaughter their unborn child through dismemberment; which suggests that you really only care about improved health care-options for born people,
   
9. And lastly, how you can vote for a woman who, as Susan Michelle of Live Action News points out, “is willing to look past the illegal actions and indiscretions of Planned Parenthood”, given their “history of fraud, supporting sex-selective abortion, willingness to cover up child sex-trafficking, failure to report child sexual abuse, dissemination of inaccurate medical information to women, and even lying about providing mammograms”, while claiming that pro-life means caring for all lives, be they children, women, or the unborn.

Evangelicals, I implore you: Don’t support Hillary Clinton. Don’t support an ageist demagogue who won’t even acknowledge that the unborn person has constitutional rights. Abortion has been legal far too long and has taken the lives of far too many unborn children. Don’t claim to be pro-life and simultaneously vote for a candidate who is committed to protect the “freedom” and “rights” of women to take those lives you claim to care about to be torn apart by abortionists. Don’t claim to believe in the inherent value and dignity of unborn persons while lending your vote to someone who might decrease the abortion rate, while at the same time boldly promising to Planned Parenthood that she will always have their back and will be their “partner in the election and for the long haul”.

Too many precious unborn human lives are on the line for us to risk anything but outright opposition to a candidate who promises to increase funding and access to abortion, to ensure a woman’s right to take her unborn child to Planned Parenthood or any other abortion provider and have that child killed so that she may live the life she wants. We hope and pray that no Christian would ever think that support for a candidate like this is morally upright or permissible.