by Hans Johnson

A pro-life exhibit at Fayettville State College in North Carolina drew a lot of positive interest. The “Black Lives Matter” project featured thought-provoking signs noting concerns such as police encounters and fears of voter suppression, and compared them to the atrocity of abortion within their community.

Many students accepted pamphlets and copies of the Maafa21 documentary. Most gratifying was that almost 30 signed up to participate in future pro-life projects. One of the organizers of the event, Revererend Johnny Walker, talked to Life Dynamics’ Life Talk TV:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/e995lD0AmCU[/youtube]

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by Kelli

Today, we point to abolition as proof that we can improve society by eliminating one glaring evil. This is what unites “new abolitionists” across the political spectrum, whether they’re working to end the death penalty or ban abortion. We like the idea of sweeping change, of an idealistic movement triumphing over something so clearly wrong.

The problem is, that’s not really how slavery ended. Those upright, moral, prewar abolitionists did not succeed. Neither did the stiff-necked Southern radicals who ended up destroying the institution they went to war to maintain. It was the flexibility of the Northern moderates, those flip-floppers who voted against abolition before they voted for it, who really ended 250 years of slavery.

~ John Grinspan, New York Times Opinionator, January 30

[HT: Eric Scheidler; photo via entertainmentrundown.com]

by Hans Johnson

It seems if you have more than 2.3 children these days, there will be people who expect you to explain yourself. That’s what Andrea Chapman found when she became pregnant after having had twin girls and a boy. After comments like “I thought you were done!” she got the idea of doing a parody of Miley Cyrus’ music video “We can’t stop!” as a cheeky pregnancy announcement.

Husband Chad, a digital marketer, handled the production of the video while Andrea did the singing. The North Carolina couple’s second boy is due in August.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/JbFzOzuQedY[/youtube]

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[HT: Susie Allen]

Abolish Human Abortion leader Don Cooper wrote on Facebook two days ago:

I am an abolitionist. I am calling for the immediate abolition of human abortion. And anyone who opposes the immediate abolition of abortion I consider an enemy of God, an enemy of my neighbor, and enemy of me.

That’s a noble thought but certainly not earth-shattering. There’s no pro-lifer in the world who “opposes the immediate abolition of abortion.”

Yet, do not be confused. When those calling themselves “immediatists” call for the “immediate” abolition of abortion, they don’t really mean immediate. When pro-lifers challenge them to stop talking and just do it already, they mock us for advancing the Straw Man of Overnightism (right).

AHA co-founder T. Russell Hunter hedged his bets during the April 25 “Immediatist vs Incrementalist” debate against Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s Gregg Cunningham, stating the tree of abortion must be hacked with an ax “over and over and over, no matter how long it takes” – a signal for patience.

Except there is one tiny people group for whom patience in this instance is not a virtue – it’s deadly.

In a comment to my Part II post, Hunter wrote to “think of the abortion tree as more like Redwood,” the world’s biggest tree.

In a comment to my Prologue post, Hunter reiterated, “As I said in the debate, Immediatism has to do with what we are calling for and focusing on, it does not have to do with what we do on a daily basis or how long it takes for us to achieve abolition.”

In yet another comment Hunter wrote, “Immediatism often produces incremental results….” What in the world?

And so we return to my “freaked out obsession,” those preborn children caught in that unknown span of time between now and “no matter how long it takes” to abolish abortion.

During the debate Hunter persistently tried to evade Cunningham’s questions about those particular babies, since Hunter and AHA oppose incremental legislation that is proven to save them, even though Hunter admitted three times (I actually found a fourth, at 1:26:11 in the video) he knows such legislation works.

In another comment to my Prologue post Hunter admitted it again, writing: “Sorry Jill, I never say that the numbers saved ‘don’t matter,’ I only say that you guys are being deceived (and deceiving others) into believing that reducing the numbers leads to abolition…”

So, “reducing the numbers” (“numbers” being Hunter’s inhuman term for children) of those slaughtered by abortion doesn’t necessarily equate to abolishing abortion, in Hunter’s opinion, even though for those kids abortion was obviously abolished.

Hunter’s opinion is grossly uninformed, I might add, since Hunter admitted during the debate (at 1:35:26) he hadn’t read the foremost statistical study listing specific “numbers” saved by incremental legislation. So how does he know?

It appears the only AHA-sanctioned way to pull children from the branches of abortion during the time between wanting the “immediate abolition of human abortion” and actually abolishing it is protesting at abortion clinics, as Hunter wrote in another comment:

Abolitionists are going into the fields to save as many as we can and change as many minds as we can while we call for the total and immediate abolition of human abortion. We go out to the killing fields to rescue children because we are not just sitting at home and supporting the incremental schemes of politicians and lobbyists who write laws specifying which of the children in the field must be protected now and which in the field must be protected later.

Nice to “call for the total and immediate abolition of human abortion,” but what’s the plan? How many of the 738 remaining abortion clinics in the U.S. (from a high of 2,176, no thanks to AHA) does AHA cover on a daily basis? One? Two? Five?

It would be great if there were fewer to cover, right? No. AHA fights regulations to close those clinics, even though Hunter admitted in the debate (at 1:27:56) he didn’t think William Wilberforce was immoral to regulate slave ships for the same reason.

AHA also fights legislation that would keep pregnant mothers from going to abortion mills in the first place, such as informed consent, parental notification, waiting periods, and abortion bans.

It’s crazy. But what’s crazier is this: Hunter launched his fight against pro-life incrementalism with no immediate and functional plan of his own in place to replace the plan he was seeking to destroy.  Hunter posted this on his Facebook page yesterday, infuriating me even more. Click to enlarge…

So Hunter knew when he launched AHA in 2011 immediatism would take “a long time,” and there would be “a long period in which it was impracticable.” But he had no safety net prepared for the children from whom he would go on to rashly attempt to remove protections. He had no immediate and workable plan in place to save the children he was pulling the rug out from under.

To this day, four years later, AHA has no cohesive, wide-ranging plan to save these kids.

Did Hunter “think it through”? Clearly not.

All one can conclude is Hunter would prefer that these children die rather than be saved in a way in which he disapproves.

And mock those standing in a gap he is too small to stand in…

[raw]

[/raw]

It’s all just so funny, isn’t it?

Steve at the Triablogue blog nailed it yesterday:

It’s risky for AHA to level the charge of “methodological moral relativism,” for that’s apt to boomerang. AHA mortgages the lives of babies here and now in the hopes of saving every baby’s life in the future - except for all the babies they sacrifice in the interim in the furtherance of their long-range goal. What’s that if not ruthlessly “pragmatic” and methodologically “relativistic”?

Read previous posts:

Prologue
Part I: Let babies die today, we can save the rest later
Part II: There’s only one way to cut down a tree?
Part III: Social justice history vs TR Hunter
Part IV: Straw men and the Bible
Scott Klusendorf: Debate between Gregg Cunningham and T. Russell Hunter
Jonathan Van Maren: Four observations from the Cunningham vs. Hunter debate

by Carder

Ella’s work on this project actually began after she’d heard a discussion of the ethics behind prenatal tests to detect birth defects. The First and Foremost I Am photo series aims to do more than showcase the “beauty and diversity of humankind.”

When looking at her 21 subjects — a number purposefully chosen to illustrate the extra copy of chromosome 21 that causes Down syndrome — who range in age from 9 months to 60 years old, Ella hopes it will make people see what we’d lose if we lived in a world without them.

~ Kathy Schweitzer, describing photographer Sigga Ella’s Down Syndrome portrait project, POP Sugar, May 5

[Photo via Ella’s Facebook page]

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

• Culture Campaign comments on self-professed Satanist name “Mary” who claims the Missouri waiting period is preventing her from exercising her religious belief “that her body is subject to her will alone.” (I wonder how they square this with other laws in society which restrict individual rights.) Of course, Mary and the Satanists have the full support of abortion advocates. A fund has been established so “Mary” can have an abortion ASAP at the only remaining abortion clinic in MO, Planned Parenthood of St. Louis – which is not exactly known for it’s great track record on safety.
• 40 Days for Life just celebrated its second event in Nigeria in the past two years.

• Clinic Quotes has a bizarre, twisted quote from Christiane Northrup, a former abortionist, who apparently believes abortion should remain legal because the mother-child bond is sacred. What?
  

  The bond between mother and child is the most intimate bond in human experience. In this most primary of human relationships, love, welcome, and receptivity should be present in abundance. Forcing a woman to bear and raise a child against her will is therefore an act of violence. It constricts and degrades the mother – child bond and sows the seeds of hatred rather than love. … Life is too valuable to inhibit its full blossoming and potential by forcing a woman to bear it against her will.

  Is banning abortion an act of violence, or is abortion itself the act of violence?

• At Live Action News, Amanda Read discusses the past winners of Life Film Fest’s Capra Award and how they honored life:
  

  Capra was the youngest of seven children in an Italian immigrant family, and is remembered for crafting the simple richness of everyday life onto the silver screen in such films as “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

  The beauty of Capra’s filmmaking is the power of the parable, as seen in the compelling illustration that no one’s life is an accident.

• Josh Brahm talks about his experience of touring this exhibit (pictured right) in Portland, Oregon. Although, as Brahm points out, some may be “triggered” by the exhibit (perhaps due to their belief that any scientific display of preborn humans is somehow anti-women’s rights), showing the development of the preborn child is scientifically valid:
  

  The exhibit was created by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the person behind the controversial “Body Worlds” exhibit. He uses a plastination technique to preserve animal and human bodies and sets up exhibits in an effort to educate people about anatomy in a way that books can’t. The exhibit is controversial because in the case of the human bodies, these were real people who arguably should have been buried. My staff and I have unresolved concerns about that aspect of it.

  In the case of the prenatal development exhibit at OMSI, they only have babies who were miscarried and then preserved, presumably with the parents’ permission….

  It became harder for me to step into the shoes of a pro-choice person and defend abortion rights later in the exhibit though. Around the point where the baby in front of us was nine weeks old, it became clearer than anything that this is a little human, not an unorganized mass of developing tissue.

  As I was staring at a child who was about 20 weeks old my brother Tim came up to me to ask me what I was feeling. I paused, and then responded that I felt “intensely sad about abortion.” I asked him what he was feeling, and he replied, “As I looked at the younger embryos, I felt really sad, but the older they get, the more I feel angry.”

  I reminded Tim that abortions at 20-weeks or later don’t happen nearly as often as first-trimester abortions before asking, “What specifically are you angry about?” Tim thought about it, and responded, “I’m angry that 20-week abortions are defended so often. I’m angry that our society is even having to debate whether or not to pass a bill that would ban abortions at this stage.”

[Photo of OR display by Eric Shierman via Josh Brahm; Northrup photo via pinterest.com]

Abolish Human Abortion followers love to use the term “straw man” to dismiss pro-life arguments that point out their inconsistencies.

(For example, during their recent “Immediatist vs Incrementalist” debate, AHA’s T. Russell Hunter called it a “very, very silly straw man” when Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s Gregg Cunningham challenged Hunter for saying he would let a secularist save the life of his 2-year-old but not let a secularist help him save the lives of children marked for abortion [beginning at 1:20:20 on the video].)

So today let’s talk about straw men.

Repeatedly throughout the debate, Hunter blamed incrementalists for the fact that abortion has remained legal in the U.S. for 43 years, and this because we don’t have enough faith in God. Excerpted from his closing argument (1:53:39-1:59:47), italicized/underlined emphases mine for points to make afterward:

The Word of God is clear on at least this point. When there are grave injustices and evils going on in your midst, you ought to, because you love your neighbor, do justice and show mercy.

My big beef – my big problem- with the incrementalism is that people, instead of trusting in the Word of God and coming together as the bride of Christ and bringing the Gospel into conflict with the evil of the age, and doing what we are commanded to do, instead of being like Jonah to Nineveh, we go and we say, “What do the laws say? What can I get within the current federal ruling?”…

The debate between immediatism and incrementalism, when it’s couched in the, “which should we rally around, which should we come together,” if all Christians had to say, I’m going to go all my funding all my energy, my time, my talent, my church, which project should the people of God do? You may call it binary. Should we all pick up the ax and lay it to the trunk of the tree over and over and over, no matter how long it takes…. Should we do that – should that be what we unify around – or should we continue to say that’s good, I like that, but I’m gonna work on cutting down these branches….

My contention is that the people of God are under a false delusion that incrementalism is what they ought to be paying attention to. They ought to be unifying….

I don’t find incrementalism in the Bible. I don’t find incrementalism in the historical record of fighting social justice, except for that it is as a tutor to tell us don’t play around with it….

It’s just a question of like, do you believe in that God?…

If we can get people to believe in Him and trust in Him we can abolish abortion. But if we can’t get people to believe in Him and trust in Him we will not abolish abortion.

The emphasized sections highlight three flaws – straw men, if you will – in Hunter’s logic.

False premise

First, Hunter sets up a false premise, claiming we must choose between immediatism and incrementalism.

But Hunter is the only one “couching” it as an either/or. As Cunningham repeatedly rebutted, Hunter’s assumption is flawed and binary. Incrementalists pursue both strategies. We can walk and chew gum. Hunter apparently can’t.

Let babies stuck in the branches die

Second, Hunter glosses over the babies he is callously willing to sacrifice while focusing on chopping down the abortion tree with his ax, “no matter how long it takes.” Russell repeatedly refuses to stop and own the span of time between when immediatists began axing and when the tree falls. How exactly do we “show mercy” to our neighbors caught in the branches of abortion while ignoring them to hack at the tree “over and over and over, no matter how long it takes“?

Blame incrementalists when immediatism fails

Third, Hunter says we only need faith to stop abortion, but apparently the faith of he and his band isn’t strong enough. If they fail, it’s our fault. International Coalition of Abolitionist Societies reiterated their convenient escape hatch/scapegoat in a recent Facebook post:

In other words, there’s a Goliath II blocking AHA from getting to Goliath I.

Scott Klusendorf of Life Training Institute responded to that logic fail in his article analyzing the debate:

Hunter never once said how his policy of immediatism plays out in the real world. How, exactly, does it work to insist on the immediate abolition of abortion? Got the votes for that? Here is where Hunter’s argument is truly self-sealing. He states that if only all incrementalists would become immediatists, we could take the ax to the root and win.

So there you have it. When you can’t explain how your strategy actually works in the real world, you just fault your opponents for your failure to execute. This reminds me of faith healers who blame the victim for “not having enough faith” when he doesn’t immediately recover from a systemic illness….

… Hunter’s reply was that pro-life incrementalists don’t trust the power of the risen Lord and thus don’t embrace immediatism. But wait. If Hunter truly believes the power of the risen Lord enables us to end abortion immediately, why wait for us? Doesn’t that same power enable small groups as well as large ones?

If so, stop blaming the pro-life movement for not joining your immediatist crusade. After all, the gospel proclamation began with just twelve men, accompanied by signs and wonders, proclaiming the power of the risen Jesus in the very city where he was crucified in the face of hostility far worse than Hunter faces today.

Hunter also stated, “I don’t find incrementalism in the Bible.” If so, it’s only because he doesn’t want to. Cunningham gave but three examples (2:00:12-2:02:16), as summarized by Klusendorf:

First, Paul (1 Cor. 3) works incrementally to convey hard truths to weak brothers in the faith. He gives them milk instead of solid food. He revealed God’s law to them incrementally so they could digest it. Second, Jesus (Mark 10:4) says that God instructed Moses to relax the law on marriage because the people were not ready for tough divorce codes just then. Gradually, however, Christ toughens those laws. Jesus said this! Third, when Peter asked about paying the temple tax, Jesus compromised and paid lest he offend weaker Jews. Jesus was skillfully picking his fights!

Klusendorf added:

Commenting on the debate, Dr. Marc Newman, professor of rhetoric at Regent University and well-known debate coach, writes:

Look at Acts 17, with Paul on Mars Hill. He preaches a sermon during which he, quite interestingly, doesn’t cite a single scripture, but does invoke the local religion, philosophers, and poets. At the end, some scoff, some convert, and others say that they want to hear more on this subject.

Similarly, God in his foreknowledge and omnipotence, could convert all of the elect in the womb, but he does not. C.S. Lewis came to Christ incrementally: from an atheist, to a mythologist, to a theist, to a Christian - and this road has been traveled by many others.

God saves people in much the same way that incrementalists save children. God makes it clear that it is His desire that all be saved (1 Tim. 2:3-4), and that He takes no delight in the destruction of the wicked (Ez. 33:11). Nevertheless, we all come, one at a time. This one gets saved, then that one.

Imagine if the apostles waited until they crafted a strategy that resulted in the salvation of everyone before they actually began evangelizing? The Church would have been strangled in its cradle. No. The Apostle Paul says that he works separately among the cultures in all ways that don’t require him to compromise the core of the faith, becomes all things to all men, that by all means, he might saves some - not all, some (1 Cor. 9:19-23). Paul even declares that he will live as one under the law, even though he is not under the law, if by doing so he can save some. If Paul was an incrementalist, count me in.

In short, if Paul and the other apostles didn’t immediately end the social ills of their day by applying the power of the risen Christ, what makes Hunter think he can do so today?

Actually, as he stated during the debate and elsewhere, Hunter doesn’t believe “immediatism” means “immediate,” the topic of my next post.

Also read:

Prologue
Part I: Let babies die today, we can save the rest later
Part II: There’s only one way to cut down a tree?
Part III: Social justice history vs TR Hunter
Scott Klusendorf: Debate between Gregg Cunningham and T. Russell Hunter
Jonathan Van Maren: Four observations from the Cunningham vs. Hunter debate

by Hans Johnson

A moving encounter occurred last Friday at the Founder’s Women’s Health Center in Columbus, Ohio. A woman passing by saw displayed images of abortion victims and felt compelled to stop and relate her awful experience from 30 years before. When a couple who had previously been counseled exited the clinic and sat in their car, the woman went over and told them her story as well.

As she left, she encouraged the Created Equal members: “If one mother hears you, you did a good job!” She did a good job as well. The couple accompanied a counselor to a pregnancy resource center nearby, and later cancelled the abortion appointment.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/IemwiUxsH_Q[/youtube]

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