--- layout: base.njk title: About description: Why this site exists, where the word "abolitionist" comes from, and what it cost the last generation of Christians who used it. permalink: /about/ source_url: "https://www.abhortion.org/about.html" --- # The Argument Has Already Been Won Once Ask anyone on the street whether slavery is wrong. You will not get a debate. You will get a look — the look people give you when you ask whether murder is wrong, or whether two plus two is four. The question has been settled so thoroughly that it no longer feels like a question at all. That certainty is an inheritance. It was purchased for us, over decades, by people who were mocked as fanatics, hounded from their pulpits, beaten in the streets, and told by respectable men that they were rushing God's providence. Most of them were Christians. Many of them were formerly enslaved Christians. And they did not win by being reasonable. They won by refusing to stop saying a thing everyone was tired of hearing. This site exists because we believe that argument is not finished. --- ## Where the word comes from *Abolitionist* is not a word we invented, and we do not use it loosely. It was the name taken by men and women who insisted that a human being made in the image of God cannot be owned, and that any law permitting otherwise is not a law at all but a legalized crime — to be abolished, not managed, not reduced, not regulated into a more humane shape. The word carried a specific claim: that some evils cannot be negotiated with, because negotiating with them concedes the thing in dispute. ## The Christians who pushed In Britain, the campaign to end the slave trade was built and staffed largely by believers. Granville Sharp fought his cases in the courts. Thomas Clarkson gathered the evidence, riding thousands of miles to interview sailors and surgeons. The Quakers petitioned Parliament as early as 1783, having already condemned the trade among themselves a century before. Olaudah Equiano, who had been sold as a boy and bought his own freedom, wrote the narrative that put the trade in front of the English reading public. William Wilberforce carried it into the House of Commons. In 1787 he recorded in his journal that God had set two great objects before him: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. He introduced abolition bills and watched them fail. He introduced them again. The slave trade was outlawed in 1807 — twenty years in. Slavery itself was not abolished across most of the British Empire until 1833. Wilberforce died three days after the Commons passed it. In America the picture is similar and messier. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening produced a generation of preachers who could not reconcile the new birth with the auction block. Theodore Weld and the Lane Rebels walked out of seminary over it. The Grimké sisters, daughters of a slaveholding family, testified against the household that raised them. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Black congregations across the North became the movement's spine, its shelter, and often its conscience. Sojourner Truth preached. Frederick Douglass wrote. ## And the Christians who didn't Here is the part that gets left out of the tidy version, and we will not leave it out. The most sophisticated theological defenses of American slavery were written by Christians. Richard Furman, James Henley Thornwell, and Robert Lewis Dabney were not cranks; they were serious churchmen with serious congregations, and they argued from Scripture. The Methodists split over slavery in 1844. The Baptists split in 1845. The Presbyterians split too. Slaveholders sat in pews, took communion, and heard sermons that told them their property was providential. Frederick Douglass saw this clearly and named it. He drew a hard line between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity practiced in the land around him, and he refused to let the second borrow the credit of the first. So the lesson of abolition is not that the church is reliably right. The lesson is sharper and more uncomfortable: **the church was on both sides, and being on the wrong side felt entirely normal at the time.** The pro-slavery divines were not consciously choosing evil. They were reading their Bibles, defending their institutions, warning against extremism, and counseling patience. ## Immediatism was the fight *inside* the movement The serious opposition to abolition, for most of its history, did not come from people who thought slavery was good. It came from people who agreed slavery was evil and disagreed about the speed. Gradualism was the respectable position. So was colonization — the proposal to end slavery slowly by shipping freed people abroad. Both were held sincerely, by decent people, on grounds of prudence: society was not ready, the economy would collapse, immediate emancipation would harm the very people it meant to help, and half a loaf was better than none. In 1824 a Quaker widow named Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet arguing for *immediate, not gradual* abolition. She had no platform and no office. Her argument was simple: gradualism asks the victim to wait, and the victim is the only party in the room who has no time to spare. When William Lloyd Garrison launched *The Liberator* in 1831, he took the same ground and famously promised not to equivocate, not to excuse, and not to retreat a single inch. They were told they were dividing the coalition. They were told a purist gets nothing while a pragmatist gets something. History did not vindicate the pragmatists. ## What hindsight costs It costs nothing to oppose slavery in 2026. There is no price. No one loses a pulpit, a friendship, a donor, or a seat at the table. That is exactly what should make us nervous. A moral conviction that costs nothing tells you very little about the person holding it. The people we now honor held theirs when the price was real, and the marker of their conviction was not the eloquence of their arguments but their willingness to be thought unreasonable for a very long time. The reflexive certainty we all now feel about slavery is not evidence that we would have been abolitionists. Statistically, it is evidence that we would have been the ones counseling patience. --- ## The gradualists never went away. They got a new name. Read the last section again and notice who the abolitionists were actually fighting. Not slaveholders. Slaveholders did not read pamphlets. The abolitionists spent their strength on men who already agreed with them — men who granted that slavery was a moral horror, who wrote against it, who prayed about it, and who spent forty years making sure nothing was done about it *yet*. The American Colonization Society was not a proslavery organization. It was the respectable antislavery organization. It had the funding, the churches, the statesmen, and the numbers. And its entire function, whatever its intentions, was to hold the ground that abolition wanted to take. That is the position the mainstream pro-life movement occupies today. We want to be precise, because this is where careless argument does damage. The pro-life movement is not the abortion industry. It is not Thornwell defending the auction block. Its people are not our enemies, and many of them have given their lives to this work at real cost. They are not lying when they say abortion kills a child. But they have built a movement that will not treat it as killing a child. ## The immunity clause Here is the thing almost no one outside the debate knows. Every abortion ban currently on the books in the United States exempts the mother from prosecution. Not as an oversight. By design, written in, on purpose. The [Charlotte Lozier Institute](https://lozierinstitute.org/pro-life-laws-exempt-women-from-prosecution-an-analysis-of-abortion-statutes-in-27-states/) — the research arm of one of the largest pro-life organizations in the country — surveyed the state statutes and reported the result approvingly: the laws exempt women, and this is consistent with the mainstream pro-life movement's long-standing position. That position is not private. On May 12, 2022, with *Roe* about to fall, [more than seventy national and state pro-life organizations](https://www.nrlc.org/uploads/communications/051222coalitionlettertostates.pdf) signed an open letter to state lawmakers. It states that the signatories do not support *"any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women,"* and commits them to continue opposing legislation that does. The signatories included National Right to Life, SBA Pro-Life America, Students for Life, Americans United for Life, Focus on the Family. Then a bill came that would have done it. In 2022, Louisiana Rep. Danny McCormick introduced HB 813, the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act. It defined *person* from fertilization and extended the state's existing homicide law to the unborn — no new penalties invented, no special crime created, simply equal protection under the law Louisiana already had. Louisiana Right to Life came out against it publicly, [objecting that it "does not exempt women from criminalization,"](https://lailluminator.com/2022/05/07/louisiana-right-to-life-opposes-bill-that-would-classify-abortion-as-homicide/) and then [lobbied Republican legislators to strip it](https://www.wwno.org/2022-05-12/fate-of-abortion-as-murder-bill-in-doubt-after-right-to-life-group-allies-come-out-against-it) and replace its text wholesale with a bill that protected the exemption. SBA Pro-Life America opposed it too. The bill died. It has kept happening. Equal protection bills modeled on the Prenatal Equal Protection Act have been filed in Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. [None has passed.](https://19thnews.org/2025/04/state-bills-abortion-homicide-pregnant-people/) In South Carolina, twenty-four Republicans co-sponsored one; as the coverage grew, nine of them [took their names off](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/9-republicans-south-carolina-abortion-death-penalty-bill-rcna75383). Bradley Pierce of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion put the situation plainly: *most major pro-life lobby organizations still oppose equal protection.* They support, he says, a policy that singles out one class of person and grants them legal immunity for prenatal homicide. So it is not true, and we will not say, that the pro-life movement is not trying to restrict abortion. It has restricted it enormously. What is true is this: **the largest, wealthiest, most respectable anti-abortion movement in American history has spent its influence ensuring that the killing of an unborn child is the only homicide in American law where the person who arranges it is immune by statute.** Ask what that immunity concedes. There is no other victim class for which we would tolerate it. No one proposes that a mother who hires a man to smother her toddler should walk free because she was a victim of the smothering industry. We grant the immunity because, somewhere beneath the words, we do not fully believe the claim we are making about the child. ## The reasons they give — and they are real reasons We are obliged to state their case as they state it, and it is not a stupid case. They argue that women are the abortion industry's second victim: coerced by boyfriends, abandoned by fathers, sold a lie by a predatory business, and left with lasting grief. They argue that no woman was prosecuted for her own abortion in any reported American case before *Roe*, so the exemption is the historic norm and not a modern compromise. They argue that prosecutorial resources are finite and better aimed at the abortionist, who acts knowingly and at scale. They argue that the mother is the state's necessary witness against him. And they argue, candidly, that the public will not tolerate it — that equal protection bills poll disastrously and cost the movement seats it needs. Every one of those is worth taking seriously. Several are true. They are also, without exception, the arguments of 1825. Slavery's gradualists said the South was not ready. They said emancipation would harm the freedmen. They said the planters were themselves ensnared, born into a system they did not choose. They said abolition would fracture the union, the party, and the church — and they were right, it did. They said, we agree with your principle and we differ only on the timing. Elizabeth Heyrick's answer has not been improved on. The party asking for patience is never the party that has to wait. ## The objection we find hardest Slavery did not, in fact, end because the immediatists won the argument. It ended by war, and then by constitutional amendment, signed by Abraham Lincoln — a man who spent most of his public life a gradualist, who ran on containment rather than abolition, and who freed no one in 1861. The Garrisonians called him a coward. The record is that his incrementalism moved, and their purity did not pass a single statute. We take that seriously. History is not a clean tract, and anyone who tells you the abolitionists won by refusing to compromise is selling you something. The movement needed the agitators *and* the legislators, and the two despised each other. But notice what Lincoln finally signed. He did not sign the Gradual Emancipation and Slaveholder Immunity Act. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished the thing — completely, immediately, and without exemption — and it was ratified because thirty years of unreasonable people had made the moderate position unlivable. Immediatism did not pass the law. It made passing the law possible, by moving the boundary of what a decent person could say out loud. That is what we are for. --- ## The claim this site makes We hold that the same principle the abolitionists established — that a human being bearing God's image may never be treated as property, and that laws permitting otherwise must be abolished rather than regulated — applies to the unborn, and that the church today occupies the position it occupied in 1830: divided, comfortable, and reaching for the language of prudence. That claim rests on arguments, not on the analogy. **An analogy proves nothing by itself.** People of good faith, including many who oppose abortion, dispute this comparison — some on the grounds that the moral status of the unborn is the very question at issue and cannot be smuggled in through a parallel; some because invoking chattel slavery, with its particular and unrepeatable horrors against Black Americans, to argue a separate cause risks trading on suffering that was not ours. Those objections deserve a hearing, and you will find them addressed rather than ignored here. So we do not ask you to accept the parallel. We ask you to examine the argument underneath it: what Scripture says, what the church has historically taught, what embryology has established, and what the law has actually done. Then decide. ## What you'll find here Primary sources. Scripture in context, not proof texts. The history of Christian teaching, including the parts that indict us. The scientific case, stated the way an honest opponent would state it. The full legal record. The strongest objections we could find, presented in their strongest form — because an argument that only survives against a weak version of the other side has not survived anything. We would rather you disagree with us for good reasons than agree with us for bad ones.