It is no dirty secret that factions exist within the pro-life movement. Some organizations believe that regulating the killing of preborn children is a viable strategy to end abortion for good. Others, American Life League included, find the practice of preborn child killing so wicked and abhorrent that the only means of ending it is legal recognition of the obvious: Preborn children are people, no different than anyone else, and they deserve the same equal protections enumerated in the US Constitution.
Scott Klusendorf, president of the Life Training Institute and a prominent pro-life speaker and author, frequently keynotes pro-life banquets, summits, and training events. His pro-life apologetics influence the policies of many advocates and organizations. These apologetics include, as outlined in a recently published commentary, an opposition to equal protection for preborn children.
You read that right. A pro-life advocate argues against human equality.
We’ve reached a crossroads within the pro-life movement where equal protection for the preborn child is deemed to be, as Klusendorf phrases it, harmful to pro-life efforts.
Justifying murder
In his commentary entitled “Why Equal Protection Bills Harm Pro-Life Efforts,” Klusendorf follows the Republican line of thinking: To ban abortion, we must work within the political and cultural frameworks of our time. In other words, politicians and pundits, not the pro-life advocates who wish to see a permanent end to the slaughter of babies, dictate the terms of fighting evil. But it isn’t the pragmatists in Washington who determine the rules of engagement. Klusendorf argues that we must abide by the fearmongering of abortion advocates, stating, “The relentless drumbeat of stories claiming that women will die from abortion restrictions or be prosecuted for suffering miscarriage resonates not only with the general public but also with marginally pro-life voting blocks.”
According to Klusendorf, the pro-aborts lie about prosecuting miscarriages; therefore, we must act according to that deception. We shouldn’t be surprised by such messaging. The pro-life establishment’s glad-handing of self-proclaimed pro-life Republicans in Congress is notorious, but what have these “pro-life” votes amounted to? Consider the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act of 2017, which aimed to ban abortions after 20 weeks. By what standard is a 20-week ban considered pro-life? What is different about preborn babies prior to 20 weeks that makes them unworthy of protection?
It is incumbent on everyone repulsed by preborn child killing not to depend on pro-life labels. Decades of abortion polling focus on how American voters identify across the pro-life/pro-choice divide. Klusendorf states that forty-three percent of churchgoers identify as pro-life. This is a meaningless statistic given the fact that less than half of self-proclaimed pro-life voters understand that every abortion is immoral, no matter the circumstances.
Additionally, the Knights of Columbus’ 2026 abortion poll found that 37% of the adults polled identified as pro-life, but only 6% of those adults agreed that abortion should never be permitted under any circumstance. By all appearances, the majority of people identifying as pro-life are just pro-abortion with exceptions.
Incrementalism: Principled and unprincipled
American Life League and our equal rights allies are on record as opposing the incremental proposals that the pro-life movement refers to as “pro-life laws.” To justify this incrementalism, Klusendorf refers to both William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln and their prudential pursuits to end chattel slavery, which was eventually abolished in the British Empire and in the US.
Wilberforce is renowned for his parliamentary campaigns to abolish the slave trade. What is important is that he did not pursue its regulation. Regulatory reforms such as the Slave Trade Act 1807 were not authored by him. He sometimes accepted incremental measures to bring about the most good, but he found these to be insufficient and morally inadequate because they legitimized an immoral act. Today’s pro-life abortion regulators see Wilberforce’s tolerance of gradualism as necessary for abolition, when in fact he could have opposed it and still would not have compromised the principle that all men are created equal.
Klusendorf uses this example to make the leap that incrementalism is a necessary step toward the abolition of abortion. That is to say, if we’re going to end the evil of preborn child killing, we must follow the Wilberforce way.
Further, Lincoln may have been limited to the political realities of that time, but those limitations were imposed on him and not of his making. When pro-life organizations propose bills to regulate abortion—with exceptions for rape and incest, heartbeats and fetal pain, non-viability, and health concerns—that is not the abortion industry setting the rules. It is the pro-life movement. Principled incrementalism recognizes that an Oklahoma lawmaker cannot protect the equal rights of preborn children in Texas, but he can in his own state. The unprincipled incrementalist says, “It seems impossible to protect all the preborn babies in my state, so I will just save the preborn babies with a detectable heartbeat.”
The abortion industry wants unlimited, unregulated abortion. It does not seek to compromise with rape and incest exceptions. So, what gives us the right to suggest them? What gives us the right to choose which children are given protection under an incremental law and which are not? It isn’t Planned Parenthood picking the winners and losers.
It is us.
Critical personhood
American Life League’s pursuit of equal protection and personhood of the preborn requires justice for the babies murdered before birth, just like babies murdered after birth. Our mission isn’t about the prosecution of post-abortive mothers. It isn’t even about the abortionists who crush heads and dismember children for a living. Punitive sentences for criminals and their accomplices—we leave that for lawmakers and the justice system to litigate. We do not demand punishment for the perpetrators. We demand justice for the preborn because charity demands it. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Every offense committed against justice and truth entails the duty of reparation.”
This is not to make Klusendorf the instigator of pro-life failures. He is merely a symptom. Many in the pro-life movement are guilty of adopting language that undermines the principle that every preborn child is created in the image and likeness of God.
By referring to some abortions as “extreme,” they imply that some of the killing is not. “Abortions up to birth” is meant to evoke in the reader’s mind the destruction of a plump baby who is hours or days away from birth. Are we to believe that the murder of a preborn baby who is months away from birth is less horrific? We cannot make the case for human equality when we refer to trimesters as we discuss murdering a baby waiting to be born. Killing a baby at nine months gestation is just as wicked as killing a baby at nine weeks gestation.
Klusendorf suggests that a mother isn’t in the right state of mind when hiring an abortionist. These pragmatists frame these scenarios as if the rights and value of preborn babies are different than born ones. Think about it: Does the justice system require prosecutors to prove that the wife who hires a hitman to gun down her cheating husband knows what the hitman knows? The courts do not examine whether she knows, for certain, that hiring a killer is criminal. The defense does not argue that the wife fails to know the feeling of pulling the trigger of the gun the way the hitman does. Yet, Klusendorf argues that this is enough to exempt mothers who abort their preborn babies.
Choosing which preborn children are protected under a “pro-life” law is not taking the killing seriously. Giving immunity to individuals who cooperate in murder is not taking the killing seriously. Abiding by the political realities of the day is not taking the killing seriously. Preferring to do the practical thing rather than the right thing is not taking the killing seriously. And if the pro-life movement isn’t going to take the killing seriously, we want nothing to do with it.
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