By Gregg Cunningham

Nearly every woman who aborts knows in her heart that what she is doing is wrong:
Romans 1:18-20, “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

BibleRef.com: This verse (Romans 2:15) concludes an idea begun in the previous verse. Paul wrote that Gentiles, though not given God’s law or required to follow it, may end up keeping parts of the law ‘by nature’ just by listening to their own conscience. This is similar to his point from the prior chapter that God makes certain ideas obvious to all people (Romans 1:18–20). Now Paul makes it clear that this doesn’t mean Gentiles with this awareness always do the right thing. What it does mean, apparently, is that the same God who gave the Israelites the law also built into the heart of all people a sense of what is right and wrong. It is the human conscience that condemns us when we do wrong and defends us when we do right. The conscience, though, is not a perfect standard. It is flexible. It can be hardened or softened. That’s why Paul refers to our ‘conflicting thoughts,’ as the conscience talks to us about the morality of our choices.

But there are different levels of “knowing.” Few women who contemplate abortion actually understand the full extent of abortion’s evil. Nearly every influential institution in society tells women that the human embryo and fetus are mere “blobs of tissue” and that abortion is the most common surgical procedure in medicine and not a morally consequentially act. Then in the face of this relentless campaign of lies and propaganda, most churches do little or nothing to properly educate believers about the indescribable miracle of prenatal development or the inexpressible horror of abortion. A lack of information combines with an abundance of bullying and women grudgingly yield to temptation. Then some pro-lifers argue we should pile-on with still more punishment for these already victimized women.

Surveys reveal that most women who abort felt coerced to do so. They are frequently pressured by boyfriends who threaten to abandon them, husbands who threaten to divorce them, parents who threaten to kick them out of the house. They fear they will have to withdraw from school or lose their jobs. Then a certain element of the prolife movement tells them if they abort, we will work to throw them in jail. They therefore see us as their uncaring enemies, not their supportive friends.

A crisis pregnancy support group recently noted that “According to a study recently published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, nearly 75 percent of the 987 American women who participated in an after-abortion survey admitted that they experienced ‘at least subtle forms of pressure to terminate their pregnancies.’ Two other findings are significant: (1) nearly 60 percent of the women indicated that they decided to abort “in order to make others happy” and (2) almost 30% of those surveyed admitted that they were “afraid that they would lose their partner” if they didn’t abort their pregnancies. http://www.jpands.org/vol22no4/coleman.pdf

The most fundamental element of American criminal law is defined in the Latin term “mens rea.” It means that before an accused person can be convicted of a crime, it must be established that they possessed sufficient “guilty knowledge and willfulness,” which is another way of saying they must have a “guilty mind; a guilty or wrongful purpose; a criminal intent.” Women who abort are usually not without fault, but that fault seldom if ever rises to the level necessary to convict someone of a crime. People providing abortions know the facts which are carefully concealed from aborting mothers, and it is therefore they who should be held to a criminal standard of culpability.

Nor does it make sense to attempt pass legislation which would charge post-abortive women with murder when even pro-life lawmakers will rightly refuse to vote for it. Such a provision would unquestionably doom any bill containing it and the pro-aborts would chortle at the strategic stupidity of such cruelty. Most pro-life legislators understand that supporting such a hard-hearted measure would be political suicide. Who wants to campaign against an opponent who is hammering them for a belief that post-abortive women should be locked up with murderers, rapists, and the like?

Neither does it make sense to pass such legislation when the police won’t arrest women who abort, prosecutors won’t charge them, juries won’t convict them, and no judge will ever punish them. Pro-lifers must stop parroting the Planned Parenthood line that pro-lifers are women-hating misogynists who want to hurt post-abortive mothers.

Pro-lifers who pursue this doomed strategy apparently have little or no awareness of the history of failure which has accompanied it over the centuries. Even when abortion was widely unlawful in this country, women were seldom if ever convicted of violating these prohibitions. Attorney Clark Forsythe’s excellent article on this subject forcefully makes that point:
https://aul.org/2010/04/23/why-the-states-did-not-prosecute-women-for-abortion-before-roe-v-wade/

It is somewhere between moronic and imbecilic to make our already difficult task (outlawing elective abortion) virtually impossible.

Gregg Cunningham is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.