An abolitionist vision.
Imagine this future.
Abortion is completely illegal.
Laws that have protected people from assault, homicide, and wrongful death after their birth now also protect them before birth—from the moment of conception.
Instead of law enforcement officers guarding abortion clinics, they now raid them.
Women who find out they are mothers no longer think of abortion as a legitimate option.
Churches, nonprofits, and communities provide mothers encouragement, resources, and a loving community.
Instead of calling abortion a choice, counselors describe it as the sin of murder for which there is forgiveness in Christ to those who repent.
No one who had an abortion before it was outlawed may be prosecuted.
The very few parents who break the new law by hiring someone to murder their child or doing it themselves risk arrest, along with those who assist them.
Many parents arrested are given immunity in return for their testimony against abortionists.
All defendants face a justice system of law enforcement, prosecutors, grand juries, judges, trial juries, and appellate courts, each part of which is tasked with considering each situation on a case-by-case basis, including mitigating circumstances.
Those defendants who cannot afford an attorney are provided one.
Governors review each conviction and decide whether or not to grant a pardon, a reprieve, or to commute the sentence.
In other words, the same justice system protecting born people also protects those not yet born.
Laws prohibit prosecution of accidental miscarriages or conviction of mothers who abort their child while under threat of force, mothers whose lives are threatened by a medical emergency, or mothers who truly do not know what they are doing—these mothers are protected from criminal liability by existing legal justifications and defenses of duress, necessity, mistake of fact, among others.
Parents, boyfriends, husbands, and others who pressure or aid a mother to abort her baby are all subject to prosecution.
New technologies are developed to address ectopic pregnancies and other medical emergencies to better protect both mother and child.
Fertility doctors using in vitro fertilization no longer fertilize more eggs than they implant.
Legal and financial barriers to adoption are lowered.
Ultimately, as a society, we and our institutions treat all human life from the moment of fertilization as made in the image of God and deserving of love, respect, and equal protection of the laws.
These actions that are fruits of repentance invite God to withhold His hand of judgment upon our land and extend His hand of blessing.