We have a serious problem in the pro-life movement.
The modern pro-life movement stands vociferously opposed to treating abortion as murder in any meaningful legal sense, even while confusingly declaring its agreement that abortion is murder. This contradiction is not accidental. It is the fruit of feminist capture.
The greatest threat to the fight to end abortion isn’t external hostility, political opposition, or legal setbacks. It is internal compromise. Over the past several decades, a feminist framework: one that redefines freedom, elevates victimhood, and rejects moral accountability, has steadily embedded itself into the language and logic of pro-life advocacy. This framework is often presented as compassionate, strategic, or necessary to “reach women,” yet it stands in direct opposition to Biblical truth. The compound effect of being even one degree off-course compounded over time is stark, and we are seeing the results in today’s pro-life movement.
Feminism’s Murder Exemption
As modern Americans, our factory settings are thoroughly feminist.[1] No one is untouched by the assumptions, language, or moral instincts of feminism—the idea that men and women are interchangeable. When this cultural air is combined with the seeker-sensitive church movement that gained momentum in the early 2000s, the result has been a quiet but consequential shift: hard truths are softened, offense is avoided, and female moral responsibility is often downplayed in the hope that Christianity will appear compassionate, reasonable, and above all, nice. Much of this impulse comes from a sincere desire to love people well, to avoid driving women toward those who openly despise them, and to resist the false charge that Christians are cold or cruel. These are Godly desires. But Scripture is clear that faithfulness, not likability, is the standard. We are warned that “the fear of man lays a snare” (Prov. 29:25), and that the servant of Christ cannot shape his message around human approval (Gal. 1:10). However well-intentioned, we cannot adopt ideological frameworks rooted in rebellion against God and expect them to yield righteousness. “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). The fruit of this approach has not been greater holiness or repentance, but the steady watering down of truth.
1. For a brief history of feminism, see Doug Ponder, “Slaying Feminism: Ending the Impossible Quest for Sexual Interchangeability,” Christ Over All, October 28, 2024.
Nowhere is this feminist capture more evident than in the pro-life movement’s reflexive hostility to the idea of holding women legally accountable for abortion.
The phrase “criminalizing women” has become a rhetorical cudgel within the pro-life movement. It is deployed not to defend justice, but to shut down serious moral and legal discussion. It reframes accountability as oppression and quietly smuggles in a feminist premise: that women require special moral exemptions when it comes to the killing of their own children.[2]
2. See the names of more than seventy pro-life organizations that signed an open letter denouncing any criminalization of women who pursue abortions while also calling these women “victims” in The National Right to Life Committee et al., “An Open Letter to State Lawmakers from America’s Leading Pro-Life Organizations,” May 12, 2022.
The phrase itself is revealing. We do not speak this way in any other contexts. We do not lament the “criminalization of women” when a woman commits fraud, abuse, theft, homicide, or is caught double parking. We do not argue that laws against child neglect are an attack on motherhood. We do not insist that holding a woman accountable for drunk driving is a denial of compassion.
Only abortion enjoys this bizarre moral immunity. Why? We can thank feminism.
At our pregnancy help organization, Alliance Family Services, we hold what we believe to be the only position that is logically and biblically consistent with the claim that abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, and it is, then children in the womb must be afforded equal justice under the law. The law should inform the conscience of the woman considering abortion by telling her the truth: abortion is the murder of her child, and choosing it carries moral and legal consequences. This is not cruelty or hatred. It is the only position that can honestly be called loving and compassionate toward both the child whose life is at stake and the woman whose conscience is being formed.
The notion that women should be categorically exempt from all legal consequences when they knowingly and willingly participate in the killing of their own child is not merely mistaken, it is the most unbiblical and indefensible position imaginable. Yet somehow this view has become the unchallengeable orthodoxy of the modern pro-life movement. To remain “respectable,” one must affirm that abortion is murder in theory while denying it in practice. Biblical fidelity is no longer the standard by which the movement’s core values are measured. Instead, the standard is emotional comfort: whatever sounds nice is deemed righteous, and whatever sounds hard, even if it is true and just, is dismissed as cruel.
The Pro-Life Movement’s Victim Blind Spot
I know this not in theory, but by experience. I have repeatedly faced intense criticism, scrutiny, and slander for the simple offense of holding the position the pro-life movement claims to believe: abortion is murder. Major pro-life organizations have convened meetings with leaders and donors in communities where we operate clinics to “warn” them about our supposedly “extreme” views. They have contacted our staff and volunteers to pressure them to disassociate from us. Former friends and long-standing allies have quietly severed ties. These same organizations insist that those who seek to abolish abortion are unkind, yet not one could credibly accuse me of any sort of mistreatment. Still, some in the movement feel fully justified in treating me like a pariah, not because of my conduct, but because our convictions refuse to conform to the approved narrative.
Much like progressive ideology more broadly, the operative framework here is not truth, but what sounds nice. More specifically, the moral binary of oppressed versus oppressor. Within this framework, women are always cast as the oppressed in abortion, and therefore beyond moral or legal accountability. They cannot be named, challenged, or restrained. This is not Christianity. This is explicit feminism, and there’s barely an attempt to hide it.
What Happened to the Men?
For decades, the pro-life movement has intentionally sought to elevate women as the primary leaders, spokespeople, and moral center of the fight against abortion. Men, at best, have been encouraged to take a back seat. More often, they have been pushed out of the car entirely and left for dead on the side of the road. Christians have been programmed to believe this arrangement is not only normal but virtuous.
Let me be clear. Women can fight. Scripture records moments when God, in His providence, allows women to step into roles of confrontation or deliverance (see Esth.7:3; 1 Sam. 25:23–31; Josh. 6:25 Ruth 3:9). But these moments are exceptions born of crisis, not blueprints for normal order. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. A movement dominated by female sensibilities, priorities, and instincts, however well-intentioned, will inevitably reflect those sensibilities in its moral reasoning. And that is precisely what we are witnessing.
What likely began as a reasonable impulse—women should have input in a fight that affects women—has metastasized into something far more disordered: a smuggled-in feminist conviction that female leadership is not merely acceptable but ideal, and that male leadership in this arena is at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous.
Instead of men leading the way and bearing the load of responsibility, the cultural machinery is bent on “empowering” women while systematically neutering men. The tragedy is that the pro-life movement should have been the last bulwark against this ideological drift. Instead, it has often functioned as feminism’s most effective Christian ally. By insisting that women are always victims and never perpetrators, the movement has unintentionally reinforced the very worldview that makes abortion deceptively seem “necessary” in the first place.
If women are powerless, fragile beings overwhelmed by circumstance, then of course they need an abortion. If women cannot be trusted with moral agency, then of course society must manage their fertility for them. You cannot dismantle abortion while affirming the anthropology that created it. To recover moral clarity, Christians must reject the feminist premise that accountability is oppression. We must insist, lovingly but firmly, that women are fully capable of moral decision-making and therefore fully accountable before God and man. A movement unwilling to speak these truths will never truly end abortion. It will only endlessly manage it: soften its language, shift its rhetoric, and preserve the illusion of righteousness while the slaughter continues.
To be clear, I love the pro-life movement, and am firmly entrenched in it. I want it to succeed, but I want it to truly succeed, and not merely survive in a compromised form. I am not interested in making enemies; I am interested in winning over friends. Time and again, I have gone out of my way to tell leaders who disagree with me that I value them, that we can work together in meaningful ways, and that what we share in common far outweighs our disagreements. My aim is not to tear down the pro-life movement, but to reform it. That reform must begin with a return to Biblical fidelity as our sole standard, and a rejection of the feminist assumptions that allow emotion to displace truth.
A Test Case for Moral Consistency
Consider one of the clearest examples of the moral incoherence found in the pro-life movement.
A man secretly slips abortion pills to a woman without her consent. Christians rightly call this murder. He is condemned as a predator and a killer and Christians in the pro-life movement rightly rejoice when such a person is criminally prosecuted.
But when a woman willingly swallows the exact same pills, eyes wide open to what they are designed to do, she is cast as a second victim. Christians in the pro-life movement recoil at the idea of her facing legal consequences for her actions.
But what is the difference? Why is the man morally competent but the woman morally incapacitated? Why does intent suddenly evaporate when the perpetrator is female?
The standard response is predictable: women were lied to by the abortion industry.
I’m sure that’s true, but it begs another question. Were men not lied to by the abortion industry? Apparently not. Or perhaps they were, some may reply, but he should face justice anyway. Men, we are told, know exactly what they are doing. Women, somehow, do not. “How do the men know but not the women?” Silence. Shrugs. Circular logic.
This double standard is so normalized that many Christians can no longer see it. We have accepted a framework in which women possess full moral agency only when it flatters feminist narratives. We are told, often in the same breath, that women are strong, capable, intelligent, and independent. And I agree. Women are fully human moral agents made in the image of God. But we are also told that women cannot possibly understand the moral gravity of taking abortion pills, while men can. This is both inequality and biblical injustice. If you’re looking for a real example of misogyny, well, you might have one here. Failing to inform the consciences of women in the same way we are informing the consciences of men is certainly hatred toward women, and we should change that. The feminist equation appears to be this: give women more and more authority, autonomy, and deference while requiring less and less accountability. This is a disastrous formula, both culturally and spiritually. If anyone actually cares about women, they will reject this gospel-denying formula.
Conclusion
At its core, feminism is not simply a call for dignity or protection, both of which Scripture clearly affirms, but an ideological framework that begins with a specific moral claim: society is fundamentally structured to privilege men and oppress women, and justice therefore requires dismantling those structures so that women may attain equality, autonomy, and power equivalent to men. This framework directly conflicts with the biblical account of reality. Scripture teaches that sin, not structure, is the fundamental problem of the human heart (Rom. 3:23), and that both men and women stand equally accountable before a holy God. From the beginning, woman was created not as a victim, but as a moral agent made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), capable of obedience and disobedience alike (Genesis 3).
The Bible never shields women from moral responsibility in the name of compassion; rather, it dignifies them by calling them to truth, repentance, and faith, just as it does men. True freedom is not found in autonomy or power, but in submission to God’s design: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). When feminist categories replace biblical ones, women are seen fundamentally as helpless victims instead of sinners with moral agency who will stand before a holy and just God for their actions. Any movement, pro-life or otherwise, that abandons such basic truth in the name of compassion will ultimately lose both truth and love.
