North Dakota’s pro-life law bars providers from performing abortions in all cases except rape or incest if the mother has been pregnant less than six weeks, or when the pregnancy would be considered a serious physical health threat under “reasonable medical judgment.”  The law establishes penalties of up to five years in prison and a maximum $10,000 fine for anyone found in violation of the law which, incidentally, is the same penalty for animal cruelty causing serious injury or death.  However, the fast-growing, most common, and most accessible method of abortion remains 100% legal.  Pregnant women in every single pro-life state, including ND, have the legal right to self-induce their own abortions because all pro-life legislation exempts pregnant mothers and gives them blanket legal immunity when they purposefully cause the death of their preborn child.

ND’s pro-life law has driven abortion clinics from the state, which is a positive accomplishment. However, the abortion industry retains a significant presence within our state through online access to abortion pills. Clinics are becoming more obsolete by the day as 2/3 of all abortions are now taking place inside women’s homes. Abortion has never been more attainable, affordable, and anonymous than it is today.

North Dakota’s pro-life law prioritizes the perceived victimhood status of the pregnant mother over her child’s unalienable right to life, and therefore, the lives of abortion-vulnerable preborn children remain unprotected. Abortion will never be banned until all preborn children have equal protection under the law.

American law does not allow for criminalizing classes of people.  Instead, we criminalize behavior.  For example, no one claims that we are “criminalizing men” by outlawing rape.  Instead, the act of rape itself is criminalized.  Similarly, extending equal protection for preborn children criminalizes the act of abortion, which does not single out women, but instead prohibits anyone from taking part in the murder of an innocent preborn life.

The equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution mandates that all people be treated fairly under the law and that no class of people receives special rights or privileges that are denied to others.  Just as it is illegal for women to kill their born children, it should be illegal for them to kill their preborn children.

While it is true that the abortion industry propagates lies and preys on vulnerable women, perceived  victimhood status of an entire class of people is not adequate legal justification for denying another class of people their unalienable right to life.  Injustice for the innocent always follows the replacement of impartial justice with emotional reasoning. One clear way to fight against the pro-abortion propaganda within our culture is to have the truth - that all innocent lives deserve to be legally protected - clearly outlined and codified into law.

Finally, providing a legal boundary for pregnant mothers considering abortion would be the ultimate act of compassion because the law acts as a deterrent.  Many post-abortive women have expressed that they wish there had been a clear legal consequence in place for having an abortion because it would have kept them from making the biggest mistake of their lives. Some women who are determined to abort their baby will find a way to do so, but for many women considering abortion, knowing there could be legal consequences for pursuing a self-induced abortion would be enough to cause serious reconsideration. The end result will be more babies and mothers saved from the tragic consequences of abortion.

The claim that most women are coerced into getting an abortion comes from a study done by the Charlotte Lozier Institute which states that over 60% of women who obtained an abortion reported experiencing coercion or pressure.  This particular study defines coercion as “modest interpersonal pressure” which is not a legal definition, nor is it justification for extending special murder rights to all pregnant women.

While it is illegal in the state of North Dakota to coerce a woman into having an abortion, it is important to clarify that North Dakota’s law narrowly defines coercion as committing or attempting to commit, or threatening to commit physical harm to a woman, unborn child, or another individual intended to compel the woman to have an abortion performed against her will.  This means that it is still legal for anyone to pressure pregnant mothers into obtaining an abortion as long as they aren’t threatening physical harm.  North Dakota is failing to protect women from coerced abortions because it remains legal for a woman to self-induce her own abortion, which means it remains egal to pressure her to do it.

If we want to protect women from all types of coercion or social pressure, then we must treat abortion as murder under the law because anyone who even suggests murder as a solution to any circumstance could be held legally complicit and face the same charges as the principle offender.  Equal protection under the law is the only way to protect preborn life and to deter coerced abortions.

The abortion pill was approved by the FDA in the year 2000.  For over 25 years, we have not only failed to remove mifepristone and misoprostol from the marketplace, the FDA has recently approved generic versions intended to make self-induced abortions more affordable.  Even if we could shut down every website and every doctor in the country from providing abortion pills to women, there is no stopping the numerous foreign organizations like Aid Access which mail abortion pills from overseas pharmacies into the United States.

To go after the method of prenatal murder alone is like attempting to end the homicide of born people by banning guns. Even if access to abortion pills was completely restricted, pregnant mothers would still find other ways to induce an abortion.  There are already numerous homemade concoctions that women share with one another in online pro-abortion support groups. The problem isn’t the supply.  It’s the demand.  True justice requires that we criminalize the act of abortion for every person involved, not simply regulate the various methods of prenatal murder.

Providing equal protection under the law for preborn children would not threaten anyone with imprisonment for seeking help at a pregnancy resource center (PRC) even if the mother stated her desire or intention to abort her child because our justice system does not impose a general duty to report possible future crimes.  PRCs take patient privacy seriously and do not share the details of conversations that take place between staff and clients.  Even in the unlikely event that a staff member reported a woman’s stated intention to self-induce an abortion, law enforcement would be unable to arrest, detain, or charge the mother because her statement does not meet the legal criteria for current threat crime standards.   

Criminalizing the act of abortion will only strengthen the efforts of those within the pregnancy help movement to rescue abortion-vulnerable babies and their mothers because the legal option to abort would be off the table, therefore deterring most women from choosing abortion. This will cause more women, not less, to seek help from PRCs.

Regardless, neither God’s Word nor the U.S. Constitution gives us the authority to deny the unalienable right to life of an innocent human being for any reason, including self-perceived good intentions or the speculation of possible consequences.

In the rare cases of pregnancies resulting from rape and incest, it is the perpetrator who should be punished, not the preborn child who has no control over how he or she is conceived. Humans who have been conceived through rape or incest have the same inherent worth and value as anyone else and deserve equal protection under the law.

It is never necessary to perform an abortion to save the life of the mother. In the extremely rare circumstance that a choice must be made to end the pregnancy in order to save the mother’s life, the preborn baby can be treated with dignity and delivered whole. All efforts should extend to saving the life of the baby as much as it is medically possible.

In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, there is only one life that can be saved, and that is the mother’s. Removing the child from the womb is a life-saving act, and in that case is not an abortion. North Dakota’s current pro-life legislation specifically excludes the removal of an ectopic pregnancy from the definition of the term abortion.

Equal protection under the law for preborn children does not prohibit rescue attempts of the mother’s life. For more information on this topic, read Understanding Life of the Mother Provisions in Prenatal Equal Protection Legislation from Foundation to Abolish Abortion.

Self-Managed Abortions (SMAs) are abortions that are performed by the pregnant woman without assistance or oversight from a clinic or provider. She simply orders the abortion pills online without a prescription and uses them at home. SMAs, unlike medication abortions provided through telehealth, are not reported to state or federal agencies, so it is difficult to get a clear picture of how many women are choosing that option. However, a study published in November 2022 in the Journal of the American Medical Association examined data provided by Aid Access, the single largest provider of abortion pills, and found a significant increase in abortion pill requests following the reversal of Roe. One year after the Dobbs decision, Aid Access self-reported a 270% increase in average daily pill requests and that they had shipped abortion pills to over 3,500 people living in states where abortion is banned. Do we know exactly how many self-induced abortions are happening in ND? No. Does it matter? Again, no. A better question for someone opposing equal protection for preborn children might be this: Is there an acceptable number of babies being fatally poisoned before the state intervenes and starts protecting all preborn children?

We don’t need to know exactly how many self-induced abortions are taking place in North Dakota to know that it should be illegal for anyone to buy, sell, and/or ingest abortion pills.

For more information read Babies Unprotected: An Analysis of Self-Induced Abortion Numbers in States with “Bans”

The support for equal protection among pro-life leaders is growing. Lila Rose from Live Action, Dr. Abby Johnson from And Then There Were None, and Seth Gruber from White Rose Resistance have all affirmed the need for criminal penalties for anyone - including the pregnant mother - who willingly takes the life of a preborn child. The movement for equal protection has been growing steadily over the last 10 years, and abolitionists are currently reshaping the pro-life movement in undeniable ways. However, it is true that the majority of the pro-life establishment continues to advocate for blanket legal immunity for mothers who murder their preborn baby. Why? Because the central doctrine of the pro-life movement is that every woman who has an abortion is a victim of the abortion industry and therefore should not be “punished” for killing their baby.

According to the pro-life establishment, the mother’s victimhood status trumps her child’s unalienable right to life. However, the 14th Amendment is clear: no one gets special treatment under the law. No one gets special murder rights, and no class of people may be excluded from equal protection under the law. We have neither the freedom nor the authority to deny the fundamental right to life based on our own personal opinions and good intentions.

Appealing to authority is a common, yet fundamentally flawed way to dismiss minority opinions. Listen to the experts, we’re told. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that consensus among the professionals doesn’t always tell us what is right, what is true, or what is Biblical. Unfortunately, the consensus among the leading pro-life experts unwittingly reveals a low view of the preborn. To affirm equal protection under the law for those who have been born, but not for those still in the womb, exposes the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement which claims that all life is created equal and at the moment of fertilization.

Let’s consider if the consensus of opinion among pro-life leaders has produced acceptable results after 50 plus years of activism. From Live Action:

• Estimates indicate one million abortions in 2023, a number not seen for over a decade.

• Current statistics show 2,548 abortions daily in the U.S.

• Nearly 6 million preborn children have been killed by the abortion pill in the U.S. since its FDA approval in 2000.

• Planned Parenthood clinics are closing, but more abortions are taking place than ever before because abortions by pill are easily accessible, affordable, and oftentimes anonymous.

• Public opinion on abortion has shifted so far to the left that the vast majority of Americans now believe abortion should be legal to some degree, particularly in the first trimester.

It is clear that the pro-life movement has not only failed to end abortion, it has failed to even reduce the number of preborn children being murdered on a daily basis within our country. A fundamental change in strategy is clearly needed.

Finally, the framing by the pro-life establishment that bills of equal protection “criminalize the mother” is inaccurate and emotionally misleading. Our justice system criminalizes behavior, not classes of people, and so bills of equal protection do not criminalize the pregnant mother, they criminalize the act of abortion by simply extending to preborn children the same laws that protect born people from homicide, assault, or wrongful death.

There is no evidence to support this claim.  North Dakota has already passed legislation that is deemed by many to be one of the most extreme bans on abortion, and yet we remain a state with a Republican supermajority.  As Governor, Doug Burgum signed North Dakota’s controversial pro-life bill into law, and his political career was rewarded with a position in the Trump administration as the Secretary of the Interior.  Similarly, Governor Brian Kemp was reelected after he signed Georgia’s Heartbeat Bill into law.  In Texas, over 50% of voters want looser restrictions on abortions in their state, yet the overwhelming majority continue to vote Republican.  

Republicans claim to be the party of life, liberty, and justice for all, but they fall short of those principles by denying equal protection under the law for preborn children.  Legislators have a duty before God and the U.S. Constitution to stop the shedding of innocent blood and establish justice for all regardless of what the political consequences may or may not be. 

North Dakota’s pro-life legislation may be well-intentioned, but it falls short of protecting the lives of all preborn children.

If we truly believe that all life begins at fertilization and that all life is equally valuable, we cannot be content with abortion being legal in any circumstance, nor can we be content to allow pregnant mothers the legal right to self-induce their own abortions.

We can be thankful for the pro-life laws that caused abortion clinics to close in North Dakota. However, we must acknowledge that the abortion industry continues to have a presence in our state through the online accessibility of abortion pills. North Dakota’s pro-life legislation does nothing to stop self-induced abortions which are now the most common method of prenatal murder.

Rather than undoing the work of previous legislation, a bill of equal protection would be the ultimate fulfillment of previous efforts to save preborn babies by simply closing the loopholes that allow abortions to continue in our state.

The purpose of a bill of equal protection is to criminalize the act of intentionally causing death or harm to preborn children, not to ban IVF.  The main components of IVF are creating, storing, and implanting embryos, none of which constitute homicide or assault, and therefore would remain legal if a bill of equal protection were to pass.  However, the purposeful destruction of embryos during the IVF process would become illegal. Unfortunately, that’s a problem for the IVF industry because in order to increase the chances of a successful birth, IVF physicians routinely create more human babies than are reasonably expected to survive in the mother's womb. This results in human life being frozen indefinitely, experimented upon, and/or discarded as medical waste. The number of humans dying during the IVF process each year has surpassed the number of humans dying from abortion each year in the US.

Fortunately, there are healthier and more ethical options for couples struggling with infertility.  Unlike IVF, Naprotechnology seeks to restore natural fertility, and depending on the diagnosis, has a higher rate of success.  We can and should support the creation of life without sacrificing other innocent lives in the process.

Pro-lifers should be seeking the approval of God, not man, particularly not the pro-abortion activists who attack anyone who attempts to implement even the slightest restriction on abortion. God’s Word is clear: We must end child sacrifice, and we must do it according to God’s definition of justice in which there is no partiality given and equal protection under the law is extended to all people, including preborn children.

There is no media campaign that could insulate the pro-life movement from the hatred of those who advocate for the destruction of human life in the womb. Standing for equal protection for preborn children does not give ammunition to our critics, rather it strengthens the pro-life movement because criminalizing the act of abortion for every person is the only logical, Biblical, and Constitutional way to abolish abortion.

The bottom line is that neither God’s Word nor the U.S. Constitution gives us the authority to deny unalienable rights to people based on optics or fear of being criticized.

A fetus is not part of the mother’s body, but is, in fact, a separate human being that is biologically distinct with his or her own DNA, blood type, and sex. While the fetus is dependent on the mother’s body for survival, the right to bodily autonomy does not allow a person to harm or kill someone else. When a baby is born, he continues to be completely dependent on his parents, yet the law rightly prioritizes his right to life over the comfort and bodily autonomy of the parents. Parents have a natural duty to care for their children - whether in the womb or out - even when doing so requires significant bodily or personal sacrifice.

Autonomy is rightly limited within the law, and it’s always balanced against the rights of others. When certain rights conflict, the more fundamental right should prevail, and there is no more fundamental right than the right to life.

At the moment of fertilization, a distinct, living, and whole human being is formed. An embryo is not merely a “clump of cells”, but a brand new life that will continually progress through stages of human development. Heartbeat, brain waves, sentience, viability, and birth are all developmental milestones of a human being, not transformations of a “potential life” into an actual life.

The only differences between an embryo and a born person are size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency, none of which justify the denial of personhood to any human being in any stage of life.

There is no non-arbitrary point after fertilization at which personhood suddenly begins. If personhood depends on traits that emerge gradually or may come and go, then personhood itself becomes a sliding scale which threatens the human dignity of every person, particularly those who are fully dependent on others.

An embryo is a human being. All human beings are persons. Therefore, embryos are persons worthy of the same legal protections as everyone else.