If You Are Pro-Life and Support Incremental Laws
You are likely here if you believe
- Abortion is the killing of a human being and should ultimately be abolished.
- Heartbeat bills, 15-week bans, and pain-capable laws are real victories worth celebrating.
- “Half a loaf is better than none” — incremental progress is prudent political stewardship.
- Abolitionists are idealists who let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- Trusted voices — SBA Pro-Life America, the ERLC, James Dobson — have endorsed this strategy, and they’ve been fighting this longer than you have.
The question your position cannot answer
A heartbeat bill does not merely fail to ban all abortion. It bans abortion after a heartbeat and by doing so writes into law that abortion before that threshold is permissible. The bill teaches the culture that 5 weeks and 1 day is a lawful killing. It is not a failed abolition bill. It is a successful iniquitous decree.
Isaiah 10:1 says, “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees.” There is no exception in God’s word that reads, “…unless the iniquitous decree is less iniquitous than the current alternative.” Less iniquity is still iniquity. The argument that a 20-week ban is better than no ban is moral relativism dressed up as prudence. Iniquity does not become justice by degree.
Elizabeth Heyrick saw this same logic at work in the campaign for gradual emancipation of slaves. She called it “the grand marplot of human virtue and happiness; the very masterpiece of satanic policy.” Christians were cajoled into asking for less. A gradual demand produced a gradual indifference. The slaves remained in chains.
Read in this order
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Immediatism — The load-bearing text for this path. The Heyrick quote in full, the Isaiah 10 framing, and the documented evidence that incremental laws train the culture to accept the killing they don’t restrict.
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Biblical, Not Secular — Establishes the standard your position has quietly abandoned. Pragmatism (“save as many as possible”) is not a biblical standard; Scripture is. This is where you ask: by what authority am I evaluating these laws?
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Against Pro-Life Compromise — Eight SBC seminary professors argued that abolitionism is overnight-ism. This piece answers them. William Lloyd Garrison in 1831: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will alas! be gradual abolition in the end.” Abolitionists are not naive. The question is what we demand.
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Abolitionist, Not Pro-Life — Why the pro-life movement cannot self-correct. The institutions you trust have structural reasons to defend the incremental strategy. Read this to understand what you are actually defending when you defend their bills.
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Kristan Hawkins’ Flawed Reasoning vs Scripture — The “save as many as possible” principle exposed. If outcomes are the only standard, clinic bombings would be justified when they deterred abortions. Pro-lifers rightly reject that — which means they already know a higher standard exists. Apply it consistently.
The specific objection the corpus answers
“But we’ve saved X lives by passing heartbeat bills. Isn’t saving some babies better than saving none?”
The arithmetic ignores what the bill does to the babies it doesn’t protect. A heartbeat bill does not leave the law silent on 5-week-old children — it declares their killing lawful. One mother at the Norman Statement gathering quoted a Pain-Capable argument back at T. Russell Hunter: “My baby won’t feel any pain.” The law had taught her that was the relevant question. The bill didn’t save her baby. It told her when killing was acceptable.
The choice is not “some lives saved vs. none saved.” It is iniquitous decrees that preserve legal abortion vs. bills that demand its abolition. Garrison again: “We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be we shall always contend.” Read Immediatism.
When you’ve read these
If the “less iniquity” framing has collapsed, you are no longer an incrementalist — you are an abolitionist who hasn’t yet broken with the movement that trained you.
Or, if the harder sticking point is exceptions rather than strategy, read If You Are Pro-Life But Support Exceptions next.