It’s time for those that consider themselves to be “pro-life” to more deeply consider the words that we use when describing our position. The words that we choose matter. Otherwise, we might find that our position is more arbitrary than principled.https://t.co/w3AnZft7a8
This is a highly worthwhile essay. Very short, but it addresses the inconsistencies that "pro-life" advocates have accepted into their value system over the decades. This is another argument against incrementalism. Incrementalists are consistently worn down over time and begin to compromise.
Republicans in both the Christian County Missouri Republican Assembly (MRA) and the Christian County Republican Central Committee (CCRCC), as well as organizations like Missouri Right to Life and Freedom Principle Missouri, have all compromised on a consistent value system that would uphold the equal protection bills in our legislature. They are lukewarm.
Our elected representatives have been influenced to do the same. No one has the right to murder a human being. No one. The pro-life movement is morally atomized. In order to succeed at saving babies, they must do the work of coming together with a morally cohesive platform and end the infighting.
The abolitionist movement is not going away. It is growing. It is morally consistent. It is hated because the world hates truth. Pro-life individuals and groups must learn to love the truth again. The lives of countless children are at stake.
Abortion is murder. Women who abort their children have committed murder. Doctors who perform abortions are murderers.
Our legislature must pass personhood and equal protection legislation.
David Rice of Hick Christian has written a critique of a Freedom Principle Missouri presentation about the new Amendment 3, due to be voted on in November's election.
The New A3 is still pro Abortion
A3 still allows for Abortion—95% of the abortions in this state won’t be touched at all
By David Rice
Tonight, I attended a local Missouri Republican Assembly’s meeting.
They were hosting Missouri Freedom Principle’s speaker, Katie Sickles,
speaking on Amendment 3.
No, not Amendment 3, from 2024,
but the new 2026 Amendment 3 which is a tacky attempt to fix a terrible
constitutional amendment with a bandaid. For some stats, go here.
Around
4000 women are having telehealth abortions yearly. After the Ban went
into place after the Dobbs decision, Abortion nearly doubled. I covered
here in my article, Sausage Factory.
Below,
you can listen to Gretchen Garrity and me question Katie Sickles. Some
of our questions land and some don’t. We got push back. We were alone,
going into a room, where we were the outnumber twenty to two with our
contrarian views. When I walked in, people saw me, and their faces
dropped. It’s funny how quickly I can take the joy out of a room.
We’re
abolitionists stuffed into a room of compromisers at the Nixa’s
Godfather’s. Like real pepperoni on vegan pizza—so authentic that it
hurts.
I recorded the whole lecture, but it’s kind of boring, but you can find the full spiel on YouTube here.
There are two ways to think about this bill. One is to argue that we
still exist under the old Roe v Wade tyranny. We must win every battle,
inch by inch, slowly over time.
Katie Sickles, of Missouri
Freedom Principles (run by Byron Keeling who once told me I could work
for him as an editor if I stopped being so Christian even on my own
substack), holds we have to win this fight over time. She also holds we
can trust the legislators. She held that it was only one Senator who
stopped IP Reform in 2024 which would have stopped Amendment 3 from
reaching the ballot. It’s a long story, but Mary Elizabeth Coleman was
not the fly in the ointment. She was one person in a Super Majority
Republican Senate working with Senate President Pro Tem, Caleb Rowden,
to kill IP reform. I covered it here.
Bryon knows that because he asked to publish this letter and this photo on my substack then:
But
now he’s running around the state trying to convince us we can trust
the Senate and House again. Somehow they’re wonderful—again. His friend
and co-journalist, Cary Wells, started to record Gretchen and me. I’m
sure he was hoping to embarrass us.
The problem is they aren’t embarrassed that they are committing to a law which does nothing.
Amendment 3 changes almost nothing. Really.
It
aims at the lowest-hanging fruit, medical restrictions and fetal
anomalies, and protects them, while doing nothing really to protect
children from elective abortion, telehealth abortion, out of state
abortion, or abortion activist judges.
They claim that they will
add parental consent, but ta-da!, it will have the Separation Clause
built in so that if the courts strike down parental consent, the rest of
the bill still stands.
Surely, No judge will strike down parental consent. You know. Judges always care about what’s best for children.
The
law does nothing to address tyrannical judges, which rule from the
bench with long terms, with no oversight. They admit judges are the
issue, but don’t do anything to attempt to correct their overreach which
can strip away the effectives of this amendment or any other future
amendments.
Essentially, 95% of current abortions will continue
with the hope that one day, Missouri legislators will grow a backbone
and stop it. Or Missouri Christians will begin to vote. Or Missouri PACS
will educate future children some day to not want to have abortion.
Worse,
it will legalize abortion again in Missouri hospitals so that hospitals
can charge for the procedure and it requires Missouri taxpayers to pay
for it if it is medically necessary.
Section 36(a), subsection 2 reads exactly: “No public funds shall be expended for the purpose of performing or inducing, or otherwise assisting, any abortion.”
That’s the blanket prohibition on taxpayer funding. No exceptions listed in that subsection.
Read subsection 5 immediately after:
“A
woman’s right to reproductive freedom shall include the right to health
care in cases of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other medical
emergencies, and the provisions of this section shall not be construed
to limit a woman’s access to such health care.”
That
subsection 5 creates a constitutional right to access medical emergency
care without restriction. It doesn’t say “except when publicly funded.”
It says the rest of the section cannot be construed to limit access to
that care.
So you have subsection 2 prohibiting public funding for
abortions and subsection 5 guaranteeing unrestricted access to medical
emergency care — and those two provisions are in direct constitutional
tension with each other. When a Medicaid-eligible woman presents with a
medical emergency requiring termination, subsection 5 guarantees her
access while subsection 2 purports to prohibit public funding. Courts
resolving that conflict would almost certainly rule that the access
guarantee in subsection 5 overrides the funding prohibition in
subsection 2 for the excepted categories — because you cannot
constitutionally guarantee a right and simultaneously prohibit the
funding mechanism that makes it accessible for indigent patients.
That
is the hidden taxpayer funding mechanism built directly into the
amendment’s own text. And nobody in the campaign on either side is
explaining it to Missouri voters.
That’s how it’s
written. That’s how the whole thing is written. It says one thing, then
says something else. Of course it needs the Separability Clause. It’s
going to be challenged here, there, and everywhere.
During the above heated questioning, I proposed that the only solution is two step.
Personhood.
Unequivocal personhood. Every person must be given it without
exception. That would eliminate 95% of the elective abortions we have,
plus more, allowing for the tiny percentage of medically necessary ones.
We must criminalize it. Women, men, doctors, nurses, and everyone else must go to prison for murder.
And
yes, it sucks, and yes, it will be hard. Guess what? It will probably
be so unpopular, it will cost us more than just an election or two. It
might lead to a Civil War. That’s the price we were forced to pay when
they made this decision 50 years ago. It gets steeper every year we put
it off.
I was yelled at by a tall, balding man because no one is
going to want to fund it, or create the media for it. He thinks I should
come up with a magical wand and fix it. I told him I wanted smarter
Christians. The problem with some people is that if you gave them a
quilt, they couldn’t find the pattern.
It wasn’t that long ago
that no one wanted to criminalize owning slaves. There was a time when
no one criminalized beating children or wives. We have regressed to a
time when Republicans are arguing that we can legalize abortion for most
of the babies, just save a tiny amount.
I’ve been in the signal groups. I’ve seen what they argue. We’ll save a lot of babies.
That’s not what they presented tonight.
Tonight,
they admitted that the only thing this new Amendment 3 will do is give
the legislators the ability to campaign on broken promises year after
year, promising to do something about abortion, but never really
accomplishing anything at all.
Byron Keeling gave away the plot
before the meeting when he was referencing John Adams to Carey Wells.
John Adams was seen as wise during his time. Men like him treated slaves
as 3/5ths of a person. They stymied those religious zealots who wanted
abolition because they preferred to gradually eliminate slavery. Keeling
argued that this was why we needed incrementalism.
Every
compromise set up by Adams catastrophically failed, including the
Missouri Compromise. Adams thought he could predict the future. He was
as blind as Jefferson’s Deism.
Missouri Abortion incrementalists
think they can predict the future. They can’t. It will get worse the
more we throw babies on the altar. There is only one choice, and it must
be terrible, final, and irrevocable. Personhood, with criminal
outcomes—just like we did for slavery. It’s not radical, unless it was
and is for slavery.
Byron—That’s moral cowardice. Eventually,
someone will demand payment from the empty shells of men who puff out
their chests—but they lack conviction. Their shells will crack, and no
one will pick up the pieces. Keeling is a hollow-shaped egg man, sitting
on the walls of little kingdoms, courting tiny men with no power, all
while lacking any internal substance.
We will absolutely pay for it in blood and more death than we can imagine. The Civil War was horrendous.
What
will come from Moloch’s altars will be far worse, and we act as we can
incrementally make deals with Moloch. Just a little Moloch.
Did
you know that in Missouri, 11% of our residents are Black, yet 48% of
our abortions are of Black babies? At what point do we stop punting the
problem down the road into the lives of poor whites or minority groups
while we act outraged in our White Protestant Churches?
I have one
final point of contention. Katie Sickles referenced a poll in which
over 80% of Protestants and over 80% of Lutherans voted against A3 in
2024, but only 52% of Catholics did.
The reason A3 lost by implication? Catholics. Is the Senator to blame for IP reform failing? A Catholic again!
Those damn Catholics.
Here are some demographics.
Out of the 6M people in Missouri, roughly 16% are Catholic, so about 960K.
58%
of the state is Protestant. I’m not sure why she separated Lutherans
from Protestants. I doubt she’s a historian, but Lutherans are
Protestants. That’s roughly 3,480,000 Protestants.
Amendment 3 passed by a margin of about 95,000 votes — a margin of about 3.2%. KSDK The total votes cast works out to roughly 2.97 million, split approximately:
Yes: ~1,535,000 (51.7%)
No: ~1,440,000 (48.3%)
Simply,
there aren’t enough Catholics on their own to have passed A3. Even if
every Catholic voted no or yes as a block. But that’s not what her poll,
which she doesn’t link to or share the source for, says.
Of the people that responded, the ones who were Catholic, 52% voted no on it. Was that 20 people? 500? 2000?
But she’s repeating it on Facebook, YouTube, and in meetings across the state.
Those damn Catholics who can’t vote.
Do you know who formed the first prolife groups? Catholics, unambigiously, Catholics.
Protestants
were still struggling with when life began when I was at Seminary in
2002. I was at the largest Protestant Seminary in the world, by size if
not by prestige, and they hadn’t answered the question. In 1973, W.A.
Criswell was still claiming life didn’t begin until after a child was
born...
...Notice who is sponsoring Katie Sickles going around talking about this supposed prolife bill:
Rice details a timeline that I did not include here. Do read the whole thing at the link above.
