Abby Johnson said in a recent interview that organizations like ERI (and like most other pro-life organizations) that do want to prosecute doctors who perform abortions but do not want to prosecute women who have abortions must not really want to end abortion. Her exact words were, “I just find it hard anymore to pretend that these groups actually are interested in ending abortion.” She’s wrong. Let’s talk about it.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Some Common Ground
If you don’t know who Abby Johnson is, she’s a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who’s now an anti-abortion advocate. Her story is told in the movie Unplanned. If you’re not familiar with it already, here’s the very short version: She had an abortion, volunteered for Planned Parenthood, and eventually worked at and even directed a clinic. Then one day, she was asked to assist during an actual abortion procedure by holding an ultrasound probe. As a result of seeing the abortion procedure happen in front of her, she quit her job at Planned Parenthood and joined the pro-life movement.
It took courage and integrity to leave, and Abby has done important work since then in exposing Planned Parenthood, advocating against abortion, and helping workers leave the abortion industry. And she’s right that it’s important for pro-lifers to articulate clearly that elective abortion isn’t just “not great”—it’s the unjust killing of an innocent person. It’s a human rights violation. So it’s not something we should be content to just reduce—we should want it to be illegal, and we should want it to never happen at all, just like we should want both of those things to be true of the unjust killing of toddlers, teenagers, and adults.
I get the pull toward saying we should prosecute women for having elective abortions. After all, if we really take seriously the fact that human fetuses have the exact same equal right to be protected from violence that human toddlers and adults have, someone might wonder if it’s inconsistent to prosecute people who pay someone to kill an adult, but not prosecute people who pay someone to kill a fetus. But I argue that there’s no real inconsistency: Even though an aborted fetus and a murdered adult have the same value, a person who pays for an abortion and a person who hires a hitman typically have very different levels of knowledge and culpability about the value of the life that is being ended. U.S. law frequently responds differently to people who have been involved with killing a person based on their level of knowledge and culpability, and doing so is also clearly a requirement of justice.
The Point of This Article
The rest of the article will explain ERI’s view about why we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions, and then argue for two very modest claims about that view:
That it’s psychologically possible for someone to hold that view and still care about ending abortion.
That it can be logically consistent for someone to hold that view and still care about ending abortion.
Most pro-life people already agree that we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions. But if you think we should, you can agree with everything I’m arguing for in this article and still hold that view. I’m not going to argue here that ERI is right and we shouldn’t prosecute women for having abortions. I’m just going to argue for the extremely modest claim that, pace Abby Johnson, it’s possible to simultaneously hold ERI’s view and really care about ending abortion.
One last preliminary note: Since this article is going to get into some pretty abstract moral and legal philosophy, I want to pause for a second and acknowledge that this is a really heavy topic that impacts real people, including some of you reading this article. You may have grieved the loss of a baby you know of who was killed by abortion, or you may yourself have survived a failed abortion attempt on your life, or you may have experienced other forms of deep injustice or dehumanization that lead you to have a lot of passion for affirming that all humans (born and unborn) have the same value. Or you may have had, participated in, or enabled an abortion, or known someone you care about who has, or been complicit in another form of harm, and that may also bring up emotion for you as you read this. Or you may have both types of experience.
Whatever your story, as you read through the intellectual arguments, please also give some kind, curious attention to your heart and body, and pause if you need to.
ERI’s View
ERI’s view (which is also the majority view among pro-life organizations) is that we should pass laws that prosecute abortion providers if we can, but we should not pass laws that prosecute women who have abortions, even if we can. In other words, imagine I’m in a room with two magic buttons.
If I press Button #1: Congress immediately passes a well-written federal law against elective abortion under which abortion providers can be prosecuted for murder.
If I press Button #2: Congress immediately passes a well-written federal law against elective abortion under which women who have abortions can be prosecuted for murder.
If I could press Button #1, I would press it in a heartbeat. The only reason I support bills and laws that outlaw some but not all elective abortions, or outlaw elective abortions but with less severe penalties for abortion providers, is a pragmatic concession to current political realities about what laws it’s possible to pass right now: I would rather pass a law that gives prenatal humans some protection than leave them with no protection.
But even if I could press Button #2—if it were suddenly politically possible to pass a law like that—I wouldn’t. Because I don’t think it’s just.
An Extremely Modest Claim
In my next article, I’ll argue that I’m right, that it’s not just. But for today, I’m not even going to go there. To show that Abby Johnson is wrong, I don’t have to prove that my view is right. I just have to show you that it’s psychologically possible for a person to hold my (maybe incorrect!!) view and still care about ending elective abortion.
Someone who agrees with Abby might say, “Hang on—passing laws that could prosecute women for having abortions would be extremely effective at preventing abortions. How could you really care about ending abortion if you’re not willing to use something that would be so effective at it?”
But the answer is really simple: The ends don’t justify the means. There are all kinds of things that would be really effective at accomplishing goals I really care about that I’m not willing to do, because they’re wrong. For instance, I care about people not dying from kidney disease, but I’m not willing to forcibly take kidneys from people who don’t consent to donating them. I believe that passing laws to prosecute women for having abortions would not be just. So I’m not willing to do it, even if it would be a very effective means of accomplishing a goal I really care about—ending abortion.
“But wait,” someone might say, “how can you think it’s unjust to prosecute women for having abortions? You think it’s just to prosecute people who pay someone to kill an adult! So if you think it’s not just to prosecute people who pay someone to kill a fetus, you must not really believe that fetuses and adults have equal value.”
This person is arguing that it’s not possible to believe all three of the following things:
It’s just to prosecute someone who pays a hitman to kill a human adult.
It’s not just to prosecute someone who pays an abortion provider to kill a human fetus.
Human adults and human fetuses have equal value.
But even if those three statements contradict each other—if it’s logically impossible for them to all be true—it’s still psychologically possible to believe them all. People believe contradictory things all the time, because they’re not fully cognizant of the implications of their views. I can just about guarantee that right now you hold some set of beliefs that’s self-contradictory, and that I do too. That doesn’t mean we’re stupid. It just means we haven’t thought through all the ramifications of absolutely everything we believe.
So my first extremely modest claim is that it’s psychologically possible to believe that fetuses and adults have equal value (and to care deeply about ending abortion) and also believe that women shouldn’t be prosecuted for having abortions—even if that’s self-contradictory. It’s psychologically possible to believe self-contradictory things. People do it all the time.
An Only Slightly Bolder Claim
But my second claim—only slightly bolder—is that it’s not self-contradictory to believe that fetuses and adults have equal value and also believe that women shouldn’t be prosecuted for having abortions. To be clear, right now I’m not arguing that both of those beliefs are true. I’m arguing for the much more modest claim that they at least don’t contradict each other.
Statements 1-3 above don’t directly contradict each other. To derive a contradiction, we have to add statement 4:
It’s just to prosecute someone who pays a hitman to kill a human adult.
It’s not just to prosecute someone who pays an abortion provider to kill a human fetus.
Human adults and human fetuses have equal value.
If two living things A and B have equal value, and someone pays a person to unjustly kill A and someone else pays a person to unjustly kill B, it’s always just to treat both payers the same way, regardless of any differences between the two circumstances.
I agree that that set of four statements would be self-contradictory. If someone believed all four of those statements, she would be contradicting herself. But I believe statement 4 is clearly false. I’ll explain my full reasons for thinking it’s false in my next article. For now I’ll just say that if we treated everyone who committed the same type of harm against equally valuable people exactly the same, then manslaughter would be punished the same as first-degree murder.
But even if I’m wrong—even if statement 4 is true—I’m still not contradicting myself. Statements 1-4 together are self–contradictory, but statements 1-3 without statement 4 are not. Since I only believe 1-3 and not 4, my beliefs don’t contradict each other—even if it turns out that some of them are wrong.
If everything I’ve argued for here is right, I could still be wrong that it’s unjust to prosecute women for having abortions. But I have argued that at least it’s both psychologically possible and logically consistent for me to believe that and still believe fetuses are just as valuable as adults, and still want to end abortion. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not contradicting myself.
Many of you reading this already agree with me that we shouldn’t prosecute people who have abortions. If that’s not you, I’ll give my arguments for that view in my next article, and I’ll be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts and pushback. But for now, I would invite us all to clarify that people on both sides of that question can care deeply about ending abortion, and to cultivate a more productive conversation by acknowledging the genuine common ground we have with each other and seeking to understand where we actually disagree.
¹By elective abortion, I mean any abortion that’s not medically necessary to save the life of the mother. The reason we need that qualifier is because there are cases—most commonly ectopic pregnancies—where procedures that are necessary to save the woman’s life, and that virtually all pro-lifers agree should be legal, are medically coded as types of abortions. But saying “elective abortion” every time is really cumbersome, so in the context of the rest of this article, when I say “abortion” I’m referring exclusively to elective abortion.ff.
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Rebecca is the Director of Scholarship at Equal Rights Institute. She is a PhD candidate and former teaching assistant in philosophy at the University of Southern California, where she also cofounded and co-led the student pro-life club.
A sought-after speaker, Rebecca frequently delivers lectures all across the country at academic conferences, colleges, churches, high schools, and other events.
Rebecca’s favorite part of her work at USC was teaching both her philosophy students and her pro-life club members how to cultivate mutual, respectful dialogues with people they disagree with. That work has led her to the strong conviction that if we can teach one side of an issue how to approach dialogues well, people on the other side will very often follow suit, so that we really can radically transform the state of public discourse on abortion just by helping the pro-life side to have a better approach: we can create a culture where people on both sides value each other more and perceive the truth more clearly, and ultimately we can change more minds and save more lives. At ERI, Rebecca uses that passion and experience and her philosophical expertise to train and inspire pro-lifers through writing, video content, live speaking and interviews, academic research, and individual consulting for pro-life advocates and politicians.
“You can’t fix a dialogue single-handedly—it takes two good-faith interlocutors to make a good-faith dialogue. But what you can do is make the first move. You can clearly communicate and demonstrate your care for the other person, your genuine desire to understand where they’re coming from, and your openness to considering their point of view, even while they’re not doing the same for you. It takes a little bit of work and a lot of charity, but if you do that, far more often than not the other person will meet you halfway—even people you think of as crazy extremists.”
Rebecca expects to complete her PhD in philosophy at the University of Southern California in May of 2026. Her dissertation is in metaethics; her other areas of research include philosophy of law, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. She has earned an MA in philosophy from USC, as well as a BS in philosophy, summa cum laude, from Hillsdale College, with minors in mathematics and theatre.
