THE PATH TO ENDING ABORTION

For decades, Southern Baptists have affirmed the sanctity of life through resolutions, public witness and local church ministry. We have supported the work of pregnancy centers, actively advocated for legal reform and prayed for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. With Roe now gone, we are in a new moment — one that requires not only conviction but careful judgment about how best to order justice in a post-Roe landscape.

The current debate within the pro-life movement is not about whether the unborn are human. It is about how justice should be ordered in a culture that has normalized abortion for more than five decades.

For half a century, abortion was protected by federal law. It was defended by courts, subsidized by state and federal governments, and framed as health care and empowerment. Law is a teacher, and for decades it taught the American people that abortion was not only permissible but a protected right.

That reality, no matter how wrongheaded it is, matters.

Millions of women have made decisions inside a moral framework constructed long before they faced their own crisis pregnancy. This does not eliminate moral agency. Women make real choices, and those choices carry moral weight. But those choices are not made in isolation. Men participate as well through coercion, abandonment or silence. Fathers, boyfriends, husbands, friends and even parents often shape the crisis long before a clinic is ever called.

Beyond individual relationships, there is also the broader machinery — legal, medical, cultural and economic — that has sustained abortion as a readily available option. A culture that has subsidized abortion, sidelined fatherhood and taught women that self-preservation requires the destruction of their own child cannot be repaired by individual criminal prosecution alone.

Some argue that equal protection demands abortion be treated in law exactly as any other homicide. That argument flows from a desire for moral consistency. They argue that if the unborn child is fully human, then the law should fully recognize that humanity.

I do not disagree, on the surface, with this sentiment. I simply believe we get there eventually — and only when justice is rightly ordered. If abortion remains widely accessible through mail-order abortion pills, still defended as health care and still legally protected in many jurisdictions, criminalizing women while the infrastructure remains intact risks placing the weight of justice on those shaped by a system the state itself constructed.

Before we criminalize, we should demagnetize. We do this by curtailing supply chains, increasing accountability for providers and removing the legal and financial incentives that sustain the abortion industry. By doing so, we can collapse the machinery that has normalized abortion for decades.

Our goal as Christians has never been merely to change a statute. It has been to see a culture transformed. We long for a day when abortion is not only illegal but unthinkable — a day when no woman believes it is her only option and no man abdicates his responsibility.

Scripture reminds us that justice and mercy are not competitors. Micah 6:8 calls us to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” Those commands belong together.

The state bears responsibility to restrain evil and punish wrongdoing. The church bears responsibility to proclaim the gospel and form consciences. These roles are distinct but not disconnected. When law has catechized a culture for decades, the church must patiently help re-catechize it with truth.

This is why the current legislative conversation matters. Laws shape culture, and culture shapes laws. Which is why we should not assume that 50 years of moral formation can be undone overnight by prosecutorial force alone.

If abortion is ever to disappear from our land, it will not be because we perfected a legal framework. It will be because hearts changed. It will be because fathers took responsibility. It will be because churches supported mothers in difficult circumstances. It will be because believers spoke clearly about sin and just as clearly about forgiveness in Christ. And it will be because those same churches discipled Christians to articulate a life ethic grounded in Scripture and the dignity of every human life.

Southern Baptists have long affirmed both the sanctity of life and the sufficiency of the gospel. We must hold those convictions together.

To do so, we must be unwavering about the humanity of the unborn, confront systems that profit from their destruction and exercise wisdom as we consider how justice should be applied in this moment.

Justice is essential. But justice must be ordered wisely.

If we pursue both clarity and prudence — both conviction and compassion — we may yet see abortion not only outlawed but abandoned. B&R — Andrew Wood served as the executive director of Hope Resource Center in Knoxville and was the co-founder of the Tennessee Pregnancy Center Network