Last month Alabama passed the strictest abortion ban in the nation. Most legal experts believe the law will be struck down by the federal courts and that the Supreme Court will simply ignore it. But while it won’t be effective in ending abortions, the law has been successful in re-launching the decades old debate between two groups of pro-lifers: incrementalist and immediatist.
Pro-life incrementalism means supporting legislative actions that affirmatively protect the unborn and women, reduce abortion, and have the potential to pass current constitutional scrutiny. The alternative for pro-lifers is immediatism, the idea that incrementalism should be rejected and that the most, or only, moral position is the immediate and total abolition of abortion. The extreme form of this position claims that “allowing abortion in some cases along the way to its total abolition is neither strategically sound nor consistently Christian.”
Almost all principled pro-lifers are in some sense immediatist, since our ultimate goal is the immediate end of the practice of abortion. Where the difference lies is in the question of what we should do now since we do not have the power to immediately end abortion. The incrementalist position is that we should work to save what children we can through taking actionable steps to put limits and restrictions on abortion. The immediatist position is that we should reject incrementalist legislation and work only for the immediate abolition of human abortion through constant efforts of moral persuasion.
Source: Joe Carter
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