Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, square beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his crew at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to broadcast live to his followers.
“We dealt a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” said the man, Jeff Durbin. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”
“Even states that have trigger laws” that ban abortion at conception without exceptions for rape or incest have not gone far enough, said Mr. Durbin, a pastor in the greater Phoenix area. “They don’t believe the woman should be punished.”
Resistance to “the question of whether people who kill their children in the womb are guilty or not,” he said, “is going to have to be something that we have to overcome, because women are still going to kill their children in the womb.”
Even as members of the anti-abortion movement celebrate their nation-changing Supreme Court victory, there are divisions over where to go next. The most extreme, like Mr Durbin, want to pursue what they call “abortion abolition”, a move to criminalize abortion from conception as murder and hold women who have the procedure accountable – a position that in some States may make these women eligible for the death penalty. This position is at odds with the anti-abortion mainstream, which opposes the criminalization of women and focuses on the prosecution of providers.
Many people who oppose abortion believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Abolitionists follow this thinking to what they believe to be its logical and uncompromising conclusion: from the moment of conception, abolitionists want to give the fetus equal protection as a person under the 14th Amendment.
Abolitionists have long been a radical fringe, minimized by prominent grassroots national groups that have focused on advancing gradual abortion restrictions.
But abolitionists’ reach has grown in the past year, largely through online activism and targeted efforts in some state legislatures and churches. Mr. Durbin’s group, End Abortion Now, which began in 2017, filed an amicus brief in the recent Supreme Court case overturning Roe, along with the Abortion Abolition Foundation and 21 other like-minded groups from states such as Idaho and Pennsylvania. His Apologia Studios YouTube channel has more than 300,000 subscribers, and he leads the Apologia Church, a congregation of about 700 people.
They see Roe’s reversal as a significant boost to their case and an opportunity to advance their goals and seize the future of the broader movement.
Abolitionist views found support in the ultraconservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. “We listened and followed the wrong leaders,” said Tom Askol, a prominent ultraconservative Southern Baptist pastor, a week after the Supreme Court decision. Mr. Askol was second in the last election for president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“The future of the anti-abortion movement will be led by those who adhere to a consistent and truly ‘pro-life’ ethic, meaning that because life begins at conception and fertilization, the full personhood of the unborn life must include equal protection under the law , which is afforded to all other persons in the Constitution of the United States,” he said.
From Opinion: The End of Roe v. Wade
Commentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.
- Michelle Goldberg: “The end of Roe v. Wade was foreseen, but in wide swaths of the country it still creates agonizing and potentially tragic uncertainty.”
- Spencer Bocat-Lindell: “What exactly does it mean for the Supreme Court to experience a crisis of legitimacy, and is it really one?”
- Bonnie Christian, journalist: “For many supporters of former President Donald Trump, Friday’s Supreme Court decision was a long-awaited vindication.” It could also mark the end of his political career.
- Erica Baccioci, legal scholar: “It is precisely the state of the unborn child’s existential dependence on its mother, rather than its autonomy, that makes it particularly suitable for care, nurturing and legal protection.”
“All mothers who abort their children are guilty on some level, though not necessarily equally guilty of murder,” he said.
Some states have already banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. State legislatures can no longer use Roe as an excuse to avoid abolitionist proposals, Mr. Durbin said on his live broadcast. He called on churches to join his group and expand their protests from abortion clinics to places like Target and CVS where women can access medical abortion.
Mr. Durbin, driven by his set of Christian beliefs, and others in the abolitionist coalition recently pushed a bill in Louisiana that would have classified abortion as murder and given prosecutors the ability to bring criminal charges against women who terminate pregnancies. The measure failed, but it went further than any of the other “equal protection” bills that abolitionists worked to introduce in about a dozen states over the past two years.
The bill drew significant opposition from other anti-abortion groups. In an open letter, about 70 anti-abortion groups called on all state legislators to reject such initiatives.
“As national and state pro-life organizations representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women and children across the country, let us be clear: we state unequivocally that any measure that seeks to criminalize or punish women is not pro-life and we strongly oppose such efforts,” the letter said. It was signed by groups including National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Americans United for Life. Other groups, such as Students for Life, say they want to “eliminate abortion” and make it “unthinkable and unaffordable” but oppose criminalizing women.
Privately, some grassroots leaders worry about how quickly abolitionists have gained ground. In Texas, the Abortion Abolition Foundation opposed the state’s six-week ban because it “discriminates against someone who doesn’t have a detectable heartbeat,” said Bradley Pierce, the group’s president. A group called Free the States pushed for abolitionist campaigns from Oklahoma.
About one in three American adults believe that if abortion were illegal, women who had the procedure should serve jail time or pay a fine or do community service, according to a March Pew Research Center survey. Men, white evangelicals and Republicans are among the most likely to believe a woman should be punished, the survey found.
They reflect the undercurrent of the anti-abortion movement that Donald J. Trump raised the bar in 2016 when he said women who get abortions should face “some form of punishment” if the procedure is banned in the United States, before bipartisan outrage pushed him to backtrack.
After all, abolitionists believe they are fighting against a holy Christian mission, accountable to the God they worship.
In their amicus brief, they wrote: “The Court is bound not only by the text of the Constitution but also by the God-revealed limitations of human civil authority.”
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To prevent a woman from walking into an abortion clinic, you have about 15 seconds to get her to change her mind, Mr. Durbin said, casually holding a yellow box of Yerba in his office in Tempe, Ariz., recently and pointing to a stack signs his team goes to clinics that say, “Babies are killed here.”
Mr. Durbin worked to achieve abolitionist goals with a multi-pronged approach: evangelizing online and preaching at his church; teaching congregations how to prevent women from entering an abortion clinic; and traveled to state legislatures to promote bills classifying abortion as murder.
He works in a studio office space behind a door with a sign with the name of a meat shop and cross knives. The sign is a security decoy, he said, to ward off naysayers. The interior is dark, industrial and metallic, with movie posters for movies like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Tubs of 4Patriot emergency food kits were stacked nearby, with water, protein powders and chia seeds.
Mr Durbin, 44, has five children as well as three grandchildren and five black belts. Before becoming a pastor and online activist, he was a national karate champion who played Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat: The Live Tour. He married his wife when he was 20 and she was 18 and pregnant with their first child, and he dedicated his life to Jesus after nearly overdosing on ecstasy, he said.
He often tells the story of how they adopted their youngest son after the boy’s birth mother sought an abortion when doctors mistakenly expected him to be born with spina bifida.
He is motivated by the belief that he is obeying God. “It is God’s command to save those who are being led to slaughter,” he said. “This is not a request or a suggestion. That’s right, save them.
It is no accident that “removal” is the word that the movement has chosen for itself. Mr. Durbin and his fellow activists describe their mission as comparable to the push to abolish slavery in the United States before the Civil War. And pro-abortionists—as well as many in the broader anti-abortion movement—equate abortion rights supporters with defenders of slavery.
“At the time, there were people who argued against the abolitionists,” he said. “They were saying, ‘Well, of course that’s wrong.’ But if you don’t want a slave, don’t get one. You know, so it was all kind of like, ‘It’s their plantation, their choice.’
He opposes news articles that say he wants to see women who have abortions executed. But he wants women who have the procedure to be prosecuted for murder according to their state…
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