This article was written and originally published by Seth Gruber on his Substack– reprinted in full with permission.
Scott Klusendorf has been a steady and articulate voice in the pro-life fight for many years. His apologetics trainings have inspired and educated thousands in defense of preborn lives
Having worked for Mr. Klusendorf as a younger man I’m thankful for the opportunity he gave me to grow in my gifts and calling.
Yet, Scott shifted out of his lane this week with a poorly reasoned article on political strategy that demands a gracious but stout response.
Klusendorf attempts to legitimize the pro-life establishment’s efforts of ensuring that women maintain the legal immunity to murder their unborn babies via the abortion pill, or any other personal means. Why?
Because he argues that pro-life people like myself who are mobilizing the Church to fight for giving preborn babies the same legal protections any infant has will actually bring about the death of more babies and harm the political progress of Conservatives.
His argument is essentially this: because full legal protection for unborn children is wildly unpopular with the broader culture, Christians should refrain from pursuing it politically until some undefined future moment when society is supposedly more prepared to accept it.
What cultural arrangements must happen and how we make them happen before it’s okay to work toward legally protecting unborn babies, Klusendorf doesn’t tell us. How do we create those conditions without fighting for our political goals in the present? Klusendorf never tells us.
Roe Is Gone. Legal Immunity Remains.
For those new to the debate, here is your quick reminder. It is legal for a mother to abort or murder her unborn child in all fifty states in this country. This is because, despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade, red states often at the behest of pro-life leaders such as Kristan Hawkins, Marjorie Dannenfellser and organizations such as Concerned Women for American, National Right to Life and March for Life, have actually written wholesale immunity clauses into their pro-life legislation for the aborting mother.
This means that a pregnant mother in the most conservative state in America can abort her baby at any point in pregnancy by any means and face zero legal consequences, so long as she performs that abortion herself. And with the abortion pill accounting for more than 65% of the abortions in America each year, you can see the nightmare this represents for our smallest neighbors.
What makes Klusendorf’s position even more troubling is that Roe is gone. Abortion law has returned to the states. This should be a defining moment for the Church: a moment to awaken Christians, pressure Republican legislators, challenge cowardly incumbents, and labor tirelessly until equal protection for unborn children is secured in every conservative state in America; for starters.
But Klusendorf doesn’t want us to try that.
Klusendorf along with many other leaders in the pro-life movement insist that they want preborn children to have legal protections, but that trying to remove the wholesale immunity clauses for aborting mothers is unwise right now.
Would We Tolerate This for Any Other Right?
For the sake of moral clarity, imagine applying that logic to another constitutional right. Suppose Republican governors announced: “The culture is uncomfortable with AR-15s, so we’re suspending your right to own one until society becomes more accepting.”
Conservatives would erupt in outrage—and rightly so. Which raises an uncomfortable question:
Will we fight harder for our guns than for our children?
Likewise, the existence of widespread cultural evil has never excused legal injustice. The fact that slavery endured for centuries did not absolve lawmakers of their duty to criminalize the ownership of human beings. In the same way, the normalization of abortion cannot justify refusing to legally protect the unborn.
You do not dismantle a culture of death by preserving the laws that sustain it.
The Culture Was Never “Ready”
It’s true our culture is likely “not ready” for the criminalization of abortion, wherein little babies are actually given the same protections against being murdered than you and I and our children have. Our culture is no more ready for that than it was for “gay marriage” in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges), for legal porn in 1973 (Miller v. California), or for full-term abortions also in 1973 (Roe v. Wade).
Have you noticed how the sexual liberationists and occult feminists never WAIT for the culture to be “ready” for the next iteration or unfolding of their secular faith in the public square? They create culture and change it according to their whims THROUGH their political engagement. They go all-in and mobilize their relatively small portion of the public who are willing to sacrifice nearly everything on the altar of “orgasms without responsibility.” They understand and understand well that “statecraft is soulcraft.”
I’m very aware of and familiar with Klusendorf’s framework. I used to work for him. Anthony Breitbart summarized the position of folks like Klusendorf when he said “politics is downstream of culture.” So change the culture, you change the politics. True enough. But only half true. Culture is also downstream of politics. Stay tuned on that.
What “Prudence” Actually Produces
Klusendorf points to former Congresswoman Liz Cheney as a cautionary example. Cheney maintained an “A” rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—arguably the most influential pro-life lobbying organization on Capitol Hill—yet after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization she quickly adopted pro-abortion rhetoric in public interviews, claimed state abortion laws were endangering women, and ultimately endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, arguing that “pro-life and pro-choice women are uniting behind candidates committed to protecting health care and safety for women.”
As my friends at the Foundation to Abolish Abortion point out, Klusendorf presents Cheney as proof that aggressive anti-abortion legislation risks alienating politically vulnerable allies. But the example actually demonstrates the opposite.
If a legislator celebrated as a premier pro-life ally abandons the cause the moment cultural pressure intensifies, the problem is not that the movement demanded too much of her. The problem is that the pro-life establishment built a grading system that rewards symbolic votes, shallow commitments, and political convenience—then mistakes that arrangement for principled coalition-building.
A single defection could be dismissed as an anomaly. But when one of the movement’s highest-rated lawmakers begins repeating the claim that abortion restrictions are dangerous to women, it reveals something deeper than personal inconsistency. It exposes a movement that has confused political access with conviction.
Cheney is not a warning against equal protection.
She is evidence of what decades of “prudence” and incremental compromise have actually produced.
Humanity’s Ancient Covenant With Death
What will happen if we take Klusendorf’s advise and refrain from demanding and fighting for full legal protections for the unborn in America’s red states and focus on the culture (changing public opinion, changing hearts and minds, refuting pro-abortion lies, encouraging pastors to preach boldly)? Can we change enough hearts and minds through cultural engagement alone to create a sufficient enough shift that the people will “be ready” for the criminalization of abortion? Not likely. Klusendorf has forgotten the significance of the thanatos factor. It is the natural sinful inclination of humans toward death.
Dr. George Grant once reminded me that from the moment of the Fall, humanity became enthralled to death (Romans 5:12). In Adam’s rebellion, mankind entered into an alliance with the grave itself (Isaiah 28:15). Scripture warns that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25). Whether knowingly or blindly, men have continually chosen destruction over life (Jeremiah 8:3). Death has become our master and companion (Psalm 49:14). Our thoughts are governed by it (Romans 8:6), our desires are drawn toward it (Proverbs 21:6), and our sinful nature remains enslaved to its dominion (Romans 8:2). We move to its rhythm (Proverbs 2:18) and wander willingly into its halls (Proverbs 7:27). Indeed, all who despise God become lovers of death (Proverbs 8:36).
For this reason, abortion, infanticide, exposure, and abandonment are not aberrations in human history, but recurring manifestations of fallen man. From the earliest ages, mankind has devised ever more sophisticated means of indulging corrupt appetites and silencing inconvenient life. And among humanity’s oldest and most persistent evils has been the destruction of children.
The Church Fathers Didn’t Wait for the Culture
Thank God the early Church did not adopt Klusendorf’s strategy.
Had the Church Fathers decided to “wait for the culture” before pursuing political righteousness on behalf of the unborn, Western civilization itself might look very different today. The patristic writers confronted cultures far more depraved than ours—cultures that normalized abortion, infanticide, child exposure, prostitution, and even pederasty. Yet they did not retreat from political engagement because the surrounding culture was hostile.
Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, Justin Martyr, John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Athanasius of Alexandria, and countless others openly condemned abortion and infanticide and called for legal penalties against those who murdered children.
Their witness mattered.
Eventually, Roman emperors Valentinian and Theodosius issued edicts in 374 AD restricting child exposure and protecting abandoned infants—something virtually unprecedented in the ancient world. That transformation did not happen because Christians carefully moderated their message to avoid political backlash. It happened because they were faithful.
They sacrificed comfort, reputation, influence, and often their lives in defense of children whom the surrounding culture did not even recognize as fully human.
With an earth-shaking political shift, the culture of the ancient world began to change. Because culture is also downstream from politics.
And abortion is in fact the best example for this. The median number of illegal abortions before 1973 in America was 98,000.1 Within just a handful of years following Roe, the annual total of murdered babies was 1.6 million! That cultural change was due solely to the political change. And this despite the fact that in 1973, the Democrat Party was largely pro-life. Meaning, the culture wasn’t WITH the decision; and yet the radicals still prevailed because they were willing to sacrifice. Will we learn from them?
Equal Protection Is the Historic American Position
Additionally, the position that preborn children should have legal protections is more traditional in American jurisprudence than the position of Mr. Klusendorf. By the time of ratification, nearly every state had criminal legislation proscribing abortion. Twenty-three states and six territories referred to the fetus as a “child” in their anti-abortion statutes. Twenty-eight jurisdictions classified abortion as an “offense against the person.”
Nine ratifying states provided the same range of punishment for killing the preborn child as for killing the mother. Ten states classified abortion as manslaughter, assault with intent to murder, or murder. The Ohio legislature that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in January 1867 passed legislation criminalizing abortion at all stages just months later — its committee declaring abortion “at any stage of existence” to be “child-murder.”
Senator Jacob Howard, who sponsored the Amendment, declared its purpose to “disable a state from depriving not merely a citizen of the United States, but any person, whoever he may be, of life, liberty and property without due process.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens called it “a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.”
Justice Blackmun acknowledged in Roe that if “personhood is established,” the case for abortion “collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment.”
Just as the First Amendment protects speech technologies that did not exist in 1791, and the Second Amendment protects arms that did not exist in the 18th century, “person” protects every member of the human species — including those whose membership in the human family is now confirmed by modern science beyond any doubt the framers could have imagined.
It is neither foolhardy nor imprudent to commit oneself to the hard work and sweat equity of securing equal rights protection for the littlest babies. And the craziest thing of all? My position is neither fringe (just wait for the equal rights protection statement we’re dropping soon at The White Rose Resistance) nor radical.
How the Pro-Life Establishment Lost Its Nerve
For the first 5 years after the Roe decision, the Pro-Life movement supported the equal protection Human Life Amendment, and there was no big kerfuffle. What unfortunately has happened is that there are these large national organizations which have been co-opted by the GOP Republican Establishment and serve as incumbent protection programs… and these are the ones now opposing equal protection. We must end their subversion and restore the Pro-Life movement to its first principles. And consider: every Republican platform from 1984 to 2024 called for the 14th Amendment’s protections to be extended to unborn children! That language existed because the pro-life movement built it!
Then in 2024, the GOP kept the 14th Amendment language but gutted the conclusion — repurposing it to justify leaving the personhood of the child up to each state. And the national organizations that now oppose equal protection? They didn’t fight it. Forty years of platform language, stripped overnight, and the gatekeepers applauded. That tells you everything you need to know about who these organizations serve.
