Recent events in Pensacola have intensified the national debate on abortion. A jury has recommended the death penalty for Paul Hill, who was convicted of shooting an abortionist and his bodyguard. The New York Times headlined, “Protestor Is Convicted Of Murder,” — a nice propaganda ploy. Those for abortion are now calling for more draconian measures in limiting the rights of anti-abortion protestors. While the Clinton administration, with all its Supreme Court hearings indicating that Roe v. Wade is “settled law,” increases frustration and thereby encourages people who feel that violence is the only recourse left. Paul Hill has now raised the question of whether homicide is justified in protecting the unborn life about to be snuffed out in the mother’s womb. In order to answer the question, the issue has to be stated properly.
The issue is not whether abortion is right or wrong. Abortion is wrong. It is an abominable crime. The issue is not whether or not this abuse should be extirpated from our country. It must if this government is to survive. Any land which holds that the right to life is a self-evident truth, and which gives its citizens an historically unprecedented amount of self-determination in the governance of that country, will be held to a greater degree of accountability before the Lord.
The government condones abortion. That being the case, the duty of any responsible citizen should be clear. His obligation is to change the law so that innocent life is no longer liable to be terminated at the whim of the mother or the manipulation of the father. At this point it needs to be emphasized that changing the law and personal persuasion are the only measures that will protect the unborn. Closing down a clinic by blowing it up or shooting the abortionist, for the most part, only means the deferring of the abortion to another time and place.
The analogy with self-defense or defense of another has problems. If someone is about to kill me, and I repel that attack with deadly force, I am not doing something similar to what someone does when they shoot an abortionist. To begin with, I am acting in lieu of the state when the state cannot act but would if it could. In abortion this is not the case. Only the state can wield the sword. Only the state can punish malefactors. Individuals who arrogate to themselves this right, no matter how grievous the provocation, threaten the order that is necessary to any society.
But beyond that, the act of killing the abortionist is ineffective in another way. If I disable or even kill the person threatening me with harm, I have for all practical purposes completely eliminated the threat. The person who shoots the abortionist does no such thing. For the most part, all that is accomplished is adding a little inconvenience to the crime of abortion by forcing a rescheduling of the killing at another clinic or a later date. Thus the means do not bring about the desired end, even if they were legal means, which they are not.
But to return to our starting point: the government condones abortion, and we, as citizens of this republic, are called upon to change the law. We can accomplish that by one of two ways: either within the law or outside the law. If we act within the law, ours is essentially an act of persuasion. If we act outside the law, ours is essentially an act of insurrection, which may or may not be justified. In order to judge the legitimacy of acts of insurrection, we have the just war criteria, of which one requirement is likelihood of success, and another is the ability to take over the role of government should our insurrection prove successful.
I mention the just war theory only to make two points. First of all, the normal recourse to changing the laws has not been exhausted. Since this recourse has not been exhausted, it should be pursued because taking this course of action poses the least threat to public order, which should be preserved as much as possible even in the face of unjust laws and unjust rulers.
Second, an act of insurrection which does not follow the just war criteria, which is to say any act which one individual carries out on his own with virtually no likelihood of success, is an act of vigilantism and should be condemned as such, lest others be scandalized into engaging in the same sort of behavior. The authority of the law is crucial for the protection of all human rights.
That being said, we should not allow our concern for public order and the moral order to be seen as justification of the status quo. The killing of the unborn is a heinous crime and it can and must be stopped. The only question which remains is who will do the stopping. Will we finally draw back from the worship of Baal and Dionysus which became our state religion in 1973 or will God have to do it for us?
John Brown was a vigilante in his day, but the injustice of what he did should blind no one to the enormity of the evil he was fighting against. Similarly, God had a way of extirpating the evil of slavery from this land. It involved a bloody war and the death of a half-million men. Its legacy is with us still. The legacy of abortion far outweighs that of slavery on the scales of justice. Paul Hill may very well be a John Brown. And having said all that, I fear what that presages for the future of my country.