This weekend, I finished watching a debate between Students for Life, one of the major pro-life players, and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, a leading voice in the abolitionist movement. To put it mildly, this has become an intense fight in pro-life circles over the past several years.
If you're unfamiliar with it, it's basically this: Both camps want to “abolish” abortion, but they disagree about how the law should get there, specifically whether it's worth passing laws that protect some children now while leaving others unprotected. One additional flashpoint is that nearly every state abortion ban on the books today punishes the abortionist and leaves the mother immune from prosecution.
One side, the incrementalists (Students for Life), are willing to take incremental wins, like laws that ban abortion after a certain number of weeks, and often see calls for total and immediate abolition as unhelpful, especially the call to end mothers’ immunity from prosecution, even for those who end the life of their child knowingly and willingly.
The other side, the abolitionists (Foundation to Abolish Abortion), calls for the total and immediate abolition of abortion through equal protection, treating preborn children the same under the law as born children, with no immunity for anyone, including the mother.
Now—what surprised me was how they started: by agreeing on equal protection as the ultimate goal. That is, they both agreed “the same laws that protect the lives of born children should protect the lives of pre-born children.” Students for Life staff apologist Jojo Ruba opened with Jacob, a two-year-old in Florida whose life, Ruba said, was saved by the state’s 15-week ban; his mother was already 22 weeks pregnant. “This debate is not about the outcome,” Ruba told the audience. “We agree children like Jacob deserve equal protection just like born children.” Later he said, “We support equal protection 100%.” He then made clear that his objection was to the abolitionist bills: “What we don’t support are your bills that don’t provide equal protection because they’ll never be passed.” Bradley Pierce, the outspoken leader of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, summed up what they were fighting over: “We’re debating about how to get there through the laws.”
This was an encouraging amount of alignment out of the gate. Whether abolitionists like Pierce pushed the broader movement to say this out loud, or equal protection was truly the goal all along, both sides now use the same words for where we are going. That’s a win. The fight is over strategy and timing, and on strategy the groups could not be more different.
The two positions
Ruba characterizes his incrementalist approach as “permanent abolition,” which “means working through the culture and offering cultural abolition as well as legal abolition.” Bans at six, 12 or 15 weeks that can pass now are he believes “a step to permanent abolition.” The abolitionist approach, on the other hand, he labels “premature abolitionism,” because “an equal protection bill that they propose can’t provide any equal protection if it can’t be passed.”
Scott Klusendorf, another well-known incrementalist, makes the same case on his podcast, The Case for Life. “I’m not against abolition,” he said this month. “I’m not even against prosecuting women for having abortions... Oh, yes, we can and we ought to. But there is prudence that comes into play.” His fear is Queensland, Australia, where a ban with “no exceptions” “died standing up because no one would enforce it.”
Pierce is just as clear about the abolitionist view. Instead of supporting bills “that outlaw the act of prenatal homicide for everyone,” he said, “the pro-life [incrementalist] way merely regulates the circumstances of prenatal homicide.” And to get a bill passed each year, “you will certainly have to give absolute immunity to all women who willfully abort their children.” That immunity is the heart of his objection. In his mind, a law that bans abortion while exempting the mother is at odds with, even totally antithetical to, the equal part of equal protection.
So the two sides are sitting at a crossroads, each advocating for its path forward. Both are in pursuit of eradicating an evil, and both appeal to results: what will actually work. And so naturally, they both reach for William Wilberforce, who led the fight to end the slave trade, to justify their approach.
When Ruba called abolitionist bills losers, Pierce answered, “You know who else introduced a bill over and over and over again for the total and immediate abolition? William Wilberforce. Was that a loser bill?” Ruba had his own Wilberforce answer ready: “Wilberforce did introduce bills to abolish slavery, but he started with abolishing the slave trade before he abolished slavery. That sounds like a step, strategic incremental step to me.”
Clearly, this historical figure and his legacy are critical to both sides advancing their agenda and steering the fight for the unborn in the next decade. So I thought it was worthwhile to spend a little time looking deeper at the actual record of Wilberforce to see if it gave us any hints as to which camp can truly claim his legacy.
How Britain actually ended slavery
If you don’t know Wilberforce, here is the short version. William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was a member of the British Parliament and an evangelical Christian who made ending the slave trade his life’s work. He led the fight in Parliament until Britain banned the trade in 1807, and he stayed in the fight against slavery itself until his death in 1833. Nearly every civilization in history has practiced slavery; that is not what made his story unique. He was unique in that he led a nation to voluntarily stop. Britain was the biggest slave-trading nation in the world, and it gave up that trade while it was still making the country rich. That’s why both camps want him on their side.
First, it’s important to break down the several terms that made up the slave economy:
Enslaving: capturing a free person and making him a slave. In Africa, that was largely done by local rulers and dealers, who sold captives to European traders at the coast.
The slave trade: shipping those captured people across the Atlantic to be sold.
The slavery marketplace: buying and selling them within the colonies after delivery.
Slave births: children born to enslaved mothers, who became enslaved themselves.
The slave owner: the person who owned them.
In trying to end the practice, Britain dealt with each differently, and each move was in some ways incremental and in some ways immediate.
The first move was the slave trade bill. Wilberforce introduced it in 1791, and it failed. His motion called for immediate abolition of the trade, but in many ways, it was incremental too. It only went after the slave trade (think transportation), which left the people already in bondage untouched. That was a deliberate choice by the movement, which believed emancipation was too radical to pass. Unconcerned with the optics of losing, Wilberforce kept pitching the bill for 16 years, through eleven failed attempts.
The second move was a back door. In 1806, Wilberforce and his allies backed a narrower bill banning British ships from supplying slaves to foreign colonies. It was sold as a wartime measure, and the abolitionists in Parliament kept quiet while it passed. But they knew what it would do: it wiped out the British trade and once it did, with no defenders left, the full ban passed a year later. Unlike many of today’s incremental bills, which are meant to prepare the culture, this half measure was a back door to a full and immediate dismantling of the trade.
The third move was ratcheting up the penalties. The 1807 law covered the entire trade but only fined traders and seized their ships. In 1811 slave trading became a felony, and by 1824 carrying slaves at sea was piracy, punishable by death. It applied to everyone in the trade, from owners and captains down to the ship’s surgeon and the men who insured the voyage, with no immunity for any of them. But the penalty grew over time.
The final play took aim at slavery itself, and in some ways, it was a mess. By then, Wilberforce argued openly for emancipation, but he insisted on the record that it come gradually, through "moral causes" rather than "suddenly effected by an act of parliament," though not "an hour longer than is absolutely necessary." A younger generation of immediatists disagreed. These firebrands, led by women like Elizabeth Heyrick, pushed for immediate, not gradual, abolition. In contrast to Wilberforce, they even pressed the Anti-Slavery Society, threatening to withhold their donations until it adopted this demand in 1830. Wilberforce never argued for immediate emancipation himself, but in April 1833, retired and in failing health, he attended an Anti-Slavery Society meeting that resolved to petition Parliament for immediate emancipation. In the end, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 brought down the institution for good. The concession was that slave owners would be paid roughly £20 million, or 40 percent of the Treasury's annual income. The enslaved got nothing. Wilberforce, retired by then, got word that it had passed a critical hurdle just before he died.
We should not lose sight of how difficult a pill that last part would have been for abolitionists to swallow. This direct payment to slave owners was a gift to those who had done the wrong thing. It was a deal with the devil that ended the status of slave for good.
So where does that leave Wilberforce? Well, he seemed satisfied to take partial wins, and he did go after one piece of the evil at a time. He argued openly for emancipation, but insisted it come gradually. In Parliament, though, he kept introducing the full bill against the slave trade, even though it kept losing, and the partial wins he did take were crafted to end the trade as quickly as possible, not to wait for the culture. Whether today’s incrementalists or abolitionists are more closely following him is a separate question, and I’ll come back to it after looking at how America handled the same evil.
The American version
I think it is worth considering the American version of this same process. After all, the United States faced the same evil in the same era and started down the same incremental road Britain took, but it ended somewhere very different. And since the fight over abortion is being waged in American legislatures, under an American Constitution, our own history may have more to teach us than Britain’s.
Anyone familiar with our history knows our founding was full of compromise. The document we ended up with, in so many ways, was an incremental product. Our Constitution didn’t abolish slavery, although many founders wanted that. Instead, the deal that was struck was one that could pass, with the hope that eventually this evil would die. Unfortunately, it didn’t. In many ways, it continued to expand. And when Washington offered incremental terms, the slaveholding states refused them all. Congress struck compromise after compromise over slavery’s expansion, from the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to the Compromise of 1850. Lincoln’s party only proposed stopping slavery’s spread, not ending it where it existed, and on the eve of his inauguration, Congress even (shockingly) passed an amendment that would have protected slavery in the states permanently. The Deep South had already seceded and didn’t come back. Even compensated emancipation, Britain’s model, was offered to no avail. As a congressman in 1849, Lincoln drafted a bill to pay slave owners in D.C. and free children born after 1850, and he abandoned it for lack of support. During the war, Congress freed D.C.’s slaves in 1862 and paid their owners, but the border states, slave states that had stayed loyal to the Union, refused the same deal. This was going to have to be settled on the battlefield. Ultimately, the victors imposed the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery with no compensation, no timetable, and no compromise.
And it didn’t stop with the Thirteenth Amendment. When Southern states answered emancipation with Black Codes meant to keep freedmen in near-slavery, Congress didn’t wait for the culture to catch up. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. Within three years, it wrote citizenship and equal protection into the Constitution with the Fourteenth Amendment and made ratification a condition for Southern states to rejoin the Union. They weren’t concerned with cultural compliance. They wanted it settled forever and outlined in the Constitution, and then they spent the next century trying to bring everyone into obedience and alignment.
With very slow progress. After tossing Reconstruction aside, the South entered the era of Jim Crow, and with it came the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson. Incrementalists could point to this as an example of cultural backlash. But importantly, even with that backlash, the constitutional standard stayed on the books, and in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education used it to strike down segregation. Klusendorf’s fear was that a law can die standing up because no one will enforce it. His implication was these aren’t worth pursuing. The Fourteenth Amendment tells a bit of a different tale. It had a large portion of the country in open defiance for decades, but it still won out in the end.
This highlights a major difference in the environment and the role it plays in strategy. Incrementalism worked, to a degree, in the British Empire because there was a willingness on the other side to make incremental progress. In the U.S., there was no willingness like that. Incrementalism only works when the other side is willing to play ball.
Can incrementalism work today?
There are parallels today. I probably don’t need to draw all of them out for you, but we need to draw on these historical lessons to consider whether incrementalism can work, and what the cost may eventually to achieve truly equal protection.
I must admit the incrementalist case is pretty easy to make. It feels pragmatic and prudent. Dobbs itself came through one of these incrementalist bills: a 15-week law, a limit, not a ban. Ruba named the classic warning of moving too fast: Prohibition, “where they tried to ban alcohol but didn’t change the culture.” It was repealed 14 years later.
On the other hand, the abolitionists have a case too, and it comes from the other side of the culture war. Let’s be honest: progressives have won most of the big legal fights over the last 60 years, and they never waited on the culture to catch up. Instead, they mobilized the levers of government through coordinated judicial, cultural, and legal strategies to force a change in public opinion. When Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, most states still banned it, and for 49 years the law (and the media) was fairly effective in teaching the country that the “clump of cells” in the womb should not count. When Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage in 2004, by court order, only 42 percent of Americans supported it. It lost at the ballot box even in California in 2008, then was imposed nationwide in 2015, and support reached 71 percent by 2023, largely as a result of a coordinated push to make it all seem inevitable and to silence dissenters in the public square.
I think it is safe to say, the progressives have only grown bolder in their claims. In the 1990s, Democrats said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” By 2016, “rare” was gone from their platform, and in 2024 Planned Parenthood parked a mobile clinic outside the Democratic National Convention, offering free abortion pills. Their legislators have not been afraid of the messaging either. When Minnesota made abortion a “fundamental right” in 2023, Democrats rejected an amendment to limit abortion after 24 weeks, even though only 22 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in the third trimester. The same year, Minnesota dropped its requirement that doctors take all reasonable measures “to preserve the life and health” of a baby born alive after an abortion. It is arguably one of the most horrific legal practices on the books today.
These legislative and court victories rested on supposed rights that are a lot harder to find in the Constitution than equal protection for life, and yet they convinced much of the public of the constitutionality and, eventually, the morality of these two very terrible things. The Fourteenth Amendment, by contrast, says no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” We have a much easier case claiming all life is protected.
What we all need to learn from Wilberforce
Finally, in light of all this history — let’s take a look at where each movement is currently falling short.
What incrementalists need to learn
Incrementalists claim it is damaging to introduce bills that will fail. Ruba’s main objection to abolitionist bills was that they were losing. But Wilberforce’s first bill, which went after the slave trade (not slavery itself, already incremental), still lost for 16 years, and yet he kept introducing it anyway. He didn’t wait for the culture. We can take one evil at a time, but if we want to liken ourselves to Wilberforce, we can’t allow the chance of success to be our only measuring stick.
Further, today’s incrementalists have also chosen to go somewhere Wilberforce never did. It is one thing to decline to support a bill you think cannot pass. It is another to mobilize support against it. In 2024, the North Dakota Republican convention was considering a non-binding resolution supporting “efforts to abolish abortion in the state of North Dakota by establishing equal protection under the law for the unborn.” A letter urging delegates to reject it was signed by many of the major pro-life groups, including Ruba’s own organization (something he acknowledged willingly during the debate). The letter described the resolution as one that “supports charging women as ‘co-conspirators’ in their own abortions,” and it reaffirmed their 2022 pledge: “We state unequivocally that we do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women.” The resolution fell short of the 60 percent it needed, and the groups celebrated its defeat. Dannenfelser promised more: “Together, we will oppose any effort to criminalize women – even non-binding resolutions.”
Their concern is real. We know that a majority of the public is not on board currently with putting criminal penalties on women. But it’s also incredibly difficult for me to believe that Wilberforce would have petitioned publicly against a measure like this. His record supports an incremental strategy, but it gives no cover for working to defeat fuller measures.
That pledge, made in an attempt to earn the public trust, or to not appear too radical, actually contradicts the true intentions of the movement, as both sides stated them at the opening of that debate: equal protection for the preborn. It takes off the table, with no end date, any punishment even for those who knowingly, freely, and willingly end the life of their child.
To anyone paying close attention, it makes pro-lifers look hypocritical. Refusing to hold the mother accountable obscures the one thing we all know has to happen eventually: equal application of the law. Truly equal protection can’t exist unless the same laws that apply outside the womb apply inside it. If we are unwilling to hold accountable everyone who knowingly ends a child’s life, then, truthfully, we’re treating that life differently. And people outside the movement notice. It hands them an easy reply: “I know you think it’s valuable, but even you don’t think ending it deserves the full weight of the law.” Whether we’ll admit it or not, the child has been made lesser.
Pierce brought up the North Dakota letter, and Ruba’s answer shows how this very issue is dividing incrementalists today. In the debate, Ruba said the North Dakota letter “no longer represents our organization,” and reaffirmed that the group’s position today is to “pursue equal protection eventually.” He wasn’t working for them when it was signed, but when Pierce asked whether he was recanting it, he said, “I’m not recanting anything,” and did not dispute that the organization has issued no statement repealing it. Pierce then read from Students for Life Action’s candidate pledge, still live today, which asks candidates to “affirm that women who procure abortions are often victims of the predatory abortion industry and should not face criminal penalties.” The exchange that followed is worth seeing in full:
Pierce: “Did you know that was up there right now?”
Ruba: “I agree with the priorities that are listed there, but I don’t necessarily agree with the final way it’s worded.”
Pierce: “Do you think it would be a better way to pursue equal protection if pro-life groups like Students for Life Action stopped pushing candidates away from supporting equal protection?”
Ruba: “Again, we support equal protection 100%… What we don’t support are your bills that don’t provide equal protection because they’ll never be passed.”
Ruba didn’t defend the pledge, and he didn’t disown it. That is the tension running through the incrementalist movement: trying to stay sensitive to the culture and to public opinion, while finding that doing so requires keeping the end goal out of view. Ruba seemed to know both can’t hold forever.
Wilberforce was a gradualist too, and he said so on the record. He dismantled the trade, then worked on emancipation over time. But arguing that emancipation should come gradually is an argument about timing. Ruba’s “eventually” is the same kind of argument. The pledge’s “should not face criminal penalties” is not. I could find no record of Wilberforce advocating for the end of the trade while claiming emancipation should never come.
What abolitionists need to learn
Abolitionists claim that hypocrisy in a bill, like immunity for mothers, makes it unsupportable and even worth working against. In the debate, Pierce granted the principle of taking one evil at a time: “You can take one evil, abolish it, then take another evil, abolish that. Nothing wrong with that.” But Ruba charged that abolitionists oppose laws like the 15-week ban that saved Jacob, and he asked a question abolitionists need to answer: “How many abolitionist bills have saved babies’ lives? Absolutely none.”
While that is a bit of a gotcha question, the truth underneath it that abolitionists need to wrestle with is this: if there is an opportunity to protect some (even if it's contradictory to provide immunity), isn't some progress better than none at all, while pursuing, at the same time, everything you can get, even criminalization in places where it might be tolerated?
Wilberforce took what was winnable (banning the trade not the status), even though it left everyone enslaved, and his broader movement went so far as to compensate those in the wrong. Just as it is hard to imagine Wilberforce working to sink a bill that asked for too much, it is hard to imagine him helping sink one that made progress.
No one owns the blueprint
No one knows how we will eventually realize our shared goal of equal protection in this country. Britain ended the slave trade first and then paid to end slavery entirely. America fought a war, wrote equal protection into the Constitution, and then spent a century living up to it. Nobody should be claiming that this is simple, clear, or easy to understand.
So here is the caution for each side:
For incrementalists, pragmatism can become an idol, and shrewdness can descend into deception. The work so many in your movement did to overturn Roe deserves to be applauded, and it has saved children like Jacob. I’m all for progress, but call those wins out for the compromises they are, and be clear about the ways in which even they are not living up to the ideal.
For abolitionists, purity can become an idol too. Your clarion call to equal protection has injected the movement and many young people with a new boldness that has effectively pushed back on the narrative that tries to make all women co-equal victims of abortion. It has done much to put the child back at the center. But this evil will have to be disassembled in pieces if we are ever going to make progress; that is the state of a fallen society, and working against partial protections leaves real children unprotected now.
So who gets to claim Wilberforce? Neither side gets all of him. But his record asks four things of anyone who wants to try:
Take the wins that are winnable, the way he went after the trade before the status and slipped through the 1806 bill.
Keep pressing for more than you can get, even when it keeps losing, the way he did for 16 years.
Say plainly where you are going, even if you argue about how fast to get there.
Don’t work to sink the people fighting the same evil, whether they are asking for more or taking what they can get. You can decline to support a bill you think is wrong without working to defeat it.
This is the Wilberforce way, and it should apply to both camps.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
Thanks for this thoughtful analysis. The one thing I would add is that we must be honest about the numbers. I have thoroughly researched and followed the numbers in Florida. Yes, it is personal to me, as I have always been told that I should be okay with being thrown under the bus every time as a child conceived in rape, because we are just a small percent and I should be willing to sacrifice my life for the good of the 99 that are saved. The problem is, they never deliver. The compromise never means "most" are saved. In fact, and in practice, the compromise only resulted in women killing their children faster and with no chance to intervene. It is not a fair discussion when we refuse to acknowledge that lives saved are not at all what one side is claiming. Why should I continue to agree to be thrown under the bus, when the result is most, if not more, babies are dying in the process?