State of Abortion in North Carolina
There is a genocide taking place in North Carolina. Over 45,000 of our preborn neighbors are murdered every single year in North Carolina. Tragically, many North Carolinians, including many Christians, have become desensitized to the genocide taking place all around us. The killing does not take place in the open, but behind the walls of North Carolina’s 14 abortion clinics, where babies are sucked into vacuums and dismembered, or in the privacy of people’s homes, where mothers use abortion pills to poison their children to death before flushing their remains down a toilet.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the enactment of so-called 12-week “abortion ban,” the situation for preborn children in North Carolina has only worsened. All of North Carolina’s neighboring or nearby states (with the exception of Virginia), regulate abortion at a stage of gestation earlier than North Carolina, making North Carolina an “abortion destination” for mothers from across the South. The “Preferred Women's Health Center” in Charlotte murders 400 babies per week, making it the deadliest abortion facility in the entire southeastern United States.
Current North Carolina laws allow abortionists to kill children up to 12 weeks in the pregnancy, while mothers have the right to kill their own children with total legal immunity at any stage of gestation. Due to the widespread availability of the abortion pill and of in-clinic abortions, the Tar Heel State has become a bloodbath for preborn children.
Beyond the current 12-week regulation, North Carolina Republican leaders have, so far, taken no action to stop the bloodshed in our state. This failure represents an abdication of our legislators’ duty before God as civil magistrates to prevent the slaughter of innocent people (Genesis 9:6) and to bear the sword against evildoers (Romans 13:4).
Legalized child murder should not exist in our state. The “who,” “what,” “where” and “how” of abortion should not be regulated: abortion must be fully criminalized. Giving mothers total legal immunity to take the lives of their own preborn children diminishes the intrinsic value of preborn children, each and every one of whom are created in God’s holy image. Furthermore, maternal immunity discriminates against preborn children by creating a special class of killers with special murder rights, representing a sinful partiality that God calls an abomination (Proverbs 20:10). Lastly, maternal immunity erases any deterrent effect that an abortion ban may have on perpetrators, while allowing vulnerable women to be legally pressured into abortion by sex traffickers, pimps and other abusers.
Failing to end abortion in North Carolina will only invite God’s judgement upon our state. The Bible says that God hates the “hands that shed innocent blood” (Proverbs 6:17), and God promises to curse a people that practices child sacrifice (Leviticus 20:3). God demands that we must stop the shedding of innocent blood in our state, and as Christians we must obey this command by pursuing all legal and biblically sanctioned avenues to this end.
What is the Solution? About Equal Protection
The only way to end the abortion genocide in North Carolina is by providing equal protection to every preborn child, at the moment of fertilization. The same laws that protect the lives of born people should also protect the lives of those who are not yet born. Thus, the same legal protections with respect to the homicide and assault statutes that protect every North Carolinian outside of the womb should also protect every North Carolinian inside of the womb. By protecting preborn children with the same laws that protect our lives, we are simply loving our preborn neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:3). Equal protection satisfies God's requirement for biblical justice.
Additionally, equal protection is the only effective method of public policy to stop the killing of preborn children in North Carolina. Classifying the act of abortion as homicide will establish the same deterrent effect that exists for homicide against born people, deterring both in-clinic and self-induced abortion.
A bill of equal protection would protect mothers who are coerced into abortion under duress, and hold the individual responsible for the abortion legally accountable. Additionally, applying any form of pressure onto a mother to procure an abortion would be illegal. Penalties would be decided on a case by case basis by the justice system, just as they are in cases involving the homicide of a born person. Doctors would be permitted to intervene to save the life of the mother in life-threatening situations, while also taking reasonable steps to save the life of a preborn child.
Equal protection is the Christian answer to legalized abortion: it obeys God’s command to establish justice without partiality and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Our Mission
Our mission at Equal Protection North Carolina is ensure that every preborn child in North Carolina is protected by the same laws that protect everybody else. We will labor to ensure that a bill of equal protection becomes law in North Carolina as fast as possible. Accomplishing this objective requires being engaged politically and advocating for this legislation at the state house. Each legislative session after legislative session, we will labor to gain more legislative support for the bill at the statehouse in Raleigh, while advancing the conversation forward on equal protection in our state.
Passing a bill of this nature will require a groundswell of Christian conservatives across North Carolina engaging the legislative process by applying political pressure on Republican politicians to pass the bill. That is why, in addition to our work at the statehouse, we are working to equip the Church across this state with the tools and political insight necessary to be effective in the fight to end abortion in our state.
In pursuit of this mission, we frequently partner with organizations, such as the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, Operation Save America, Love Life and Personhood North Carolina.
On the Role of the Church
in Abolishing Abortion
The Christian Church is central to the fight to end abortion in North Carolina. The late R.C. Sproul once wrote:
“When the church protests abortion on demand, what the church is doing is not asking the state to do the church’s work for the church. No one’s saying to the state, “Look, state, you have to preach the gospel; look, state, you have to administer the sacraments,” or any of that business. The church is not calling the state to be the church. The church is calling the state to be the state. Because according to the Word of God, the principal justification for the existence of any state in this world, its primary vocation, its primary task, its justification for being under God, is to protect, to maintain, and to nurture human life. And when the state is derelict in that responsibility, not only may the church exercise prophetic criticism, beloved, but the church must exercise prophetic criticism and call the state to be the state.”
Sproul perfectly articulates the dominion that the Church must exercise in the political sphere. The Church must be a prophetic voice in calling on the state to obey God and establish justice. This involves pastors leveraging their pastoral authority to tell political leaders what the Bible says about their responsibility to establish justice and protect the innocent, while also spurring their flocks on to God-honoring involvement in the political process.
Core Principles
We believe that the Bible is the complete and infallible Word of God and that the commands God makes in the scriptures must be obeyed by Christians in all facets of life, including in politics and civil government
Salvation and forgiveness of sin, including for the sin of abortion, is found in Jesus Christ alone, through faith alone, and by the grace of God alone
Abortion is murder, and there are no exceptions to this reality. Our laws must therefore treat abortion as murder
Equal protection of the laws is the only morally acceptable and practically effective way to end abortion
Legislation that shows partiality by, for example, providing legal immunity to any class of persons for the murder preborn children or setting gestational limits on abortion, violates God’s law (Proverbs 20:10); therefore, Christians should reject such legislation