Seth Gruber@sgruber91
When pro-lifers say they want to end abortion, what does that mean? Naturally, that has always meant we want to make abortion illegal. We want unborn baby humans to be given legal protection, for their right to life to be restored. Thus far, every anti-abortion advocate agrees with my 3 sentences. But what does it mean for someone to have a right to life? What does it mean to have legal protection against being murdered? I learned that answer as an elementary homeschooler.
Our government was instituted to recognize and protect the RIGHT to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So you don’t have a right to life in the legal sense, unless that government that was instituted to protect the right to life actually protects it. And how does our government protect our right to life? By prosecuting those who seek to abuse it or who actually destroy it. It’s no different than parenting really. We can declare what is right and wrong to our children. But if your 6-year old doesn’t experience consequences for punching his sister, he will learn that punching his sister is something he can continue doing and getting away with.
Today in 2026, over 60% of the murdered babies are killed almost exclusively by their mother through abortion pills delivered to her mailbox. And this number is rising quickly! She takes the poison to end the life of her baby, and she delivers the corpse on the toilet and flushes that small child down our sewage system. And this is happening in very large numbers in red states with Republican supermajorities because Rhinos often acting at the behest of pro-life organizations have insisted that murdering babies in “pro-life” states should be a crime for everyone except the aborting mother. And that idea has been codified in red states who celebrate their “pro-life” bonafides.
As long as we continue to pass laws in red states that declare it’s a crime to kill unborn babies but the aborting mother can kill her unborn baby by herself with legal immunity and impunity - we will never end abortion. You cannot dismantle a culture of death by legitimizing the very laws that created it.
And my position - that it should be illegal for everyone to murder anyone - is not new.
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 v. Wade 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.
This isn’t about “criminalizing women” or whatever other phrases are used to dishonestly describe my position. This is about restoring full legal protection to little babies, whose metaphysical right to life currently has no political application in any state in America.
The tragedy in all of this is that many pro-life organizations in various red states are actively working against people and organizations attempting to restore full legal protections to little unborn humans. These pro-life organizations fundraise on “ending abortion” and then join the ACLU and Planned Parenthood in fighting against those who are trying to codify the little baby’s right to life; by ensuring that our government that was instituted to protect the right to life will actually do so once again with the most vulnerable members of the human family!
To declare that precious unborn babies have a right to life but actively oppose and work against the political realization of that right to life is either deceptive, hypocritical, cowardly, or horrifically ignorant.
This is neither complicated nor controversial. It’s worth adding that my position is in line with roughly 1,900 years of Christendom going all the way back to the patristics. If their cultural milieu of child-abandonment and infanticide was not a good excuse to give parents wholesale legal immunity to kill their babies, then neither is our cultural milieu.
To quote Aristotle, “statecraft is soulcraft.”