American Right to LifeOn the Abolition Wing of the Pro-Life Movement2020 Completed ARTL Candidate Survey
Real World Example
Candidate Name: Sylvester Williams
Campaign Website: Facebook
Political Party: Independent
Office Sought: Mayor
Jurisdiction: Durham, N.C.
Election Year: 2020
Dear Anti-Abortion Candidate, please send your answers to American RTL.
Dear Anti-Abortion Organization, you are invited to replace ARTL's name and websites with yours to make this survey your own in the jurisdiction where you fight. A goal of ARTL's Candidate Survey is to eliminate the "wiggle room" common in typical candidate surveys. Countless pro-abortion politicians have been "rated" as pro-life by the pro-life industry. The following questions are designed to bring an end to the time when pro-lifers are commonly deceived (see examples) by our own organizations into voting for "pro-choice" politicians.
American Right To Life Candidate Survey
Dear Candidate,
Please consider your responses to these seven questions and then send your answers to us at the contact information below. We hope you will agree and answer "Yes" to each of the following fundamental moral questions. Thanks!
Candidate Name: ____________________________
Campaign Website: __________________________
Political Party: ______________________________
Office Sought: ______________________________
Election Year: 2020
City/State/Etc: ____________________________.
1. Will you advocate that the government recognize and uphold the God-given, inalienable Right to Life for unborn children from the beginning of their biological development?
2. Do you agree that abortion is always wrong and should be prohibited, even when the baby's father is a criminal (that is, a rapist)? [If necessary, see online AmericanRTL.org/exceptions, and see the life-of-the mother note below.]
3. A 2009 news headline reported: 'Personhood' movement explodes in 32 states. This modern movement started with Colorado's 2008 Amendment 48 and continued with its 2010 Amendment 62 and Mississippi's 2011 Amendment 26 and now for 2020 there are many personhood initiatives underway in various states. Will you courageously help lead the continued legal and political efforts to acknowledge that the word "person" includes every human being from beginning of the biological development of that human being?
4. Will you oppose all abortion funding, including opposing funding for all chemical and surgical abortion regardless of the reproductive circumstances at the beginning of the child's life, and opposing funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest and richest organization in the abortion industry?
5. It is not immoral to let an irreversibly dying person die. But will you oppose euthanasia in its various forms, including doctor-assisted suicide, and will you oppose acceptance of starvation by denial of food and water?
6. While adult stem cell research is delivering real-world cures and boundless hope, it would be wrong to intentionally kill a single child even to save the whole world. Will you advocate for prohibition of, and oppose any funding or regulation or legislation for, practices that would intentionally destroy the tiniest living humans in embryonic stem cell research?
7. Legislation that says, "Abortion shall be prohibited except..." and which requires a woman to meet some condition like waiting 24 hours or giving her written consent before having her child killed, in effect re-affirms the approval of the State for such abortions. Will you refuse to support any legislation, even so-called "pro-life regulations" that, after certain conditions are met permit abortion? [If necessary, see online AmericanRTL.org/regulations.]
Thanks for taking our abolitionist survey designed to identify now the true leaders and heroes whom later history will recognize. See also this example of a completed survey. And candidates, please feel free to forward yours to us!
Leslie Hanks
President
American Right To Life
PO Box 1145
Wheat Ridge, CO 80034
office [at] AmericanRTL.org
1-888-888-ARTL
[For "pain capable", admitting privileges, waiting periods, heartbeat, informed consent, anesthesia, "protected class" bills, racially-motivated abortion bans, etc., see Compromised Incrementalism below.]
PRINCIPLED INCREMENTALISM
When personhood is finally enforced in law, of all the abortion laws then in effect, only the principled incrementalism bills will not be thereby abolished. All compromised incrementalism will be repealed when personhood is in effect. As American RTL wrote to Dr. James Dobson in our full-page open letter that appeared in newspapers around the country, "Incrementalism is fine; compromised incrementalism violates God's enduring command, Do not murder."
Examples of Principled Laws
American RTL's two must-read articles, Oppose Regulations Because... and Oppose Exceptions Because... explain the principles that must be adhered to in order to write principled incremental legislation. In summary, the God-given right to life must be advocated without exception. As an example of a horrendous violation of those principles, see ARTL's PBA Summary: Saved Not One, about the 15-year fundraiser that took in a quarter-of-a-billion dollars for the pro-life industry, yet as Dr. Dobson wrote, "Ending partial-birth abortion... does not save a single human life." Rather than being a victory, many pro-life leaders have since condemned the U.S. Supreme Court's Gonzales v. Carhart ruling upholding the PBA "Ban" for being a virtual late-term abortion manual.
On the other hand, morally compromised legislation can be recognized in that they are child-killing regulations, present child-killing exceptions, and in that they therefore:
- end with "and then you can kill the baby"
- would keep abortion legal if Roe were ever merely overturned.
"And then you can kill the baby" bills include:
Examples of Unprincipled Laws
Use the Personhood Test: One way to help people see whether or not an abortion law is principled or not is to apply the personhood test. When America finally recognizes the personhood and God-given right to life of every child, some pro-life laws will become redundant and unnecessary. However, other laws which include "pro-life" regulations and exceptions will be explicitly invalidated and annulled. The pro-life laws that will be merely rendered no longer necessary are the principled incrementalism. The abortion regulations that will be invalidated are the compromised laws. An example of this is found in Ohio's HB 125 "heartbeat bill" which bans the killing of an unborn child only after the detectability of a heartbeat). Morally compromised incremental efforts have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for their supporters but undermine the nation's recognition of the sanctity of human life. Principled pro-life laws build toward victory. So American Right To Life urges everyone to oppose compromised incrementalism and to support only principled laws, and especially personhood!
Compromised: Pain Capable, Heartbeat, Etc: Just like Roe v. Wade, pain capable bills, heartbeat bills, etc., regulate the age at which a child can be killed, showing them to be violations of God's command, Do not kill the innocent (and so also unconstitutional). Therefore, by the law of unintended consequences, though well-intentioned, passing a heartbeat bill can actually increase the number of unborn children killed. For if a "heartbeat bill" becomes law, there would be a predictable significant increase in the use of mechanical abortifacient IUDs and chemical abortifacients like RU-486 (mifepristone) including the routine use of the Morning After Pill.
A prestigious Harvard University publication, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, published an important paper by Josh Craddock, Protecting Prenatal Persons: Does the Fourteenth Amendment Prohibit Abortion?