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Signer’s Remorse

 

(Image credit: Birmingham Museums Trust)

 

So you’re minding your own business running an errand, when you are stopped by a friendly woman with a clipboard who asks you if you’d like to sign a petition to protect women and children. You appreciate traditional family values, and consider yourself to be pro-life. You ask a few questions, and the answers you receive seem satisfactory enough. You don’t want things to get worse. “This will help us hold the line,” she says. You sign your name.

 

Or perhaps it was that you heard on the radio that there was an initiative to make abortion a constitutional right. That’s terrible. We have to do something about this! you think. Then an alternative is offered. One that, they imply, instead of allowing more babies to be killed, will protect them. Great. Where can I sign? Happily, the following week your friend tells you he’s helping as a circulator for the very petition. You give it your signature.

 

Or, maybe you’ve wanted to become more active in the pro-life space this year. You care deeply for your preborn neighbors, and want to help them any way you can. You look up what the Nebraska pro-life organizations are doing, and read some blog articles and watch a few videos. One is a passionate message by Nate Grasz that you find compelling. And in short order, you’ve added your name to that of thousands of others supporting the “Protect Women and Children” ballot initiative, glad that you discovered a way that you’re confident will help innocent, needy people.

 

However it may have come about, the end result is that you signed your name to the “Protect Women and Children” petition for a constitutional amendment.

 

But then…

 

What happened next? Did you remain confident in your decision to sign? Did some uncertainty creep in? Did you later change your mind?

 

What if the following took place?

 

 

A startling discovery

 

One day you hear something that, quite frankly, you at first find hard to believe. It is referred to as the “dirty little secret of the pro-life industry,” and it is this: no pro-life organization supports criminal penalties for the act of abortion (for the mothers who choose to commit it). “But wait,” you say. “If abortion is the murder of an innocent human being, and mothers can choose to have abortions without facing any penalty, and pro-life organizations support this absence of penalty under the law, then are such organizations helping keep murder by abortion legal?” Surely this can’t be! (And doesn’t that sound pro-choice?)

 

You begin to investigate, and come across a May 2022 letter titled, “An Open Letter to State Lawmakers from America’s Leading Pro-Life Organizations,” bearing the names of 76 different pro-life groups. The letter says in no uncertain terms:

 

“As national and state pro-life organizations, representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women, and children across the country, let us be clear: We state unequivocally that we do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women and we stand firmly opposed to include such penalties in legislation.”¹

 

So, not so secret, then. And they don’t represent me! You notice the misleading language. What is left out? “[W]e do not support any measure seeking to … punish women” who murder their own preborn children. And why refer to “criminalizing women”? It makes it sound as if a law treating abortion as murder would criminalize a class of people on account of being women, and not rather be against the act of abortion itself, and any principal actors and co-conspirators involved. You also note that not only do they support the absence of penalties for mothers who commit murder by abortion, they “stand firmly opposed to include such penalties in legislation.”

 

Unsettled, you continue your research, and encounter an incredible example of such opposition. Louisiana House bill 813, which would enact “the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act of 2022,” had easily passed through the Louisiana House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice with a vote of 7-2 on May 4th, 2022. It was the first bill of its kind to make it out of committee, and was scheduled for a floor debate the next week.² This was a bill of equal protection that would have considered the act of abortion to be legally what it is in fact — murder, with any party involved being culpable. Isn’t that what we want?

 

But then pro-life organizations sprung into action. Within the space of only eight days, after significant pressure from pro-life leaders at the highest level, going all the way up to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, what had been broad support for a commonsense bill to legally protect preborn children turned into wholesale opposition, as state senators listened to “trusted” pro-life voices telling them what to do. For instance, Senator Alan Seabaugh, who had not just voted “yes” to pass the bill out of committee, but “Absolutely!” went on record later to say, “We don’t need this bill.”³ Over the next year, it’s been estimated that around 8,000 legal abortions occurred in Louisiana.⁴

 

It begins to sink in. Pro-life organizations do not want abortion, as an act, to be criminalized. Not only do they not want it to occur, but they exert heavy pressure on senators and legislators to oppose this taking place.

 

Uh-oh. You remember that petition you signed the other day, the one recommended by pro-life organizations in your own state. Hurriedly, you go back to the open letter to lawmakers signed by pro-life organizations and scan through the list of signatories. You note on page six the name of Sandy Danek, executive director for Nebraska Right to Life. You remember that Nebraska Right to Life is promoting the ballot initiative that you signed. Well then, that certainly needs another look.

 

Soon you are on Nebraska Family Alliance’s website, rereading the language of the amendment. On the one hand it sounds good, but on the other, something just seems … off. And you have recently become much less trusting of organizations which call themselves pro-life, so you are hesitant to simply accept what they say at face value.

 

As you read the amendment over again, you take in the first few words, “Except when a woman seeks an abortion…” Wait a minute. “Except”? Why are there exceptions?! When should murder ever be legally OK? Shouldn’t murdering anyone be illegal all the time? Next, the final phrase catches your eye: “in the second and third trimesters.” But what about the first one? Before long, after a quick web search, you’ve discovered that the vast majority of all abortions nationwide occur in the first trimester. But if our state’s Constitution says that all human beings have a right to life, yet this would exclude preborn human beings in the first trimester from any protection if they are murdered, doesn’t that take away their constitutional right, and treat one kind of human beings as unworthy of any protection?

 

It’s enough to make you sick. Realization dawns. What have I done? I signed my name to a petition that would constitutionally legalize almost all abortions in my state!

 

 

Humble regret

 

Grieved and disturbed, you turn to the Lord Jesus for help. You know his Word is good, and you trust what he says. Isaiah chapter 10 is next up in your daily Bible reading, and you find that it begins with these words:

 

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,

and the writers who keep writing oppression,

to turn aside the needy from justice

and to rob the poor of my people of their right,

that widows may be their spoil,

and that they may make the fatherless their prey!”⁵

 

You’re cut to the heart. I literally wrote my name down in support of an unrighteous and oppressive law that would constitutionally deprive my needy preborn neighbors from justice, and condemn fatherless, rape-conceived children to death.

 

What do I do? As soon as your heart asks the question, you know the answer. You know that sin can be committed unintentionally.⁶ And as with any sin, you recognize that, first and foremost, you are accountable to God. Broken, you seek the Lord in prayer and ask him for forgiveness. As you have many times before (the Christian life being one of continual sanctification), you find him to be a gracious God, giving you this assurance of pardon, through the merit of the person and work of Christ:

 

“Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,

Whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity” (Psalm 32:1–2, NKJV).

 

Is the Lord not good? Your heart is full of his kindness.

 

After thanking God from your soul for his mercies that are new every morning, you recall to mind these words from John the Baptist: “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:8, ESV).

 

What do I do now? How can I make right what I’ve done wrong? If there were any penalty under the law for my misdeed, I would gladly bear it. I wish the petition I signed were still in my hand, that I might throw it away. But can I take my signature back? Can I remove it from that foul document?

 

 

Where are you at?

 

What do you think? Do any of the details of your own story intersect at all with what you just read? Have you signed the “Protect Women and Children” initiative but later regretted doing so? Did what you read just now give rise to any questions? Are you firmly committed to having signed the petition?

 

Reader, if you signed the “Protect Women and Children” petition, and now wish you hadn’t, please know that there is something that you can do! See the next section below.

 

But perhaps instead, you’ve reached this page and you’re still not sure. Or maybe you balk at even the suggestion that signing the “Protect Women and Children” is anything other than a good and important measure. Friend, if either of those things describes you, we ask: Are you aware of just how similar the “Protect Women and Children” and “Protect the Right to Abortion” initiatives are? If you are against the one, why would you sign your name in support of the other? If the fact that both proposed amendments are very much alike is news to you, could you please take some time to read “Questions for Nate Grasz and Nebraska Family Alliance”? In it we identify 15 ways the two amendments are similar. Would you be willing to give them some thought and ponder what is said?

 

 

How to revoke your signature

 

To remove your name from the “Protect Women and Children” petition:

 

1. Print the Affidavit for Removal of Name on Petition. (The title of the initiative is already put in for you.)
    

2. Write in your legal name, home address, and the date that you will be finishing the form in front of an appropriate public officer (see next point).
    
3. Sign and date the form in the presence of either an election official or a notary public.
    
4. The completed and signed form must be delivered to the Nebraska Secretary of State by July 3:
   
   Nebraska Secretary of State
   P.O. Box 94608
   Lincoln, NE 68509-4608

 

If instead you reached this page and have signed your name to the “Protect the Right to Abortion” initiative, but now regret it, follow the same instructions as above, but with this form instead.

 

 

Footnotes

 

[1] “An Open Letter to State Lawmakers from America’s Leading Pro-Life Organizations,” National Right to Life, May 12, 2022, https://www.nrlc.org/uploads/communications/051222coalitionlettertostates.pdf.

[2] “HB813,” Louisiana State Legislature, https://legis.la.gov/legis/BillInfo.aspx?i=242732.

[3] “Exposé: Mike Johnson & Pro-Life Hypocrisy,” Apologia Studios, November 17, 2023,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl-3tTfeZ-8.

[4] “Babies Unprotected: An Analysis of Self-Managed Abortion Numbers in States with ‘Bans’,” Foundation to Abolish Abortion, January 2024, https://faa.life/sma.

[5] Isaiah 10:1–2 (ESV).

[6] Hebrews 9:7.