At a time when women are encouraged to “shout your abortion,” it’s no surprise that even religious leaders of a certain stripe will try to work pro-abortion messages into the church calendar. A legal challenge to Texas’s new abortion restrictions made its way into the headlines recently, and drew the attention of Rev. Katheryn Barlow-Williams, who pastors Central Presbyterian Church of Austin, Texas. The challenge, and Barlow-Williams’s response, show how state legislative efforts permitted by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision revoking Roe v. Wade are affecting both medical practice surrounding pregnancy and childbirth and attitudes of liberal churches and pastors concerning the issue of abortion.

First, the challenge. Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two children, became pregnant and was looking forward to a third child. Ultrasound tests showed numerous anatomical defects in the fetus, however, and last November an amniocentesis revealed that the baby had Trisomy 18, a genetic disorder that leads to stillbirth in about 95 percent of cases.

Cox asked her doctor if she could abort the baby. She was told that because of the new Texas law prohibiting most types of abortions, it would be hard to find anyone in the state willing to do the procedure. “Texas laws,” reported the Texas Tribune, “ban all abortions unless ‘in the exercise of a reasonable medical judgment,’ a doctor determines that the patient is experiencing ‘a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.’”

Although Cox had suffered some cramping and unexplained fluid leakage, she was not at imminent risk of dying or losing a major bodily function. Once she found out what was going on with her baby, she clearly wanted to end the experience as soon as possible: “I do not want to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” she was quoted in the Tribune story. “I do not want to continue until my baby dies in my belly or I have to deliver a stillborn baby or one where life will be measured in hours or days.”

Told that she couldn’t get an abortion under the prevailing circumstances, Cox allowed the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion law organization, to file a lawsuit in Travis County District Court in Austin asking for a temporary restraining order that would allow her to have an abortion. The suit claimed, according to the Tribune, that “continuing the pregnancy threatened her health and future fertility,” because the necessary caesarean delivery would reduce her chances of becoming pregnant again.

District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble granted the motion, but then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to overturn her ruling. Before the court could act, Cox’s lawyers announced that her medical condition had deteriorated further, and on December 11 she left Texas to obtain an abortion in another state.

Only a few hours after Cox left the state, the Texas Supreme Court rejected the lower court’s temporary restraining order. While acknowledging the difficulties Cox experienced, the judges called on the Texas Medical Board to create guidelines for doctors to decide at what point a problem pregnancy constitutes valid reason for obtaining an abortion. But absent such advice, doctors remain uncertain regarding the exact conditions under which an abortion will be allowed by the new law.

The Roe v. Wade regime lasted nearly half a century; barely two years have elapsed since it was overthrown in June 2022 by the Dobbs decision. Since then, the State of Texas has passed one of the most ambitious abortion bans in the United States. Just as in the original Roe case, which involved a woman from Texas, the new abortion ban is being tested vigorously by opponents, who had grown accustomed to the virtually unrestricted abortion license provided by Roe. Jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is the most well-known source for the legal adage “Hard cases make bad law.” Kate Cox’s situation was admittedly a hard case. Her plight of carrying an almost certainly doomed baby was agonizing, and she viewed an abortion as the answer to her problems. Aborting a normal, healthy baby is one thing, but aborting a malformed child, most likely to die in utero or not live more than a few days after birth, seemed to her like taking a path of less pain. “I do not want to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” she said in a court filing. “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer a heart attack or suffocation. I need to end my pregnancy now so that I have the best chance for my health and a future pregnancy.”

The media, the doctors, and even Cox herself dehumanized the baby once she was discovered to have Trisomy-18. Although she is already a mother of other children and referred to her unborn daughter as a baby, her attitude seemed to parallel that of the owner of a beloved pet dog whose illness is beyond remedy, and for whom euthanasia is the best choice. Most media accounts didn’t mention the sex of the child, referring to the baby only as “it.” Those who oppose restrictions on abortion place their sympathies with the woman seeking an abortion over against any alleged rights of the fetus. Cox’s plight so appealed to Rev. Barlow-Williams that she decided to make the case into a modern-day retelling of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.

Ordinarily, an opinion piece penned by an obscure pastor and published in a regional newspaper would not merit much attention. But the way Rev. Barlow-Williams constructed her arguments says a great deal about the way pro-abortion religious leaders think.

The Christian feast of Epiphany is celebrated in the Western church on January 6. Rev. Barlow-Williams’s piece, titled “An Epiphany for Reproductive Freedom,” was carried in the Sunday January 7 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. She begins by pointing out that Herod doesn’t figure prominently in Christmas images of the Three Wise Men visiting Jesus. She reminds the reader that Herod, “threatened by rumors of a newborn king . . . ordered the murder of all baby boys in Bethlehem.” But we err, she says, in ignoring Herod’s malevolence, because, in her words, “Anytime love is born, fear threatens to kill it.”

In the next paragraph, she casts Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the role of a modern-day Herod: “One such Herod recently made national news. Attorney General Ken Paxton has declared all-out war against women who are already injured and battle-weary from grief.”

Like Donald Trump, to whom she indirectly likens Paxton, the current attorney general is an ambivalent figure. He is under a long-standing indictment for securities fraud, he recently survived an impeachment attempt, and some of his headline-grabbing lawsuits against the federal government are probably intended more as publicity stunts than as serious legal initiatives. Nevertheless, the attorney general is allowed broad discretion in enforcing laws passed by the Texas legislature, and in a statement issued after the district court’s restraining order, which would have permitted Cox to have the abortion, Paxton warned that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors or anyone else from civil and criminal liability.”

In the absence of any generally accepted moral basis for making decisions, organizations such as hospitals, obstetrical practices, and insurance companies still respect threats to their economic viability in the form of lawsuits and criminal charges. Paxton has mastered that language, which may be the only kind of threat that such institutions understand at this point.

But to Rev. Barlow-Williams, Paxton’s success in getting the Texas Supreme Court to overrule the lower court’s ruling to allow Cox’s abortion is on a par with Herod’s order to kill all male babies under two years old in Bethlehem.

The parallels she cites are superficial: Both Cox and the Virgin Mary were dealing with problem pregnancies. Both women ended up fleeing persecution by entrenched authorities. To Rev. Barlow-Williams, these parallels show that just as Herod tried to kill the love that was born when Jesus Christ came to earth in the form of an innocent baby, Paxton is trying to kill the “love” that would allow Kate Cox to abort her baby.

Toward the end of her piece, Rev. Barlow-Williams deplores Texas’s poor maternal health and infant mortality rates and asks why Paxton doesn’t concentrate on those problems instead of persecuting pregnant women who want abortions. She finishes with this peroration: “As Cox and all the women like her escape today’s Herods, they forge a path of healing and hope for others. They remind us that love doesn’t always come in the form of a baby in a manger or a uterus. Sometimes it comes through a wise soul who sees Herod for who he is and travels home by another way.”

While hard cases may make for bad law, they can also reveal previously hidden assumptions and worldviews that do not come to light in less extreme circumstances. In the original Epiphany story, the innocents were the Christ Child, then the Virgin Mary, and finally Joseph, who led the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The heavies were Herod and his troop of enforcers who carried out the holocaust of infant murders in Bethlehem.

In adapting the story to fit her modern sensibilities, Rev. Barlow-Williams casts Cox and the legal staff at the Center for Reproductive Freedom as the innocents, and Ken Paxton as the bad guy. In her retelling, she neglects the person most vitally concerned with the outcome: Cox’s baby. Rev. Barlow-Williams applauds what she regards as Cox’s wisdom, which led her to flee the domain of Paxton/Herod for an abortion elsewhere.

If, instead of a baby with Trisomy-18, Cox possessed a crippled pet dog, and the State of Texas were persecuting her for wanting to euthanize her pet, it might well have been the wisest and most loving choice to go to another state to find someone willing to put the dog out of its misery. What makes a woman treat her deformed fetus with no more consideration than she would grant to a pet dog? The best answer seems to be that Cox, Rev. Barlow-Williams, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and their sympathizers have lost any sense of the uniqueness of humanity. Whether or not they admit it, they are operating on a philosophical basis of materialism.

If the materialist worldview is correct, there is nothing distinctive or even particularly consequential about human life compared to other kinds of life, or even inanimate nature. This view completes the “abolition of man,” as C. S. Lewis described in his famous 1943 book of that name. If there is no God who impressed His image onto every member of the human race, then there is no ultimate basis for right and wrong or good and bad, despite Rev. Barlow-Williams’s efforts to liken Ken Paxton to Herod. But as Lewis says in Abolition, “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”

Once Cox discovered her baby’s condition, her desire was to be rid of it, and that meant having an abortion. If she and her baby are essentially no different from the other animals, what is good for a disabled dog is good for a disabled baby.

The Texas abortion law rests on a different foundation. It is consistent with the truth that man is made in the image of God, a truth that was well-nigh indisputable in the Western world until a few decades ago. Every person living today was once a baby, and before that a fetus, and before that an embryo. Modern knowledge of genetics, biochemistry, and embryology carries that truth home with a force that was unknown to the ancients, who were uncertain about the spiritual status of the unborn baby simply because they didn’t know the details of the gestation process. Now that we know about the unique DNA formed within each fertilized egg, the poetic words of David in Psalm 139—“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb”—have solid scientific backing. A unique human individual is formed every time a human egg is fertilized, and there is no time afterwards when one can contend that the image is not there.

Carl Trueman, a theologian at Grove City College, has written extensively on what he considers to be the most important cultural and spiritual crisis of our time: the absence of correct anthropology both inside the church and in the world at large. While in the early centuries of the Christian era the church struggled with questions surrounding who God is, today Western culture can no longer answer the question “Who is man?” with confidence or even clarity. When a U.S. Supreme Court candidate can, with a straight face, decline to define the word “woman,” matters have reached a point in which ignorance of common-sense things that everyone used to know about the nature of man is no longer something to be ashamed of, but something to be defended and even applauded.

In the absence of certainty that every human being from conception to natural death bears the image of God and thus is entitled to equal respect and protection from violence, other criteria will rush in to fill the void of knowledge. Among these criteria are perceived value to the mother and to society. Disabled persons—those with Down’s syndrome and others whose physical state in the womb is statistically associated with poor outcomes for maturing into a useful adult—are all now judged by these criteria alone, and often found wanting. Once they have been found wanting, disposal often appears to be the most sensible course, especially if the alternative of continuing the pregnancy is dangerous, uncomfortable, or threatening to the mother or other adults.

A society that reifies the avoidance of pain and discomfort and demonizes anyone who stands in the way of such avoidance is going to interpret “love” as acting to ease the immediate discomforts of life, almost regardless of the cost to others with lesser claims to humanity, based upon consequentialist and utilitarian calculations. Rev. Barlow-Williams’s dictum, “Whenever love is born, fear threatens to kill it,” applies with equal force if we change it to say, “Whenever love is conceived, fear threatens to abort it.” Most abortions, including many that are done for medical reasons, are committed because of fear: fear of continuing the pregnancy because of possible harm to the mother or defects in the baby, fear of raising an unwanted child, fear of career or relationship disruptions, and so on.

In prohibiting nearly all abortions, the new Texas law implicitly recognizes that even deformed fetuses are made in the image of God. To unbelievers, we can appeal to the fact that every human being was once a fetus and ask them to apply the Golden Rule: Would you want to have been aborted when you were that age? As the new Texas law takes a stand that American society has not encountered for nearly five decades, there will be further attacks on it and attempts to soften or negate its impact. Attorney General Ken Paxton is a flawed tool in the hands of God, and so are the rest of us. As more cases concerning the new law are tried, perhaps a workable medical consensus will emerge in which doctors do not neglect the claims of the fetus when considering whether an abortion is medically necessary. But such a consensus will never arise if the rights of the fetus are abandoned at the start. And whatever his flaws, Ken Paxton defended those rights. If this gains him the title of Herod in some circles, Paxton has been called a good many things worse than that.

At the first Epiphany, God supernaturally warned the Magi and Joseph to flee Herod in order to protect the Love that came down to save us all. That same Love would die on the cross as a man. God the Father did not protect Jesus from the inexpressible suffering that crucifixion involved. One suspects that the kind of love Rev. Barlow-Williams espouses avoids suffering at almost any cost, including the cost of a baby’s life. With such love, she will please many of her fans and members of her congregation. But that kind of love is not the love that led Jesus to the cross, nor is it the kind that will save the lives of infants in the womb.

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Original Bio:

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of engineering at Texas State University and has published articles on engineering ethics, the history of technology, and atmospheric physics.