The Equal Protection Debate: John Mishener and Lynda Bell on Criminalizing Abortion
Key Topics
The debate on whether abortion should be illegal and criminalized, with differing perspectives from the guests.
The role of the law in addressing abortion, and the potential consequences of criminalizing women who have abortions.
The importance of changing hearts and minds through education, compassion, and support for women, rather than solely relying on legal measures.
The nuances in the pro-life movement, with some advocating for absolute abolition of abortion and others favoring incremental progress through legislation.
Insights and Takeaways
Linda Bell, the president of Florida Right to Life and the chairman of the National Right to Life, believes that criminalizing women who have abortions would be counterproductive and harm the pro-life movement. She advocates for a more compassionate approach that focuses on supporting women and changing hearts and minds.
John Mishner, the pro-life abolitionist author, argues that for abortion to be truly illegal, there must be criminal penalties for those involved, including the women who have abortions. He believes that without consequences, the law will not be effective in stopping abortions.
Both guests agree on the ultimate goal of ending abortion, but they differ on the best strategies to achieve this. Linda emphasizes the importance of incremental progress through legislation, while John advocates for a more principled, absolute approach.
The debate highlights the complexities within the pro-life movement and the need for open and respectful dialogue to find common ground and effective ways to address the issue of abortion.
Conclusions and Decisions
The debate did not reach a clear consensus on the issue of criminalizing abortion, with the guests maintaining their respective positions.
The discussion underscored the need for the pro-life movement to carefully consider the practical and strategic implications of different approaches, balancing principles with the realities of public opinion and political dynamics.
Both guests acknowledged the importance of continuing the dialogue and finding ways to work together towards the shared goal of ending abortion, while respecting each other’s perspectives and approaches.
The show highlighted the complexity of the abortion issue and the need for a multifaceted approach that combines legal, educational, and compassionate efforts to address the problem effectively.
Pro-Life Radio is a pre-recorded program paid for by Pro-Life Radio. Preserving the sanctity of life in Florida. A loud voice for the unborn. This is Pro-Life Radio with your hosts, Vicki and Bruce Cherry. And welcome to another episode of Pro-Life Radio on a Valentine’s weekend. Amen. You know, I think it was, wasn’t it a year ago this weekend that we had one of our guests in for our love life lunch and no, it was, it was. Oh my goodness. No, I think it was a year. Wasn’t it a year ago? John? You know, I can’t remember. These pink and red hearts come flying so fast on the calendar now. It’s either been 12 months or 24. It’s got to be one or the other. One or the other. One or the other.
I’m pretty sure it was 12. It could have been, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it could have been. So we have a very interesting show for you today. John Mishner, who is a pro-life author, a speaker, and an abolitionist, who’s joining us today. But we also have with us John, a great friend, but Linda, a great friend as well. We’ve got Linda Bell, who is the president for Florida Right to Life and chairman of the board for National Right to Life. She’s a pro-life advocate and lobbyist, and we’ve got them both here. We’ve got what I believe is going to be a very interesting show for everyone as we listen in on the debate. But before we get started, we always start off with Jeremiah 1-5 and prayer.
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I ordained you a prophet to the nations. Heavenly Father, we come to you once again, and we thank you for this weekend, and we thank you for this time, we thank you for this show, and we thank you for these two strong individuals. individuals who are working to save babies. And we all are. And God, we thank you for that. We ask you that we be blessed to change hearts and change minds and to share truth and to educate someone, anyone out there within the sound of our voice tonight. That hears this show that may be thinking about having an abortion. We pray that we can change that and save that child and to bring healing as well.
God, we ask for your blessing upon our guests and upon all who hear this show. And we thank you for this opportunity. In the name of your precious son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. All right. So, Linda, welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you. I did also, I would be remiss to say that I’m also a speaker. It just comes with the territory, so I just guess that’s part of it. And you are quite the speaker. We had the pleasure. Of hearing Linda speak at the Florida Right to Life Gala a few weeks ago in Jacksonville, and it was just an incredible night. Incredible night. And Tim Tebow, he was just, wow. And Linda brought along her arm candy too. Yeah. Okay. Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
My pastor did the opening prayer. And when I called, when I called my husband, my hunk, a hunk of burning love, he started texting Elvis, Elvis. All right. Okay, so. And by the way, this is our anniversary weekend also. It is. It is our anniversary weekend. Bruce, you are my hunk of hunk of burning love. Oh, snap. Yes. Anniversary. How many years? It’s only been three. Yes. It has only been three years. We’ve known each other for about five years, but it’s only been three years that we’ve been married, and we got married on the beach in New Smyrna, Florida, three years ago this weekend. On Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day, yeah. So Bruce wouldn’t forget Linda, you know. Yes. Well, my husband, sometimes he has a better memory on this than I do, but we’ve been married for 41 years.
Wow. Wow. Now, John, you’ve got a wife and a family at home. How long is it for you guys? It’s 30 years this year. Wow, very nice. John, it agrees with you because I would not have guessed that you had been married 30 years, because you don’t look old enough to have been married 30 years. And your beautiful wife was with us for our love life lunch and learn. It was very great. You’re too kind. So let’s get right down to it. This is a topic that is kind of dividing the pro-life movement a little bit. Let’s just jump into it. Should abortion be illegal? We definitely, everybody wants illegal. We want to stop abortion. And so that’s the very definition of it: should be illegal. Should it be criminal?
Should criminal penalties be handed down to the doctors and nurses? And… women and men who are seeking abortion and having one performed. John, I know you stand on the side of… It should be criminal. Linda, I know you stand on the side of no. So we’re all friends here. We all love each other, and we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing. I say that to set the ground rules. I don’t think anybody’s going to be calling names or anything, but let’s hear your thoughts on this. Ladies first. Linda, would you mind sharing your side of it, please? Of course. Let me say right on the onset that… I don’t think the… I don’t necessarily say the movement is divided.
And yeah, I know there are divisions, but the movement isn’t divided on life. I mean, this. This fighting goes back, and I’ll use it, fighting in the lightest terms. goes back to the Hatch versus the Helms Amendment. We’ve had disagreements with other areas in the pro-life arena for decades. So I want to say that we’re all equally committed to ending abortion. It’s how we get there that’s different. So I want to start out on a footing of ‘I don’t consider’ someone who’s an abolitionist to be my enemy. I don’t consider anybody to be my opposition because we’re all trying to get there. I just differ with the tactics. And I differ with how we get there. I think that the minute you start criminalizing women.
The minute you start making them, you will make them the victim. They will become the victim. And then you’re creating a whole level of animosity within, I mean, trying to think of, let’s just realize, with the state of Florida. If we would have a bill that would criminalize women and say women who have abortions should be charged with a crime and we should put them in prison, put them on trial. The minute you do that, Another Amendment 4 type comes back. And it comes back with a vengeance. And they got 57% last time. Thanks to good Lord, Florida has a 60% threshold because we’re smart like that. So if we would have been a 50% plus one. We would have already had legalized abortion through birth in Florida, but we were able to fend that off.
Part of how we fended that off was by saying, ‘Look.’ We’re not anti-woman. We’re not trying to get out there and criminalize women. We want to end abortion, but we don’t want to put women behind bars. Because you know, within the right to life movement, we’ve been saying for decades: ‘Love them both. Love them both.’ And so I think that this tactic or that end game actually harms the movement and harms the babies and harms us. Try it, harms the effort. And let me give you an example. So I’ve been lobbying in Tallahassee for quite a while now. And we’ll get up there and when we were lobbying for way back— the parental consent bill or ultrasound bill or whatever— you’d have somebody in the abolitionist side that would oppose the bill, oppose parents knowing what happens with their little girls.
Because it’s still a lot of abortion. Oppose good pro-life legislation. Because it’s still allowed for abortion. I think those tactics are probably a little misguided, and I think that they do more harm than they do good. And so I’ll just leave it there, and so I can hear from Mr. Mishner. John. Yeah, thank you for that. I don’t want to get too in the weeds of what different abolitionists or pro-life lobbyists may have done. Across the country, with different bills, because personally, I don’t like to paint with a broad brush. I very much want to look at each particular bill. And say, is that a good bill? Why or why not? Is it constitutional? Is it right? Is it moral? And things like that.
So I can’t speak to something that someone that I don’t know might have barked against at the Florida legislature. But what I do know is that the state of Florida and the state of Oklahoma, where I’m currently, are almost identical as far as their political makeup. Florida has supermajorities of pro-life Republicans in the House and Senate, and also in the executive branch, and so do we out here in Oklahoma. The only difference is that right now you have dozens of freestanding abortion death camps still open in Florida. Whereas we have shut ours down. Now, abortion is still allowed in both states. The difference between Oklahoma and Texas is here. We have protected all women in the state who want to kill their own children in the womb.
They actually have a pro-life license to kill that was sponsored by the National Right to Life and passed in our trigger bill here when we overturned Roe nationally. So, um, Linda says that the movement is not divided. And of course, it depends on what you mean by that. And I will just explain what we’re facing in the various red conservative states. And I’ll give as an example my own state. Here, for the last eight to ten years, every single year in our legislature, we have run a bill that would provide constitutional, moral, godly, just, equal protection for pre-born humans. So right now, we do not have equal protection for the preborn in the womb because we have made it criminal only for a few doctors.
Uh To kill them, but their mothers can kill them indiscriminately with zero penalty, absolutely no threat of the law whatsoever to guide them, to direct them, to stop them from killing their own children. It’s protected under our law. So we have run a bill every year that would close that loophole and make it a criminal offense for anyone who kills the child in the womb, including that child’s own mother, father, sperm donor, boyfriend, influencer, whatever. There’s a lot of people involved in abortion, right? It’s not just women. Everyone should be held accountable. If they are a guilty party in that act. So what I face is I go to the Capitol and we have all these state representatives and these senators who are on board. with providing equal protection of the law to the pre-born.
and generally it doesn’t pass. And the reason it doesn’t pass is because our friend Tony Launger from the National Right to Life, who lives here in Oklahoma, is there lobbying every day. And he’s telling these legislators that, no, you can’t pass this bill. because it’s wrong to criminalize women. And so this is the debate that we need to have. If you kill an innocent human being, by definition, you’ve done something wrong. I think we agree and we’re on the same page here that in the eyes of God, that is an immoral act. And where we differ is on whether or not we should make that a criminal act under the law. And since our law is based on the natural law of God in this country, we actually ought to be criminalizing anyone who does that.
And I think that’s where we need to have that. John, let me jump in here real quick. We’re up against a break. We’ll be right back. The debate is rolling. It is Pro-Life Radio, and we’ll be right back on a Valentine’s weekend Sunday night on AM 950, FM 94. 9, The Answer. And welcome back to Pro-Life Radio. On a Sunday evening, I’m Vicki Cherry. Across from me is my very handsome husband, Bruce. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Happy Valentine’s weekend to everyone out there. And may you be as fortunate enough to be as loved as I am. Just so sweet. Well, right now we are having a very strong conversation about a lot of different things, but we have two great guests on. I mean, we love them both and we’ve had them at several things.
We’ve been to several things with them. So we’ve got Linda Bell. She is the Florida Right to Life president. Mm-hmm. And then also the chair for the National Right to Life. Lobbyist, speaker, all kinds of wonderful things. Pro-life advocate. And then we’ve got John Mishner. He has written a book. Um, it is. The dark side of the pro-life movement, right? Avoiding the dark side. Okay. We’ll let John talk more about that. But we were right in the middle of a strong discussion. And we’re going to start back with John. And go ahead. Well, I think I had made a good case before the break. That, um… We want to make abortion against the law. But if there is no penalty for those involved, then it’s not really against the law.
You know, without enforcement, without some fear of the law, it doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. And I kind of wanted to. Dive a little deeper into exactly where we have common ground and where the difference lies to see if it’s even reconcilable or not, because I don’t know. And that might require me to ask some questions to Belinda. Because if I had an easy button. No, I’m not going to answer your questions. I’m just going to listen to you and then I’ll respond. Yeah, yeah. So if I had an easy button, a magic button, and I could push it, and tomorrow in my jurisdiction, all abortions would be against the law in anyone who performed one, whether that was mother, doctor, anybody. Would risk being prosecuted, then I would definitely push that button.
So that would protect everyone equally under the law. And if a prosecutor and a district attorney could prove that someone willingly broke the law, knew what they were doing, knew that they were killing an innocent human being, and broke that law anyway. Then a case could be built against that person and persons involved. And they might risk some sort of penalty. Now, that could be some sort of negligent homicide. They might go to jail for a year or two. It could even get worse, depending on the situation. But that’s why we have a legal system, and that’s why we have a court system. So I would definitely be in favor of that. And my understanding, I think, is that Linda Bell would not push that button. and doesn’t want to ever criminalize women.
One of the areas where I’m unclear, and so I don’t know how to proceed, and we need to have a conversation here, I guess, is… Would you ever push that button, Linda? Is there a time in the future when you think it would be right for it to be a criminal act for anyone? to perform an abortion. I’m trying to understand sort of where you draw the line. Okay, let’s go back to the beginning. So. You are. speaking as if we are dealing with a moral and a Christian nation. I hate abortion. I’ve been with Border Rights Alive since 1989. I’ve seen. Thank you. Huge. incremental progress in the state of Florida. We’ve gone from 24 weeks to 15 weeks to heartbeat, which is actually six weeks.
So we have passed laws that… put parents back in basically in the home dealing with children. Women’s right to know what happens during an abortion. Ultrasound where they have to see the ultrasound of their unborn baby. We’ve passed a 24-hour waiting period. We have an in-person requirement even for the pill— you have to see. Unfortunately, you have to see the abortionist. But we have made such incremental progress and steps in the fight for abortion, fight against abortion. As a matter of fact, Florida’s… Abortion rate just dropped 46 percent. And I wrote an article in a press release about that very thing. So what you have is the debate of pro-life incrementalism versus absolutism. And so. We have to create a society. We have to create— of Florida.
By the way, Tony Lauinger is a good friend of mine. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man. So we have to create a state. a nation where we can help make abortion unthinkable. We have to love the women. We have to love them and our babies. the unborn baby. You’re never going to get there by saying, by the way, we want women charged with a felony crime. They want to give him a $10,000 fine. And then I was listening to one of your podcasts or radio shows. I’m not sure which one. And you were saying that. Well, who’s going to convict? A person who possibly was under duress. Or was assaulted. Or was trafficked. The point is the conviction. The process is the problem. The process.
You know, you always say, ‘show me the person’ or ‘show you the crime.’ The process is the punishment. So the minute you start putting women and girls on trial. The minute you start seeing that, because we do not have the media. You can tell by 57% of the vote in Florida, we certainly don’t have the public. You start putting girls… and women on trial. We will have an Amendment 4, which would be Amendment whatever. Like we have never seen. Because they were trying to tell the public that we wanted to criminalize women. They were trying to tell the public. Tremendous lies. We were able to go out there and say no. We don’t support criminalizing women. We don’t support… putting women who have been persecuted, possibly trafficked, possibly abused.
Very often coerced or in a desperate situation that they feel like abortion isn’t their choice. Really, it’s their only choice or their last choice. These are not the people you want to criminalize. We want to go to them with. We have our wonderful sidewalk counselors. We have pregnancy centers who do just an amazing job. And we have a 501(c) that tries our hardest to do the best we can to educate. We all have the same goal. Kind of like the slavery debate when you go back all the way back to Wilberforce. He wanted me up. abolition of slavery. But what did he do? He got a law first. That said we have to reduce the amount of slaves. That we’re carrying overseas on the ship. We have to reduce that.
Well, then the abolitionists were like, absolutely not. We shouldn’t do that because that’s still tolerating slavery. What he did is: he improved the conditions at that moment, at that time, and that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. I want to leave. To the absolute ending of abortion in Florida. That is the absolute goal. How we get there, I don’t think, is criminalizing girls and criminalizing women. I think that’s the death. That’s the death of the pro-life movement. That is the absolute welcoming of legislation because everything that you’re saying about criminalizing women is what the left has been saying we want to do. So we’ve been able to refuse that. I promise you, if we were to pass some kind of criminalization… of women, we would be doomed.
I mean, the Oklahoma population, what do you got? 4 million? 4 million, I think, and Florida’s population is over 23 million. In Miami-Dade County, you have 3 million people alone. We got 57, they got 57% to pass Amendment 4. plus, we’ll lose elections. Every time you see politicians… Two. who basically accept or adopt. The pure abolitionists. a lot of times they lose. So I think that you’re going to doom. Babies. You’re going to doom women in the long run, and you’re not going to be helpful in the fight against abortion. Not at all. Okay, John? What do you have to say to that? We have about three and a half minutes left of this segment. Well, you said a lot, a lot of stuff there, and a good portion of it I agree with.
I wish we could have stopped along the way and just talked about one thing at a time. You know, I agree with you that it’s bad. Press to put innocent, naive, victim type girls on trial. And I have always made the point in interviews on this show and in other articles and things that I’ve written that. That’s not something we want to do, and it’s not something we believe would happen. We do have a system that actually assumes that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. So even in a world where you truly provide equal protection and everyone is criminalized who performs an abortion. You’re only going to put on trial those people who can be proven to have known exactly what they were doing.
Um, Linda, I know you said over and over again that women are victims of abortion. They require our compassion and our support and that we should love them both. And I completely agree with you where that is applicable. But I’m wondering if you believe that 100% of women who get abortions are victims of abortion. Are there not those women that know exactly what they are doing and callously kill an innocent human being? It would basically be like committing murder. It’s just that they’re not criminals for doing it currently. So even if I granted that, you know, 97 or 98% of women who seek abortions are victims at some level and do not deserve prosecution. Would it not still be just, though, to have a law that would be able to prosecute?
Certain women who know exactly what they’re doing. I’m trying to get to the principle. I mean, I know we can debate all day long on the practical or strategic implementation of it, but I don’t even know if we have agreement in principle that we should definitely criminalize those women who know exactly what they’re doing. Thank you. So who decides? Who decides which women? Who decides? prosecutor that’s what the legal process is about. There’s a process of discovery. You know, you look at all the social media posts and you interview the boyfriends and parents and there will be a plethora of evidence. And then it will be determined whether or not to have a trial. And ultimately, there will be 12 jurists, a jury of peers, who will decide if that person actually committed some sort of premeditated criminal act or not.
But right now, we can’t even do that at all. And no one on the pro-life side is really even willing to pursue it. So how are you going to get there? Right now, we have… um, the heartbeat bill or the six-week abortion ban. We have that. So we almost lost a battle of our lives that we all literally I think I lived in my car for nine months and lived in and out of my car for nine months while I traveled the state, speaking and educating people against Amendment 4. And even when I was like, I just did a debate at the University of North Florida. And. Let me tell you, just the heartbeat bill alone, just this last two years, has saved 44,000 babies.
And so to say that incrementalism doesn’t work is false. Well, I’m not saying that. I haven’t said that at all. No, you’re correct. I don’t think you’re saying that. Guys, let me jump in here for just a second. We’re up against another hard break. Wow, this is rolling really fast. This is quite the debate. We’ll be right back with more Pro-Life Radio on a Sunday night, streaming on TheAnswerOrlando. com and on AM 950, FM 94. 9, The Answer. And we’re back on a Sunday night, Valentine’s weekend, and I’m not going to say anything other than we’ve got Linda Bell, who is the chairman for National Board of Right to Life and president for Florida Right to Life. And we have author, pro-life abolitionist John Mishner. And the debate is if we criminalize abortion.
Who gets prosecuted and how do we determine that? So I’m going to let you guys go right back to it where we left off. Well, I was still trying to get some clarity from Mrs. Bell. I still want her to respond to it. I don’t understand whether or not she agrees with the principle that someone who kills an innocent human being ought to be guilty of a crime under the law. That hasn’t been made clear to me yet because I know it’s not a Christian nation. But our laws are based on the natural and revealed law of God, that it’s wrong to kill innocent people, to steal their stuff, to abuse others. You know, it doesn’t make sense that, oh, well, I don’t want to put rapists in jail because they didn’t know any better.
We still have a law against rape. And if someone didn’t know any better, there is a level of mens rea where they don’t receive as much of a penalty or perhaps no penalty at all. But that is a part of our legal system, which is great, that makes things easier. fair. We do try to protect innocent victims. But we can’t even prosecute people who are not victims right now. And I’d like to know if you would ever be in favor, when would you be in favor? Of passing a law that would allow us to prosecute those who know they’re killing innocent human beings. Okay, here’s three. The problem. Like I just stated earlier. I hate abortion. If I had a magic wand that I could end abortion tomorrow, I’d be waving it all day long.
The pro-life population and the Christian population of Florida is about 36%. So I’m just going to stick with Florida because that’s my stomping ground. Is 36 percent. What you’re proposing. Is a law that presumes that everybody is a Christian. Or everybody has biblical, godly, and moral values, and they do not. But that’s not true. Can I finish? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Okay. What you’re stating is that… We have to have a law, and I agree, our laws currently are based on biblical moral grounds, absolutely. But do people recognize that? We have got work to do. in the pro-life movement of changing the hearts and minds. That’s why when we passed Heartbeat, we attached $25 million a year to help women in crisis, to help women in need.
And I’m telling you, the tactics of criminalizing women, I do not support. I will not support, I will support criminalizing abortion. If we could ever get to the point where abortions are 100% outlawed or illegal. I would support criminalizing the abortionist. Those who profit from it, those who sell the abortion pills, those who traffic on these women, those who profit from these women. And I would support all of that, but I will not support the criminalization of women who often are the victims. How do I know that? Because they talk to me. I know them. I know some of them in my own family. I know some of them who are girlfriends who’ve gone through the abortion restoration healing. The after-abortion healing. So I know these cases. What you’re saying is that.
Did they think they knew what they were doing at the time? They did. But they didn’t realize how they were being pushed because of a college or pushed from a father or pushed from a mother or pushed from a A very angry boyfriend. They thought it was their decision when it was not. So what you’re doing is you’re putting these girls and women in very vulnerable situations, and I don’t even think that is Christ-like. We are supposed to rescue those. We are supposed to be a part of them. We’re supposed to be helping out women. I mean, I think back with them. Jesus confronting sin, the woman who was caught in the act of adultery. And there was a mob of men wanting to stone her to death.
And Jesus looks up and he says, ‘Women, women, where are your accusers? Go and sin no more.’ He was just. to have her stoned. The law, she broke the law. They could have stoned her to death, but he chose mercy over what would have been considered judgment and justice at that time. I choose mercy for these women. I choose mercy for these girls. I do not choose condemnation. Many of them that I’ve spoken with have come out now. They’re pro-life activists when before they weren’t because they grieved and they hurt from their abortion decision. What you’re talking about is victimizing them twice. Can we jump in for just a quick second here? Well, and I think… What John was saying is, what about the ones that know, that totally know what they’re doing?
I mean, I’ve seen sites. I’ve seen sites like ‘Not a Victim of Women,’ and I’ve seen them saying, ‘I know it’s a baby.’ I don’t care. I’m going to kill it. And there’s a movement right now. There’s a movement going on right now. It’s more of an influencer movement where they’re bragging about how many abortions they’ve had because there are women out there using abortion like birth control. And they literally are online bragging about, ‘Oh, I’m up to my fifth abortion.’ And there are, on the other side of that, there are so many victims of it. Their boyfriends made them. The trafficker made them. But I think what John… And this is just, you know, and John, I think when we come back, you should go ahead and.
I don’t think John needs help. I don’t think John needs help. I think he’s doing a really good job by himself. I’m clarifying, but thank you. My point has been that you can’t treat them all the same. And Linda’s point is that we should treat them all the same. You treat them all like victims, regardless of what the real scenario is. And God requires justice and mercy of us. And I think the issue that I see with the standard pro-life approach right now is that they want to offer only mercy indiscriminately, even if it’s undeserved to every single. Person involved in abortion. You know, you say you want it to be criminal, you say you want it to be against the law, but that can’t happen without penalties.
You can wish all day for it to be against the law, but without criminal penalties, you can’t stop people from doing something that’s legal and available and protected by law. The law does not presuppose in itself. That everyone is guilty. The law does not presuppose that women are victims. That they’re not victims. The only thing that the law says is: don’t kill an innocent human being. And if you do, then we’re going to look into that and find out. What the level of guilt is. Is it negligent homicide? Is it manslaughter? Was it self-defense? Were you manipulated? There’s no penalty. There’s no harm, no foul. Or was it premeditated murder? That’s the way our system works. Right now, it’s not allowed to work in the case of abortion because we’re offering indiscriminate mercy.
But God requires justice and mercy, and mercy follows justice. Before you can tell someone, that’s okay, we’re not going to punish you, you have to first be found guilty. You have to know that you broke the law and that you did something wrong. And then we can extend mercy if it’s appropriate. But the law is not a minister. The law is not the son of God. The law is there just to provide these social boundaries of ‘do’ and ‘do not’. Here’s how you behave yourself in civil society. And right now, you can indiscriminately kill innocent human beings in the womb because we’re too scared to punish it at all for anybody. And that’s… can’t continue if we ever want to make it against the law. Hang on, John.
Go ahead, Linda. think the word ‘too scared’, ‘too scared to punish’, or ‘indiscriminately’, or ‘not that that’s okay’, because I was going to do something you should say. Nobody’s saying that’s okay. Nobody is saying that. I’ve seen those women, too. That’s the effect of no penalty. All right. I understand what you’re saying. I get it. Thank you so much. But what I’m telling you is, now, let me ask you this. Is there a law in Oklahoma that abortion is a felony with a $10,000 fine? It is something very much like that. Interestingly enough, in Oklahoma, in 1907, we had a statute against soliciting an abortion, and that would have been a misdemeanor, actually. But Tony Lallinger had that law stricken.
In 2022, 2023, with the trigger law, and that was part of, and so the argument has always been, well, these women don’t know what they’re doing. They’re deceived. They’re victims. And so it’s almost as if we’re claiming that women knew more and were more culpable in 1907 than they are today. I just find that hard to believe. Well, I’m going to just… Talk to Tony on my own, in my own little window. I’m not going to just take your word for anything you’re saying here this morning. I’ll verify it. because I have a feeling there’s probably a much different perspective than what I’m hearing here. But I just wanted to say this. Bye. I understand what you’re saying. I really do. I get it that there are women who say, shout your abortion, who say.
proud of my abortion. And I want you to know something as a woman. Many of those women are hurting. And they’re angry. And psychologically, I’ve talked to a wonderful psychologist, and actually she was on the Board of Nations for many years. And she said that this is just a way of shielding your psyche or shielding you from the pain of what you’re suffering. So you say, ‘Oh, I loved it,’ or ‘I this,’ because you don’t. It’s the opposite. But the bottom line is, this is what I want to make sure. I hate abortion. I recognize there are women that know exactly what they’re doing. I recognize that there are multiple victims. I know that for a fact. I’ve spoken with them. The problem is. Who decides?
You can say, ‘Oh, look,’ she said, ‘shout your abortion,’ and she had an abortion, so we’re going to go after her. But we’re not going to go after this 18-year-old who said, ‘Well, I had an abortion because my boyfriend forced me into it.’ So who decides? And then we said, ‘Well, there’s a jury. There’s a jury. There’s 12 members. There’s 12 peers.’ They get to decide. The process is always the punishment, not necessarily the trial. And what you have now done, you have painted the pro-life movement as a movement that wants to harm women. Which is what they’re trying to say anyway. But now you’re validating that. You’re saying, see, they really just hate women. They really just want to see women in prison.
And what you’ll be doing is you’ll be setting the pro-life movement back 50 years. We now have the overturning of Roe. We now have different states. Look where we’ve come in Florida: 24-15 in heartbeat. So, or, you know, six weeks. So we are making such progress. What this type of thinking will do to the American psyche and to the state of Florida’s psyche, it will say: this is just an extension of the war on women. They will say it. They will have the media on their side. They will literally set us back. And our pro-life members of the House and the Senate, if they adopt that, they will be defeated, and then we’ll be sent all the way back, and we’ll have abortions on demand. Okay, we need to stop.
We’re up against a break. I did want to say before we do, quickly go to break. I understand what Linda’s saying about those people that are angry because anger usually is hurt behind it. It’s not anger. Go ahead, Bruce. Segment four is coming up. The debate rolls on. It is Pro-Life Radio on a Sunday night on AM 950, FM 94. 9, The Answer. And we’re back on a Sunday night. It is Pro-Life Radio, and the debate has been about ‘should,’ well, we know abortion should be illegal, but ‘should it be criminalized?’ And we’ve been talking with, and who should be held accountable? And we’ve had Linda Bell. I agree it should be criminalized, but not for the girl or the woman, but for everybody else. Okay.
We’ve got Linda Bell, who is a Florida Right to Life president and chairman for the board of National Right to Life. And we also have Linda’s against. criminalizing it for the for the women involved and we have John Mishner, author, speaker, pro-life abolitionist, uh, and Linda is also a speaker. I want to I want to point that out she’s Fabulous speaker. Yes. And John Mishner, author, speaker, pro-life abolitionist. And I’m proud to say that both of these folks are friends of ours. So we’ve enjoyed having them on. I don’t know that I’d want to be in the same room with them. Actually, actually, it’s been very wonderful and the breaks have been just amazing and and I I think this the reason I felt so strong about having something like this is because there is such a division, I think and we we need to talk, we need to be able to openly communicate with each other on all of the issues, you know, in a respectful, loving Christian.
And John and Linda have done a great job. And during the break, you guys couldn’t hear this, but they were talking about John’s going to autograph and send one of his books to Linda. She asked him. To. So just to share, it’s been fun. And speaking of books, John’s book is Overcoming the Dark Side of the Pro-Life Movement. It’s available on Amazon. Is that correct, John? Yes. Okay. And, John, do you have an email address you’d like to share or anything you’d like to put out there for folks? You know, you can find me at unitedforlife. us, unitedforlife. us. I have lots of great articles up there. And, in fact, I posted one recently right at the top of news and updates called The Myth of Victimhood. The myth of victimhood.
Don’t misunderstand. I do agree that there are victims out there. But I dive into how that concept can be misused to twist what our law should be. Okay. All right. And Linda… Go ahead. I’m just going to tell folks how to connect with you. Linda is at… F-R-T-L dot org. That is Florida Right to Life dot org. That’s the website. And Linda, how can we donate? You just go to frtl . org and there’ll be a donate button or you can put go to frtl . org slash donate. All right. Okay. Now. Back to it. Yeah, I have a question, though. Um, John said something interesting that not all abolitionists are the same or not all think the same. So.
Like, from my – so all I know is – my reference of what I’ve experienced and the people that I’ve encountered. And I was doing, and so I’m not saying this is you, but this has been my experience. I was doing a press conference. In the Capitol a few years ago because we had a bunch of pro-life legislation, really good stuff, and so I asked all the sponsors to please come to the microphone and coordinated this press conference. And all of a sudden you had. My parents had people in their pink shirts, and then you had these people shouting at us, shouting at us, shouting at us. And I’m looking, and they’re like, ‘Your legislation kills babies.’ Your legislation kills babies. And I’m looking, and they had shirts on.
They were abolitionists. So I actually had to say, if you guys don’t stop, I’m calling for security to have you removed. That was my first real experience with the abolitionists. Then I had another abolitionist Florida group record me illegally. They called me and were asking me questions on the phone. They recorded my conversation without letting me know, and then they put it on a website saying, ‘Linda Bell, the president of Florida Rights to Life, is pro-abortion.’ And so my experiences haven’t been the best. And then. But then being in the capital. So do you support, like if there was a parental consent bill that came into effect. Or a woman’s right to know what happens in the abortion procedure, that education component. Or the 24-hour waiting period, the in-person requirements for whether it’s a pill.
Or whether it’s a social abortion. Would you oppose those bills? Well, we already have all of those statutes in place in Oklahoma, and they were passed. In a right in a past time when that. The people who did that felt like that was the best way to save lives. And I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know. I would have to be in that particular position at that time. There’s a lot of obnoxious people in the world, both on the abolitionist side and all over the place. I personally just want to have healthy dialogue. with everybody on every side. and try and move us to the goal of saving lives. And I want that to be done in a principled way. I think everyone sometimes on both sides get caught.
It’s easy to get caught in the trap of trying to guess. the future would be if we did x, y, and z, and we just don’t know the future. And my opinion is that God calls us to do what we know is right. fight based on a moral principle. and then you kind of let the chips fall where they may, and just always be careful that when you’re strategizing and using logic, that you make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. And don’t let that get in the way of your principles, because it’s easy to jettison a principle when you start trying to calculate the greater good and you’re using the wrong measuring stick. So we’ve got the law. And. To say that something is illegal or not legal.
But we’re not criminalizing anyone is kind of a semantic game. In order for something to truly be against the law, then there has to be a criminal penalty or there’s no point in the law, and it’s not really illegal practically. And I guess what I’m saying is that the law is the greatest teacher of the civil body politic, and it’s a very powerful teacher when it concurs or agrees with our moral intuition and conscience. So your conscience already tells you it’s wrong to kill an innocent human being. So if you can set up a criminal penalty and make it illegal to agree with your conscience, it makes people behave very well. There’s always going to be people who break the law, but most will not. But right now, we’re protecting abortion by not criminalizing everyone equally.
And as long as that’s the case, we’ll continue to have thousands and thousands of abortions in every jurisdiction every year. Okay, John, let’s let Linda get in there for a bit. Yeah, yeah. I know, I’m chomping at the bit. So long. The laws and the government. are not going to change hearts and minds. It’s us. It’s our job. It’s the church’s job. We need to go out. We need to love. So. What you’re proposing sounds so good philosophically or theologically. It sounds so good on paper. Criminalize women, but it doesn’t work. It backfires. And what’s happened is if you prosecute women. It will come across as hating women. It will come across as lacking compassion. It would backfire. I know this. It would backfire. terribly because I debate this issue.
Um, and, you know, so the abolitionists, some of them, are treating abortion as murder when it comes to women under equal protection law. Criminalizing the penalties, criminalizing women. It’s basically… basically going to turn much of the nation away from pro-lifers when we are winning the battle. So. Why would you snatch? It’s basically snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We are progressing. We are winning in Florida. We have gone from 24 to 15 to heartbeat, and we’re winning. A reduction of 44,000 abortions in a very short time is… Huge. Do I want to get to zero? 100%. but you’re never going to get to zero. Unless you incrementally passed good laws, that shows that we love both the baby and the woman.
You’re never going to win the hearts and the minds of Floridians or Americans. If you say, ‘We love babies,’ and by the way, if you have an abortion, we’re going to put you in prison. They’re going to charge you with a felony. You’re going to give you a $10,000 fine. And the jury will decide if it’s fair or not. We’ll just see. And then the stories will come out. I’m going to tell you, the stories will come out. I was taken there by my father, who said he was going to beat me, but she said, ‘I want this abortion.’ Those stories will come out, and we will be… It’s horrible. We will be the big bad. anti-woman movement. We will not be the pro-life movement anymore.
We’ll purely be the anti-abortion movement that wants to criminalize women. That’s bad, and it will backfire terribly. My concern is saving babies, saving lives, saving women from basically their own decisions. Sometimes that they feel like they have no other choice. So while I respect you terribly, I think that would backfire horribly. Okay, we’re getting close to two minutes left in the show here. What is the one thing that each of you would like to have people take away from this? John, I’ll let you go first. You have about a minute. I completely disagree with that presumption of what the future would look like. I think it makes all kinds of wild assumptions. I think that if we will obey God and protect innocent people, there may be a momentary political backlash in for a few days.
But it would only take a couple of marquee prosecutions of clearly guilty people to teach the rest of the population that, oh yeah, we’re not going to kill innocent human beings in this jurisdiction anymore. And scripture and history teach us that God blesses those who cleanse their hands from innocent blood and follow his law. And repent politically. Collectively and individually. And I think God will bless any state that immediately abolishes abortion. Okay. And just real quick before Linda starts, I have heard several people say, if it would have been illegal, they wouldn’t have done it. And I can say personally that is the case, that is the case for myself. Go ahead, Linda. Thank you. So. We are acting, and the abolitionists act like we are a moral nation full of Christians.
We are not. And it’s sad that we are not. The pro-life versus Florida are about 36%. We almost lost. And then it’s for. They got 57% of the vote. Yes. By showing them how much we love the women. And the babies. How many times have we heard they only care about babies once the baby’s born, they don’t care about their women? We have been able to kind of bridge that gap, little by little, by little, by saying, ‘No, we love them both.’ We will never win over the public or the population by saying, ‘Yeah, we love you both, and if you have an abortion, I want to put you in prison.’ Let’s… How about we penalize those in power? How about we penalize the abortionists, those that are profiting from the abortion pill?
How about we criminalize the people that are in power and not the bottom of the chain here—whom the victim has the abortion or the person has the abortion, whether they consider themselves victims or not? Whether they say this is their choice or not. I could get behind that, especially the Planned Parenthood and the doctors. I could get behind criminalizing them, absolutely. Guys, this has been a fantastic show. We’ve got to do this again. We really do. And John, I want to thank you so much for being here. Linda, thank you so much. Even though I know you’re not feeling well, prayers for you to feel better and to get well. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you. Details on how you can help keep this show on the air coming up. This is Pro-Life Radio. Happy Valentine’s weekend. On behalf of my lovely wife, Vicki Cherry, I’m Bruce Cherry saying goodnight, and we’ll see you again next week on AM 950, FM 94. 9, The Answer.