Tennessee Republicans dropped the ball on abortion



A viral video from Memphis recently drew national attention for good reason. A woman was filmed at a gender-reveal party murdering her preborn baby with abortion pills.

In the video, she aired grievances about her “baby daddy” and announced that she would not complete the pregnancy. As friends watched, cheered, and even shouted “kill it,” she opened a packet of abortion pills while whooping and singing, “Thank you, Jesus.” Instead of announcing whether the baby was a boy or a girl, she declared the baby was “no gender” and swallowed the pills.

Tennessee Republicans understand perfectly well that Democrats have no real power in the state. They can govern as they please. And they chose not to abolish abortion.

The episode horrified pro-lifers. But much of the reaction missed a harder truth: Tennessee Republicans recently had a chance to stop this kind of killing and chose not to.

In a later interview, the woman said she had consumed alcohol throughout the pregnancy and that she and the father believed the baby would be born “slow.” That, she said, is why they decided on an abortion. She then celebrated the abortion with the interviewer, who joked that she had managed both a gender reveal and a “funeral” on the same day.

The whole episode stands as a brutal commentary on the culture. Some pro-life leaders still describe women as abortion’s “second victims.” But more women now openly and brazenly celebrate the killing of their preborn children. In recent years, a sickening “shout your abortion” culture has taken root among women who do not merely defend abortion, but praise it as liberation.

This case drew intense backlash. Yet the Christians expressing horror may not realize that Tennessee lawmakers had a chance only months ago to stop such violence and refused to act.

Many state and national pro-life groups insist that the abortion issue is basically settled in Tennessee. Americans United for Life says “abortion is illegal in Tennessee, with limited exceptions” and that “chemical abortion pills are tightly regulated.” Tennessee Right to Life claims “abortion is illegal in Tennessee” and that the state is “a national leader” in protecting preborn babies. Students for Life Action has even described Tennessee as “abortion-free.”

The Memphis video exposes those claims as false.

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The woman and her friends were able to obtain the supposedly “tightly regulated” abortion pills, use them to kill a baby, record the act, and post it online for the entire country to see. They could do that because Tennessee law grants complete immunity to women who procure abortions. In practice, that means no deterrent exists to stop a woman from willfully murdering her preborn child.

The statute that supposedly makes Tennessee “abortion-free” states plainly that it “does not subject the pregnant woman upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to criminal conviction or penalty.”

In other words, the woman in the video cannot be held criminally accountable for intentionally killing her baby, no matter how openly murderous her intent was, because Tennessee’s pro-life laws shield her and every other woman from penalty.

Lawmakers had a chance to close that loophole this year through House Bill 570, which would have established equal protection for preborn babies. Instead of banning prenatal homicide only for third-party abortionists, the bill would have applied the same murder laws that protect those already born and criminalized abortion as murder for anyone willfully involved.

But when the bill appeared, pro-life establishment groups immediately pressured lawmakers to avoid supporting it. None of the Republicans on the Tennessee House Population Health Subcommittee even made a motion to grant House Bill 570 a hearing.

That failure matters because Tennessee is not some purple state with divided government. Republicans hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers. They recently pushed through redistricting and punished Democrats who objected. In other words, Tennessee Republicans understand perfectly well that Democrats have no real power in the state. They can govern as they please.

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And they chose not to abolish abortion.

That means any woman in Tennessee, no matter how brazen or malicious, can commit prenatal homicide without fear of legal consequences.

The baby murdered in that video was no outlier. More than 5,000 preborn babies are killed every year in Tennessee through abortion pills obtained through telehealth providers. Thousands more die outside the formal medical system.

If Tennessee lawmakers want to stop this legally tolerated bloodshed, they must establish equal protection for preborn babies and treat them as the image-bearers of God they are. That means abolishing abortion and criminalizing it once and for all.

The REAL reason the pro-life movement is hitting a ceiling



The pro-life movement has seen a number of significant victories under President Donald Trump.

In less than six years, Trump has stopped U.S. tax dollars from funding groups that perform or promote abortions overseas, appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminated some federal funding to Planned Parenthood through Title X rule changes, protected doctors and nurses who didn’t want to participate in abortions, ended most government use of aborted fetal tissue for research, and pardoned several pro-life activists who had been arrested for protesting.

Despite these wins, many pro-lifers are frustrated with President Trump’s public stance on abortion. They criticize his treatment of the issue as a state concern instead of pushing for a strong national ban or more federal limits. They also feel he hasn’t done enough to stop widespread mail-order abortion pills and condemn his calls for “flexibility” on related policies.

While BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is fully on board with the pro-life movement, believing abortion is “the murder of a child in no certain terms” and “one of the most horrific things about our society,” he argues that many activists fail to see the reality of what the movement is up against.

On this episode of “The Auron MacIntyre Show,” the host argues that no amount of laws or Trump bans can fix the problem because the entire American system — its economy, workforce, and culture — is built on easy access to abortion.

While Auron sympathizes with the many pro-lifers who were dissatisfied with President Trump during his 2024 campaign for refusing to make big promises about abortion bans, he argues that Trump was wise to take a nuanced approach to such a deeply polarizing issue.

“Donald Trump knew that this was going to be very unpopular, and he just refused to run on it in the election. ... That makes political sense,” he admits.

Now that Trump is president, he continues to treat the issue of abortion exactly as he promised to treat it during his campaign, but many pro-lifers are nonetheless incensed.

As midterms draw nearer, pro-lifers are working to ban the abortion pill, but Auron says the timing of this initiative is unwise.

“Trump’s got enough problems with other optical issues going on — Iran, deportations, Epstein files, all that stuff. He doesn’t need another unpopular thing on his plate,” he argues, reiterating that he fully supports the pro-life movements’ initiatives in principle.

But practically, these initiatives aren’t working.

“The core issue is the state referendums. If the pro-life movement was winning at the state level after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it wouldn’t need Trump to go out and do any of these things,” Auron explains.

“They’re doing the Lord’s work, ... a completely justified and righteous crusade. But you need to understand that if you’re losing consistently on the state level, something has happened,” he continues.

What has happened, he explains, is that abortion has become foundational in America since Roe v. Wade. What that landmark case did was “[create] an incentive structure that put abortion at the center of many of our economic and cultural systems and understandings.”

“We have made literal child sacrifice the center of our civilization,” he says bluntly.

It fueled the 1960s sexual revolution, which coincided with the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion, and turned sex from a risky behavior into a virtually consequence-free one, changing relationship dynamics between men and women, de-incentivizing marriage and family, and teeing women up to enter the workforce en masse.

“[Women in the workforce] has all kinds of huge benefits for employers. Corporations love working women. ... It basically doubles the labor pool,” Auron says.

Women also became huge money-savers for businesses because employers could not only pay women less than men to do the same job, but they could also pay men lower wages because the pressure to pay salaries that could provide for whole families suddenly vanished.

“Instead of getting one man doing the job that raised a family, you got a man and his wife both working for the same amount that just the man used to work for,” Auron says.

This shift also culminated in the need for more government. Before women entered the workforce, “Americans didn’t need a big government because women were at home, and they were building these associations, these connections, this social credit,” Auron says, “and so you didn’t have to have people step in and do all the things that women were doing.”

It also upped the nation’s GDP because all the work women were doing at home suddenly “[had] to get reterritorialized into the market.”

“When you move all of the female jobs, all of the female roles, all of the social capital that females were creating out of the economic zone and you move it into the economic zone, of course GDP goes up, line goes up, economic activity goes up because now there’s all these surrogates who have to do what women did when they were mothers,” Auron explains.

Abortion thus became a guarantee that the benefits of working women were locked in for corporations.

But the depth to which modern society is built upon the altar of abortion runs far deeper than that.

To hear Auron’s full breakdown, watch the episode above.

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