Pro-Lifers Belong in Jail

by Timothy Kirchoff

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In an interview with retired pastor Pat Kahnke, former pro-life leader Rob Schenck explained one of the experiences that ultimately reshaped his perspective on abortion. A number of years ago, after being arrested during a political protest, Schenck was briefly detained in Alabama, in the Montgomery County Jail (jails are usually temporary pre-trial holding facilities, while prisons are for holding people post-sentencing). 

Schenck found himself in the same wing of the jail as people in mental distress. For the duration of his brief stay, a woman a few cells down from him was continually shouting desperately, worried about her children and how they would be fed and cared for in her absence.

He recounted imagining her children being cared for by friendly church ladies, the same way he imagined that every woman seeking abortion could find help in local churches, if they only asked. At some point later, though, Schenck said he sat down and did the math on what that kind of support network would look like. He found the network of American churches to be utterly unprepared for the level of commitment it would take to provide the kind of support he was imagining. 

As Schenck put it, he was expecting women in difficult pregnancies to "leave their reality and enter [his] fantasy," when his obligation to truth and justice was to reverse it: he needed to leave his fantasy and enter into their reality. His experience in the Montgomery County Jail brought him into contact with one woman's desperate reality. This led him to recognize how much support pregnant women need and how little is actually available to many of them.

More recently, a Rescue protest in Memphis, Tennessee (which I have previously discussed as an interesting contemporary example of civil disobedience) led to the arrest and detention of its participants. One of the protestors, Elise Ketch, recounted a number of horrifying experiences in her one day in the Memphis jail, which at the time was extremely overcrowded as a result of ICE's activities in the city. 

Ketch described how women being held in the jail were denied the space to lie down and the freedom to stand without permission or even to wear more than one outer layer of clothing. These extreme conditions risked inducing miscarriages among the pregnant women being held—a "prison abortion," in Ketch's words.

This Memphis experience differed significantly from the arrests Ketch had previously undergone as a result of her activism in the Washington, DC, area. She explained that local officials in the nation’s capital are accustomed to arresting protestors in a relatively orderly fashion, then processing and releasing them with little more than a small fine as a penalty. 

Ketch, a former member of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), was already sympathetic to the progressive arguments in favor of rebuilding our system of justice from the ground up in a way that does not revolve primarily around prison-based detention, a goal also known as “prison abolition.” Her experience in the Memphis jail only further solidified those convictions. Her fellow protestors, though they were not immediately won over to the cause of prison abolition as a result of their own experiences in the Memphis jail, told her that they now saw the importance and urgency of prison reform in a way they had not before.

Similarly, at the 2025 Rehumanize Conference in Washington, DC, Lauren Handy, also a former member of PAAU, recounted her experiences when she was in prison for a FACE Act violation and got to know the other women being held in the same prison. In getting to know these other women's stories, connecting with them, and encouraging them, Handy's understanding of our society's problems and resolve to work toward solutions were both deepened.

It is noteworthy that both Ketch and Handy reported that they were able to build rapport with the women with whom they were incarcerated, particularly when it became clear that they were being held for protesting abortion. In both of their accounts, even women who had had an abortion opened up about their experiences, discussing how their familial or economic circumstances made abortion feel like their only option. 

Through enduring the shared experience of incarceration and the horrible dehumanization that characterizes American practices of incarceration, Schenck opened himself to the reality experienced by pregnant women—especially economically vulnerable women—in modern America. Ketch's fellow rescuers in Memphis, after spending just one day in an overcrowded jail, were ready to rethink our incarceration system. 

But even more importantly, Ketch and Handy were able to enter into relationships of genuine solidarity with these incarcerated women, hear their stories, and come to a deeper understanding of the resources, whether institutional or personal, that would have helped keep some women out of the circumstances that led to their incarcerations and, in some cases, their abortions. 

Prevention, Not Deterrence 

When I say, then, that “pro-lifers belong in jail,” I do not mean that they should go out of their way to commit crimes that will land them in jail, nor do I intend to commit any such crimes myself. Rather, I mean that a direct, honest, and compassionate encounter with people on the receiving end of our criminal justice apparatus provides pro-lifers with important insights into how to fight abortion more effectively. 

Our regime of retribution and deterrence seems to do relatively little to prevent crime (if imprisonment were an effective deterrent, we would not need nearly so many prisons), and many people who end up imprisoned because of desperate acts would have been happy to solve their problems in other ways if they had had the resources (whether social, economic, or emotional) to do so. Just so, we can do more to prevent abortions by ensuring that women actually have access to healthcare and economic opportunities than by trying to intimidate them into giving birth.

I can't help but think of these stories and lessons in the context of efforts by certain conservative factions to argue that the natural next step for the pro-life movement is the prosecution of women for procuring abortions. Monica Snyder of Secular Pro-Life, who used to work in forensics, has already pointed out the numerous practical and logistical difficulties involved in investigating women for abortion via pill. 

But even if I set aside those considerations, the prospect of applying the cruel logic of our current criminal justice system to abortion is still unconscionable to me. We in the pro-life movement must not take for granted that our justice system actually promotes justice. We must not subject desperate women to the realities of what our justice system is and does based on our naive fantasies about it. 

If the experiences of pro-life activists in jails and prisons were not enough to prove that we need to radically rethink our society's relationship with prisons, we might also listen to the innumerable criticisms of our prison regime by advocates for other vulnerable populations.

My own starting point for research into criminal justice reform did not come from spending time behind bars, nor do I expect to see the inside of a jail cell any time in the near future. Rather, my introduction to modern criminal justice reform came from Bryan Stevenson's 2014 book Just Mercy. This book is full of accounts of people who were victimized by our criminal justice system in various ways, and it is what gave me the context to understand pro-lifers' accounts of their own experiences in our justice system. 

Some of the stories in Just Mercy are about guilty people whose full life circumstances were not considered in their sentencing. There are, however, several striking stories in which a person was innocent of any real crime but nevertheless was targeted by an overzealous prosecutor (who was in turn under pressure from the public) or was implicated by shoddy or outright corrupt forensics work. 

The central example in the book (and its film adaptation) is the story of Walter McMillian, who was sent to death row for years based on false testimony. However, the main example in chapter 12, which focused on women's interactions with the prison system, is particularly relevant to contemporary debates in the pro-life movement. 

Marsha Colbey suffered a stillbirth after the 2004 hurricane season left her living in an Alabama FEMA trailer with her husband and 6 other children but without proper access to prenatal care. After they quietly buried their stillborn baby in their yard, a nosy neighbor reported them to the authorities on suspicion of infanticide. Some time later, when the marked grave in their yard was dug up by the police, a forensic pathologist declared, before any autopsy, that the baby had been born alive. Colbey was arrested and charged with capital murder. 

The neighbors and law enforcement who could not be bothered to ensure Colbey had access to prenatal care were more than eager to see public resources spent on imprisoning her and tearing her away from her other children. She spent 10 years in the awful conditions of Tutwiler prison—which at the time had rampant problems with sexual assault by prison guards—until the efforts of Stevenson's legal team finally won Colbey a fair hearing and her freedom. 

Stevenson recounts several other stories similar to Colbey's, more than enough to demonstrate that there is "a growing community of women imprisoned for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment." We must not extend the same dysfunctional logic that pervades our justice system to the problem of abortion. If we do, then we should not consider ourselves true and conscientious advocates for any vulnerable population whatsoever. Instead of advocating for the vulnerable, we would be using one group of vulnerable people—preborn human beings—as an excuse to waste public money on investigations, prosecutions, and imprisonments that do absolutely nothing to alleviate the poverty that drives people—including pregnant women—to desperation. In most of the circumstances in which abortion is a consideration, the best way to help the unborn is to help their mothers, and our policy priorities should reflect that.

We must not promote the current policy regime that invests more in investigating a stillbirth than safeguarding that child’s health in the first place. We also must recognize that expanding the legal system’s jurisdiction to include looking for abortions—implicitly empowering nosy neighbors to report miscarriages as suspected abortions—will increase rather than decrease the injustice in our country.

We need not all spend time in a jail cell, but we do need to learn to question the premises of a law enforcement system that results in so much injustice. Too many innocent people are hurt, and too many powerful people commit evil acts with no real fear of punishment. We need to build an understanding of justice that goes beyond the logic of retribution and superior force. 

More to the point, we need to break away from the conceptualization of government as an external force that punishes us for being bad and recover the idea that government is of, by, and for the people, and its responsibilities include not just protecting us from violence, but helping us live better lives together.