Recently, Steve Holt announced that he will not support or advance any legislation that criminalizes abortion unless there is an exception shielding the woman from prosecution. In practical terms, that means he will not support HF2316 — Iowa’s bill of abolition — because it applies the law equally to all who participate in the intentional killing of a child in the womb.
Let’s strip away the rhetoric and ask the only question that matters:
If abortion is murder, who is the murderer?
If abortion is not murder, then we should stop pretending that we are defending life.
But if abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being — and if we believe that life begins at conception — then justice cannot stop halfway. Law that protects everyone except the one who hires the killer is not justice. It is preference.
We are told that the woman must always be treated as a victim.
Always.
Without exception.
But a system of justice that declares in advance that one entire class of participants in an intentional killing can never be held accountable is not justice at all. It is immunity by policy.
In no other area of law would we tolerate a homicide framework where the person who initiates, authorizes, or participates in the killing is categorically shielded from prosecution.
Yet when the victim is an unborn child, we are told justice must stop short.
Why?
Because we fear the political cost.
Because we fear the optics.
Because we fear being called extreme.
But what is more extreme:
placing murderers in jail — or placing babies in the morgue?
The state does not bear the sword symbolically. Romans 13 describes civil authority as a minister of God, “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” The sword is not decorative. It is judicial.
When a representative publicly declares that he will never allow that sword to fall where justice requires it to fall, he is not choosing compassion. He is choosing partiality.
And partiality in judgment is condemned throughout Scripture.
This is not about cruelty. It is not about vengeance. It is not about spectacle. It is about equal protection under the law.
A law that affirms that a preborn child is a person but refuses to apply justice when that person is intentionally killed is internally unstable. It proclaims life with one hand and excuses its destruction with the other.
And this is not theoretical for me.
My son Thomas survived an at-home abortion attempt from his birthing person.
He did not “self-abort.”
He did not “miscarry.”
He survived an intentional effort to end his life.
His birthing person didn’t seek out a hitman, she didn’t go to a Planned Parenthood, she tried an at-home concoction. She was the sole actor in the attempted murder. Yet today Rep. Holt has proclaimed she is the victim and he believes she rightly received immunity and impunity under the law.
Today, Thomas lives with the consequences of a legal system that refuses to establish equal justice — a system Rep. Holt has pledged to preserve.
Multiple surgeries.
Hundreds of doctor’s appointments.
Years of therapy.
Complications that will follow him for the rest of his life.
He bears scars in his body because someone tried to kill him.
Under the logic being advanced in Iowa right now, the person who attempted that act would be treated categorically as a victim — regardless of the facts — while the child who endured the violence bears the lifelong cost.
That is not mercy.
That is not justice.
That is not equal protection.
God requires civil rulers to bear the sword righteously. Not selectively. Not politically. Not sentimentally.
Righteously.
When the state refuses to apply justice where it knows a life has been intentionally taken, it is not protecting women. It is protecting a legal carve-out for lethal violence.
I do not write this as an outsider.
I write this as a father.
As a man who has sat in hospital rooms.
As a man who has watched therapists work for years to help a child heal.
As a man who knows that if the attempt had succeeded, there would be a grave instead of a testimony.
We are told that equal justice is too harsh.
But tell that to the child who survives the attempt.
Tell that to the families who bury their babies.
Tell that to the children whose names never make it into the statistics because the law refuses to call the act what it is.
Representative Holt has said he will not advance legislation without an exception shielding women from prosecution. But what he is really saying is that some homicides are exempt from full accountability.
God requires civil rulers to bear the sword righteously. Not selectively. Not politically. Not sentimentally.
Righteously.
Rep. Holt, your duty is to establish justice and justice alone.
Until you commit to this, you are the enemy of children in the womb in Iowa.
Repent, for Judgment Day is coming.
“The phrase “law is blind” signifies the ideal that the legal system should be impartial and treat all individuals equally, regardless of their personal characteristics or status.”