As promised, Pastor Doug Wilson revisits the question of whether women should ever be punished for having an abortion:
So the question is this. Should women who procure abortions be charged with anything? Should there be any penalty? Ever?
Wilson breaks this into two parts. The first part involves the foreseeable future, and for this Wilson maintains his previous answer; no, since even after a law has been passed making abortion illegal we can’t expect women to know better.
But he does allow for the possibility of holding women accountable a thousand years from now, assuming everything lines up just right:
But the second question concerns an ideal biblical republic, and involves the logic of the thing. If abortion is murder, then who is the murderer? And even if the murderer is the abortionist, on what grounds could we possibly say that the mother can never be complicit?
So say that all this postmillennialism stuff is true, and a thousand years from now we have believing magistrates, a faithful people in the main, biblical laws, and all those unfortunate people who were born with a critical spirit have no scope for their blogging talents. Everything in the civil realm is exactly as it ought to be. What would the case be then? Could there be any penalty then? The answer here is of course, but it is an of course that requires very careful exposition.
