The president of the Southern Baptist Convention appears to have endorsed proposed legislation in Tennessee that would impose the death penalty on women who have abortions.
Clint Pressley, pastor of a church in Charlotte, N.C., weighed in on social media to endorse House Bill 570/Senate Bill 738 in the Tennessee Legislature. The bill itself would direct the state capitol commission to be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the monument to unborn children through funds appropriated to the commission. But a proposed amendment that has not yet been voted on would do much more. It would allow prosecutors to charge women who obtain abortions with fetal homicide, punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, or in some cases, the death penalty, according to the Tennessean.
On Feb. 19, Pressley posted on X: “I am glad to support HB 570 and SB 738, two bills in the Tennessee legislature that would protect every preborn child in Tennessee from abortion by providing preborn children with equal protection of the laws. By protecting the lives of preborn children with the same laws that protect people who are born, we are simply loving our neighbors in the womb as ourselves.”
That appears to be a reference to the amendment, not to the bill itself.
According to the Tennessean, the state already has some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country since the state’s “trigger ban” took effect in 2022. The Human Life Protection Act prohibits all abortions from fertilization, with no exception for rape or incest. Performing an abortion is a Class C felony in Tennessee, resulting in up to 15 years in prison and fines for physicians.
Pressley added in his X post: “Tennessee now has the opportunity to set an example of how states can protect the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. I am urging the Tennessee legislature to move these bills forward this legislative session. It’s both pro-life and consistent!”
The issue of charging women who get abortions with murder is a contentious one even among anti-abortion activists.
In 2021, messengers to the SBC annual meeting in Nashville adopted a strongly worded resolution calling for the “immediate abolition of abortion without exception or compromise.” That resolution was the most strident language ever used in an SBC resolution against abortion and is so strongly worded that the SBC’s own Committee on Resolutions had declined to bring it forward.