After Roe v Wade fell, many assumed the next step for the American pro-life movement was clear: press for equal legal protection for unborn children at state level. Instead, some of the best-known organisations and pregnancy-centre networks have actively opposed those bills, arguing that any penalty attached to abortion would “criminalise women.”

Ginna Cross, executive director of Alliance Family Services (now operating 13 clinics plus a maternity home), tells Seth Gruber why she and her team rejected that stance. The episode lays out specific legislative fights, internal pressure on centres, and competing visions of what “pro-life” actually requires.

The Louisiana shock

Cross and her husband took over a single clinic in 2021 and expanded rapidly. They assumed the wider pregnancy-help and pro-life world shared the same end goal: ending abortion by securing legal protection for the child. In 2022 that assumption collapsed.

An equal-protection bill in Louisiana cleared committee 7–2 and appeared to have the votes. Then, according to Cross, more than 70 pro-life leaders issued a letter—on National Right to Life letterhead in her recollection—telling legislators the measure was “not pro-life.” March for Life, Susan B. Anthony List and state groups signed. Current House Speaker Mike Johnson also intervened. The bill died. Cross calls the episode a revelation: “We do not have the same end goal.”

She notes that the first state to pass such a law would likely start a cascade. The delay, she argues, has already cost countless lives.

Pressure inside the pregnancy-centre world

Cross reports that state coalitions in Wisconsin and Tennessee have required centres to oppose equal protection as a condition of membership. Alliance Family Services has been labelled extremist and effectively blacklisted in Tennessee. She cites instances in South Dakota and Tennessee where pro-life lobbyists, not Planned Parenthood, persuaded legislators—including original co-sponsors—to abandon or refuse to hear equal-protection bills. In one committee hearing that never happened, Planned Parenthood staff reportedly cheered as supporters walked out.

The same organisations later claim the bills “cannot pass.” Cross and Gruber describe this as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Competing arguments

Critics inside the movement, including some pregnancy-centre leaders and figures such as Scott Klusendorf, raise several objections that appear in the discussion:

• Timing and prudence: the culture is not ready; media will portray the movement as hating women and cost elections.
• Trust and access: women will stop seeking help from centres if they fear being reported.
• Abortion-pill reversal: centres that become mandatory reporters might lose the chance to reverse some chemical abortions.
• Language: talk of “criminalising women” is rejected as inflammatory; Cross and Gruber insist the bills simply remove the exemption that currently treats the unborn as outside the protection of ordinary homicide law.

Cross answers each point from her operational experience. Her centres have continued to grow in client numbers, including high percentages of abortion-minded women, while publicly supporting equal protection. She argues that removing legal abortion will reduce demand far more than any single clinic can achieve, and that pregnancy centres exist primarily to contend for the child’s life, not merely to offer a neutral menu of options. Analogies to child-abuse reporting and to Harriet Tubman’s dual work of rescue and abolition recur throughout.

Heartbeat International’s Jor-El Godsey is quoted as distinguishing “ending abortions” (one by one) from “ending abortion” legislatively. Cross rejects that separation as a loss of focus.

Practical and theological stakes

The conversation repeatedly returns to consistency. If abortion is the intentional killing of a human being, then the absence of any legal consequence is anomalous. Cross notes that involuntary manslaughter already carries penalties; deliberate chemical abortion involves greater foresight. She also observes that pregnancy-centre directors routinely engage political and cultural battles on other issues—school curricula, gender ideology, obscenity—yet many draw a bright line against equal-protection advocacy for the very children their clinics exist to protect.

Gruber and Cross frame the disagreement as more than tactical. They see a therapeutic Christianity that prioritises the woman’s immediate feelings over justice for the child, and warn that closed-door conversations have not shifted institutional positions. Public pressure, primary challenges, and donor accountability are presented as necessary.

Limitations

The episode is advocacy, not neutral reporting. Specific vote counts, letter contents and private lobbying claims should be checked against primary legislative records and organisational statements before being treated as settled fact. Scott Klusendorf’s position is characterised as “eventually but not yet”; listeners should consult his own remarks for precision. Australian readers will also note the U.S.-centric legal and cultural context; the underlying principle—equal protection versus incrementalism—still travels.