Does Christian Creation Care Undermine the Pro-life Movement? E. Calvin Beisner

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E. CALVIN BEISNER

E. CALVIN BEISNER, Ph.D., is President, Founder, and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Former Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College, he is the author of over fifteen books, including Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990), Man, Economy, and Environment in Biblical Perspective: The 1992 Staley Distinguished Christian Scholar Lectures at Covenant College (1994), Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (1997), What Is the Most Important Environmental Task Facing American Christians Today? (2008; rev. 2014), and Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment? (2018), as well as books in Biblical studies, theology, and apologetics.

The Pro-Life Movement? DOES CHRISTIAN CREATION CARE UNDERMINE

‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ —Humpty Dumpty

Ever looked up “pro-life’ in a dictionary?

Merriam-Webster defines it tersely: “opposed to abortion.’ 1

Collins defines it in two slightly different ways: in American usage, “opposing the legal right to obtain an abortion’; in British usage, “(of an organization, pressure group, etc.) supporting the right to life of the unborn; against abortion, experiments on embryos, etc.” 2

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “supporting the belief that it is immoral for a pregnant woman to have the freedom to choose to have an abortion (= an operation to end a pregnancy) if she does not want to have a baby” or “opposed to the belief that a pregnant woman should have the freedom to choose an abortion (= the intentional ending of pregnancy) if she does not want to have a baby.” 3

On Wikipedia, ‘pro-life’ redirects to ‘Anti-abortion movement’, which begins, “Anti-abortion movements, also referred to as pro-life movements, are involved in the abortion debate advocating against the practice of abortion and its legality. Many anti-abortion movements began as countermovements [sic] in response to the legalization of elective abortions.” Significantly, it immediately adds, “Abortion is defined as the termination of a human pregnancy accompanied by the death of the embryo or fetus.” 4

So in standard English usage—American and British alike—‘pro-life’ describes opposition either (most commonly) to abortion, a procedure that, if it achieves its intended purpose, produces a dead baby, or to (not therapeutic procedures intended to heal but) experiments on embryos that also produce dead babies.

PLAYING HUMPTY DUMPTY WITH THE TERM ‘PRO-LIFE’

Yet some Christians dedicated to ideas they express by terms like ‘creation care’ and ‘stewardship of creation’ apply the term ‘pro-life’ to other concerns entirely. The ‘Catholic Climate Covenant’ asserts ‘Creation Care is ProLife.’ 5 Ben Lowe, organizer of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, says,

We believe that life is sacred, so when we say we’re “pro-life,” we believe we need to care about our human life from what some people have called from the womb to the tomb. We are concerned about abortion, and we realize that it’s a very complicated issue that Christians haven’t always engaged in a way that’s very loving or very thoughtful. But we’re concerned about all factors, including environmental factors, that affect human life. 6

Cheryl Bridges Johns argues similarly in an article published on the website of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. 7 Ronald Sider, author of the best-selling Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, says creation care is part of being “completely pro-life.” 8 The Mennonite Creation Care Network claims its position on creation care is “pro-life’ and lists sixteen Christian organizations that do likewise. 9

This article will focus on just one organization: the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), one of America’s better known and more influ-

ential ‘creation care’ organizations. 10 Two Google searches on January 28, 2020, for ‘pro-life,’ the first restricted to EEN’s main website, creationcare.org, and the second restricted to another of EEN’s websites, eenetwork-een.nationbuilder. com, turned up 141 and 26 hits, respectively. A search for ‘abortion’ restricted to creationcare.org turned up just one hit—to a page that seeks to broaden the meaning of ‘pro-life:’ “For most of us being pro-life is more than simply being antiabortion, it’s about defending life from conception until natural death.” 11 A search for ‘abortion’ at eenetwork-een.nationbuilder.com turned up no results. So it seems that for the Evangelical Environmental Network, ‘pro-life’ means “defending life from conception until natural death” (emphasis added).

But a look at the 166 other uses of ‘pro-life’ on EEN’s website suggests something quite different. Ironically, the very first hit for ‘pro-life’ led to an article titled “Significant commitment made to reduce methane from existing sources.” 12 The article reproduced a statement by EEN President Rev. Mitchell Hescox that applauded what it called ‘positive leadership’ from then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “to develop regulations for methane pollution from existing oil and gas resources.” It continued:

As pro-life Christians, we have a special concern for the unborn.… We want the unborn and those yet to be born to have a world free of dangerous climate change. Yet today from or [sic] natural gas infrastructure large amounts of methane are being released, a climate pollutant 86 times stronger than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 20 year timeframe. And it is what we do over the next 20 years that will determine whether our struggle to overcome climate change will be won or lost. That is why reducing methane pollution is morally strategic.

Hescox began by quoting a White House statement that Obama had made the announcement in a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Obama was then and

is now a staunch supporter of abortion rights. Trudeau in 2011 described himself as ‘personally opposed’ to abortion but believed “nobody should tell a woman what she should do with her body.” 13 By June, 2014, he had come to insist that all Liberal Party members of Parliament would be “required to support a woman’s right to choose in any vote on the subject.” 14 And in October 2019, Trudeau said his views had ‘evolved:’ “I no longer feel like I can or need to say that I’m against abortion. That is not for me, as a man, to say.” 15

Hescox’s statement was posted March 10, 2016. At the time, neither Obama nor Trudeau could by the wildest stretch of the imagination have satisfied the standard definition of ‘pro-life’. Yet Hescox chose to begin his statement with a quotation that featured both of them prominently, to applaud Obama and the EPA’s action, and to justify that by explicitly stating EEN’s ‘pro-life’ ‘concern for the unborn.’ Is that not at least a little strange? But perhaps this odd triangulation is to be explained by the effect of the regulation Obama announced restricting methane emissions. Might that restriction be described as ‘prolife’? Certainly not in terms of the standard usage established above: opposition either to abortion or to experiments on embryos, both of which produce dead babies, the first intentionally, the second inevitably even if not on purpose. “This article will focus on just one organization: the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), one of America’s better known and more influential ‘creation care’ organizations.”

‘PRO-LIFE’: OPPOSING INTENTIONAL KILLING, OR ACCIDENTAL HARM TO HEALTH?

Hescox seems to be working with a much broader definition of ‘pro-life’ in mind. For him and EEN generally, it appears to mean anything in support not merely of human life but of human health. That this is so is clear upon examining many other uses of ‘pro-life’ on EEN’s websites.

EEN has conducted a ‘Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign’ for years. The page describing the initiative 16 reads:

has serious consequences for the health of our children and other vulnerable populations like the elderly. This is why pro-life Christians must lead the charge on clean energy, and why the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) will organize half a million pro-life Christians to participate in our Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign.

It includes a petition that begins:

As a pro-life Christian, I believe pollution harms the unborn, causing damage that lasts a lifetime. Dirty water and air have serious consequences for the health of our children and other vulnerable populations, like the elderly.

So, I ask my Governor and other elected officials to support a plan for clean electricity that will: free our children from pollution by relying entirely on clean electricity from renewable resources like wind and solar by 2030; defend our freedom to create our own electricity from sunshine, without fees championed by monopolistic utilities; free our communities from regulations that prevent us from joining together to create our own electricity; and free businesses from such regulations so that they, too, can create and sale clean electricity.

Two things should stand out to attentive readers. First, abortion and experiments on embryos cause death—abortion intentionally and experiments on embryos inevitably. But what EEN is concerned about here is not death but undefined and unquantified ‘damage’ (whether catastrophic or barely detectable) to ‘health’—damage that is not intentional but accidental. Both of those differences are morally significant. Both also serve to exclude EEN’s concern about pollution from what can legitimately be called ‘pro-life.’ Closely related to EEN’s ‘Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign’ have been its cam- “...abortion and experiments on embryos cause death—abortion intentionally and experiments on embryos inevitably. But what EEN is concerned about here is not death but undefined and unquantified ‘damage’...”

paigns on ‘Methane Pollution’ 17 and ‘Mercury Pollution.’ 18 The page on methane says:

For years EEN has been helping pro-life Christians oppose pollution from our natural gas infrastructure, especially methane and volatile organic compounds or VOCs. Why? It’s simple — because they harm human health, especially the unborn. The leaks, venting, and flaring from the natural gas industry spew out smog precursors, as well as other toxic pollutants and cancercausing agents like benzene. Studies have shown that smog, VOCs, and air toxics have a disproportionate impact upon life in the womb; for those near production sites the emissions have been linked to birth defects, pre-term births, and lowbirth-weight babies, who are at greater risk of infant mortality, ADHD and asthma, among other things. In addition, methane is [a] highly potent greenhouse gas, 86 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year timeframe. This is crucial, because it is the next 10-20 years that will determine whether we keep the world safe from catastrophic climate impacts.

Note again here: the expressed concern is that methane emissions ‘harm human health,’ not because they kill. And even the ‘greater risk of infant mortality’ EEN alleges to be associated with methane and VOC emissions from natural gas wells is precisely that—a risk (and a tiny one at that, more than offset by the home heating that prevents thousands of deaths during cold snaps or the electricity that powers the life-saving equipment of hospitals), not an inevitability. And neither the health effects nor the mortality risk is what natural gas producers intend. They intend the home heating, the electricity, and thousands of other benefits, many directly contributing not only to improved health but also to longer lives, that come from our use of natural gas. Here again, EEN positions one of its campaigns as ‘pro-life’ when it meets neither of the defining criteria of ‘pro-life:’ opposition to procedures that don’t merely reduce health but actually kill, and that do so at least inevitably and, for abortion, intentionally.

We find the same in EEN’s mercury campaign. Its main page contains a statement by Hescox that begins, “As a pro-life organization we are thankful for the leadership Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) is providing on mercury pollution. Her bill to establish a monitoring system, the Comprehensive National Mercury Monitoring Act, recently reintroduced, is an important part of protecting our children from mercury pollution.… Our commitment to Jesus Christ compels us to do all we can to protect unborn children from mercury poisoning. It is a pro-life concern, plain and simple” (emphasis added). The page also features a video in which a woman says:

Oftentimes faith communities get very captured by the conversation of ‘how many pregnancies are terminated every year in the United States.’ There’s a sobering statistic that says that 1.2 million children are lost to terminated pregnancies every year in the United States. 19

One of the pieces we forget as people of faith is some of the other very shocking statistics that are out there, namely, the fact that currently 700,000 children every single year are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood. 700,000 children means that 1 in 6 children are born with high levels of mercury in their blood. If a parent wants to do everything she can to give her children the best start in life, this is scary.

Women accumulate mercury poisoning by eating simple foods during their pregnancies, one of which is fish. When I became pregnant my doctor told me to make sure fish was part of my diet, because of the Omega 3 and the health benefits of eating fish. At the same time, this advice came with a stern warning. It said, “Don’t eat fish more than once a week or you could potentially endanger your child.”

Every state in America has a mercury catch warning, which means that many of the fish caught in the rivers and the lakes and the streams in those states have danger-

ous levels of mercury and are potentially unsafe to eat. Decades ago my parents and my grandparents didn’t have to worry about these sorts of things. Now it’s shocking to me as a parent that I have to worry about eating something as simple as fish. … I’ve never met a parent who didn’t worry about something that they wanted to happen in their child’s life. But honestly, worrying about what fish we eat should not be something that we have to worry about.

We as parents can do something about this, something very simple. You can log on to creationcare.org and check out the ‘End Mercury Poisoning’ pledge. It’s a simple bit of action that you can take to tell your elected officials that this matters, that they can take action to keep the levels of mercury in our air and in our water safe enough for the developing hearts and minds of our children. Shortly I shall examine the accuracy of some of the claims here. First, however, let us keep our focus on the dubious framing of this as a ‘pro-life’ concern. Here again, EEN presents not intentional and inevitable killing but unintentional risk of reduced health (through an activity not only intended to serve human health and life but also highly effective at it) to perhaps 1 in 6 children, as a ‘pro-life’ concern, carefully framed as analogous to concerns about abortion. While 1.2 million pregnancies are terminated every year, the argument goes, 700,000 children ‘are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood.’ By that understanding of ‘prolife’, she might as well oppose pediatric corrective heart surgeries because some, though intended to save a child’s life, fail, and the child dies. “...EEN presents

not intentional and inevitable killing but unintentional risk of reduced health ... as a ‘pro-life’ concern, carefully framed as analogous to concerns about abortion.”

FOLLOW THE POLITICS—AND THE MONEY: EEN’S AIM IN REDEFINING ‘PRO-LIFE’

And here again the Evangelical Environmental Network praises a politician (Collins) for supporting this ‘pro-life’ concern despite the fact that in 2017 she was one of only two Republicans to

vote against a bill that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks 20 (the age at which infants in the womb are known to feel pain).

This was not a new tactic for EEN, either in 2016 when it applauded pro-choicers Obama and Trudeau, or in 2018 when it applauded Collins, or in 2011 at the start of its mercury campaign. In that year EEN ran radio, television, and billboard ads in nine states and the District of Columbia that clearly implied that those who supported the EPA’s proposed new limits on mercury emissions from power plants were ‘pro-life,’ or at least ‘sensitive to pro-life concerns,’ and those who didn’t weren’t. Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin (both D-MI) both had 100% pro-abortion voting records in the 110th Congress (2007–2008). Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (both R-ME) and David Pryor (D-AR) all had 78% proabortion voting records. Yet EEN’s ads gave voters the impression that all were pro-life or ‘sensitive to pro-life concerns’ because they supported EPA’s proposed new mercury limits. “What lies behind this Orwellian redefinition of ‘prolife’? Two possible explanations stand out. First, the rhetorical move could be political ... Second, EEN’s funding sources might be involved.”

What explains this? What lies behind this Orwellian redefinition of ‘pro-life’? Two possible explanations stand out. First, the rhetorical move could be political, designed to make conservatives, usually skeptical or suspicious of environmentalism, more receptive, especially because it links environmentalism with religion and morality. 21

Second, EEN’s funding sources might be involved. I’ve not been able to unearth where the funding for the ad campaigns came from. (E&E News’s Greenwire reported that the radio campaign alone cost EEN $150,000.) 22 But EEN received a $50,000 grant in the summer of that year from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund “to elevate the voice of the evangelical community in its efforts to protect the Environmental Protection Agency” 23 (the primary activity of which, insofar as EEN paid attention to it, was to impose new regulations on mercury emissions from power plants). And Rockefeller Brothers (which also gave EEN $200,000 in 2009 to support its global warming campaign) is a long-

time supporter of abortion on demand 24 as a means of population control.

CHECKING EEN’S FACTUAL CLAIMS

Now let us turn to the accuracy of the claims. We begin with what ought to have been an easy statistic for EEN to check: the claim “that 1.2 million children are lost [note the present tense] to terminated pregnancies every year in the United States.” EEN produced the video around 2011, when it launched its mercury campaign. While the number of abortions in the United States rose from about 1.2 million in 1978 to a high of over 1.4 million in 1990, it fell after that. The last year in which it reached ~1.2 million was 1997, fourteen years before EEN produced the video. By 2011 it had fallen to 730,322. (By 2016, the last year for which data are available, it had fallen further, to 623,471.) 25 Might EEN have had in mind not the number in the most recent year but the average since Roe v. Wade? Even if that were so, they got it wrong: the average number of abortions per year 1973–2011 was 1.07 million.

Any abortions at all are of course lamentable. But one wonders: if EEN exaggerated this number and failed to do a simple fact check, does it handle other factual, statistical claims—particularly those that are more difficult to ascertain—similarly?

The answer to that question is yes. Consider these four additional factual claims in the video: that (1) 700,000 children, 1 in 6, every year (2) “are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood’ (3) caused by their mothers’ consuming fish, many of which from every state “have dangerous levels of mercury and are potentially unsafe,” and (4) her “parents and grandparents didn’t have to worry about these sorts of things.”

HOW MANY VICTIMS?

First, how many children actually are (or in the years leading up to 2011 were) born with what EEN calls “dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood?” The truth, as documented in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation’s technical research paper The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War

against Conventional Energy, 26 by environmental economist Dr. Timothy Terrell, is that not 1 in 6 but about 1 in 1,000 American babies is exposed to mercury at a level above the EPA’s ‘reference dose’ of 5.8 parts per billion. That is, EEN has exaggerated the rate at which infants in the womb are exposed to what it calls “dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood” by 167 times, from the true 0.1% to the false 16.6%.

HOW MUCH HARM?

Second, is that level of mercury exposure actually ‘dangerous’ to however many infants actually are exposed to it? Again as Terrell demonstrated in The Cost of Good Intentions, no harm has been detected at any level below 85 parts per billion (over fourteen times higher than the ‘reference dose’)—a level studies indicate is not found in any American babies. Even at that level, the observable harm is not death or even grave impairment but a temporary, almost undetectable delay in neurological development—so small it’s overshadowed by normal variation, is less than one IQ point, and disappears in nearly all affected by age seven. Indeed, Terrell points out:

the risk of exposure to methylmercury caused by mercury emissions from US electric utilities is…so low that the proposed EPA rule is not likely to have any substantial positive impact on human health. In fact, the overall impact could be substantially negative, given the costs (discussed below). While the EPA’s proposal for mercury is supposed to reduce emissions by about 24 tons a year, EPA’s own estimates are that reducing emissions even by as almost twice as much (41 tons) “is unlikely to substantially affect total risk.” 27

WHAT’S THE FISH STORY BEHIND CLAIMS OF HARM?

Third, do pregnant women pass on “dangerously high levels of mercury” to their unborn children by consuming fish from every state with “dangerous levels of mercury” that are consequently “potentially unsafe?” To quote Terrell again: The alarmism evident in some of the evangelical literature on mercury is often based on hair-trigger ‘fish advisories’ issued by government agencies. The same EEN fact sheet displays a map indicating that mercury advisories exist in every state (as of 2008). For those who are unaware of the actual risks behind the advisories, it is easy to overestimate the danger. Overall, the risk, even in freshwater fish, seems to be quite low. 28 Jon M. Heuss, an authority on the technical basis for air quality and emission standards frequently called on to report on his research to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, the EPA Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, and other government agencies, warned in 2003:

Advisories are meant to be protective in nature so even one sample above the triggering level (which varies from state to state) is enough to consider an advisory. There are several different kinds of advisories that range from restricted consumption of some types of fish for sensitive sub-populations to commercial fishing bans. Because of the wide range of types of advisories, statistics on the number of advisories or even the fraction of water covered by advisories are not particularly helpful in estimating the extent of mercury contamination. 29 “...the EPA itself admitted in 2011 that its new mercury limits— the ones support for which EEN called a ‘pro-life’ concern—would be ‘unlikely to substantially affect total risk.’”

Indeed, the EPA itself admitted in 2011 that its new mercury limits—the ones support for which EEN called a ‘pro-life’ concern—would be “unlikely to substantially affect total risk.” And that was not its estimate for the population as a whole but for a vanishingly small number (so small EPA didn’t even estimate it): 1% of a hypothetical population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, specifically, those who consume over 300 pounds of self-caught fish per year—and all those fish have to come from the very highest mercurycontent freshwater sources in the country. 30

WHEN DOES ‘PRO-LIFE’ MEAN ‘PRODEATH’?

One last point about EEN’s claim that supporting enhanced restrictions on mercury emissions is ‘pro-life’ deserves to be made. As we have seen, Terrell noted, “the proposed EPA rule is not likely to have any substantial positive impact on human health. In fact, the overall impact could be substantially negative, given the costs.” Why is that? Terrell explained:

Economists have estimated the relationship between a decline in income and the loss of life that will result. One study indicates that a life is lost, on average, for an income decline of $10 million to $15 million. Another approach indicates that it takes a $17 million income decline to result in one lost life. 31

At the time of EEN’s mercury campaign, it was estimated that implementing the EPA’s proposed new mercury regulation would cause electricity rates nationwide to rise by an average of 11.5%, or about $42.5 billion. Divide that by $10 million or $17 million per life, and you get 2,500 to 4,250 extra deaths per year. 32 Ironically, then, by EEN’s definition, it was more ‘pro-life’ to oppose the regulation than to support it.

DID EARLIER GENERATIONS HAVE IT BETTER?

Fourth, did the parents and grandparents of the woman in the video not have to worry about such things? The speaker doesn’t specify the time periods she had in mind by reference to her parents and grandparents. She appears in the video to be something on the order of 35 to 45 years old, so let’s assume for the sake of argument that she was born sometime from 1966 to 1976, and let’s assume that her parents were born about 30 years earlier, 1936 to 1946, and her grandparents another 30 years earlier, 1906 to 1916. What were air and water pollution in America like then? Getting data for so long ago isn’t easy, but we can at least get the general idea.

We begin with air. The EPA reports 33 that from 1990 to 2011 national concentrations of the 10 key air pollutants fell dramatically: lead by 9%, carbon monoxide by 82%, nitrous oxide by 80% (annually) and 56% (hourly), ozone by 5%, PM2.5 by 18% (annually) and 29% (24-hour), PM10 by 63%, and sulfur dioxide by 49%. (All of those declines continued form 2011 through 2018.)

But might 1990 have been a high point in air pollution for the United States, and the speaker’s parents and grandparents enjoyed much cleaner air before—even cleaner than in 2011? Indur M. Goklany, an economist with the U.S. EPA and Department of Interior, wrote in his book The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, that “Composite nationwide air quality data from the EPA and its predecessor agencies show that ambient air quality for each of the traditional air pollutants (i.e., PM, which is also an indicator for soot and smoke, SO2, O3, CO, NOx, and lead) has been improving for almost as long as such data are available.” 34 He specifies that “SO2 peaked in 1963,” PM in 1957, CO in 1970, and NOx from the late 1970s. “Particulate levels, which had been in decline since the 1940s, fell an additional 15 percent just between 1957 and 1970…”

But what about mercury, EEN’s main concern? Timothy J. Sullivan and co-authors report in “Air pollution success stories in the United States: The value of long-term observations,” published in Environmental Science and Policy in 2018, that “mercury emissions and deposition decreased substantially from a peak in the 1980s.” They went on to document declines in all the major air pollutants. 35

What of water quality in the United States? Obtaining solid long-term summary data is more difficult for water pollution than for air pollution, because water bodies are far less integrated than air. But a major study completed in 2018 by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley examining data from 240,000 monitoring sites from 1962–2001 found, “The 1972 Clean Water Act has driven significant improvements in US water quality, according to the first

comprehensive study of water pollution over the past several decades.… Most of 25 water pollution measures showed improvement,” as Science Daily reported. 36 (Interestingly, however, the study also found that “costs of the Clean Water Act consistently outweigh the benefits.”)

The general picture of long-term trends in air and water pollution in the United States is clear. Most pollutants’ concentrations began falling well before EEN’s speaker was born, and their levels were much higher in her grandparents’ and even her parents’ child-rearing years than in her own.

CONCLUSION

In 2012, more than 30 prominent leaders of America’s pro-life movement endorsed the joint statement, “Protecting the Unborn and the ProLife Movement from a Misleading Environmentalist Tactic.” 37 In it they said:

Recently some environmentalists have portrayed certain of their causes as intrinsic to the pro-life movement. The tactic often involves appealing to a ‘seamless garment’ of support for life, or to being ‘consistently pro-life’ or ‘completely pro-life.’

As leaders of the pro-life movement, we reject that portrayal as disingenuous and dangerous to our efforts to protect the lives of unborn children.

The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception. The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies.

In stark contrast, most environmental causes promoted as pro-life involve little threat to human life itself, and no intent to kill anyone. For example, even

Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity Christian Creation Care 37

if one grants the exaggerated numbers and harms claimed by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) in its recent quarter-million-dollar advertising campaign that claimed, ‘being pro-life means protecting the unborn from mercury pollution’, mercury exposure due to powerplant emissions does not kill infants.

Consequently, calling mercury pollution and similar environmental causes pro-life obscures the meaning of pro-life. And thanking politicians with 100% proabortion voting records (even some who support partial-birth abortion) for their ‘pro-life’ position because they supported restrictions on mercury emissions, while rebuking some with 100% pro-life voting records because they opposed or didn’t support the new restrictions, as EEN’s campaign did, will confuse voters, divide the pro-life vote, and postpone the end of abortion on demand in America. This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life. Genuinely pro-life people will usually desire to reduce other risks as well—guided by cost/benefit analysis. But to call those issues ‘pro-life’ is to obscure the meaning of the term. “This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life ... to call those issues ‘prolife’ is to obscure the meaning of the term.”

Two fundamental principles distinguish truly pro-life issues (like abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research) from environmental issues. First and foremost, truly pro-life issues are issues of actual life and death, while environmental issues tend to be matters of health. Second, truly pro-life issues address actual intent to kill innocent people, whether the unborn, the gravely ill, or the aged, while environmental issues do not.

If environmental advocates still want to support mercury-emission reductions or other environmental causes, let them do

so honestly and above board. But they should not promote those causes under the pro-life banner. That is at best badly misinformed, at worst dishonest.

We call on environmentalists to cease portraying such causes as pro-life and join us in working diligently to reduce and end abortion on demand in the United States…

The statement was justified then. It is justified today. It is time for the Evangelical Environmental Network and other creation-care organizations to repent of this deceptive tactic.

1 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pro-life#h1. 2 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/pro-life. 3 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/pro-life. 4 ‘Anti-abortion movement’, Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_movement. 5 “Care for Creation is ProLife,” Catholic Climate Covenant, https://catholicclimatecovenant. org/teachings/creation-care-prolife. 6 Madeline Thomas, “Pro-life equals pro-planet for this green evangelical leader,” Grist, December 26, 2014, https://grist.org/living/ pro-life-equals-pro-planet-for-this-green-evangelical-leader/. 7 Cheryl Bridges Johns, “If You’re Pro-Life, You Should Be Pro-Earth,” International Pentecostal Holiness Church, General Superintendent’s Office, August 20, 2019, https://iphc.org/ gso/2019/08/20/if-youre-pro-life-you-shouldbe-pro-earth/. 8 Ron Sider, “Being Completely Pro-Life,” Evangelicals for Social Action, undated, https:// www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/beingcompletely-pro-life/. 9 Mennonite Creation Care Network, https:// mennocreationcare.org/not-alone/. 10 That EEN’s practice is widespread among ‘creation care’ advocates is, however, clear. A Google search for the terms ‘pro-life’ and ‘creation care’ together on January 28, 2020, brought 8,890 results. See also Jordan Wood- ward, “Creation Care Is a Matter of Life”: The Rhetoric of Pro-Life Evangelical Environmentalism (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University, Master’s Thesis, 2017). 11 Caution: attempting to open the following link generates a warning that the site is unsafe. In addition, while my Google search <abortion site:creationcare.org> on January 28, 2020, returned the following link as its only hit, the same Google search repeated the next day failed to turn up any hits. A DuckDuckGo search for the same on January 29 also failed to turn up any hits. Searching for the quoted text on January 29 instead turned up no hits on Google, but DuckDuckGo did return the link. Again attempting to open it brought the warning. But both Google on January 28 and DuckDuckGo on January 29 displayed the quoted text beneath the link. The link is https://www. creationcare.org/epa_halts_protections_for_ our_children, to an article titled ‘EPA Halts Protections for Our Children’. 12 The original hit in response to the search <‘prolife’ site:creationcare.org> had the link http:// www.creationcare.org/tags/pro_life, which gave an ‘Error 404: Not Found’ response. But by searching for text that showed up under that hit, ‘Statement by Rev. Mitch Hescox: “Today in a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”’, I came to the article, ‘Significant Commitment Made to Reduce Methane from Existing Sources’, March 26, 2016, at https://eenetwork-een.nationbuilder.com/significant_commitment_made_ to_reduce_methane_from_existing_sources, a site controlled by EEN. 13 Catharine Turney, “Trudeau says his personal stance on abortion has ‘evolved,’” CBC News, October 4, 2019, online at https://www.cbc. ca/news/politics/trudeau-abortion-personalbeliefs-1.5308987. 14 Canadian Press, “Justin Trudeau Says Abortion Stance Policy Applies to All Liberal MPs,” June 18, 2014, online at https:// www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/06/18/justin-trudeau-abortion-stance_n_5509380. html?utm_hp_ref=ca-justin-trudeau-abortionstance. 15 Turney, “Trudeau says his personal stance.” 16 “Pro Life Clean Energy Campaign,” Evangelical

Environmental Network, https://creationcare. org/what-we-do/initiatives-campaigns/pro-lifeclean-energy-campaign.html. 17 “Methane Pollution,” Evangelical Environmental Network https://creationcare.org/what-wedo/initiatives-campaigns/methane-pollution. html. 18 “Mercury Pollution,” Evangelical Environmental Network, https://creationcare.org/what-wedo/initiatives-campaigns/mercury-pollution. html. 19 Source: ‘Abortion statistics in the United States’, Wikipedia, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States. 20 “What Yesterday’s Vote Says About Your Senators,” Family Policy Alliance, last modified January 30, 2019, https://familypolicyalliance. com/issues/2018/01/30/what-yesterdays-votesays-about-your-senators/. The page lists no year of publication; the page source indicates it was first published January 30, 2018 and updated July 6, 2019. 21 Ben Rosen, “Could making climate change a ‘pro-life’ issue bring conservatives on board?,” Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2017, https:// www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2017/0502/ Could-making-climate-change-a-pro-life-issuebring-conservatives-on-board. 22 “Evangelicals run ads urging lawmakers to back EPA regs,” E&E Daily, http://www.eenews.net/ eed/2011/12/01/2. 23 This information used to be available on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s website at http:// www.rbf.org/grant/11531/evangelical-environmental-network-0. It has since been removed. 24 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008). 25 Source: ‘Abortion statistics in the United States’, Wikipedia, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States. 26 Timothy D. Terrell, The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy (Chattanooga, TN: Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation), 2011, online at http://www.cornwallalliance. org/docs/Cost_of_Good_Intentions_1.pdf. 27 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 15. 28 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 16. 29 Jon M. Heuss, Critique of the United States

Public Interest Research Group’s June 2003 Report Entitled “Fishing for Trouble: How Toxic Mercury Contaminates Our Waterways and Threatens Recreational Fishing” (Annapolis, MD: The Annapolis Center, 2003), 6. 30 United States Environmental Protection Agency, Technical Support Document: NationalScale Mercury Risk Assessment Supporting the Appropriate and Necessary Finding for Coal and Oil-Fired Electric Generating Units (Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency), 2011, http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/utility/pro/ hg_risk_tsd_3-17-11.pdf#page=59. 31 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 18–19. 32 E. Calvin Beisner, “EEN’s Machiavellian Mercury Campaign Threatens Pro-Life Movement,” Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, December 21, 2011, https:// cornwallalliance.org/2011/12/eens-machiavellian-mercury-campaign-threatens-pro-lifemovement/. 33 “Our Nation’s Air,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, https://gispub.epa.gov/ air/trendsreport/2019/#introduction. 34 Indur M. Goklany, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2007), 137. 35 Timothy J. Sullivan et al., “Air pollution success stories in the United States: The value of long-term observations,” in Environmental Science & Policy 84 (2018): 69–73, https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1462901117312352. 36 “Clean Water Act dramatically cut pollution in US waterways,” Science Daily, October 9, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009115102.htm. For the full study see David A. Keiser, Catherine L. Kling, and Joseph S. Shapiro, “The low but uncertain measured benefits of US water quality policy,” PNAS 116(12) March 19, 2019: 5262–5269, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5262. 37 “Protecting the Unborn and the Pro-Life Movement from a Misleading Environmentalist Tactic: A Joint Statement by Pro-Life Leaders,” February 8, 2012, https://cornwallalliance. org/2012/02/protecting-the-unborn-and-thepro-life-movement-from-a-misleading-environmentalist-tactic-2/.

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