“That means—don’t miss this—that Southern Baptists have not supported exceptions permitting abortion in cases of rape or incest,” Barber said. “Ours is not a ‘moderate’ position. It is certainly not a position that is “against the innocent preborn.”
The SBC President then explained that the SBC funds crisis pregnancy centers, foster care, and adoption services. Southern Baptists “have adopted tens of thousands of children ourselves, and have created poverty-assistance ministries in our communities, working in every way to ease the burden of carrying babies to term.”
“We have invested in providing advanced imaging technologies to pregnancy care facilities across the country—massive investments—to help expectant mothers to meet their babies before deciding whether to let them live,” Barber continued. “We’ve tried to give the baby a voice to speak to her mother. And we have not been silent on the legal front. We have supported legislators and legislation from state-to-state with the goal from the very beginning to accomplish one thing: The end of legal abortion.”
“Through success and failure, with indefatigable courage, over the course of decades, calling upon the brightest of minds and the strongest of wills, Pro-Life legislative and judicial strategists successfully implemented an incrementalist strategy that has finally toppled Roe. This is the only Pro-Life approach that has actually saved any babies at all,” Barber said.
Barber said that the abolitionist movement, which Deevers is in favor of, is working against pro-life legislation like “the ‘Value Them Both‘ amendment in Kansas.”
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“But Deevers has chosen this line of messaging,” Barber said. “According to him, if you supported the actual legislative and judicial work that produced the Dobbs decision and overturned Roe, you might still be ‘against the innocent preborn’…THEY can oppose the ‘Value Them Both’ amendment in Kansas and claim the high road in doing so, but anyone who opposes their poorly-written legislative efforts they will accuse of being ‘against the innocent preborn.’”
Barber argued, “Because unless you 100% agree with every jot and tittle of Deevers’ obsession with sending 16-year-old girls to prison for succumbing to the coercion of their parents to have an abortion, he will label you ‘against the innocent preborn.’”
Barber added, “Because if you want an exception in the law for ectopic pregnancies where the mother (and the baby) would be in grave danger of death if the pregnancy were not ended, he will label you ‘against the innocent preborn.’”
Deevers knows that Leatherwood isn’t “against the innocent preborn,” Barber said. “He’s just hoping that YOU won’t know that. Because honest discussion of the actual issues is not his goal.”
Barber concluded his Twitter thread by calling Deevers comment a “Faustian bargain with the devil of politics,” and labeled what he did as a “gossipy accusing of the brethren, this focus-group-tested rabble-rousing that tramples truth in the quest for quote-tweets.”
The SBC president stated that Deevers’ tweet “represents one of the gravest threats to the work of the SBC today.”
Deevers responded to Barber’s criticism by telling him to call him and said that the SBC President’s descriptions of him “are lies and half-truths, at best.”
