“Oh, so are you against the death penalty?”

Periodically people will comment on our social media accounts asking if we oppose the death penalty. Most often the question is in the context of pro-choicers trying to identify our (perceived) hypocrisies, apparently as a justification for ignoring whatever we have to say regarding abortion.

To begin with, Secular Pro-Life does not take a position on the death penalty because we are a single issue group. We invite people both for and against the death penalty to work with us to oppose abortion.

That said, I (Monica) am personally against the death penalty, yes. I have a background in forensics, including a job in a lab that did some work for the Innocence Project. I know that our justice system sometimes results in people being wrongfully convicted, including people who have ended up on death row. I have additional issues with the death penalty but, frankly, I think that reason alone is enough.

That said, I’ve written before about why it is not per se hypocritical for someone to both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. (See here: Abortion and the Death Penalty) In short, recall that pro-lifers generally view abortion as killing not only human beings, but specifically babies. The death penalty is meant to kill adults who have committed some heinous crime. Abortion kills babies, who have done nothing.

I also don’t think it’s per se hypocritical for someone who opposes both abortion and the death penalty to spend dramatically more energy actively fighting abortion.

How many abortions happen in the US each year? Guttmacher estimated 930,000 abortions in 2020, and believes the 2023 number will be even higher.

How many people are executed in the US via the death penalty every year? In 2023, it was 24 people.

There’s nothing hypocritical about treating two extremely different situations differently.