After the Pro-life vs. Abolish Human Abortion debate

In March of 2014, Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) spokesperson, T Russell Hunter sent out a plea for a pro-life leader to engage AHA in a debate.

At the time, T. Russell Hunter stated in part:

I am looking for someone in the Pro-Life Movement to engage me in a public forum and friendly debate regarding the morality and effectuality of fighting abortion by pragmatically focusing on the passage of 20 week (fetal pain) abortion bans. I would argue for the abolitionist position–that all people who are opposed to abortion ought to unify around abolishing all forms of intentional prenatal destruction regardless of the age of the human being in question–and my opponent could argue for the pro life establishment’s position that we should focus our time and energy on regulating abortion while it remains legal and seek incremental gains against it.

After repeated requests, Gregg Cunningham took the AHA challenge and the official debate took place the end of April 2015.

After the debate, the analyzing began.

On the International Coalition of Abolitionists Societies which sponsored the event, the chest pounding was loud as they tried to say that Gregg conceded the debate:

Then this post appeared on the event page:

Shortly after several pro-lifers called them out, to their credit ICAS issued this apology:

And ICAS edited the post to read this:

Kudos for both an apology and an edit in the post above.

The debater himself, T Russell Hunter believed that he won- defending himself on Jill Stanek’s blog saying that Gregg “mauled himself.”

And so did others with AHA:

After the debate, pro-life bloggers and leaders weighed in. I have not reviewed all the AHA support pages but I would imagine there are a number of reviews posted by their supporters as well.

Scott Klusendorf with Life Training Institute published his analyses here claiming that Gregg Cunningham won hands down:

Scott ends with this statement, “At the end of the day, Hunter picked a fight with a pit bull and got chewed up in his own yard. This was a public-relations disaster for AHA and served to solidify its brand as being more about attacking pro-lifers than stopping abortion. If Hunter wants to fix that, he better stop grinding his ax against pro-lifers—immediately.”

Jonathon Van Maren with the Canadian Center for Bio-Ethical Reform published his response here, where he wrote, “The exchange was fiery and extraordinarily lopsided. Since Hunter had months to prepare, I was genuinely surprised at the out-and-out mauling that he received. I knew Gregg Cunningham was a talented debater. Although I was well aware of Abolish Human Abortion’s selective historical cherry picking and theologically immature underpinnings, I thought Hunter would put up a better fight.”

Saynsumthn even weighed in to a part of the debate here.