How Are We Doing On Abortion?

The conservative political objection to Roe v Wade (besides the moral issue) was that it took the subject of abortion out of the democratic process and enshrined it into law via judicial fiat. There was no debate, no persuasion, just boom — abortion. Dobbs undid that. It put the abortion issue back into the hands of the people and their representatives. Now we can have that debate. Now people can try to persuade each other of the rightness of their view.

How are we doing on that?

I don’t see a lot of persuading going on. I don’t see any large-scale attempts to change people’s minds. Oh, there’s lots of yelling on the internet, but the “democratic process” has largely been whichever side has a majority clubbing the other side over the head with the most extreme law they can devise.

What are we doing to persuade people that our view is correct?

Ronald Reagan wrote a short book to do just that in the ‘80s:

When we talk about abortion, we are talking about two lives — the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child. Why else do we call a pregnant woman a mother? I have also said that anyone who doesn’t feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.

The 1981 Senate hearings on the beginning of human life brought out the basic issue more clearly than ever before. The many witnesses who testified disagreed on many things, but not on the scientific evidence that the unborn child is alive, is a distinct individual, or is a member of the human species. They did disagree over the value question, whether to give value to a human life at its early and most vulnerable stages of existence.

Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value.

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the English writer, goes right to the heart of the matter: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.¹

I don’t know what effect this had, but at least he tried. Where is something similar by Lindsey Graham, Ron DeSantis, or Greg Abbott? Has any prominent pro-life politician at least recommended a book on the subject to voters?

Abortion will never be gone until it becomes unthinkable. Laws will never be enough to end abortion, and if we do not change minds, laws will not go our way in the democratic system. Every election is now about abortion. In Dobbs, we won a battle. Clumsily worded laws and thoughtless statements by politicians will not be enough to win the war. We must work to change hearts and minds about this issue.

We need ads by pro-life organizations striving to show that this tiny little thing is as much as human being as she’ll ever be. We need stump speeches by pro-life politicians making the case for protecting life at the earliest stages of development.

We live in the age of social media. People are influenced by memes and TikTok videos more than books. For good or ill, the former are a lot easier to produce. We need to learn to use their tools to our ends. Can we at least produce some memes or short videos that strive to persuade more than “own the libs”?

We finally have the opportunity we’ve been praying for. Will we squander it or play to win?


1 Abortion & the Conscience of the Nation

Useful resources:
Make the Pro-Life Case in 60 Seconds
Secular Pro-Life


Image via Pixabay