The pro-life movement takes center stage in Washington

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

A congressional committee investigating Planned Parenthood issued its final report this week. The findings included significant privacy violations of women who sought abortions; misleading consent forms; middlemen businesses that made between 300 and 400 percent profits on the transfer of fetal tissue from abortion centers to research facilities; the dissection of fetal brains at a University of New Mexico summer program; and websites that allowed customers to add baby organs such as brains, hearts, lungs, and livers to virtual shopping carts.

The committee wrote a letter this week urging Congress to make Planned Parenthood ineligible to receive federal tax dollars and instead redirect those funds to support the thousands of better, low cost healthcare options for women and families.

John Stonestreet this week shared his excitement at seeing the fight taking shape in Washington, D.C., over the lives of unborn babies.

“This is great,” Stonestreet said. “Even if it doesn’t go the way that we want, immediately you’ve got to at least love we’re back at the political fight. For so long, the fight was in the culture, and there was no progress to be made politically.”

Political progress by the pro-life movement is a “clear indication of a cultural shift,” Stonestreet said.

“When something is quiet in the culture, that means it’s normal and accepted. And right now, abortion is not,” he said.

Pro-lifers can take a more pronounced political stand today because of years of work done at a cultural level—work that must continue. Stonestreet urged Christians to keep making the pro-life case locally to their friends and neighbors: “We’ve got to provide the cultural support on the ground for the decisions that are being made in light of the blowback that will necessarily come.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Jan. 6 edition of The World and Everything in It.