The youthful state of the pro-life movement

Tens of thousands of pro-lifers descended on the nation’s capitol in Thursday’s March for Life that marked the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that gave a woman the right to pay an abortionist to kill her unborn child in any state, at any time, for any reason or no reason. In remembering that decision, John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and I talked this week about the progress the pro-life movement has made since then. He said the availability of ultrasounds and the advancing science of embryology have helped tremendously.

“All of these things have made abortion far less appealing to the American public, particularly young people,” Stonestreet said. Youth leadership in groups such as Live Action, Save the Storks, and Students for Life brings an entrepreneurial spirit to the fight for the unborn.

“They’re not only articulating a pro-life position in the public square, they’re articulating it eyeball-to-eyeball with friends and colleagues on college campuses, and they’re winning hearts and minds,” Stonestreet said. But those youth are working against a culture with harmful worldviews, making their jobs much more difficult.

“What we’re dealing with, really, is a fundamental framework that values social structures over individuals,” Stonestreet said. The idea that individuals are expendable for the sake of a social vision directly opposes a Christian worldview. And it doesn’t help that those worldviews are competing in a culture of relativism.

“That’s the ground upon which we’re planting these seeds of pro-life, and a lot of times, it strangles out the fruit,” Stonestreet said.

Listen to my conversation with John Stonestreet in the “Culture Friday” segment of The World and Everything in It.