How to be pro-life in a pro-abortion world

The Republican Party’s recent abandonment of important pro-life commitments in its platform has provoked voluminous commentary and anguished hand-wringing among social conservatives. It is a particularly bitter pill to swallow just two years after Dobbs, when pro-life Christians were ecstatic over what seemed to be the stunning triumph of a five-decade effort to roll back abortion “rights” in the United States. In human affairs, few such victories turn out to be quite what they seem, and this was no exception, as the months following Dobbs witnessed numerous defeats for the pro-life cause in the states that had now been empowered to legislate against abortion.

Depressing as this moment may seem, we can at least be grateful for the clarity the present moment provides: You cannot have pro-life politics without a pro-life culture. For the past few decades, even as we used the language of the “culture war,” we have often been tempted to view the abortion fight as an essentially political battle. To be sure, law can shape culture, and it is clear that the Supreme Court’s enforced legalization of abortion via Roe v. Wade in 1973 helped dramatically shape a culture of complacency toward unborn lives in much of America. But it did so because the legal change itself took place within a broader cultural philosophy of law, one that expected legal change to always take place in one direction: the expansion of individual rights. A legal change that dares try and reverse this flow of history is likely to be swept away in the cultural tide rather than stem it.

Going forward, pro-life conservatives certainly should not forsake the political battles, whenever they can be fought on promising terrain, such as in more conservative states or under the leadership of popular governors. Even on more hostile terrain, legislative victories can perhaps still be won around the margins with creativity and effective rhetoric. For instance, conservatives might take advantage of the new groundswell of sentiment in favor of limiting minors’ access to social media or pornography to push for more robust parental notification laws for abortion. If a 14-year-old girl shouldn’t be able to get something as dangerous as Instagram without her mom or dad’s permission, it shouldn’t be hard to argue that maybe she shouldn’t be able to get an abortion either. And it is also not unreasonable to expect that the headwinds facing the pro-life movement may ease somewhat when Donald Trump is no longer seen by impressionable moderates as the movement’s standard-bearer.

That said, larger victories will likely have to wait for a change in the culture. Thankfully, this is the kind of work the Church does best and has for two millennia. Christians can and must model healthy marriages, selfless dedication to their own children, and a willingness to patiently care for every life: unborn, handicapped, or terminally ill (assisted suicide is likely to be the next big legal battlefield). They must pour more resources than ever into pro-life pregnancy care centers, giving desperate and confused women more reasons not to choose an abortion. Of course, some will object that we’ve already done these things and are still losing the culture, but that’s no reason to stop being faithful. Every seed bears fruit in its own time.

What we perhaps have not already done so well, though, is catechize our people. Many of today’s pro-abortion voters grew up in the Church, and although they may have been told that abortion was wrong, they were also often taught that “pro-choice” was right in almost every other domain. We live in a culture that valorizes unfettered individual choice and self-expression more than any in history and rarely pauses to warn young people just how badly such choices can go. Many Christians have enthusiastically jumped on the consumeristic train and reframed their political priorities in the language of individual freedom. In service of such freedom and personal fulfillment, we’ve allowed many believers to tacitly think of human life as raw material for human technique, as evidenced in the widespread evangelical acceptance of practices like in vitro fertilization. Only through more holistic teaching, first within the Church and radiating outward, can we challenge the basic presuppositions of our culture that make the acceptance of abortion so plausible to so many.

It may seem like an intolerable compromise for Christians to play this long game, while every day new unborn lives are being callously taken across our country. On the other hand, it is precisely as Christians that we are enabled to patiently suffer the presence of evil and injustice in the world, knowing that there is a higher Judge who demands only that we be faithful, and who Himself takes responsibility for the outcome.