Putting lawmakers on the record on life

In a move that has many across the political spectrum scratching their heads in bewilderment, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has scheduled a vote today in the Senate on the codification of abortion rights into federal law. The horribly misnamed Women’s Health Protection Act is a response to an expected ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Most court observers expect the 6-3 conservative majority to at least allow Mississippi to continue to protect unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks of gestation, and some think the court’s ruling could spell the end of Roe v. Wade altogether.

The move by Sen. Schumer comes at a time when Democrats are facing increasingly bleak odds of holding majorities in the House and Senate after November’s midterm elections, given President Joe Biden’s plummeting popularity. Today’s scheduled vote on abortion will put vulnerable Democratic incumbents on the record on a radical piece of legislation that ensures the right to an abortion all the way through a pregnancy. The bill, a version of which passed the House last fall, would wipe out any state-level laws regulating abortions, including ultrasound and waiting period requirements. It is even more radical than Roe v. Wade itself.

The Women’s Health Protection Act almost certainly won’t clear the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster and may not even garner a majority of Democrats with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other moderate Democrats likely voting against it.

Christians who believe what Scripture teaches about the dignity and worth of the most vulnerable human beings rightly regard this legislation as a moral horror. It’s lamentable that the majority party is actively trying to enshrine into federal law the right to end the life of innocent human beings, defenseless babies who have no power to speak up for themselves. The fact that the Senate’s Democratic leadership is pushing a radical piece of legislation like this speaks to just how ingrained abortion is as a priority within Democratic Party politics.

And yet this move by the Senate majority leader is welcome in the sense that it forces U.S. senators to state, on the record, where they stand on the most defining moral issue of our time. Declaring whether one has the moral will to protect the unborn or to license their death is what transparency demands in a republic like ours. It’s good that elected representatives will have their views on the sanctity of human life permanently etched in our history, some in the service of protecting life and others in the service of shame. And the arrival of this legislation is a sign that the nearly half-century of pro-life activism, often mocked by those in elite positions of power, is seen as such a threat to the abortion industry that it requires an ill-timed vote in an election year.

Some well-meaning Christians argue that perhaps we should turn away from passing laws that restrict abortion and focus solely on making cultural arguments that win hearts and minds, but this kind of thinking underestimates the moral force of a nation’s laws. While the pro-life movement is about much more than what happens in Congress and statehouses, it is never about less.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. understood this well, as he campaigned both for a moral shift in the nation’s attitude on race and for legal justice for the disenfranchised. “Well, it may be true that morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated,” King said in 1967. “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can restrain him from lynching me; and I think that is pretty important also.”

We must fully understand that if, as we hope and pray, the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade this summer, our fight for unborn lives is just beginning. We know that laws can’t change a person’s heart. But we also recognize that a nation’s laws are moral documents, a barometer of what a society believes is right and wrong.

So while we urge senators to loudly reject the Women’s Health Protection Act and thus refuse to codify abortion and infanticide into federal law, we should be grateful for the opportunity to see our elected officials put to the test and see if they, by their votes, really believe what we know to be true: Unborn lives matter and must be defended.