This week’s TIME magazine cover story announces that, forty years after Roe, the pro-life side is winning the abortion debate. I say, “Not so fast.”
On the one hand, yes, as the article points out, there have been some
real gains in protections for the unborn in some important arenas. And
public polling data does demonstrate, rather consistently, that younger
people are more willing to identify themselves as being “pro-life” than
are their mothers’ generation. This is due partly to sonogram and other
technologies that make it harder and harder to maintain that the “fetus”
is a clump of impersonal tissue. Whenever evangelical Christians see
polls like this, we tend to see some triumphalist rhetoric about how
“we’re winning.”
I think it’s more complicated than that.
Yes, it’s a win just that the concept of “pro-life” is still alive.
The abortion rights movement probably assumed that forty years after the
Supreme Court legalized abortion that the issue would be as settled as
school integration or women’s suffrage. It’s still a controversy, and
the pro-life side hasn’t been sidelined by history.
And it’s true that there have been some gains in the numbers of
doctors who, for conscience reasons, are unwilling to go along with the
lie that abortion is “health-care.” Continue at Russel D. Moore
