I want to spend the two weeks before the Presidential election addressing the topic of abortion as it relates to public policy. This is an important issue for the millions of Christians who feel trapped. On the one hand, many evangelical Christians, unlike any time in the past 30 years, identify more with the Democratic party than with the Republican party on most issues. But there are many people in this “conservative Christian yet Democrat” demographic whose conscience will not allow them to vote for Democrats in the end because of abortion.(For a clear example of this struggle, go here)
I believe that abortion is wrong in the moral sense. I have seen arguments that attempt to make abortion morally justifiable, but I remain unimpressed. So if my choice was between allowing millions of abortions to happen or not, I would probably be forced to vote for Republicans, despite the fact that I disagree with them on about every other issue. But this is not the choice. There are a few considerations which make this issue more complex, which I hope to cover this week and next. I hope that my “Christian yet Democrat” audience will consider the issue more deeply than they have before.
First, as a practical matter, let’s ask what would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow. Well, the number of legal abortions would certainly go down – to zero, actually. But the actual number of abortions would not go down much at all. It is well-documented that before Rove v. Wade, there were a lot of illegal abortions, which often times permanently maimed or even killed the confused teenage girl having the procedure done. There are of course no statistics on this (that’s why they called them ‘back-alley’ abortions), but we know that they were common. In fact, this was one of the liberal motivations for Roe. If you overturned Roe tomorrow, the number of back-alley abortions would be absolutely astounding, with the additional evil that a girl may be maimed. As Christians, we need to ask ourselves if we want to stop abortions, or stop legal abortions.
So for those of us who are deadly serious about keeping abortions from happening, whether they are legal or illegal, the act of making abortions illegal is only a small part of the solution. After all, a back-alley abortion is still an abortion, and declaring it to be illegal does not change the fact that it happened. The truly important thing is not to simply create laws, but to work for the kind of society in which young women do not want to have abortions. This is the only way to stop back-alley abortions. On this issue, I judge that the liberals are doing much better than the conservatives. I’ll give some specific examples next week.
