The Christian and the SCOTUS Abortion Decision

Over the years I have heard professing Christians excuse their lax stance on abortion or even their vote for pro-abortion candidates by saying that there is nothing that is going to be done about abortion, so their stance or vote does not matter. No change is possible, abortion is fixed in law, so conservatives should "give it up."

This thought pattern became the philosophical underpinning that excused votes for godless candidates who were supposedly less personally objectionable or who had more experience, or were more "statesman-like," or who were more "compassionate," or who supported desirable entitlement programs.

In contrast, we always believed that our stance against abortion and vote against pro-abort candidates does matter to God, even if no change in abortion law seemed possible, so the whole way of lax thinking was flawed from the beginning.

In early May 2022 with the leak of a draft decision by the court that would flip Roe v. Wade, it seemed that something could be done about it. And now that the Supreme Court decision has come out (June 24, 2022), and something has been done about it, the wrongheadedness of those professing Christians is all the more clear. They were wrong that nothing could be done about abortion. For the voter, what could be done was to vote for a pro-life president and senators and state legislators and governors. These men and women could stand for the unborn to give them a voice and provide some level of protection to their lives. They did this through passing state laws, defending those laws in court, appointing pro-life justices, and confirming them to the court.

As an example of the effect that better abortion law can have, note the story from NPR that abortions were reduced from 5,400 in August 2021 to 2,200 in September 2021. This is a reduction of 60%. If all those moms stayed in Texas and did not travel to neighboring states to murder their children, approximately three-thousand two hundred lives were saved that otherwise would have been aborted. This is a lot of lives saved in a single month—more than died in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks (2,996).

If, on the other hand, some of those moms decided to be more careful and use birth control—or demand their men to use birth control—then some pregnancies were avoided. That is OK too, particularly if those potential parents were unwed, because little baby's lives were not murdered.

Beloved, righteousness always makes a difference, even if you think it will not. If you previously thought the way I describe above, please repent.

For those of you who are angry today because a precious right was taken away, recognize this please: God never thought you had a right to kill unborn children. The support for the right in the U.S. Constitution was very weak, because it did not really exist there either. And recognize too that all the SCOTUS decision does is to push the decision back to the people in their states and through their representatives. There is no reason to go berserk about this. In many states there will be little true change. For us Christians, that is a tragedy, because every womb with a baby in it should be a safe space for that baby.