(LifeSiteNews) — “The lazy man will not plow because of the cold. He will beg during harvest and have nothing.” (Proverbs 20:4)
On election night three states voted to reaffirm abortion as a fundamental human right, Maryland and Ohio by way of constitutional amendment and Virginia by electing to power a party dedicated to protecting child killing at any cost. No one is surprised about Maryland, but quite a few pro-life people seem shocked and disappointed by the other two. How could this happen? Isn’t Roe v. Wade in the dustbin of history? Shouldn’t the momentum be going in our direction?
Personally, I am not surprised at all. What occurred last week was a natural result of the pro-life movement’s myopic focus on political power and its neglect of cultural transformation. We’ve tried to change law without simultaneously changing hearts, seeking a harvest without first sowing seeds.
The Dobbs v. Jackson decision of 2022 was the culmination of half a century of political wrangling by leading pro-life organizations with the rest of us asked to do nothing more strenuous than voting for whom they endorse and making the occasional donation. Don’t get me wrong. Dobbs was a victory and has led to the outlawing of clinical abortion in over a dozen states. But this victory did not come because we convinced more people to reject abortion. Rather, it just so happens that pro-life opinions roughly correspond to Republican votes. And we have been blessed with enough Republican presidents and senators at exactly the right moment to secure a pro-life majority on the nine-person oligarchy that is the Supreme Court. So while the most pro-life states now feel comfortable closing abortion mills, the rest of the country is opening new ones.
This mainstream strategy has had its critics. A growing number of anti-abortion leaders now point out that the court had no authority to set national policy in the first place and that state and local governments should have just ignored those guidelines and abolished abortion in their jurisdictions. This would have been very courageous, and I commend any local magistrate who now attempts to “interpose” against pro-abortion state policy. But interposition has its limits. We are not likely to find much support for it in those regions where most abortions take place.
What both these strategies seem to assume is that mere law is enough to eradicate child killing. Nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, laws are useless if not enforced, and the zeal of our police and criminal justice systems to arrest and prosecute rigorously and consistently abortion providers for doing something tolerated everywhere until last year is untested. Furthermore, any law, no matter how vigorously enforced, will not succeed in stopping the sale and distribution of abortion causing drugs nationwide.
It has long been possible for a woman to purchase abortion causing drugs online and have them shipped to her home, and this practice has increased dramatically since some states have banned clinical abortion. These drugs can kill an embryo until the 12th week of pregnancy, which is the period in which most American abortions happen anyway. I think we have every reason to believe that the drug manufacturers are hard at work to extend this death-window with new formulas that can kill even later in gestation.
How is this latest incarnation of the abortion industry to be thwarted? How are we to prevent people from killing their children when there is no clinic to protest, no sidewalk on which to counsel, and no abortionist to arrest? We can safely assume that pro-abortion states are not going to prohibit anyone from shipping pro-abortion drugs to pro-life states. Currently the mainstream pro-life movement seems to believe that the key is to convince Congress to ban the transportation of these drugs into states where they are illegal. Leaving aside the immense difficulty involved in passing such a law, I would imagine its enforcement would be at least as tenuous as our nation’s enforcement of its immigration policies, waxing and waning with each presidential election.
The personhood and “abolitionist” wing of our movement has a different strategy. They believe that the heart of the matter is that no state currently prosecutes mothers for killing their unborn children. Indeed, each and every state abortion ban specifically grants them legal immunity (essentially a license to kill). Change this and most women won’t dare do the deed.
Well, maybe. If there was a way to know she did it. If it could somehow be proved that she was pregnant and somehow procured drugs or services that were used to destroy the life within her. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how easy or difficult it would be to gather such evidence.
Personally, I support both the banning of abortion causing drugs and the prosecution of anyone involved in the murder of a preborn child. But I don’t think either of these solutions will have much effect. It is already way too easy for someone to obtain a chemical abortion illegally. The internet, the U.S. Post office and the various private couriers make the sale and transportation between states and nations virtually undetectable. Even if we succeed in instituting a nationwide ban on abortion causing drugs and enforce strict penalties on manufacturer, distributor, and buyer alike, there still remains the enormous problem of finding these people. One need only look at our nation’s success in waging the war on drugs to see how likely we are to succeed.
Cultural transformation is absolutely necessary. So long as half the nation remains supportive or simply indifferent about abortion, it is hard for me to see how we are ever going to abolish it in those states where it is popular or manage the illegal interstate trade of abortion causing drugs.
And this is exactly where the movement to end abortion is weakest! In a piece I published in Revelations 3:2 Project on January 17th, 2022, titled “The Pro Life Movement is Tiny” I wrote how the majority of anti-abortion activity is concentrated in just two areas, pregnancy help centers and politics. Barely anybody is engaged in telling America that abortion is wrong. This is probably why public opinion on abortion has barely shifted in 50 years.
We must convince Americans to reject abortion, not just in theory but in practice. They must become disgusted at it and disgusted at those who practice it. When a mother in a “crisis pregnancy” ruminates on her options, abortion must not be one of them. She should feel shame for even having considered it. If a person learns that their friend has obtained an abortion, they must feel morally repulsed and inclined to report said crime to the police. We must make abortion unthinkable again.
How? Well, I am not confident that traditional media and social media are sufficient. Both are bastions of pro-abortion thought and increasingly both have become echo chambers. That is to say, we don’t watch their news or follow their online influencers, and they don’t watch or follow ours. But the public square remains open for now. Groups like Created Equal, Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, and the Anti-Choice Project have long used face-to-face conversations, victim image displays, and informational literature to confront real people and produce real heart-change in hundreds of thousands. Because such work is time consuming and uncomfortable, very few anti-abortion advocates do it. But what if there were more? What if every one of us spent a few hours each week bringing our message to every college campus, high school, doorstep and public street in America? What if no one could go anywhere without somehow being confronted with the truth?
I also suggest that as important as conversation may be, demonstrating our love for the preborn and our intolerance of “choice” is even more critical. Thus Rescue (risking arrest at abortion facilities) is essential for a speedy end to the killing. I have written elsewhere on this topic. Suffice to say we need more people willing to sacrifice for the lives of preborn kids if we ever hope to convince America that those kids are valuable.
Some will argue that the law itself is a teacher, and that once abortion is sufficiently condemned on paper most people will refrain from doing it. I agree that the law is a teacher. People like me who are inclined to keep rules will generally obey even silly laws. But I highly suspect most people aren’t like me. Think about how many drivers routinely break the speed limit, how many pedestrians jaywalk, and how common shoplifting is. Where intense social stigma is lacking, laws have little effect.
Only the truly ignorant thought the Dobbs decision meant the end of abortion. But I suspect most pro-lifers thought it would be a sort of tipping point which would make the road ahead easier and the outcome inevitable. Instead, support for abortion in all but the most conservative of states seems to have galvanized. And wherever possible, pro-death advocates have successfully entrenched their diabolical views into state policy. The abortion industry (who saw this coming at least as early as 2015) have deftly shifted focus to chemical abortion and are now successfully finding ways to circumvent laws and deliver abortion causing drugs to women everywhere.
If you do not sow you shall not reap. This was true in 1973 and remains true today. I implore you, begin sowing in earnest.
READ: Jailed pro-lifer Jonathan Darnel doubles down on support for rescue movement: ‘Selfless sacrifice’
Jonathan (Nathan) Darnel is an anti-abortion advocate currently incarcerated for alleged violation of the pro-abortion FACE Act. His websites are GetSeriousChurch.com and SmashTheFACE.life.