The Emerging Pro-Life Majority

Is it now cool to be pro-life?

Maybe. But protecting the unborn and their mothers from abortion is gaining attention in unusual quarters.

“Science is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost,” wrote Emma Green in The Atlantic. Green’s article says research shows the unborn child is not a mass of cells but a developing baby.

“Scientific progress is remaking the debate around abortion,” Green reports. “New technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status.”

The article quotes two of my former colleagues at the Family Research Council, biologist Dr. David Prentice, and March for Life President Jeanne Mancini. Green even notes the frustration of scientists who, when their research shows the humanity of the unborn child, find their integrity or ability questioned.

If The Atlantic can publish a fair and honest piece like this, quoting two leading pro-life advocates, is the uber-pro-abortion New York Times far behind? I’m not holding my breath, but miracles do happen. In fact, they happen every time a tiny boy or girl is conceived.

At this year’s Grammy Awards, singer Joy Villa “arrived … with a pro-life purse and a fetus-in-utero hand-painted onto her ballgown’s skirt.”

“A pro-life dress with hand-painted fetus kicks off political fashion on the Grammys red carpet,” blared USA Today in what has to be one of the longest headlines ever written. Its author is probably used to celebrities being lock-step liberals. I hope he’s by now recovered.

It’s Hard to Ignore a Heartbeat

In a survey published last year by Quinnipiac University, 49 percent of people ages 18-34 said that abortions after 20 weeks should be made illegal. This exceeds slightly the 46 percent anti-late term abortion average of all ages, parties, etc. asked about the issue. Of those under 35, only 43 percent support allowing late-term abortions.

The evidence of one’s eyes are compelling. C-SPAN’s coverage of this year’s March for Life on the National Mall shows not only a huge crowd but one filled with young people.

A hunch: Many of these youths have experienced the devastation of broken families in their own homes. Treated badly by selfish moms and dads, they are sensitive to the fact that abortion ends a life.

Then there are ultrasounds. As Washington, D.C. attorney Howard Slugh writes, “Ultrasounds, and other improving technologies, can help the pro-life movement persuade previously unreachable individuals. Despite their public denials, pro-choice organizations understand this, and in fact have conceded the point in lawsuits challenging mandatory ultrasound laws.”

Requiring women to watch ultrasounds before deciding to abort their babies is gaining ground. Just in the past couple of months, state legislatures in Kentucky, Tennessee and Minnesota have begun debating the issue.

Among other things, ultrasounds confirm the heartbeats of developing little ones. No wonder that nearly 80 percent of womenwho look at ultrasound images of the babies in their womb choose to carry them to term.

We Are Image-bearers, Not Slaves to Desire

Abortion on demand is merely a logical extension of the illogic of abortion itself. Grant that the unborn child has any value apart from her mother, any claim to personhood whatever. Do so, and advocates of abortion-on-demand have to agree with some kinds of restrictions. If they do, they must concede that the medical evidence shows that from conception, the embryo is a newly created person. A person — not a potential person, but a complete if tiny one.

Admit that, and the abortion argument collapses like a house of cards.

To argue that women should have the legal right to abort their children is to accept the notion that pre-marital sexual abstinence is impossible. To make this claim is to reduce image-bearers of God to slaves of sexual desire.

I refuse to do this. We can all say “no” to ourselves and, until marriage, find ways to keep doing so out of faithfulness to the Creator of marriage and the Author of all life.

When The Atlantic publishes a piece favorable to the pro-live movement, one must study the sky to see if stars are beginning to fall. Even if they are not, hearts are beginning to change — more and more of them. This means a renewal of life and all the hope that goes with it for our country.
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