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The Scariest Part of All This Abortion Talk

by Kyle Asmus on January 30, 2019

Last week the state of New York signed into law the most progressive legislation in this country’s history in regards to abortion. Following Governor Coumo’s victory speech, a grenade blew up on all forms of media rocketing political, moral, and ethical shrapnel in every direction.

All my life, I’ve known nothing but Roe v. Wade. That is to say, I can’t imagine an American culture where abortion isn’t accepted at some level.

Accepted, however, is not the same as promoted.

Acceptance and promotion are separate cultural cues that need one another to exist. If an idea is accepted but fails to be promoted over time, it will eventually become antiquated. Think Prohibition in the 1920-30s. If an idea is promoted yet never finds favor in culture, it will remain an outlier and eventually die off when its promoters get tired. Think any famous cult.

Acceptance and promotion are always interacting with one another, hoping for harmony, and when they collide we witness a battle for cultural morality. It’s through this lens that we can interpret all of last week’s abortion talk.

How’d we get to the spot where a baby can be aborted all the way through its due date?

The answer is multi-layered. It’s the moral revolution. It’s secularization. It’s a self-inflicted, blemished Christian witness. It’s so much more. Books are written on this topic alone, and I certainly do not have the space or expertise to parse out all the details. But I do think one explanation lies in the dance between acceptance and promotion.

Pro-abortionists have accomplished both acceptance and promotion in culture because they’ve twisted the language. They know science is not on their side. They know abortion is equivalent to taking an autonomous life. They know they can’t sell murder. So what did they do? They changed the conversation to center around a completely different issue: women’s rights. Abortion is now no longer an issue of infanticide, it’s about women’s equality and the right to choose what’s best for their body.

And of course, that idea is easy to accept and promote. Women have undoubtedly suffered at the hands of the patriarchy since the beginning. There isn’t a single Biblically-informed person who can argue against unilateral equality across gender and race. But, and here’s my point, that’s not what abortion is about.

Abortion is accepted and promoted because we’re not calling sin “sin.” An issue of murder has been spun to become an issue of protecting and celebrating women’s equality. In the process, the Christian ethos has become a caricature of bigotry and self-righteousness whose voice has been quieted to a whisper.

We’re losing the abortion debate because we’ve lost the language.

You know the scariest part? Language is being spun all the time to numb our sensitivity to sin.

High school boys who look at porn? We don’t call it sexual immorality. “Boys will be boys,” after all.

Adultery sounds too severe. How about we call it an “affair?”

Racism? Eh, “Nationalism” rolls of the tongue a little better.

When we lose the ability to call blatant sin “sin” we lose our voice to say anything worthwhile. Biblically speaking, when that happens, we have nothing worth trying to promote anyway.

It shouldn’t surprise us then that pop-culture has made abortion an inherent right for all women. It shouldn’t surprise us that last week’s March For Life rally in Washington D.C. received zero coverage from the majority of mainstream media outlets. It shouldn’t surprise us that nearly 1 million abortive procedures take place in America every year.

Why?

Nobody is talking about murder. Nobody is talking about dismembering babies in the womb. Nobody is talking about what abortion actually is.

We’ve been duped by semantics. We’ve been played by politicians.

The heart of God is grace and mercy and kindness. For any woman who has had an abortion or any man who’s encouraged one, there is hope and healing fully offered in the gospel. No condemnation. No shame. Total freedom.

But we cannot overlook that the heart of God is an overwhelmingly insatiable passion for life: from womb to tomb. We can and should fight for policy and legislative change in the appropriate ways, but it will be for nothing if we don’t reclaim the vernacular surrounding abortion. We must be offended by what offends God.

To care about what God cares about, namely all His born and unborn image-bearers, is not controversial. It’s not taboo. It’s gospel-witness.