Abortion opponents should celebrate — and repent
For the first time since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, the pro-life movement in America has achieved a watershed constitutional victory. States now have the opportunity to restrict abortions or ban them altogether.
Pro-lifers like me can celebrate, but we should also acknowledge what we’ve done wrong to get here. We have too often ignored a nuanced moral framing of this now-realized victory and the path taken to get here. The type of analysis that historians make of morally complex events can help us on this issue, and we need this help. A proper understanding of the pro-life movement’s history is necessary if we’re going to keep fighting for every life to be valued and help to clean up the rubble we’ve left getting here.
Even the best of ends don’t justify unjust means. Various religions and ethical systems hold firmly to this idea. Christians read this in the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, and just-war theorists emphasize jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum. Yet in the heat of a political battle, or after its victorious end, it’s very tempting to retroactively justify everything that one’s side is doing or did in order to get what it wants. “After all,” we tell ourselves, “we’re on the right side, and isn’t that all that matters?”
History shows us that it’s not that simple. Legal emancipation of slaves in 1865 and America’s victory over fascist powers in 1945, both among this country’s finest moments, came after wars in which the U.S. military committed multiple atrocities, primarily the deliberate targeting of civilian populations for death and carnage. The firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Even recognizing the full gravity of this, most would agree that the U.S. military was on the morally right side of those wars and was comprised of men and women who served and sacrificed with dignity and honor. Historians must grapple with these complex and often conflicting realities and communicate them to others — starting conversations and informing debates on how we collectively remember these events, what we should learn from them and how we teach them to our children.
The pro-life movement, much like abolitionist and anti-fascist crusades, pursues the highest of goals: humanizing and saving the lives of a dehumanized and endangered population. Yet much like the American military in the Civil War and
World War II, it has repeatedly used the justness of its cause to attempt to justify the unconscionable. In the last few years alone, many in the movement have used the vision of an antiRoe Supreme Court to excuse and even celebrate the unholy litany of lies, degradations and cruelties that were foundational to the candidacy and presidency of a predatory madman. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, in October 2016 cited abortion as a primary reason for his and other evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump even in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape that included Trump’s admission of sexually predatory behavior. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., called Trump a “sexual predator” in 2016 but openly endorsed him in 2020, despite maintaining the same moral assessment, because of the stances of the two political parties on abortion and other social issues.
The pro-life movement’s zeal also led many to dismiss, unexamined, an attempted-rape accusation against Brett Kavanaugh and to slander Christine Blasey Ford, jettisoning all standards of decency in the process and needlessly retraumatizing countless Americans who have experienced sexual harassment and assault. President of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Franklin Graham, who is also a vocal pro-life political activist, gave an interview to the Christian Broadcasting Network two days after the Washington Post published Ford’s accusation. In it, he devoted his time, not to refuting the allegation, but to asserting that it was “not relevant” even if true, since it simply involved “two teenagers” and occurred close to 40 years ago. Graham also said that the whole situation was simply “a tactic by the left to try to keep conservatives off the bench.”
Even overturning Roe and saving the lives of countless pre-born children will not vindicate a single one of these evil tactics used to accomplish it.
Then how should those of us who are pro-life view the current situation, and how should we remember it looking back?
Just as American atrocities during wartime didn’t change what the right outcome would be, even if they hastened victory, neither do they do so here. Roe was a horrendously bad ruling that has sanctioned the deaths of untold innocents and formed a blood-red stain on our nation’s integrity for half a century. But we must take a lesson from historians and look back with a nuancing eye. We should celebrate the patience and sacrifice of the countless activists and donors who spoke out for the pre-born and sacrificially served to meet the needs of mothers and children. But we should also repent for and attempt to repair the damage from the times when our fight for dignity and justice for all was marked by tactics of dishonesty and dehumanization.
Many in the movement justified these tactics by arguing they would bring this conflict to a speedier end. As it turns out, they did, but this fact is irrelevant. Such tactics are antithetical to the fight for human life and dignity, and they never should have had a place in it. This is true even if that meant opening ourselves up to more political setbacks, such as fully investigating accusations of disqualifying behavior against preferred judicial appointments, waiting for political representatives who dignify life at all stages for all people and refusing to align ourselves with groups or people who, through words and actions, repudiate such ideas of universal dignity. Going forward, we must value principles over results and exorcise ourselves of the notion that victory must be won at any cost. Such a notion isn’t political realism; it’s a Faustian bargain.