Life After Roe: A Brief Commentary on a Cultural Flashpoint.

In the Breach. Episode 4. February 9, 2023.

A few weeks ago, on January 22nd, we unceremoniously marked the fiftieth anniversary of the

odious Roe v. Wade decision, the 1973 Supreme Court case so obviously bent by the liberal

agenda that it surely erased the veneer, if ever there was any, that the judicial branch, and

particularly the high court itself, was above the game of politics. Even no less than that staunch

liberal justice RBG admitted that the Roe ruling, which hinged on a “right” of privacy not found

in the Constitution, was wrongly decided, and she lamented that the so-called right to an abortion

was not fabricated, instead, in the name of equal protection, a legitimate constitutional notion at

least, though not one that should anchor any supposed right to abortion.

Since the ruling in Roe, more than 60 million babies have been murdered inside their mother’s

wombs, where they should have been most safe. In the decades since Roe became the law of the

land, pro-life proponents have battled against an increasingly emboldened counterculture.

Progressive liberals now do not settle for pro-choice; they demand a pro-abortion posture from

society, abortion on demand, and they demand that society pay for it. To be sure, the reversal of

Roe v. Wade last year was not a welcome development to the pro-abortion camp, but it has not

slowed them down much. On the contrary, it has become a rallying point for progressive liberals,

the echoes of which were regrettably heard through the mid-term elections.

Still, by all accounts and by any standard, the USSC decision rendered in Dobbs v. Mississippi is

a landmark case in American jurisprudence and a pivotal moment in the trajectory of our society.

To be sure, the decision is a tremendous victory for those of us who are prolife. We are surely

thankful that God has heard our prayers and has raised up justices who are wise and learned,

faithful to their calling, and courageous enough to correct the miscarriage of justice caused by

the Court’s predecessors in the Roe decision, an opinion so desperately biased toward an

embarrassingly obvious agenda that one has to wonder how it took so long to correct. Yet, for all

the clarity rendered by the Dobbs opinion, there remain a number of questions and no small

amount of confusion.

First, to be clear what the Dobbs decision means, the overturning of Roe v. Wade does not, in

and of itself, outlaw abortion; it simply returns the issue of abortion to the states, where it started

and, frankly, where it should have remained, at least from a constitutional standpoint. The Roe

opinion, authored by then-Chief Justice Harry Blackmun, fabricated a supposed right to privacy

from the Fourteenth Amendment, a twist so ironic it would be laughable if it were not so tragic,

since the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the personal right to fundamental fairness. The

hallmark of a notion of fundamental fairness is that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty

without due process, yet no fetus was ever given a right to notice or a hearing before his or her

life was, ahem, deprived.

Yet Roe ruled for nearly half a century. And in that time a lot of minds were changed, shaped by

the culture around them. You see, when Roe was rendered, the states were few to none that

would have legislatively condoned abortion, and there was no federal legislative proposal to

advance any would-be right to abortion because people would not tolerate it. No president from

either of the major parties would have dared sign off on any such legislation at the time even if it

had made it to the president’s desk. But a society has a way of taking its cues from its

government. Those who do not think too deeply about a given issue, or who have no particular

belief system in which to anchor their thoughts, are susceptible to all kinds of currents, be they

found in their own home, society at large, pop culture, their government, or elsewhere. The Bible

speaks of the danger of being tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of

doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. (Ephesians 4:14) Those behind

the abortion movement have surely employed deceitful schemes, masquerading the issue as one

of women’s rights, healthcare, privacy, and an oppressive patriarchal scheme, meanwhile

creating a culture of death in our society that infects the minds of the unwary.

Many have fallen prey to the argument that the strictures of fairness and freedom dictate that a

woman has the RIGHT to choose. It’s a lie easy enough to buy, perhaps especially for men.

Women have available the legitimate complaint that men do not have to suffer the physical

demands of pregnancy; recognizing as much, men often take themselves out of the argument,

buying the “Since it’s not your body, you don’t have the right to speak on this” line of attack.

The shirking of our duty to stand up and be heard on such an important issue as life—and the

lives of children at that—is to our chagrin. Men should stand up and answer, “It’s not YOUR

body either; it’s the child’s body!” the “it” being the body subject to the brutality in question.

Certainly, men recognize that a child’s body within that of a woman—or as progressive liberals

would now insist, a pregnant person—affects the body of the latter, and we recognize, too, that

not all of those effects are desirable or comfortable. But such truth does not negate the fact that a

child’s life is nonetheless at stake, and while we are at it, let’s recognize, to state the obvious, in

the economy of life and well-being, the effects of abortion to the body of the fetus are more bad

than the relief of suddenly not being pregnant to a woman’s body is good. In other words, the

fetus aborted suffers a greater harm than the mother relieved; the negative outweighs any

possible positive.

This whole idea of a woman’s right was born out of a notion of equality and picked up steam in

the early 60s with the advent of birth control. When the pill burst onto the scene, the gift of sex

was suddenly—and conveniently—separated from the gift of procreation, and now women could

engage in casual sex without the life-long consequences that a pregnancy would bring, most of

the time. But what about those instances when the efficacy of birth control broke down? Well,

abortion became the natural next step toward erasing the unwanted commitment, the unintended

consequences. Ah, the “right to choose” came to mean something entirely other than choosing to

say yes or no, to have sex or not; it suddenly meant, at least most of the time, the right to choose

whether to honor the consummation of a consensual sexual union.

But the “my body, my right” logic breaks down very quickly in the light of truth because, first

and foremost, the body murdered during the abortion procedure is not that of the mother, but

obviously it is that of the child in the mother’s womb. Of course, pro-abortionists contend that

the fetus is not vested with personhood, at least not until a certain point. But recognizing

personhood at any point after conception—or fertilization of the egg, actually—is simply

arbitrary. Once the egg is fertilized, we have a person comprised of its mother’s and its father’s

DNA. Moreover, the person is possessed of a soul. David wrote in Psalm 139:13-16:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise

you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows

it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in

your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet

there was none of them.

David is here writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so we can count on these words as

authoritative. While that is enough for any Christian, you could take your appeal to science and

come back with the same conclusion, that a child is a child at conception. Plenty of doctors will

tell you the same thing: attempting to label any point after fertilization as the point of personhood

is arbitrary. Of course, progressive liberals don’t really care when you recognize the baby as,

well, a baby; they demand abortion right up to birth, and some openly advocate for infanticide.

Only a generation ago the average American could not imagine the agenda progressive liberals

commonly lust after today.

Calling abortion healthcare is a loathsome euphemism we should push back against. Words

matter, and like the Outlaw Josey Wales said, “What’s wrong with ‘em is wrong all through

them.” Just as they crave a perverted idea of privacy or freedom at the expense of a child’s life,

so they seek to pervert the idea of healthcare. While a pregnancy obviously affects a woman’s

body, the development of a baby within its mother’s womb cannot be fairly called the woman’s

healthcare; it’s rather a condition, and one the vast majority of the time was voluntarily risked

when she decided to engage in intercourse. Certainly, there are exceptions to that general

rule—exceptions we must be sympathetic to—but that does not change the fact that abortion, as

it relates to true healthcare, is primarily an issue for the fetus. Again, the health of the fetus

is—shall we say?—more dramatically affected by the abortion than is that of the mother by

either the abortion or the pregnancy. Progressive liberals couch the issue of abortion in terms of

healthcare for a couple of reasons: first, in an effort to make it more palatable to the masses,

more normal, less offensive, less shocking—in other words, more of what it is not and less of

what it actually is. Also, though, they pitch it as healthcare to grease the wheels for their

argument that it should be considered a right, and one for which the government should pay to

provide on demand. We must recognize that any fair discussion of healthcare in the context of the abortion issue must start with the health of the baby in the womb.

The tension between the two sides in this debate will never be resolved on this side of glory,

because there will always be those who are deluded by the secularist worldview—you know, the

one so enamored with the culture of death—abortion, euthanasia, the right to die, zombies,

Halloween, horror movies, and the walking dead, while there will also always be the church, and

even as the secularists follow the one whom the Bible refers to as the prince of the power of the

air, the church follows the one who declared himself to be the truth. While the prince of the

power of the air, make no mistake, is busy sowing seeds of confusion, as evidenced not only by

the killing of babies in the name of convenience, but as obviously in the debate over unnatural

sexuality and gender identity crises, the Truth, even Jesus Christ, the very word of God, is the

same yesterday, today, and forever. The immutable God does not change; his word does not

change; truth does not change; and there is great security to be found here for the Christian. Yes,

the church will stand on the truth, and Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against his

church. So the tension will continue until he returns.

So why do we fight? If we know the tension will persist, why bother with the fight, especially

when it appears the sexual revolution has already occurred? We fight against it as a faithful

testimony of God’s creation order and because we recognize that every person is an image bearer

of God and therefore has dignity and is owed our respect. “Hate the sin but love the sinner” is an

adage roundly impugned by secularists; in their own cynicism, they consider it disingenuous,

probably because they hate us and think we, being no better, must hate them in return; and

probably, too, because they cannot see themselves apart from their sin and think neither can we

separate the two.

It’s a funny thing: in today’s world, people have begun to describe themselves according to their

sexuality or perceived gender, as if their entire identity is bound up in their perception of

themselves and, not only this, but their perception of themselves revolves entirely around their

sexuality or gender. At no other time in history has man—or woman or whatever—seen himself

as such. This transition in the way popular society perceives is a testament to the devil’s scheme

to sow seeds of confusion; and that so many people’s perception hinges not only on this idea, but

that they have the wrong idea of their gender, which is to say that their perception does not

match their biological gender, well, that tells a story of confusion in terms all too poignant.

We can only hope they might come out of confusion as we lovingly share with them the truth,

that their identity is not confined to their sexuality or their gender; rather these are mere elements

of their identity, and they may be not only set free from the false narrative of identity perpetuated

by pop culture, but even rightly ordered if they will but find their identity in the Christ who

reconciles sinful man to the holy God with whom they so long, knowingly or not, for peace.

Oh, the number of people who identify as a gender other than their birth gender is still

infinitesimal, but it’s growing. Against all odds, we might say, since a generation ago we could

not have believed that any such nonsense could catch on, it is growing. The improbability of it

all, so unnatural, is a testament to the supernatural work that fuels it. Sometimes I wonder what,

if anything, man could not be talked into doing to hurt himself; as contrary to nature as are these

aberrations, the trends testify that pop culture is confused indeed. But confusion is what occurs

when the masses are unhinged from the truth, when they embrace the idea that there is no truth,

no objective standard by which to draw the lines.

When I was a little boy, I witnessed some other boys who had found a bird’s nest blown over at a

ballpark. The boys picked up the few baby birds that had fallen from the nest, naked and blind

and mouths agape, and they slung them, one by one, against the concrete blocks of a bathroom

wall. I knew that was wrong; nobody had to tell me that. As much as those boys reveled in that

despicable, craven act, they seemed possessed of no idea it was wrong, but I have to think deep

down they did know, because the wrongness of it was just so obvious. I have to think many in

our society, notwithstanding arms open wide for all manners of perversions, even to the point of

celebration, nonetheless know it is wrong – wrong to smear God’s creation order, wrong to

perpetuate confusion, wrong to take a baby’s life in the womb; at least, I sure hope they still do. I

hope their consciences have not been seared (though what they celebrate sure makes one wonder

what they would not accept). And I hope—and pray—that at least some of them will come to see

the light of truth and embrace it, for their souls’ sakes, for the sake of a sane society, and for the

honor of Christ.

As an American jurist, as a conservative, as a Christian, I am glad and thankful for the Dobbs

decision and its overturning of Roe v. Wade, even as I lament the proliferation of the enemy’s

lines of attack through the democratic-led Congress and so many states’ legislatures. Still, Justice

Alito got it right in Dobbs, and that’s worth something; and, too, perhaps some of our citizens in

the middle who maybe have not given the issue much thought till now, might just see that at least

there remain some semblances of moral sanity in our society. Perhaps the truth might yet appeal

to something inside them and compel them to likewise take a stand for the kind of truth that, rare

as it sometimes seems, should be obvious even to a child.

For joining me IN THE BREACH, where we always fight the good fight, and with only the best

of intentions, I thank you. If you would like to reach out with a question or comment, email me

at Curtis@thehittfirm.com. Until we meet again – and especially then – grace and peace to you,

dear friend.