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I recall a conversation almost two decades ago with a public school administrator who was sure I’d grow out of my opposition to abortion.
I was a reporter in my first newspaper gig, fresh out of college. A few of us were making small talk outside the school administration building in Shawnee, Okla., waiting on the local school board to finish its closed-door deliberations. Abortion came up in the discussion, and I explained my right-to-life views, to which the transplanted Northerner responded, “Oh, you must be a good Catholic boy.”
Nope, I explained, a Baptist.
“Well, trust me, one of these days your views will change,” he told me in a polite smugness.
He didn’t believe what I believe, apparently?that a loving, sovereign God shapes and molds us by his providential hand from the moment of conception. I’m more convinced than ever that every human embryo, armed with a complete genetic blueprint for a uniquely tailored human being, has sanctity from conception.
If that polite but misguided man were having the same conversation today with a young reporter, I doubt he’d be as eager to assert that the reporter would someday change his mind or assume such a person was a Roman Catholic.
Thankfully, times are changing, as are attitudes.
(Thankfully, also, Southern Baptists are on record as having changed since the 1970s and early 1980s, when the SBC’s Christian Life Commission spoke?profoundly out of step with its constituents?from a pro-choice position, calling absolute opposition to legal abortion “morally unacceptable.”)
More than anything, technology has made it difficult to defend the legal killing of babies in the womb, no matter how difficult the circumstance a young mother finds herself in.
Here’s what we know:
?At around 22 days after conception, the heart begins to beat with the child’s own blood.
?After three weeks the spinal column and nervous system are developing and the liver, kidneys and intestines begin to take shape.
?After five weeks the eyes, legs, and hands begin to develop. Many women don’t even know they are pregnant at this point.
?By the eighth week, the child is kicking and making swimming motions, every organ is in place and bones are beginning to replace cartilage.
?At 20 weeks the baby can recognize its mother’s voice, some researchers believe.
Some of this knowledge of fetal development is not new, but thanks to advancing medical technology, the idea of a fetus as mere tissue is harder to sell than it was when the Roe v. Wade decision nationalized legal abortion 35 years ago this month.
Thanks to faithful crisis pregnancy ministries from Maine to California, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of babies have seen life instead of death. As loving grandmas and stay-at-home moms, armed with sonograms and prayers, lend a caring ear to mothers in distress, lives are being changed daily for time and for eternity.
On another front, the apparent shortage of young feminist activists demanding so-called “reproductive rights” is cause for rejoicing for pro-lifers and cause for concern for the abortion lobby.
For example, Glamour magazine in 2005 lamented a “mysterious disappearance of young pro-choice women” while responding to a 2003 CBS/New York Times poll that found only 35 percent of women 18-29 believed “abortion should be available to anyone who wants it.”?a 15 percentage-point drop over a decade.
And statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute show the number of abortions performed annually has been dropping?albeit slightly. In a Guttmacher study released Jan. 17, there were 1.21 million abortions reported in 2005?the lowest total in three decades and down from 1.6 million abortions in 1990. The CDC reported a similar finding in its 2004 total.
The stigma associated with abortion has heightened since Roe v. Wade as well, with reports of decreasing numbers of medical school students willing to learn abortion procedures.
Even in the more liberal United Kingdom, a report on the website of medicalnewstoday.com noted the increasing number of students there unwilling to perform abortions.
One physician desperately griped, “It may not be the most glamorous medical specialty on the face of it, compared to stem cell research or neurosurgery, but it is seen as heroic work by the women that it helps.”
A 20-year veteran of abortion practice added, “Becoming pregnant is either the best, or the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”
Really? The worst thing that can happen?
Pregnancy is a lot of things, and it can be traumatic for a single woman who is ill prepared to raise a child, as well as everyone involved. But there are numerous things more gut wrenching in life than a pregnancy?even in the worst of circumstances. In fact, when loving, caring Christian believers enter the picture, an unplanned pregnancy can become a redemptive event.
What the two doctors in Britain are afraid to admit is that for millions of post-Baby Boomer young people, abortion is a nauseating thought, even for those who consider themselves pro-choice.
Technology that allows today’s youths to peer into the womb?not to mention the numbing absence of more than 40 million of their peers?have made it so.
It might also be that the kids of the divorce generation are turned off by the me-first attitudes of their parents, many of whom sacrificed their children and families on the altar of self-fulfillment.
What could be more rebellious to that way of thinking for the generation that endured no-fault divorce and abortion on demand than to embrace a nurturing, caring mentality for their offspring?
Much work remains, but the wall is crumbling. Keep pushing on it.
