Abortion is now a political liability for Republicans. The laws will not hold...but love still could.

A popular film came out in the late 80’s starring Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Sean Connery called The Untouchables (1987). It’s a loose historical fiction set in the 1930’s about how the Treasury Department brought down Al Capone and his organized crime syndicate. There’s this often-quoted line from the movie where one of Capone’s henchmen is sent to kill Sean Connery’s character, streetwise beat cop, Jim Malone. The assassin finds out where Connery lives, sneaks into his apartment and stalks Connery with a knife in hand.  When Connery is about to be stabbed in the back, he suddenly spins to face the attacker holding a shotgun. He then says to his Italian assailant, “Isn’t that just like a Wop. Brings a knife to a gunfight.” (Apologies to all my Italian friends for the ethnic slur! You can watch the clip here. )

I reference that line because, with a slight twist to the wording, it’s an appropriate metaphor for how God’s people have been fighting the abortion crisis with the wrong weapon. We brought the law to a love fight

The church, for decades now, has attempted to tackle the abortion issue by utilizing the same legislative strategy the “Abolitionists” used in Great Britain in the late 1700s-Early 1800’s. There are striking similarities between slavery and abortion. The obvious ones are the issues of personhood and individual human rights. British Parliamentarian, William Wilberforce and his influential group of Christian friends, the “Clapham Group,” knew “It is on the feeling of the nation we must rely, so let the flame be fanned” (-Wilberforce). They believed in order to change the laws of the land they must first educate and turn the hearts of the nation to their cause and so they did. (Incidentally, it took Wilberforce 44 years from the time he first decried the evils of slavery before parliament to the day emancipation was declared throughout the kingdom. Wilberforce would die 4 days later.)

The pro-life movement has done much in this regard, educating and fanning into flame the feelings of the nation. They’ve appealed to the American sense of defending those who cannot defend themselves. They’ve done a remarkable job exposing our nation to what abortion is, the procedures utilized, the profiteering and how it harms the long-term mental/emotional health of the mother. They’ve even been able to see individual states pass laws protecting the unborn and finally, almost 50 years later, they were able to overturn the ill-conceived, federal Roe v. Wade decision sending the issue back to the states. 

But it’s all about to go away. Why? Because there is one major difference between the issue of slavery and abortion that will always make legislative gains tenuous at best.

Mom > Baby? Baby > Mom?

 It doesn’t take long to see why the issue of abortion is more complicated than any other human rights issue. Unlike slavery where only one person’s sovereign rights were in question, in abortion you must violate the sovereignty of one to uphold the sovereignty of the other. That’s the message people on the other side of the issue are just as passionate about and have also done a remarkable job proclaiming. Their cry is, “Does a woman not have sovereignty over her own body?!”  Dueling sovereignties is what makes this issue so unique and why fighting it in the legislature has been a continuous back and forth.  To complicate it even more, because history doesn’t tell a favorable story of women’s rights, any hint of possible retractions or reductions doesn’t play well and perhaps more importantly for our discussion today…no longer wins elections. 

Why the Grand Old Party (GOP) / Republicans are abandoning the fight.

There was a time when being a Republican meant you were staunchly Pro-Life. In fact, for the last 30 years this one issue was so important to pro-life voters it was the main, if not the only criteria for whom they would vote. Voters simply couldn’t bring themselves to cast a ballot for someone who thought it was morally acceptable and/or should be legally permissible to allow a woman to take the life of their child. Knowing how passionate people were about this issue, Republican candidates wisely took advantage of this righteous indignation (not to imply they didn’t believe it themselves) and loudly and widely proclaimed they were Pro-Life. But now, the Pro-Life / GOP marriage is coming to an end.

During the first week of September there was a closed-door meeting of Republicans led by the “Senate Leadership Super PAC” to discuss future messaging/wording around abortion. They held this meeting because as one Republican national strategist stated in this article by NBC, “The issue of abortion was problematic for Republicans last cycle, so it’s no surprise [the Senate Leadership Fund] is polling public perception of the issue. It’s the smart thing to do.” 

What the strategist is referring to is last year’s November mid-term elections where every ballot across the U.S. that included a pro-CHOICE referendum succeeded whereas every pro-LIFE referendum failed. This even included traditional Red/Republican leaning states such as Kentucky and Montana.  More recently, this past month in Ohio, a referendum failed that would’ve made it harder to pass a proposed state constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. What these results show us is the overturning of Roe has awakened left leaning/Pro-choice voters and they’re coming out in droves to the polls to fight. It means all pro-life legislative gains are now in jeopardy, even in Red/Republican leaning states.

So how is the Republican party responding to these defeats? Are they coming out swinging? Are they assuring us of their fidelity to protect the unborn? No. Realizing that their pro-life position will no longer win them elections but is now in fact a liability, Republican leadership, including presumptive Presidential nominee Donald Trump are now saying heartbeat bills (six week abortion bans) are “a terrible mistake.” "They're too harsh." He and others are now pushing for a federal abortion ban that is well into the second trimester at 15 weeks. (See also Lindsay Graham and even ultra-pro-life conservative Mike Pence.)  It's a sneaky, cowardly way to back out of the fight.

Oh, how we’ve fallen. A 15 week federal abortion ban is a far cry from what the GOP used to push for. Nick Cotaggio writes in the following article, “In 2016, the official Republican Party Platform called for a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clarifying that unborn children are protected under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, a measure that would effectively ban abortion nationwide. Republican politicians have for decades spoken of abortion in the starkest moral terms, some even comparing it to the abomination of slavery. Now here we are in 2023 and the “pro-life” position among party leaders and some influential activists is to pass federal legislation to ban the practice after 15 weeks—which would permit all but 6 percent of abortions.”

Now when you compare 15 weeks to the view that many Democrats hold to, 15 weeks sounds pretty good. However, what most Jesus followers need to know is that a 15 week ban would allow for nearly the same number of abortions annually that were happening when Roe was in place. In other words, 90% of the 800,000-900,000+* abortions that used to take place under Roe, would take place once again. *(Accurate numbers, likely higher, if we’re including, and we should, the unregulated usage of abortion pills.)

Essentially, we’re back to where we started.

Is this really happening? Is this really our new, acceptable standard? Surely, Republicans are aware of these numbers.

Who can we trust now? Even the Pro-Life watchdog Susan B Anthony List which used to hold our lawmakers accountable to a pro-life voting record, are abandoning ship. They themselves are now ok with a 15 week federal abortion ban. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, slammed Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis for not getting on board with this awful compromise. This is not surprising given a face to face conversation I had with one of their leaders last year. She made it clear they were not willing to fight for "personhood" for the unborn and were willing to be ok with abortions stemming from rape and incest. The problem is these "deals" set precedents and once you head down that slippery slope, they've got you where they want you and it gets deadly really fast. 

We simply cannot trust politicians who seem to love their position and power more than life itself. And we cannot trust political action groups who measure “wins” apart from objective criteria such as God’s uncompromising word. But can we really blame these groups? The hard truth is, they can’t make this problem go away because laws do not burrow their roots in the good soil of truth, justice and morality. Laws are planted in the shallow, rocky, compromising nature of politics and elections. In fact, if we could get a politician to speak candidly to us, I'm sure they would say, you're asking me to do the impossible. What you're asking of me is your job!"

This should've never been about the law but about the love.

It was never going to be enough to just pass laws. I mean, it would be easier right? Just make laws that force everyone to fall in line. Let's be honest, that's why we chose this path. But working backwards logically for a moment,…we do realize that laws are passed by elected officials, right? And those elected officials are elected by the people, right? We do realize those people elect officials that most closely represent their views, right? You see where I’m going? If we want the laws in the U.S. to reflect our traditional, Judeo-Christian values we must have an electorate that wants those kinds of laws. To have an electorate that want those kinds of laws means they must first have their hearts and minds captivated by the gospel. Bottomline, moral laws only hold if you have a moral electorate. They go hand in hand.

This is where the church seems to be going in the wrong direction. We're focusing on the wrong things. We’re no longer the influential majority because we've stopped doing the things that made us the culture changing force we once were. We’re losing ground. The decline of our culture bears witness to it. We may still be the most powerful, influential country, with the most economically blessed “Christian” populous the world has ever seen but, we’re embarrassingly “under-sent” locally and globally. If the church were responding to this crisis in the manner Jesus would have us, if we didn't outsource the work of the ministry to every nonprofit, politician and Super PAC under the sun, if we pursued the good works Jesus has for each of us and thereby pursued the poor, the widow, the orphan and foreigner in our land, the very people God mentions over and over in the scriptures that He cares for and wants us to care for as well, if we pursued these moms, especially those living at or below the poverty line, who are stuck in cyclical, generational patterns of destruction, if we were making them a legitimate offer of a new life in a new kingdom, bringing them into our small groups, into our homes, the kind of communities the early church was known for, the only kind of communities that can bring about the dignity, righteousness, purpose...restoration these moms long for, we wouldn't be in this mess. In other words, if our strategies don't effectively connect these moms/dads to the one entity God designed to bring about the abundant life for all involved, then our strategies are, well…dumb. Until we lay aside our comfort and security, until we make this legitimate offer to these moms and hopefully the dads, we will slip further and further into irrelevance in our society.

Listen, the institutional church with its current, unbiblical leadership model, with one person at its hierarchical head, is the main reason why none of the above is taking place. Until that changes it's unlikely we'll have any sort of significant, societal impact. But, in the meantime, we individually can at least do this. We can use the one weapon the early church used and that's crazy, self-sacrificing, eternally minded, unconditional love. Everything is powerless against it. In fact, It's unstoppable.

"What are you prepared to do about it?"

Spoiler alert. If you’ve watched the “Untouchables” then you know the scene I referred to earlier doesn’t end well for Sean Connery’s character. After Connery chases the assassin out of his apartment, he immediately comes face to face with another waiting in the wings. This encounter ends with Connery being gunned down in a hail of bullets. 

Not long after, Costner’s character, Elliott Ness, discovers Connery dying on the floor of his apartment. Connery’s final, dying words to Costner are, “What are you prepared to do about it?”

Over the last seven years I’ve spoken and written extensively about what I believe God’s people must do to effect real and lasting change. Time, space and frankly my lack of desire to beat the proverbial dead horse again, prevent me from doing it here. For some reason the Pro-life movement in general but specifically our clinics, related non-profits and political action groups like the Susan B Anthony List, your state’s Right to Life and Legal defense groups, etc, etc, are hell bent on doing the same things and expecting different results…and for some reason many are hell bent on funding them. (Again, we do know that Jesus isn’t all that keen on poor stewardship, right?) But, in the vein of holding out hope against hope, I will say and pray this to Jesus's followers:

The pro-life movement / the church has tried just about everything to rid our culture of this horrific practice, but decades later, we can still fill every seat in ten football stadiums every year with a child lost to abortion. At this point, I think the most important thing they/we can do is, one, admit to ourselves that our response of launching Clinics, related non-profits, mobilizing sidewalk counselors and putting forth legislative/PACs solutions, simply hasn’t worked. Secondly, it’s time we start asking ourselves on a macro level, “What is it about these solutions or perhaps better, our current version of the church, that prevents us from being the influential, culture changing force we once were?” You may not agree with my diagnosis and solutions laid out in previous blogs/podcasts and portrayed in this video, that’s fine, but if not, what’s your solution? Have one? Don’t have one? Regardless, one thing is certain. God does care and one day He will ask us all to give an account for what we did or didn’t do, in our time. So the question is, “What are you prepared to do?", to end the greatest human rights crisis the world has ever known?”