Earlier this year, the Guttmacher Institute added roughly 100,000 abortions to its combined tallies for 2023 and 2024. Where did these extra abortions come from, 2-3 years after they purportedly occurred? They came through the mail, we’re told. And took place in states where it is unlawful to have an abortion. In other words, these were illegal abortions. Guttmacher doesn’t call them that, mind you. It sees nothing wrong with surreptitiously sending abortion drugs into states where such practice is against the law. Instead, these abortions are referred to as “telehealth provision(s) to residents of states with total bans,” reminding us again that the abortion industry is unmatched in its ability to hide turpitude behind innocuous medical jargon. For the first time ever, Guttmacher announced in March, these dubious telehealth abortions will be included in their ongoing abortion estimates. And retroactively added to their annual totals going back to 2023. That’s where the extra abortions came from, and that’s why they can’t be verified or denied.
For decades now, the abortion industry has argued that the best way to reduce total abortions is to ensure that abortion is “safe and legal.” It’s an absurd premise that defies both history and reason, but abortion proponents are nothing if not committed. Now that abortion actually has been banned in some 13 states, it is imperative that Planned Parenthood and its ilk be able to demonstrate that these abortions are still taking place. To that end, Guttmacher maintains that more than 90,000 abortions occurred last year in the 13 states where abortion is illegal. “In states without total bans,” and I’m quoting them now, “the number of abortions declined slightly (between 2024 and 2025); while in states with total bans, [abortions] continued to increase.” You see, they tell us with glee, abortion is going down where it is legal and going up where it’s not. Just like we said it would! But therein lies the problem. The only reason we “know” any of this to be true is because Guttmacher says it is, and their abortion numbers have never been as firm as they’d like us to believe.
Prior to the fall of Roe, Guttmacher published state and nationwide abortion estimates every three years. For most of the last 50 years, these were the only nationwide abortion counts available since those published by the CDC were grossly and perennially incomplete. We can thank the state of California for that. The state with more people and more abortions than any other hasn’t bothered to gather or publish abortion data for decades. Maryland and New Hampshire also opted out while New Jersey includes only hospital abortions in its annual totals. As a result, the abortion totals published by Guttmacher became the gold standard, or the only standard. But whereas the CDC maintains at least a modicum of ideological neutrality, the abortion junkies at Guttmacher make no secret about their activist ambitions.
According to its own disclosed methodology, Guttmacher gathered its data by sending surveys to every known and suspected abortion provider in the country. The problem is, only half of those providers typically responded. The response rate was 52% the last time around, for the year 2020. Guttmacher was able to use health department data to obtain counts for an additional 17% of abortion providers, but totals for the remaining 31% were estimated. I mention all this to emphasize the fact that Guttmacher’s abortion totals have always involved a fair bit of guesswork. But their new methodology is built upon even more uncertainty. In the aftermath of Dobbs, Guttmacher transitioned from publishing their abortion estimates every three years to publishing them every month. To do this, they stopped contacting every abortion provider and now only contact Planned Parenthood affiliates along with a selection of “key” physical and online abortion clinics. Translation: fewer hard numbers going in. More soft estimates coming out. And no estimates are softer than those surrounding illegal abortion. If you’re trying to cook the books, anonymous and untraceable totals are a good place to start.
Of course, even if Guttmacher isn’t putting a finger on the scale, there’s still no way to verify that their numbers are accurate. Guttmacher openly admits that thanks to shield laws in a handful of states, doctors can now prescribe and ship abortion drugs through the mail without disclosing their name. And drugs that can be sent through the mail without a doctor’s name can be sent through the mail without a doctor. Historically, shield laws were implemented to protect journalists from having to give up sensitive sources. Now they’re used to protect online abortion clinics from having to give up killing unborn babies in states where it is illegal to do so. Guttmacher celebrates the eight states that currently give sanctuary to these online pill mills (that would be California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) and urges more states to do the same. Massachusetts, as I shared in March, is the nationwide leader in sending fatal drugs directly to the aborting mother (or father, as the case may be). The commonwealth of Massachusetts is so brazen in its support of the practice that it now includes these abortion deaths in its own state tally. Wouldn’t Samuel Adams be proud?!
Last month, The Free Press published an article by Madeleine Kearns titled “When Abortion Pills Become the Weapon of Abusers.” It opens with the account of an Ohio woman who awoke to her boyfriend forcing an abortion pill down her throat. Their child died later that night in the emergency room. The forced abortion caused the loss of so much blood, the mother reported, that she had to go home in a hospital gown. Her clothes, along with the bedding, were utterly ruined. The rest of the article is filled with similarly disturbing accounts that are all predicated upon how easy it has become for unscrupulous men (and women) to order abortion pills online. Kearns writes:
Until five years ago, any woman who wished to be prescribed mifepristone in America had to attend a clinic in person. There, she would typically receive an ultrasound to confirm that it was safe for her to take it. If a fetus is beyond 10 weeks’ gestation, for instance, taking the pill carries a significantly increased risk of potentially fatal complications like hemorrhaging and sepsis. The appointment was also an opportunity for healthcare providers to confirm who they were prescribing pills to, and that the woman in question actually wanted an abortion.
One of the women profiled in The Free Press article got pregnant while separated from her husband. Though she didn’t want an abortion, she finally caved in when her husband threatened to sue for custody of their children if she didn’t. She got the pills through a telehealth app and reported that she did so without any conversation with a prescriber. Catherine Herring is a woman from Texas whose cheating husband laced her drink with an abortion pill. “The fact that people can go online at any age, any gender, no proof that you’re pregnant, and just order these pills and ship them across the United States,” she told Kearns, “is very scary.”
Telehealth abortion, which I have called the streaming p*rn of family planning, was supposed to be a temporary COVID allowance. The FDA stopped enforcing its ban against sending abortion drugs through the mail in 2021. The Biden administration, as Kearns reports, “permanently waived the in-person requirement” in 2023. According to the article, telehealth abortions went from roughly one in 20 abortions in 2022 to one in four by 2024. And half of all telehealth abortions are reportedly performed in states with “tight abortion restrictions”—which works out to just over 12% of the national total. Kearns doesn’t say where these numbers came from, but it’s almost certainly from Guttmacher—with an assist perhaps from #WeCount. Guttmacher estimates that 1,128,200 U.S. abortions occurred in 2025 and says that 91,110 of those occurred in states with total abortion bans. Among the four other states whose abortion policy Guttmacher deems “most restrictive” (Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina), #WeCount asserts that an additional 44,720 telehealth abortions took place. Add those up and you’ve got your 12%.
Some people will look at this sudden preponderance of unregulated telehealth abortion, along with the rampant abuse spawned by its availability, and place the blame upon states that have outlawed abortion. But that would be the wrong conclusion. The problem is with abortion itself. It is an evil act perpetuated by an evil industry. And as Live Action has been exposing for years, brick-and-mortar abortion clinics are just as unscrupulous as the online versions putting them out of business. As I reported in August, even in-person counseling sessions are little more than rubber-stamp operations designed to procure as many abortions as possible. Camelback Family Planning was found guilty of failing to obtain informed consent before ending the life of Baby Villegas despite the fact that their expert witness testified that they behaved no differently than any other abortion clinic in Arizona. They all do that.
More to the point, even if the abortion advocates are right and outlawing abortion hasn’t saved a single baby from being killed, it was still the right thing to do. That’s because legal abortions are intrinsically worse than illegal abortions. I don’t mean they’re worse for the victims. The end result for the aborted child is exactly the same. He or she is dead. And the whole of their life has been stolen from them. They will never be born, and the descendants they would have had will never be born either. The scar of a single abortion, legal or illegal, lingers for all of human history. But for the nation as a whole, there is a difference.
When I say that legal abortion is worse than illegal abortion, I mean that the only thing more evil than killing a baby is legally killing a baby. Blame for the first act falls squarely upon the killer(s). Blame for the second falls upon the whole state. When you “frame injustice by statute,” Psalm 94 warns, you mark yourself for destruction. The iniquity of those who “band together against the [lives] of the righteous” will come back upon them. The Lord our God will wipe them out for their wickedness. That’s why legal abortion is worse than illegal.
There was a time in this country when slavery was legal in some states and illegal in others. We had slave states and free states. Today, we have abortion states and abortion-free states. Back then, Democrats were the party of slavery. Now, they are the party of abortion. No surprise there. The conceptual arguments for slavery and abortion are almost indistinguishable: Choice for the ones in power. No choice for the dehumanized victims. The same essential rationale drives both, though abortion is the worse of the two. That’s the point Voddie Baucham used to make. His ancestors were victims of slavery, but if even a single one of them had been the victim of abortion, there would have been no Voddie Baucham. The generational impact of abortion far exceeds that of slavery—and only expands with time.
I do not believe that the same number of abortions are happening today as were happening before the fall of Roe. Nor do I trust those making the claim. They have a vested interest in underestimating legal abortions and overestimating illegal abortions. But even if abortion is on the rise in states where it is against the law, their abortion totals are still well below where they were before abortion was outlawed—by Guttmacher’s own numbers. Consider Texas. Guttmacher reports that 42,040 abortions took place last year in the Lone Star State, but in 2020—the last year Guttmacher published data prior to Texas’ abortion ban, they reported 58,030 abortions. And 58 thousand abortions is more than 42 thousand. But even if Guttmacher’s wild abortion estimates are correct (or underreported, as they maintain), it’s entirely immaterial. It doesn’t minimize the value of outlawing abortion one iota. Because abortion is the most quintessentially-immoral practice in the world. If you think that’s hyperbole, tell me what is worse than killing en masse the most innocent and helpless members of the human community—while eliminating in the process every one of their future descendants? This goes well beyond generational trauma. This is generational annihilation. So if you live somewhere that permits killing babies in utero, and it’s within your power to live somewhere that doesn’t, maybe you should.
]]>Our house turned 10 this year and right on cue everything is falling to pieces. That’s not strictly true, of course. The parade of breakdowns has actually been underway for a while now. Almost since the day we moved in. It’s the nicest house I’ve ever lived in and probably the worst built. Our roof has already been repaired twice. Same for the HVAC. Our washer, dryer, dishwasher, and built-in microwave all gave up the ghost long before the 10-year mark. The sliding glass door randomly shattered without an apparent cause, and when the master shower had to be replaced, it cost roughly five times my first car. Lord willing, we’ll have it paid for in about six more years. Both exterior doorknobs had to be replaced. Same for the handle on our sliding door. The ice maker and filtration system died long ago, and a portion of our refrigerator is now held together by duct tape.
American craftsmanship is not what it used to be. Or should I say South Korean craftsmanship? In a globalist economy where U.S. companies manufacture their goods abroad and foreign companies manufacture theirs in the States, it’s difficult to assign blame for product failures. That’s probably the point, since products that break are more lucrative than ones that don’t. Granted, the real culprit is far more ancient and entrenched. We might call it entropy, or more precisely: sin. While it’s true that work predates the fall (Genesis 2:15), it fundamentally changed after the fall. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” That was the judgment God pronounced upon Adam. “In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you… By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground [from which] you were taken.”
God had warned Adam that “in the day that you eat [from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] you shall surely die,” but the serpent delivered to Eve precisely the opposite message: “You will not surely die,” he told her, “For God knows that when you eat [from this tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve, as we all know, did eat of the forbidden fruit. So did Adam, but the serpent, it turns out, was telling the truth. At least in the most literal sense. Adam and Eve did not die on the day they ate of the fruit, and they did become like God—knowing good and evil. Scripture concedes as much in Genesis 3:22. “Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.’” Adam and Eve were apparently together when they ate the fruit, but they did not eat it of it together, which is telling. Eve took and ate first, then gave some to Adam who followed suit. So not only did Adam fail to prevent Eve from eating the fruit, he used her as a guinea pig—waiting to see what happened to her before committing to the trespass himself. He saw her eat. He saw her not die. And so he considered it safe to cast the world into darkness.
What would have happened if Eve had eaten the fruit but Adam had resisted? We’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know what would have happened if there had been no tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or no prohibition against eating it, or no villainous serpent allowed to roam the garden. These are what ifs. The what is goes like this. Adam and Eve ate the fruit. They didn’t die. But instead of rejoicing in their audacity and survival, they were immediately filled with shame. They somehow sewed loincloths for themselves out of fig leaves and foolishly tried to hide themselves from God. They didn’t die physically. Not yet, at least, but they did die metaphorically. Their fellowship with God devolved into fear. And lest Adam “reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever,” they were banished from the garden from that day forth—an exile that was ensured by the placement of a cherubim with a flaming sword.
We don’t know how much time elapsed between creation and exile. We don’t even know precisely how time was measured. Genesis 1 says God made the heavens and the earth in six days. Genesis 2 refers instead to “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” Whatever the timespan, the implication from the text is that Adam and Eve had yet to have children when they were banished from the garden. So in relatively short order, they went from walking with God in an earthly paradise, where their every need was met, to living in a wilderness suddenly antagonistic to them, where they had to labor for survival.
In chapter 4, a measure of healing came to Adam and Eve through the birth of Cain. “I have gotten a man,” Eve proclaimed, “with the help of the LORD.” But their joy was short-lived because that first-born son would kill their second-born son—a fate for parents that is worse than death. Adam and Eve may not have died on the day they ate the fruit, but they lived to see their son die and their other son banished, just as they had been before him. And the Lord’s confrontation of Cain went much the same as it had with his parents. Nary a one of them expressed anything like remorse. They merely complained and cast blame. “The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.” That, no doubt, was a bitter pill for Adam and Eve to swallow.
When Cain was condemned to wander the earth, he lamented that whoever found him would kill him—which is something of a head scratcher because who else was out there for Cain to be afraid of? Some suggest these were his own brothers and sisters, but the text doesn’t much allow for this possibility. We know that Seth wasn’t born until after Abel was killed. And the implication is that Seth was the third son born to Adam and Eve. I say that because of Eve’s response to his birth. “God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.” Seth’s birth would have been far less significant if Adam and Eve already had additional unnamed sons. And Eve’s proclamation would make no sense. But as it apparently stood, Cain was banished. Abel was dead. So Seth became the heir. And it was through Seth that Noah, Abraham, and eventually Christ all descended. Genesis tells us that Adam “had other sons and daughters” after Seth, but Cain and Abel appear to be the only ones who came before him.
We do know that Satan himself—identified by the apostle John as the serpent in the garden—was on the earth in those days, along with at least one sword-wielding cherubim. And in Genesis 6, we read of “sons of God” who started having children with the daughters of men. So perhaps it was angels or demons who Cain was afraid of. This would also help explain how they would know who Cain was, what he’d done, and be able to recognize the enigmatic mark God placed upon him. But it leaves other questions unanswered. Like who lived in the city Cain built and named after his son, and who were the people who began “to call upon the name of the Lord” with the birth of Seth’s son (Gen 4:26)? Nor does it solve the problem of Cain’s wife. Who was she? His sister? Perhaps, but God takes a pretty dim view of incest. “Cursed be anyone who lies with his sister, whether the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.” We read that in Deuteronomy 27, and if God is one who never changes, would he really use a practice deemed anathema to get the human race off the ground?
The third possibility is that Adam and Eve were not the only people God created and placed on the earth. There’s no indication in Genesis 1 that God made only one pair of each species or only one pair of humans. We sort of assume that from Genesis 2, but it’s never explicit. Genesis 9:19 reveals that “from [the three sons of Noah] the people of the whole earth were dispersed.” Scripture says nothing so definitive of Adam and Eve. At one level, this is a moot point. Since we are all descended from Noah, we are all descended from Adam. But if the question is: could there have been, prior to the flood, other lines of men not related to Adam? Scripture seems to at least allow for such a possibility. Adam himself is called a “son of God” in the book of Luke. That is, someone who was not born of woman but created directly by God. So maybe the “sons of God” referenced in Genesis 6 were more like other Adams than angels or demons. Their offspring, after all, were called mighty men.
While it’s true that the name Adam gave to his wife means “mother of all living,” he seems to have given it to her in the garden, before she was a mother at all. And if there were other people living outside the garden at that time, Adam may not have known it. In either case, Eve is certainly the figurative mother of all men, so it need not be a literal descriptor. The bigger difficulty with the idea that there may have been people walking the earth who were not descended from Adam has to do with our inherited sin nature. If all men were not from the line of Adam, how could all men be condemned in Adam? Interestingly, and this surprised me, nobody made this connection until the apostle Paul. In other words, it’s not until Romans 5 that we encounter the idea that Adam’s sin condemned us all. Original sin makes no explicit appearance in the Old Testament or gospels. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it does mean that Moses and the prophets never held up Adam as the universal ancestor of all men. Nor did Christ. Paul’s articulation of original sin goes like this:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned… For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many (Romans 5:12 & 15)… For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22).
The purpose of this argument is to demonstrate how the death of one man is sufficient to pay for the deaths owed by all men. Since our guilt was accrued through one man, Paul argued, our redemption could also be gained through one man. Assuming that man didn’t owe a death himself, which Christ did not. Some might contend that only those who physically descended from Adam could be culpable for his sin, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If God appointed Adam as mankind’s universal representative, then we would all be culpable for the choices he made, whether we we were his literal descendants or not. He would still be acting in our stead. Though it’s a concept difficult to grasp for those of us who have never lived under a monarchy, there are overlaps even today. Most of us are not related to those who represent us at the state or federal level, but we are still liable for the decisions they make on our behalf. Even if we don’t agree with them. More to the point, we are none of us physically descended from Christ, but that doesn’t prevent him from being the second Adam. Something beyond physical ancestry is here in play.
While Genesis tells us how old Seth and his descendants were when they first had children and when they died, the same is not true for Cain and his descendants. So we can’t know for certain how these two family branches fit together on the timeline. But we do know that Cain’s line went from bad to worse, culminating in Lamech who took two wives and boasted of killing a man. Maybe two. By the time we get to Noah, ten generations from Adam, things have gotten so bad that there is literally only one righteous man on the planet. Out of how many, you ask? Nobody knows, but starting with even one couple, if they and their descendants averaged four children each, there would likely be more than a million living descendants ten generations in.
With lifespans reaching 800 and 900 years, some scholars believe the world’s population would have been closer to a billion than a million 1,600 years in—which is roughly how much time Genesis says elapsed between creation and the flood. It works out to 165 years per generation, or 140 years more than we typically assign to generations today. That said, people in those days did not typically have children until they were 100 or older. Noah didn’t have children until he was 500. Something happened at the flood to dramatically lower the age of parenthood, but prior to that, it seems that fewer children were born to these early generations than we would have expected based on the lengths of their lives alone. There’s also the violence.
“Noah was a righteous man,” we read in Genesis 6, ”blameless in his generation… [but] the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” This is the reason God gave Noah for destroying the earth. “I have determined to make an end of all flesh,” God said to Noah, “for the earth is filled with violence through them.” All flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. Here again, we don’t know precisely what a world “filled with violence” looked like, but we might be able to imagine it. The world is a violent place today, to be sure, but it is not an anarchic free-for-all where all men, save one, engage in physical acts of violence against their neighbors. A world like that, it’s safe to say, would not be conducive to population growth. So maybe the flood claimed fewer lives than the “experts” imagine.
However many souls perished in Genesis 7, the material point is the same. On a planet full of people, it seems unfathomable that there could have been only one man who walked with God. This goes beyond narrow is the way that leads to life and few are those who find it. This is narrow is the way that leads to life and one is he who finds it. Just imagine if that were the case today. I have no idea how many names are written in the book of life, but with a global population topping 8 billion, I’d like to think it’s more than one. Because if it’s not, what hope does that leave for someone like you or me? But maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe it had to be one, because Noah is pointing us to THE one. The one righteous man in a world full of sinners. The one man who actually can save us from our iniquity. Noah was blameless in his generation. He saved humanity from destruction, but he was not sinless. He still owed a death. Just like Moses. Both men are pictures of Christ, but their inadequacies and failures highlight the fact that no mere mortal can save us.
The prophet Joel wrote that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Both Peter and Paul would repeat that declaration in the New Testament. Does that mean that none of the men and women who perished in the flood called out to God for salvation? Or was it simply too late? Or is it possible that some whose bodies died in the flood had souls that were nevertheless redeemed? This too is a question Scripture doesn’t answer. We would assume that those whose wickedness cost them their physical lives on earth also lost their eternal souls to hell, but the Pentateuch says almost nothing of life after death. It isn’t until Daniel that we get much concrete indication that something awaits us beyond the grave. Interestingly, Daniel recorded that “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Does the word many indicate that some will not awake to eternal reward or judgment? I don’t know.
Ancient Hebrews seemed to believe that all men met the same fate after death—at least initially. And physical death, more than damnation, was the perceived penalty for sin. T. Desmond Alexander, from Union Theological College in Belfast, wrote in an old piece for Themelios that “the Old Testament contains no detailed account of the fate of the righteous [following] death.” The best we can do, he maintains, “is (to) piece together various snippets of information in the hope of producing a clear picture.” In the ancient world, that which separated a good death from a bad death was largely dependent upon the circumstances surrounding it. Generally speaking, a bad death was marked by three things. One, it was premature. Two, it was violent. And three, it left the deceased without an heir. I can’t help but notice that all three explicitly apply to abortion.
I would submit that, even today, Christians are far more ignorant about how this whole thing wraps up than most of us would like to admit. There are as many end-times theologies as there are denominations—virtually all of which are held with more conviction than they should be. My own eschatology doesn’t go much beyond Hebrews 9:27: For it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment. The danger in becoming too fixated on the speculative and unknown is that it risks taking us away from the very real needs that are right before us. “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?” That’s the question James asks in the second chapter of his epistle. What good is it to offer a neighbor-in-need peace and blessing if you don’t feed and clothe them? One of the unfortunate results of what we might call our fuller understanding of eternity is a sort of laissez-faire indifference to the fate of the world around us. What do we care what happens to the planet? It’s all going to burn. Or so the thinking goes.
I see something similar in the context of abortion all too often. The essential argument goes like this. Since babies who die go to heaven, maybe abortion isn’t such a big deal after all. Maybe these children are better off dying in the womb than being born to risk the judgment of God. Though few would frame the argument so crudely or bluntly, I suspect this is the practical position of most Christians in America. Especially those of an evangelical bent—which I am. We’ve got bigger fish to fry; souls are what we should be saving. But this fundamentally misunderstands who Jesus was and what he came to do. One of the earliest and most explicit messianic prophecies can be found in Isaiah 42, which Matthew quoted in the twelfth chapter of his gospel. He referenced it to explain why Jesus told his followers not to evangelize. Here is the prophecy as it’s rendered in Isaiah:
Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth.
When we think of Jesus as savior, we think almost exclusively of his dying on the cross to pay for our sins—so that we can go to heaven when we die. But Isaiah reminds us that there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Jesus came, not to cry aloud in the street, but to comfort the afflicted and establish justice in the earth. I wonder today if we little Christs have put too much emphasis on “good preaching” and too little on good living. Specifically, acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. The human race, let's remember, was tasked with two things in Genesis one. You could summarize them like this: Have babies; steward creation. This same charge was repeated to Noah after the flood. With one addition. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”
Don’t miss the significance of that statement. The shedding of innocent blood is a crime so inexcusable that it is deserving of death. And while God took it upon himself to punish our collective bloodguilt through the flood, he delegated that duty after the flood. “For rulers are not a terror to good conduct,” Paul wrote to the Roman church, “but if you do wrong, be afraid, for [the one in authority] does not bear the sword in vain.” He is ”an avenger,” who “carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” It’s easy to blame the world for our culture of disposability, where nothing lasts and even unborn children are sent to the incinerator, but there is plenty of guilt to go around. Much of it is in the mirror.
It’s no surprise that those who reject the mandates of their Creator would treat his people and planet with contempt, but the same should not be true of us. The proper response to the curse is not to throw our hands up and let sin do its damndest—as we blithely sing hymns and wait for God to rescue us. The proper response is laid out in Genesis 3. For men, it begins with doing the hard work necessary to provide for his family. For women, it entails bearing the pain of childbirth and yielding her autonomy to a husband who will not always appreciate her as he should. Make no mistake. This is how we hold the line against the ravaging chaos unleashed by the fall. Families are the first defense. And once our family is sufficiently provided for, we move onto the needs of our brothers and sisters in the church, and then onto the community, nation, and world insomuch as we are able. Concentric circles, which is the model John Piper recommends we use in prayer as well.
Could it be that the reason so many churches and ministries go off the rails is because they’re led by men who have gotten the order backwards? Men who, in their eagerness to save the world, go too far and too fast. Instead of meeting the physical and spiritual needs of their own families first, they sacrifice wives and children upon the altar of “ministry.” The very ones who should be first to the table are left fighting for the scraps. It’s no wonder pastors’ kids have such a bad reputation. My brothers, this should not be.
Last Tuesday night, my sons and I spent a raccous evening at the Charleston Music Hall. We were there to see the greatest band in the world. That would be Switchfoot, of course, and they did not disappoint. But it’s a lyric from one of their earlier albums I’ve been pondering of late. “What's worth defending if everything's ending?” I can’t say exactly what Jon Foreman had in view with this question, but here’s how I understand it. If you see the world as merely something that is passing away, you won’t bother trying to make it a better place. But that misses the bigger picture. Consider Revelation 21. At some level, yes, the earth is passing away. But God is preparing a new heaven and a new earth where, behold, the old will be made new. And being made new, I’ll point out, is not the same as being replaced. This is how Peter put it:
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
What happens when this world passes away? The earth and the works done on it will be exposed. Said differently, from I Corinthians 3, “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.” All that is good will survive. All that is not will be burned. Which means that nothing worth defending is actually ending. So don’t buy into the shallow notion that making the world a better place is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. The lesson here is not one of resignation or abandonment. It’s the opposite. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, abound in holiness and godliness. Because all of those efforts will carry over into the new heavens and the new earth, a place—like the Garden of Eden—where the realms of God and man overlap. All that is righteous and good will survive into the new world so that none of our labors will have been in vain. As much as I’d like to solve the myriad riddles we find in Scripture, I repeatedly come back to the same conviction. That which we need to know, we do know. That doesn't mean we can't speculate about the rest, so long as we remember that there's a difference between what might be true and what we know to be true.
]]>The trial I wrote about last week had nothing to do with the ethics of abortion. Sadly. It centered instead on an Arizona state law regulating abortion. When the Supreme Court did an end around the legislative process back in 1973, unilaterally declaring all state abortion bans to be unconstitutional, it thereby spared abortion from having to bear up under much public scrutiny as it wormed its way into the American mainstream. The Court’s ruling also stripped from fathers any legal right to prevent their own children from being torn apart in the womb. For plenty of prospective dads, that was seen as a feature, not a bug. It’s the sex they wanted, not the children. Andrew Klavan recently noted that birth control and abortion have “turned fertile female bodies into sterile sex toys”—a tradeoff perfectly suited to bringing out the worst in male ambition.
Mario Villegas is not the kind of man who sleeps with a woman without any regard for the children he fathers. But even for fathers like Mario, who are married to the mother and vehemently opposed to abortion, it makes no legal difference. If the wife wants to kill their child, there isn’t a single thing the husband can do about it. The loophole in this case was that when the abortion took place in 2018, Arizona required that specific information about abortion be disclosed to the mother as a necessary precursor to obtaining her consent. Since that information was not provided, the abortion of Baby Villegas took place illegally. By definition. Despite Mrs. Villegas’ adamance that she wanted the abortion and despite evidence suggesting that virtually all Arizona abortions take place without any such disclosure. Mario Villegas won his case, and was awarded close to $70,000, but that is small consolation compared to the anguish of losing a child. The presiding judge was adamant that the aborting mother had every right to end the life of their child, no matter how much distress that caused her husband. But because the abortion clinic failed to legally obtain her informed consent, the grieving father was therefore entitled to damages.
The reason I’m coming back to the case for what is now a third article is because there is one sense in which the case of Baby Villegas vs. Camelback Family Planning did put abortion on trial. How so? By putting two “expert” OB/GYNs on record. One who is vehemently opposed to abortion and one who makes a circuit between Arizona and Nevada—so he can abort children in two states rather than one. One doctor has delivered more than 10,000 babies; the other has performed tens of thousands of abortions. How could he do such a thing? He told us, actually. He doesn’t recognize them as unborn children nor does he recognize them to be alive—despite the fact that, by his own admission, they have a beating heart and are growing.
Abortion doesn’t kill an unborn child; it removes a pregnancy. That’s how Dr. Paul Isaacson puts it. He claims pregnancy is a term synonymous with "products of conception," though the English language disagrees. Pregnancy is not a physical object to be removed. It is the state of being pregnant—which is the state of “having a child or other offspring developing in the body; with child or young, as a woman or female mammal.” This according to the Random House Dictionary. "Child," you’ll remember is a word Isaacson refuses to use of human beings in the womb, on the assertion that it is not a child until after birth. Random House be damned. Nor does he use the word kill. Because, by his definition, this not-a-child is not alive—despite unequivocal evidence to the contrary.
Anyone who would say under oath that a human embryo is not alive is not a serious or credible doctor. He’s an abortionist, so I don’t want to waste too much time on his testimony, other than to unmask him as an opportunistic scoundrel. Lindsay Clancy is on trial for killing her three born children. Meanwhile, Dr. Isaacson is heralded as an expert witness for having killed tens of thousands of unborn children. Is one killer any better or worse than the other? Some will insist that embryos are smaller than born children and don’t experience fear or pain like born children. But would Mrs. Clancy’s actions have been any less heinous if she’d administered general anesthesia before strangling her children? Would their lives have been any less over? Abortion may not be painful to unborn children early in gestation, but it is not pain that makes murder immoral. It’s the fact that it steals from its victims the rest of their lives. And nobody loses more of their lives than aborted unborn children.
Baby Villegas was medically aborted at 8 weeks gestation. If you’re not sure what the difference is between 8 weeks and 8 weeks gestation, you’re not alone. Back in 2015, I wrote an article titled “Eight Weeks Doesn’t Mean Eight Weeks.” It was in response to a high-profile pro-life pastor who made all sorts of factual misstatements about abortion and prenatal development because he didn’t understand the difference between 8 weeks and 8 weeks gestation. Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, the OB/GYN who testified for the plaintiff explained the difference on the stand:
Fertilization is the initiation of a pregnancy. [But] the problem is that most patients don't remember the exact timing of conception… so that's why historically we've always gone back to the first day of the last menstrual period, which is two weeks prior to conception. So if it had been 7 weeks from the first day of the last menstrual period, technically this baby was conceived (around) 5 weeks ago.
In other words, the victim of an 8-week abortion is a 6-week embryo. Roughly speaking. LMP, which stands for the first day of your last menstrual period, is the more practical way to age a pregnancy, but notice what Dr. Hazelrigg said at the outset of his remarks. It is fertilization that starts the clock on a baby’s life. The reason scientists age embryos and fetuses from conception is because that is the point at which each of our lives begin. It may ease Dr. Isaacson’s conscience to pretend that embryos and fetuses are not alive when he dissects or poisons them, but as Ben Shapiro likes to say, facts don’t care about your feelings. Among the facts conveyed on the ultrasound report of Baby Villegas, were the following, as described by Dr. Hazelrigg:
I saw an ultrasound that was performed within days of the abortion and on the ultrasound report, at least on the images on the ultrasound, it said 7 weeks, 6 days… [I could see that there was] cardiac motion and a yoke sac and it's just one baby… This is a viable intrauterine pregnancy. [This is] very important information [because it tells us this is] not a miscarriage, that there is a heartbeat present… Ultrasonographers and radiologists will use that term, viable, single, intrauterine pregnancy… And of course, what they mean by the word viable is that there is a fetal heart rate present... For a young woman in her 20's (like Mrs. Villegas), who is pregnant and is found to have a 7, almost 8 week pregnancy, with a fetal heart rate, a singleton, meaning just one baby, and no mention of any bleeding of any type, the likelihood of her carrying to term is over 95 percent. The chance of miscarrying (under these conditions) would be less than 3 percent.
Mario Villegas believes that his aborted child was a girl. At one point during his testimony, Dr. Hazelrigg was questioned on this point:
Attorney: Can you tell from this chart what gender this baby was?
Dr. Hazelrigg. No, I can't.
Attorney: Again, a dumb question, but this baby was a human being; correct?
Dr. Hazelrigg. Yes, absolutely.
Attorney: So when is gender fixed for a human baby?
Dr. Hazelrigg: Gender is fixed at the moment of fertilization. The chromosomes are formed from the sperm and the egg; XX would be female and XY would be male.
Attorney: And can that gender ever be changed?
Dr. Hazelrigg. No.
Though only one player, coach, or owner in the WNBA seems to understand this (Thank you, Sophie Cunningham!), a person’s gender can never be changed. Men cannot become women, and women cannot become men—no matter how many hormones you pump into them or how many body parts you cut off. Dr. Isaacson was not questioned about gender fluidity, but given his propensity to sacrifice facts for feelings (and financial gain), and given the abortion industry’s unequivocal commitment to “helping” boys and girls pretend to switch genders, I suspect he would have dutifully parroted the party line. Or simply pleaded the fifth with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is apparently smart enough to be on the Supreme Court but not smart enough to know what a woman is.
Among the most enlightening portions of Dr. Hazelrigg’s testimony was when the subject turned to the mechanics of medical abortion. This, of course, is the future of abortion both in the United States and around the globe. Every year, a greater percentage of abortions are performed with pills rather than surgical instruments. By Guttmacher’s latest estimate, for 2023, 63% of U.S. abortions are performed medically. No doubt it’s already higher now as we move closer and closer to a future in which there are no abortion clinics, but there are abortion pills flooding our mailboxes. What is a medical abortion, precisely? Dr. Hazelrigg tells us:
Mifepristone is also known as RU486. And it's given as an abortifacient because it's a potent progesterone antagonist, meaning that it blocks the progesterone receptors, [lowering] progesterone in the mother's body. And [progesterone] is the hormone in early pregnancy that supports the implantation of the baby into the wall of the uterus and the blood vessels that form to eventually become the placenta… [The placenta] form(s) in the late first trimester. So until about 12 or 13 weeks, there's a cyst on one of the ovaries that provides the (needed) progesterone until the placenta takes over as the progesterone factory in the second trimester.
Dr. Hazelrigg was then asked how the baby get nutrients and oxygen from the mother's blood early in pregnancy. This was his response:
Progesterone is being produced by this corpus luteum cyst in the ovary, and the progesterone enables that vascularity, the blood vessels on the inner lining of the uterus, to interact with this implanting embryo to form [an] interface that allows the nutrients from the mother to be transferred to the early developing embryo. And that's how the Mifepristone causes the baby to die. It cuts off that progesterone supply and doesn't allow nutrients to flow to the baby… It will take a couple days (to work)… The baby essentially suffocates… [Even though] this baby's not breathing air… the only source of oxygen and nutrients that this baby has is from the mother, from the inner lining of the uterus and the blood flow going through the uterus into the early embryo. (When) that's cut off, the baby essentially suffocates (and starves).
This, of course, is just the first half of a medical abortion. A second drug is necessary to expel the tiny dead baby. And while the first drug wreaks havoc on the baby’s body, the second does a number on the mom. That one is called misoprostol, or Cytotec, which Dr. Hazelrigg describes as “a potent uterotonic medicine [that] causes the uterus to contract strongly.” Based on many of the testimonies I’ve read from women who have gone threw it, that is something of an understatement. “The worst pain of my life” is a description I’ve heard with some frequency. And then there’s the blood. “Adult diapers would have been more suitable than maxi pads.” That’s how one woman put it. “I [thought] I could deal with the pain,” she said, “(but) I was wrong. Even when the painkillers did work, I still felt like I was going to die.” Just for comparison’s sake, this is how Dr. Isaacson said he would explain a medical abortion to a woman who was 8 weeks pregnant:
I would tell her that the embryo is approximately half-an-inch long. That it has an extremely primitive from of a heart that is not fully formed or fully functional, but is contracting. That there are arms and legs that are not fully formed. And I would tell her that at 8 weeks, she's 16 weeks away from where a fetus is able to feel pain and 16 weeks away from where a fetus is usually considered viable or capable of living outside of the uterus… I would tell her that at her next visit we'd be giving her a pill called Mifeprex or mifepristone and that pill is designed to essentially stop further development of the pregnancy. And it prepares the pregnancy to be easily expelled by the uterus. But by itself it doesn't make the uterus expel the pregnancy, so at home at a time that's convenient for her between 24 and 48 hours after taking the Mifeprex, she'll take a second medication called misoprostol. I would tell her that a few hours after taking the misoprostol, she'll begin having cramping and bleeding. Once that cramping and bleeding begins, it may go on on average for two to six hours, but it could be longer. And that at some point she should expel the pregnancy and when she does, the cramping and bleeding typically diminish. But it would be normal for her to have some light bleeding for several weeks afterwards.
We have now heard two different Arizona doctors describe, under oath, the same medication abortion in drastically different terms. So how do we determine which one is telling the truth and which one is telling a lie? Here’s how I’d go about it. I’d ask first if there is anything in either testimony that is objectively false? For instance, did either man make the claim that, say, human embryos and fetuses are not alive? Despite the fact that they are growing and have a beating heart? That would be one way to establish the relative credibility of each man. Or how about this? Does either man financially benefit from the position they’ve taken? Does Dr. Hazelrigg make any money by refusing to do abortions? Or does Dr. Isaacson make any money by being willing to fly back and forth between two states to perform tens of thousands of abortions? If we could figure out if either man is more truthful than the other, or if either man is personally enriching himself through the position he’s taken on abortion, we just might be able to figure out whether abortion is a noble and philanthropic form of health care, or whether it is a despicable act of violence that kills the most innocent and helpless members of the human community.
]]>There’s nothing unusual about a wrongful death lawsuit. Tens of thousands are filed each year in response to the more than 200,000 accidental deaths that occur annually in the United States. Most of these lawsuits are settled before they ever reach a courtroom. What is unusual is to file a wrongful death claim on behalf of someone who was never born—which is precisely the scenario I wrote about four years ago in an article titled, “The Estate of Baby Villegas, Deceased.” It is the story of a grieving father who was powerless to prevent his ex-wife from aborting their child. But instead of just lamenting his legal impotence, he found an obscure statutory basis for suing the Arizona abortion clinic that killed his child.
When I published the piece in October of 2022, no judgment had yet been rendered, but the fact that the case was being heard at all was remarkable in its own right. When a similar suit—believed to be the first of its kind—reached the Alabama circuit court in 2019, it was immediately dismissed on the assertion that the federal precedent established by Roe v. Wade precluded its consideration. Though Mario Villegas—the father in the Arizona case—first filed his suit in 2020, by the time a motion for dismissal was argued in 2021, the influence of Roe was already slipping. It would be done away with entirely just a year later. More importantly, a little-known Arizona statute from 2011 explicitly granted husbands the right to file a civil suit if their child had been aborted without procuring the mother’s full informed consent. This is precisely what was at issue in the case of Baby Villegas, whether or not Camelback Family Planning had disclosed all the information required of it to legally obtain the consent of the aborting mother.
For years the case labored through the courts, and I lost sight of it until I got a call last week from the plaintiff. Not the baby, of course, but the father. Mario Villegas. Why did he call? First, to thank me for telling his story without framing him as a villain, which he told me virtually every other outlet had done, including Rolling Stone in the piece that first alerted me to his case back in 2022. That article called him a threat to abortion providers and a threat to women, for simply trying to hold to account those who killed the child he believed to be a daughter. In an attempt to deny him legal standing, his ex-wife accused Villegas of raping her, cyber-stalking her, emotionally abusing her, and impregnating her under the guise of being sterile. None of those charges held in court, which leads me to the second reason Villegas called: to tell me that they’d won! After a two-day bench trial, Judge Bryon B. Chambers ruled on July 22 of this year that Camelback Family Planning had not disclosed to his wife information about abortion that was required by state law. As a result of this negligence, the abortion of Baby Villegas had taken place illegally which thereby qualifies it as a wrongful death.
After we spoke on the phone, Mr. Villegas emailed me both the trial judgment and the almost 600-page trial transcript. It took me several hours to read through the whole thing, but the testimonies of two men, in particular, were worth their weight in gold. That would be Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, the OB/GYN who testified on behalf of the plaintiff, and Dr. Paul Isaacson, the OB/GYN who testified on behalf of the defense. Both men reside in Arizona, both men are of comparable age, and both men have been practicing medicine for more than three decades. But that is where the similarities end. Dr. Hazelrigg estimates that he’s delivered more than 10,000 babies over the course of his career but has never performed an abortion. Dr. Isaacson estimates that he’s performed tens of thousands of abortions. No mention was made as to whether or not he’s ever delivered a living baby. Before I dive into their testimonies, here is what Judge Chambers found:
This court finds that the pregnancy at issue in this case that was terminated in abortion was not the result of any criminal conduct on the part of the Plaintiff. Further, this court finds that the Plaintiff is entitled to $5,000 in statutory damages for Defendants failure to comply with Arizona's Informed Consent Law A.RS.§ 36-2153, and $62,500 in compensatory damages for his psychological, emotional, and physical injuries resulting from Defendants violation of Arizona's Informed Consent Law. Finally, as the prevailing party, Plaintiff is entitled to judgment for his attorney fees and costs…
Central to the defense’s case was the assertion that the abortion clinic was not strictly required to provide all of the state-mandated counseling materials because the aborting mother was already “a hundred percent certain” she wanted an abortion and would later insist that “nothing would change [her] mind." Ironically, the adamance of her defense that she was determined to have an abortion despite “significant” opposition from her husband, wound up undercutting one of their separate claims. Namely, that the plaintiff exercised “coercive control” over his wife that she was powerless to resist. As to the claim that nothing would have changed her mind, the ruling countered that she “cannot reliably testify about what she would have done with information she never had.” After being cleared of all criminal charges, this is how the monetary damages awarded Mr. Villegas were justified:
1. The Plaintiff suffered two distinct categories of harm. The first is pre-violation distress. The Plaintiff learned of [his wife’s] decision to abort before the procedure occurred. He experienced immediate emotional distress, including a breakdown, inability to eat, and disruption to his professional life. This distress flowed from [his wife’s] decision, which she had every (legal) right to make.
2. The second category is post-violation loss. On July 26, 2018, Defendants performed an abortion without valid informed consent. That act destroyed the embryo. The loss of the embryo, and the parent-child relationship the Plaintiff would have had, is the injury caused by Defendants' violation of the Act.
3. The distinction matters. The Plaintiff is not entitled to seek damages for the distress of learning his wife wanted an abortion. However, he may seek damages for the destruction of an embryo that Defendants had no legal authority to destroy without first complying with the Act.
If you’re wondering what precisely “the Act” required of Arizona abortion clinics in 2018, here is a partial list of the mandated disclosures, each of which had to be communicated to the mother at least 24 hours before the abortion took place:
The term “unborn child” appears 11 times in the act, which is itself problematic for the Arizona abortion clinics tasked with fulfilling it. As the defense’s expert witness testified, abortion clinics categorically refuse to use the term “unborn child.” When asked why this is so, Dr. Isaacson answered, “it implies that what is inside [the] uterus is, in fact, a child. It may become a child in time but at the time of an abortion it is not.” Dr. Isaacson, apparently, doesn’t know what it means for a woman to be with child—the age-old euphemism for being pregnant. No doubt he’d simply write the expression off as an antiquated holdover from a more primitive time. You know, before we realized there is nothing wrong with mutilating our offspring in the womb. Despite dictionary definitions of child that include “descendant,” “a son or daughter of human parents,” and even “an unborn or recently born person,” Dr. Isaacson maintains that “embryo” or “fetus” is the only appropriate term to describe that which is in the uterus. Nevertheless, he doesn’t even use these terms in practice. Instead, he calls it pregnancy. “I think people understand,” he said under oath, “it's a pregnancy in their uterus that they want removed.” When the other OB/GYN, the one who doesn’t perform abortions, was asked about the appropriateness of calling an embryo or fetus “a baby,” this was his reply:
We always use the term baby when we discuss the pregnancy with the mother… [because] she never calls her baby my fetus or my embryo. I would venture to say in my entire career, I've never had a patient refer to their baby as an embryo or a fetus… I've been doing this for 32 years, (and) I've never heard an obstetrician tell a patient, "Your embryo looks great," or, "Your embryo is growing great." I've never heard that in my entire life. So it's not a word that we use.
It may not seem a big deal, but the words that are used—or not used—play a significant role in how we come to understand reality. To wit, there is an interesting revelation in the Rolling Stone piece that I didn’t catch the first time through. Actually, there are a couple. Tessa Stuart, who wrote the article, never used the word mother to refer to Villegas’ ex-wife. That’s almost certainly because referring to a pregnant woman as a mother implies that she has a child, which is something abortion advocates actively deny. As we’ve already seen. But the term mother still managed to infiltrate her story in two places. The truth will out! Tom Slutes, the lawyer for Camelback Family Planning, in trying to get the case thrown out, argued that even if the letter of the law had been violated, the spirit of the law had not. “The purpose of the statute,” he is quoted as saying, “is to make sure that the mother is properly advised, and makes an informed decision, and this young lady did.”
This young lady, it should be noted, had no other children besides the one growing inside her. That is the child that made her a mother, and the attorney for the defense apparently forgot about his obligation to deny this fundamental reality. By definition, according to Merriam Webster, a mother is “a female parent,” parent is “one that begets or brings forth offspring,” and offspring is “the product of the reproductive processes of a person, animal, or plant.” Combining all three, we can say that a mother is a woman who has reproduced. And that reproduction occurs at conception. That’s the decisive moment when a new human being comes into existence. Everything after that is just growth and development.
Though Stuart dutifully used the term “pregnant person” throughout the article (this was 2022, after all), she slipped up in the very last sentence. If Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban were to go back into effect, Stuart warned, “abortion (would be) illegal in every instance, except to save the life of the mother.” Why didn’t she say except to save the life of the pregnant person? I don’t know, but there it is. Women are the only ones who get pregnant, and when a woman is pregnant, she is thereby a mother. You might even say that she is never more of a mother than when her child is literally living inside of her.
To call someone a mother is to concede that she has a child, and once you concede that an aborting woman has a child, you concede that abortion kills that child. This is why abortion advocates fight so hard to control the language surrounding the vile act. It’s the only way to justify what they do. When Dr. Isaacson was asked whether it was true that abortion “killed the Villegas unborn child,” he countered that “abortion ended the pregnancy.” He then admitted that he doesn’t like or use the word kill. When asked whether or not the child was alive before the first abortion pill was taken, Dr. Isaacson said, “By my definition, no.” It was then pointed out that he’d already declared the embryo to be viable at the time of the abortion. His response: “that (only means) there's cardiac activity and interval growth.” He then doubled down on the assertion that, by his definition, the embryo was not alive before the abortion. But if that were actually the case, it’s safe to wonder, why was the abortion even necessary?
Earlier in the trial, when Dr. Hazelrigg was asked by the defense why he didn’t think a woman should “have the legal right to terminate her pregnancy,” he had a very different take from that of Dr. Isaacson. “I believe that this baby was created in the image of God,” he answered, “and we are all created in the image of God, and it's not our [right] to take another human being's life.” How that response must have galled Dr. Isaacson, though we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that men who deliver babies for a living and men who kill babies for a living see the world through a very different lens.
Perhaps the most revealing portion of Dr. Isaacson’s testimony was his assertion that the means by which Camelback Family Planning obtained the informed consent from Mrs. Villegas was consistent with the way it is done in all of the abortion clinics he is familiar with. He said this despite the fact that women at Camelback were made to sign the document stating they’d received all the counseling materials pursuant to the Women’s Right to Know act before the counseling session took place. He defended the explicitly fraudulent practice on the grounds of efficiency. Having her sign and initial it ahead of time, he said, “is a good way [to ensure against] missing signatures and initials on forms.” It’s also a good way to get the signature you need without providing the required information—which is precisely what Camelback did.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Isaacson asserted that in his opinion, Camelback Family Planning “adequately informed (the patient) of the medical care she was to receive.” He further elaborated that, despite what the statute requires, he believes informed consent can be obtained without offering the patient “a description of the state of fetal development,” and without informing her “about the father needing to provide support for the patient after the birth,” and without telling her “the gestational age” of the child she is about to abort. In other words, Camelback behaved just as every other abortion clinic behaves for every abortion they perform. The problem is, the court found Camelback liable for negligence and guilty of performing an illegal abortion for their failure to make numerous state-mandated disclosures. I suspect that means that, by this standard, virtually every abortion in Arizona that took place while this statute was on the books took place illegally. Sadly, that statute is no longer on the books—thanks in large part to the efforts of Dr. Isaacson himself.
On February 6 of this year, the Women's Right to Know Act was declared unconstitutional by the Arizona state court, which means that Arizona abortion clinics are no longer required to disclose any of the information formerly required. Not that they apparently ever did. So even as I rejoice with Mario Villegas at achieving a small measure of justice for his aborted child, I lament that he may be the last father to gain such a victory. At least in Arizona. I’m also reminded of the fact that efforts like Abort73.com are no less important in post-Roe America. Roe has been aborted; abortion has not. The information Abort73 provides on prenatal development and the mechanics of abortion is much the same information that clinics were supposed to be providing to mothers all along. The reason they worked so hard to suppress such information is because they know the same thing we do. The more someone knows about abortion, the less likely they are to have one, recommend one, or support one as a matter of public policy.
]]>Our 13-year-old son doesn’t have a phone, but he does have a new used CD player. And two weeks ago, we added a landline to our home for the first time in 20 years. Which is to say, our embrace of technology is running in the wrong direction. Then I topped it off by doing this past Friday something I hadn’t done since last century. I went to an actual store and bought an actual album on the actual day it came out. That would be Switchfoot’s Forever Now! Compact discs have done away with jewel cases, apparently, but the rest of the experience was gloriously 1990’s. And then there are the songs.
I made an uncredited reference to Forever Now’s first single in my last article, but it’s track 11–“Two Twins”—that contains a metaphor so simple and profound that it hardly seems possible I could go 50 years without having heard it before. Or thought of it myself. For those of you who didn’t buy the record at Barnes and Noble last week, or listen via more traditional means—like Spotify—the song is “a tale of two twins in their mother’s womb, talking back-and-forth inside that room, wondering if there’s life after birth.” Here is an excerpt:
One twin says to the other twin
“Do you think you and I will ever meet again?...”And the twin said, “No brother
There ain’t no other
Life outside this womb
When you and I get born
And they cut the cord
That’s the end of me and you”
“Ain’t nobody never ever come back from
Thе other side of birth”
He said “No brothеr
There’s no such thing as earth”One twin says to the sceptic other
“But brother, but brother, but brother, but brother
Don’t you think there might be such a thing as mom?
When I am quiet I can almost hear her
And all around me I can feel her nearer
As if we’ve been together all along”
Lyrically, this is the most brilliant song I’ve encountered in many a long year. Without mentioning abortion, it testifies to the humanity of children in the womb. And without getting religious, it reveals how naive it is to simply assume that nothing could await us beyond the grave. On the first front, perhaps you’d point out that twins in the womb don’t actually speak to each other. To which I would respond: Fair enough, smarty pants, but they certainly do communicate. Back in 2007, National Geographic released a documentary about multiples in the womb. It reveals that “as identical twins grow bigger, they're almost always in contact, touching hands, faces, feet and gradually becoming more aware of themselves and each other." Scientists, in fact, have witnessed twins playing games together in the womb that are carried over and repeated outside the womb. So even if you’re going to make the nonsensical assertion that rights of personhood should be withheld from human beings who don’t have the ability to form relationships, this is precisely what twins in the womb do.
Now onto the metaphor. Though the first person of the trinity is most often conveyed as God the Father, the Lord presents himself as a comforting mother in Isaiah 66. Starting in verse 12, “For thus says the LORD: ‘Behold, I will extend peace to [Jerusalem] like a river… and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip, and bounced upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.’” Whether or not Switchfoot’s indefatigable Foreman brothers had this passage in view when penning “Two Twins,” the analogy is the same. Just as skeptics in the world deny the existence of God, this skeptic in the womb denies the existence of mom. But if you quiet your soul and listen for that still small voice, you just might find that it’s there.
Though no one can pretend to know precisely what awaits us after death, neither can we pretend that our soul’s survival is an impossibility. It may even be the more plausible outcome of the two. Is it really that farfetched to think that the life to come may dwarf this one in much the same way that this life dwarfs our time in the womb? The believing twin told his brother that he could “see the shadows on the wall,” which is reminiscent of something the Apostle Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians. “Now we see through a glass, darkly;” he wrote, “but then face to face.” We are living in the Shadowlands—as C.S. Lewis put it in The Last Battle. “You need not mourn over Narnia,” Professor Diggory told Lucy. “All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia [which is] as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” The womb is a place of perpetual shadows, but for the unbelieving twin who had yet to experience anything else, it was all he could imagine. That may seem silly to us, but what is obvious from the outside is not necessarily obvious from within.
The believing twin was convinced their life together would continue on after birth. The unbelieving twin called such thinking lies and fairytales. “When you and I get born,” he warned, “and they cut the cord, that’s the end of me and you.” There’s no such thing as earth. We all know, of course, which twin turned out to be right, though modern technology has sadly introduced a third scenario in which some twins are allowed to survive while the vast majority are not. They are wiped away by what is clinically known as fetal reduction procedures—an integral part of most IVF procedures. This comes from an article I wrote back in 2012:
(What is) the problem with IVF? Generally speaking, more children are being conceived than can realistically be born. What happens to all the extras? ART (assisted reproductive technologies) technicians, Mark I. Evans and David W. Britt, report that 75% of their patients "have combined CVS (chorionic villus sampling) and fetal reduction procedures" to solve this problem. Chorionic villus sampling is a form of prenatal testing. Multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) is the process of aborting the "extra" babies that were conceived through IVF.
In practice, this means that almost all of the human beings that are created through in-vitro fertilization are destroyed before they’re born. For them, there is no such thing as earth. Or mom. They are sacrificed instead so that wealthy older women can get at least a chance of becoming a mom to one of the lucky siblings who manage to survive. And, of course, IVF birthed a brand new and incredibly lucrative industry. All it requires is money and moral compromise. If you’ve been following Abort73 since the early days, you may remember a shirt we used to have that read Birth Before Death. It was a declaration that death should not precede birth, and though it was designed with abortion in view, it is no less true when it comes to fetal reduction procedures. My research in 2024 indicated that “for every one child born through IVF, something like 12 ‘siblings’ [are] lost to the process.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine reports that 100,158 babies were born through IVF in 2024—which means that an additional 1.2 million were never born. They died in the attempt.
The Neverborn, as we might call them, is also the name of a novel I read last week by B.B. Brighton. It imagines a dystopian future wherein every American is microchipped at birth and every OB-Gyn is required by law to perform abortions. Sadly, neither premise seems all that far-fetched. The wrinkle, here, is that one particular “abortionist” has decided to specialize in late-term procedures for the express purpose of secretly delivering babies alive and placing them with families willing to raise them off the grid. Because these children are not chipped, they are known as Neverborns. Leading a normal life is not an option for them since everything from education to health care and employment to commerce is contingent upon the possession of said chip. Anyone discovered without a chip is sent off to a foreign war while their families are imprisoned or worse.
The action in this story, which is the first in a three-part series, focuses on a teenage Neverborn named Kekoa who goes on the run after discovering his lineage—and the threat he poses to his adopted family. But before he even gets off his home island of Kauai, he is targeted by a pair of murderous scoundrels who promise to help him start a new life. Neverborns, it turns out, are the perfect scapegoats for all manner of crime and villainy. In the end, Kekoa’s only means of escape is to find the birth mother who doesn’t know he’s alive and convince her to provide him the credentials he needs to clear his name. Having some inside insights from the author herself, I know that one of her objectives is to humanize the victims of abortion by introducing us to a trio of those who ”shouldn't be here”—human beings who would have lost everything if their lives had forcibly ended in the womb (or the Petri dish). The embryo who is discarded mere days after conception loses no less of his or her life than the fetus who’s aborted on the cusp of birth. This is one of the points drawn out so beautifully in the Sheldon Vanauken essay I referenced last week. When we meet as adults people who were supposed to be aborted in the womb, it becomes impossible to deny what would have been lost had the prince of darkness had his way.
Trying to predict the future of abortion, or the future of reproductive technologies, is both difficult and depressing. That’s because even the victories are inherently precarious. When other marginalized people groups make legal gains, the beneficiaries can be seen and heard. But the children who are threatened by abortion cannot make public appearances. Nor can a great orator or activist arise from their midst. You can get to know your black neighbors (or your white neighbors, as the case may be). You can get to know your Jewish neighbors or your Palestinian neighbors, but you cannot get to know your unborn neighbors. At least not directly. And so they remain a mere abstraction whose death and destruction barely merits notice. There are people the world over who came close to being aborted as an embryo or fetus, and even people who literally survived an abortion, but their very act of survival removed them from the marginalized class. They are no longer an “unwanted” unborn child. That means the only hope for those who so remain is for people from outside the group to stand in on their behalf. People like you and me, who have already survived the womb and must now make the case for those who haven’t.
It’s hard to imagine that there could be anything like a “final” victory this side of eternity, but perhaps this is a case where there is benefit in losing sight of the forest for the trees. Like the proverbial girl throwing starfish back into the sea, we might wonder what difference it makes to save a single child from abortion? Well, it makes a pretty big difference for that one! Until recently, I'd gotten out of the habit of wearing Abort73 T-shirts. What does it matter, I thought? The success of this ministry ultimately depends upon thousands of other people wearing Abort73 shirts. But what if I’m looking at it wrong? What if mine is the Abort73 shirt that saves a life? What if mine is the shirt that prompts a five- or six-figure donation? I can’t control what anyone else does; I can only control what I do. It may be true that we men and women of faith lack the empirical evidence necessary to topple the shortsighted cynicism of our brethren, but it’s the believing twin I hope to emulate—the one who never gave up on the idea that there just might be such a thing as mom.
]]>Back in the olden days, when I was in junior high school, I got a subscription to Sports Illustrated—a luxury afforded me by my mom’s remarriage. Prior to that, there had been no money in the frivolous expenditures fund, but wealth has a way of introducing new temptations. I’m speaking, of course, about the swimsuit issue. All the way through high school, it would confront me with a moral dilemma each and every February. By way of context, I had been baptized into the faith on April Fool’s Day, 1990, and I was committed. I was also a hormone-laced teenage boy. Though my mom didn’t restrict my access to SI’s famed swimsuit issue, my own moral compass was something of a tyrant. I was fairly convinced I had to get rid of it, but that was easier said than done. As soon as I would pull it from the mailbox, the reasons for not disposing of it came flooding in. I would stand with it hovering over the garbage can like Frodo overlooking the fires of Mordor. My precious!
In the pre-internet world of my youth, pictures of beautiful women in revealing swimsuits were almost sacred for their scarcity. Social media has made the swimsuit issue quaint and superfluous by comparison, but back then it was worth its weight in gold. When my dad—who was far less puritanical than I was—got wind that I’d simply thrown that first issue away, he graciously offered to take them off my hands in future. He was always looking out for me. I think I did give him a few issues over the years, but that was just kicking the can down the road. Maybe that’s why I did it. Knowing I’d be facing off against them again every time I stayed at his apartment.
Following its publication each year, SI’s letters to the editor section would be full of correspondence alternately praising or condemning the swimsuit issue. Some contended that its “celebration” of strong, beautiful women served the public good. Others insisted that it merely commodified them for something that had nothing to do with athletic achievement. But I distinctly remember one letter in which a woman wrote in to say she’d be worried about her husband and sons if they didn’t look at the swimsuit issue. In hindsight, she may have been on to something—at least as it relates to her sons. Lust is unequivocally sinful for the married man. It’s more complicated when it comes to unwed sons. And sometimes the devil we know is better than the one we don’t.
For all the people who wrote in to complain that the swimsuit issue was too risqué, I wonder how they would have reacted to the knowledge that one day Sports Illustrated would swap out their lust-inducing models for women who were too corpulent to excite anything but antipathy in the mind of your average 13-year-old. How easily I could have dropped those issues into the bin. Would the magazine’s then-detractors have considered this move away from sex appeal a net gain? Progress on behalf of the fairer sex? Or did SI actually land on something more offensive? Instead of doing away with the swimsuit issue, they did away with its only virtue. A society that makes an idol out of beauty is better off than one making an idol out of "body positivity." Idolatry is a sin either way, but the first gives homage to God’s ideal. The second gives homage to upending it. How many of those who wagged their fingers at the magazine in the 80’s and 90’s would now take as many Elle Macpherson and Kathy Ireland pinups as the publishers would deign to give us—if they’d just ditch their grotesque nod to inclusivity?
We saw something of the same cultural inversion in the disparate reactions to Sydney Sweeney’s ballyhooed American Eagle ads. There was a time, of course, when the religious right would have taken umbrage at provocative pictures of a buxom blonde being plastered all over our public spaces. But now that same demographic is mostly cheering on the return of the American sex symbol. If the only alternative is seeing advertisements full of unseemly women or “women” who aren’t women at all, we’ll take the Sydney Sweeney pictures, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the left’s condemnation of the campaign is not because the ads are too sexy, but because Sydney Sweeney is too pretty, too blonde, and too white. They consider it inherently racist to suggest that a white woman could have “great genes,” leaving conservatives in the awkward position of having to defend the ads as a sort of civic duty. These are strange times, indeed, Mr. Crow.
The reason beautiful women have become such a problem for the left is because beauty itself has become a problem. It is not diverse. It is not equitable, and it is certainly not inclusive. Though all races produce beautiful women, not all women are beautiful. The standard is too unyielding. Nor do progressives like the notion of being judged by a measure not of their own making—an external authority that does not smile equally upon all things. It may sound noble to pretend that everyone and everything is equally beautiful, but that is mere moral subversion. It mirrors the sinister designs of Syndrome—Pixar’s unlikely villain in The Incredibles—who recognized that when everyone is super (or special, or beautiful), then no one is. You cannot broaden the definition of beauty without destroying beauty any more than you can broaden the definition of marriage without destroying marriage.
The fact of the matter is this. Beauty is exceedingly unfair. The same goes for intelligence and athleticism. Even if you engage in all manner of social tinkering to try and mitigate the advantages bestowed by wealth, education, or simply growing up with a mom and a dad, there is nothing you can do to mitigate the advantages of being extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, or athletic. Believe me, I know! (that’s a joke, by the way) You can put plain or overweight women on the cover of fashion magazines and call it progress, but you’re not actually leveling the playing field. You’re engaging in a sort of sophistry that can only be maintained by vigilantly coercing the populace into parroting the party line. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not casting stones at the overweight. I’ve been trying to lose the same 20 pounds for more than 20 years. I understand the struggle. I'm casting stones at the cultural celebration of being overweight. That's where the subversion lies.
If there were a case to be made for the swimsuit issues of my youth, it would go like this. There is value in recognizing physical beauty. There is value in pedestaling the ideal. And unlike a Playboy, the swimsuit issue never showed you all the way behind the curtain. It preserved the essential mystery. That doesn’t mean I’d give my 13-year-old a copy. But neither would I be overly distraught if I found him with one. Trying to prevent adolescent boys from ever seeing women that might prompt in them lustful desires is a fool’s errand. And may do them more harm in the end. Andrew Klavan points out that it is “the erotic impulse that draws men to women.” And that’s a good thing. The swimsuit issue didn’t create our collective obsession with the female body; it is a reflection of that obsession. Klavan frequently asserts that women's bodies are thought about more often than anything else in the universe. Men and women alike obsess over the female body.
One of the greatest challenges in being a parent is knowing which temptations to remove and which temptations to let stand. Because if we shield our children from everything that might lead them astray, what will happen to them when our protections are no longer in place? How will they fare when a sea of never-before-encountered enticements suddenly floods in upon them? I understand the argument that it is unhealthy to hold up such “impossible” beauty standards, aided as they are by the world’s best photographers, makeup artists, and photo editors, and the globe’s most scenic locations. I understand that most young men will never date a supermodel, and most young women will never have the face and figure to be one. But there is something to be said for impossible ideals. Because all of us can become more beautiful than we are. All of us can become more intelligent than we are, and all of us can become more competent than we are. If we’ll put in the work, that is. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. How’s that for an impossible standard? But Jesus himself held it out in Matthew 5. Will any of us actually obtain perfection? No. Should we strive to get as close as we can? Absolutely.
For going on a generation, our culture has been awash in a very subversive message. It goes like this: You’re fine just the way you are. Don’t bother trying to improve your body. You can be beautiful at any size. Who cares about improving your mind? The internet will tell you what you need to know. And don’t worry about improving your soul. God is already crazy about you—because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough and doggone it, people like you! That was satire 35 years ago. Today it’s gospel, but the swimsuit issue of my youth conveyed a very different message. It emphatically said to both sexes alike, you’re not good enough the way you are. Not by a long shot. We can argue as to whether the delivery mechanism was necessary or appropriate, but its practical impact was pretty straightforward. To young men, it said: aspire to a woman like this. To young women it said, aspire to be a woman like this. Is that shallow? Of course, if that’s all you’re aiming for. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain. Worse still, a beautiful woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig’s snout. But do you know what’s better than a woman with discretion? A beautiful woman with discretion. That’s a woman worth being, and worth having. That’s the kind of woman who will bring the best out of a man, which is a win for everyone.
The danger of the swimsuit issue in its heyday is largely as I’ve already laid out. Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. But adultery, it’s worth noting, is a narrow sexual sin. It only applies to the married. I’ve often wondered why it is that adultery is forbidden in the Ten Commandments while fornication is not. If you were to include only one, wouldn’t fornication be the more obvious choice? It’s the broader of the two. And while fornication encompasses adultery; adultery does not encompass fornication. Its inclusion in the Ten Commandments, then, is good indication that God views adultery as the more serious offense. But why? In light of what God said in the first two chapters of Genesis, that it is not good for a man to be alone, that a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife, and that they should be fruitful and multiply, it’s fair to conclude that marriage and childbearing are pretty high on God’s priority list. With that in mind, the harsher sentencing for adultery is easier to understand. The “penalty” for fornication in the Pentateuch was marriage. And until very recently, premarital sex that led to pregnancy routinely did result in marriage. Fornication, though sinful, can still result in a positive good. Adultery cannot. Fornication may lead to marriage; adultery only destroys it.
When Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount that lust is akin to adultery, he implies that lust too is more serious when it involves a married man. I suspect this is because it is difficult to make a clean distinction between lusting after a woman and falling in love with her (though, it seems safe to assume that if you’re pining over a woman you’ve never met or seen in person, it’s probably not love). Lust, by definition, is intense sexual desire, but let us not pretend that love is devoid of such fleshly considerations. We might argue that lust has no concern for the character of the woman or the good of the woman, but we can’t say that falling in love has nothing to do with sexual desire. You can sleep with a woman without being in love with her. I’m not sure you can fall in love with a woman without wanting to sleep with her. Though my wife and I did not consummate our relationship until our wedding night, that was a primary objective from almost the first moment I saw her. I wanted to get her into bed, and so I married her—thirteen months later. Sexual desire wasn’t the only reason I married her, but it was up there. Was that lustful of me? Perhaps, but for the unmarried, it is difficult to draw the line between illicit sexual desire and healthy sexual ambition. The sex drive was installed by our maker, after all. It’s not as if we can shut it off. Nor should we. It’s there for a reason. To love a woman is to care about more than just her body, but it is not to care about less.
Lust in a single man may push him to marriage, but lust in a married man is adultery in principle and may lead to actual adultery in practice. That’s why the danger is so much greater for the married man. It's also true that unmarried adults were almost an unknown in Christ’s day, which may be another reason why Jesus focuses on lust in the context of marriage. When I was single, I naively thought that lust would be a non-factor after marriage. Silly me. Because while it’s true that a naked wife trumps a picture of a swimsuit model any day of the week—or a Playboy for that matter, the devil is nothing if not relentless. His legions do everything in their power to prevent the coming together of naked husbands and naked wives. If this weren’t the case, Christ would have had no need to warn husbands against looking at other women for sexual fulfillment. Since this is the case, he did. Husbands are forbidden from lusting after other women. Single men are forbidden from lusting after other men’s wives.
For most of human history, you couldn’t gaze at a beautiful woman continuously or privately, unless you were in an intimate relationship with her. You certainly couldn’t stare at her ad nauseam. You were at the mercy of time and place. Then came the photograph, followed by mass reproductions of the photograph, and finally, the digital photograph—distributed instantly across the globe. Now you can see, not just the most beautiful women in your own community, but the most beautiful women in the world. And you can carry them around in your pocket. Technology has made it possible to lust after a woman, not by looking at her, but by looking at a reproduction of her. A reproduction you can possess without having to woo.
I don’t want to suggest that unchecked lust poses no threat to the single man because lust can rapidly move single and married men alike up the ladder of sin. Vices, left unchecked, always move us from bad to worse. In my annual showdowns against the swimsuit issue, I was protected against climbing the ladder of sin, in part, by a significant limitation. In 1990, there was no easy or private means for the average minor to obtain pornography. That is no longer the case today, which means the stakes are even higher. And since sin is never satisfied, if you linger too long over images of women in swimsuits, you’ll eventually be urged on to images of women without their swimsuits, until even that is not enough. Satan’s endgame, as I’ve said before, is not just to pervert sex. It’s to destroy sex, until we no longer have any appetite left for the real body of a real spouse. That’s why, if I had to choose between a son who was sleeping with his girlfriend or a son who was addicted to pornography, it would be a fairly easy call. Both are sinful, but one is far more subversive. Along the same lines, would you be more disturbed to find out your teenaged daughter had slept with her boyfriend or that your teenaged daughter had an abortion? For me, it’s not even close. These are not moral equivalents. They’re categorically different. And yet there are “Christian” parents across the country, pastors included, who would sooner sacrifice their grandchildren than endure the shame of a daughter’s immorality. Such behavior is truly monstrous. Sex is a positive good that only becomes sinful when it is engaged in unlawfully. But abortion is only and always evil. No matter what James Talarico says.
Frederica Mathewes-Green has something like 800 essays to her name, but don’t let that hyphenated last name fool you. She doesn’t write the kinds of things you might expect from someone with a double-barrelled surname. She is married to an orthodox priest, and their son is an orthodox priest. But at the time she got married, now more than 50 years ago, “the woman’s liberation movement [was] very important to [her].” She announced as much to her future husband on their very first date, and when they eventually wed, both legally changed their last name to Mathewes-Green. Which is to say, a lot can change in 50 years. Mathewes-Green was once the president of Feminists for Life, but she officially excised the feminist label in 1994. Ten years later she would concede that “no matter how romantic it sounds, a hyphenated name will only give you headaches.” All of their adult children would wind up opting for a single surname. It’s just easier.
The reason I bring her up, in addition to being a fan of her writing, is because of an article she wrote for National Review back in 2002. The title was, “Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy.” How’s that for a feminist mantra? She pitched it first to an editor at the New York Times, but as her article would lay out, teen pregnancy is one of those rare “vices” that virtually everyone is opposed to. “Despite the conflict between liberals and conservatives on nearly every topic available,” she wrote, “this is one point on which they firmly agree: Young people absolutely must not have children.” Liberals and conservatives disagree on means, she pointed out, the former advocating for birth control, the latter for abstinence, but they have shaken hands on the notion that “the younger generation must not produce a younger generation.” Kudos to National Review for running the piece, and kudos to Frederica for being so ahead of her time. She was able to see the problem way before the rest of us.
In our noble efforts to keep young people from purportedly destroying their lives by having children, we little imagined the day was coming when women of all ages would stop having children. Turns out, that shouldn’t have surprised us. We’ve long known that a woman’s fertility begins to wane at 25, so delaying pregnancy often amounts to foregoing pregnancy in the end. Why would society suddenly insist that women put off having kids, particularly in light of the added protections it provides them against breast cancer? That is why, according to Frederica. The “population-control crowd promotes delayed childbearing” because they’d just assume women not bear children at all. Here is her one-paragraph case for the practical benefits of parenting young:
Younger moms and dads are likely to be more nimble at child-rearing…, less apt to be exhausted by toddlers’ perpetual motion, (and) less creaky-in-the-joints when it’s time to swing from the monkey bars. I suspect that younger parents will also be more patient with boys-will-be-boys rambunction, and less likely than weary 40-somethings to beg pediatricians for drugs to control supposed pathology. Humans are designed to reproduce in their teens, and they’re potentially very good at it. That’s why they want to so much.
My wife was 22 when our son was born. I was 26. Our daughter came just over a year later. So we were young parents the first time around. Now we’re older parents. I’m 50, and our youngest just turned 13. Having experienced it from both ends of the spectrum, I can say that Frederica was right. Maybe I have more wisdom now, but I definitely had more energy and patience when I was younger. Our youngest, I often fear, is getting short shrift. Some of it is him; a lot of it is us. More importantly, how is it reasonable to simultaneously demand that young people wait until they’re married to have sex and also wait until they’re older to get married? Practically speaking, you can only choose one. Culturally, we’ve chosen the latter—assuming it will lead to better marital outcomes. Statistically, it doesn’t. In the words of Mathewes-Green:
During the last half of the 20th century, as brides’ age rose from 20 to 25, the divorce rate doubled. The trend toward older, and presumptively more mature, couples didn’t result in stronger marriages. Marital durability has more to do with the expectations and support of surrounding society than with the partners’ age.
The prolonged childhood we now offer our kids, along with the cultural insistence that they serially date and cohabitate as young adults, is not training people to be better spouses, she argued. It’s training them for divorce. Part of the issue is that we misdiagnosed the problem. It’s not teen pregnancy that’s the problem. It’s unmarried teen pregnancy. The historic norm is to marry young, but we now call it folly to wed right out of high school. That’s because we’ve mostly done away with vocational training and tried to push everyone into higher education where they’ll likely amass crippling amounts of debt and wind up, if they survive, with a degree that has never had less practical value. If we simply “restore(d) an environment that supports younger marriage,” Frederica argued, “[people] won’t have to fight biology for a decade or more.”
Teen pregnancy is the bogeyman that gets trotted out every time the dubious ethics of abortion are questioned. Do you want your 14-year-old daughter to be forced to carry a rapist’s baby?! That’s the typical framing. Never mind the fact that girls under 15 account for one-fifth of one percent of all U.S. abortions. Or that teens in general account for only 8.5%. If you were to ask those who justify abortion by appealing to teen pregnancy whether they think abortion should only be legal for teenage rape victims, you’ll soon learn that, no, they want abortion to be legal for all women, in all circumstances. Their fiendish premise has nothing to do with their actual position. It just makes it seem less damnable. Though we don’t know how many babies were aborted in America last year, Guttmacher puts the total at 1,129,900. If that were the case, then teen mothers procured somewhere around 96,000 abortions in 2025. Mothers in their 20’s added another 638,000, and mothers in their 30’s chipped in with 354,000 more. In other words, teen pregnancy isn’t the problem. Unwed pregnancy is the problem, almost exclusively. Broadly speaking, married couples do not have abortions.
Unwed pregnancy, in the days before contraception and abortion, wasn’t anywhere near the problem it is today. Let that sink in. Since the mainstreaming of birth control and abortion, we’ve gone from children being born in wedlock, to children being born out of wedlock, to children not being born at all. When I first started this work, I thought preventing abortion was my primary objective. That’s part of it, to be sure, but it misses the bigger picture. Because if we were to do away with abortion by simply doing away with pregnancy, it would be a hollow victory in the end. We’d have avoided the bloodguilt of abortion, but we would not have heeded God’s founding mandate or discharged our duty to the next generation. Be fruitful and multiply was God’s directive in Genesis one. It wasn’t, Don’t have an abortion. Abortion is wrong because it’s murder. It kills an innocent and helpless human being. Not conceiving children at all is better than conceiving children and killing them, but the avoidance of abortion is not our final aim. We’re not just anti-abortion; we’re pro-life. And we won’t solve the problem of abortion through abstinence or contraception. It’s going to take marriage and righteousness.
Several weeks ago, on the recommendation of a friend from Down Under, I read for the first time A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. Before I’d even finished, I ordered a copy for my wife, copies for my older children, and a copy for my pastor—who isn’t much older than they are. That’s how much it affected me. I couldn’t shake the conviction that if I’d only read this book before I’d gotten married, I might have been a better husband. I might have more vigilantly guarded against the ruthless in creep of “ministry” and spared my wife all sorts of heartache along the way. Vanauken (Van) and his young bride (Davy) were not believers when they wed, but they had what I would call an abundance of holy ambition. They went to great lengths to ensure that nothing be allowed to break in and diminish their love for each other, and no pursuit of earthly treasure would derail their commitment to live an extraordinary life. And they were faithful to that vision, until God took it from them.
Without going into too much detail, Van and Davy eventually came to faith through the influence of Christian friends and the writings of C.S. Lewis. Nothing unusual there. Countless others have come to Christ in just the same way, but what is unusual about their story is that after reading all the Lewis they could get their hands on, they became friends with the man himself. Can you imagine?! They were Americans but had wound up at Oxford via Pearl Harbor and Yale. Van and Lewis would go on to exchange letters for the next decade, until Lewis’ death in 1963. Many of them are included in the book. Lewis would say of Van and his wife that he never liked two young people more, and yet following Davy’s tragic death just 15 years into their marriage, Lewis gently rebuked Van for something he saw as a grave mistake. Namely, their decision not to have children. Though Lewis was a bachelor nearly his whole life and never had children himself, he felt strongly that the Vanaukens had chosen badly. He wrote:
There's no other man, in such affliction as yours, to whom I'd dare write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love for you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared [your wife] very wrongly the pains of childbirth. Do not evade your own, the travail you must undergo while Christ is being born in you… One flesh must not and in the long run cannot 'live to itself' any more than the single individual. [Marriage] was not made, any more than [the single man], to be its Own End. It was made for God and (in Him) for its neighbours—first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g. maternity, which cannot be shared should on that account be avoided, is surely very unsound. For A) (forgive me) the conjugal act itself depends on opposite, reciprocal and therefore unshare-able experiences. Did you want her to feel she had a woman in bed with her? B) The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not & could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different, trivial in comparison.
The decision to not have children had been made before Van and Davy were married and before they bowed the knee to Christ. But it was never rescinded. They went on believing that a child would weaken the strength of their devotion to each other—not considering, perhaps, that redemption came to Eve, and to us all, through nothing less than the bearing of children. For unto us a child is born. Van and Davy had further committed, as Lewis alluded, to foregoing any experience that couldn’t be shared on equal terms by both of them. What Lewis pointed out is that individuals and married couples alike have a responsibility to neighbor that cannot be ignored. There was something beautiful about the Vanauken’s calculated devotion to each other, but it also contained the seeds of its own demise. That’s because young love cannot be maintained. It must grow into something bigger, or die. More often than not, it’s the latter. This is how Lewis put it:
I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in which men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth.
Years later, Van would concede that their decision had been “wrongheaded” and believes in time they would have seen that. “There is reason to suppose,” he would write, “that our choosing to have no children might have changed, but two years after we came down from Oxford, where our Christ had found us, she was dead, and I was learning the meaning of grief.” Van would then go on to make a rather surprising revelation—one I suspect C.S. Lewis never knew about. When Davy was just 14 years old, long before she met Van, she was impregnated by a person unknown. She gave birth to a blue-eyed girl she called Marion and reluctantly placed her for adoption. Decades later, Van would finally find that daughter living in San Francisco—a joyous discovery he would recount for the New Oxford Review. He then wondered what might have become of Davy’s daughter and Davy’s grandchildren had abortion been available to her all those years ago. He wrote:
Had the frightened young girl who was Davy lived in this decade instead of that remote one, she would perhaps (as maybe Davy did) have first confided in some girlfriend, who (instead of perhaps urging her to confide in her mother) would have urged her to see the school counselor. And the sympathetic counselor, without precisely recommending it, would have told her of the possibility of a quick and easy abortion. Nothing to be afraid of, and then she would never have to confess her dreadful secret to her mother... It wouldn’t have occurred to her that her mother, like God, loved her, even if she, again like God, was sometimes stern… And it would never occur to her, in that desperate, scared moment, that she might in future years feel a haunting grief and guilt for the baby she would have destroyed… If [Davy] had had an abortion, either she would at best have felt that guilt and grief, or she would have defiantly so hardened her heart against such feelings that her very personality would have been altered, toughened. How that might have affected our love — if indeed we should have loved — I cannot know. But, however that might have been, the frightened young girl did not, thank God, have that option.
Van would continue:
What existed in Davy’s belly was not just a growth of tissue but a unique human life: Marion. No other. This is not a religious position; it is a biological fact that the genetic character or individuality is established at the instant of conception... If she had been destroyed by abortion, there never would have been, never could have been (even if Davy had had a score of other children) a Marion… She was uniquely Marion nine years after birth but uniquely Marion nine seconds after conception also. And to kill her at either point would be to kill that particular, individual, unique, never-to-be-duplicated human life… I know Marion now and love her, and I should be diminished if half a century ago Davy had clutched at the straw of abortion. And all the folk who have touched or shall touch the lives of Marion and her children and their children-to-be would be diminished… You who read this essay would not be reading it if Marion had died in the womb, for I should not be writing it — though we should never have known. Yet if we, somehow, would have been diminished by just this one abortion half a century ago, had it happened, what of the [millions of] abortions since the Supreme Court’s precisely fatal decision? It seems to me that [even] one abortion [leaves] a hole in Creation.
King Solomon declared in Psalm 127 that children conceived in wedlock are a reward from the Lord. Arrows in the hand of a warrior. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them! Actually, that’s not quite what he said. Solomon declared that children are a reward. The “fruit of the womb” as he put it, but he said nothing about the circumstances of conception. Is not that a severe mercy? Because though sin has a way of catching up with us, fornication is a rare and singular form of immorality. What other sin has the same capacity to lead to such immense blessing? Or any blessing? Don’t read that as a license for promiscuity. Read it as a proclamation of the fundamental goodness of God and goodness of sex. Andrew Klavan calls sex one of the “great consolations of a tragic life.” But when it’s no longer happening at the frequency it used to, well, life becomes more tragic. So we turn instead to life’s other consolation: food—which may explain why almost half of Americans are now obese, compared to just 13% in the 1960’s. Or maybe it’s because we’ve quit smoking. Either way, the new vices are worse than the old. Because even when sex occurs sinfully, it still produces tiny image-bearers of God—so long as birth control doesn’t thwart the act of creation and abortion doesn’t strike them dead. How that must infuriate the devil! The new vices, by contrast, don’t leave you with children. They merely leave you all alone.
]]>Last week, the Gospel Coalition published an article by Scott Klusendorf titled “Why Equal Protection Bills Harm Pro-Life Efforts.” His basic premise: charging aborting mothers with murder will lead to more abortions in the end. Two days later, Seth Gruber posted a response via Substack in which he publicly took Scott to task for his “poorly reasoned” position. Though these are not names that will mean anything to the average American, both men carry significant clout within pro-life circles—which is why it’s distressing to see them publicly at odds. Distressing, but not surprising. This is the era of ideological infighting, after all. Schisms are the new black.
For my part, I’ve known and admired Scott Kluesendorf since the beginning of my pro-life career some three decades ago. Our paths don’t cross much, but our vocational journeys share plenty in common. Seth Gruber is someone I don’t think I’ve ever met in person, but I did have some virtual interactions with him back in 2011. He was barely out of high school at the time. Today, he is among the highest-profile pro-life speakers in the country—and his observation about abortion’s perverse relationship to the Eucharist (This is my body) is profound. Klusendorf bolstered his article with a quote from Gregg Cunningham, the man who opened my eyes to the evils of abortion. Gruber bolstered his with a quote from C.S. Lewis, the man who opened my eyes to just about everything else. Are they trying to make it impossible for me to pick a side?
Earlier this year, Klusendorf informs us, something rather unprecedented happened in Tennessee. A proposed pro-life House Bill failed to receive even a single subcommittee vote thanks, in part, to the pro-life organizations that campaigned against it. Like Klusendorf, they deemed the bill “antithetical to the anti-abortion movement.” That’s how the Nashville Banner put it. So this isn’t just a “classroom” dispute between two pro-life intellectuals. In the post-Dobbs landscape, where states can again outlaw abortion, it suddenly has more real-world implications than it’s had in a half century. This is how Klusendorf articulates the historic case against prosecuting aborting mothers:
In pre-Roe America, pro-life legislation exempted women receiving abortions from murder charges. There were three reasons for this exemption. First, lawmakers concluded that punishing abortion on the supply side (i.e., the abortionist) would dramatically reduce its occurrence. Second, prosecutors needed the testimony of the woman to convict the abortionist, and without immunity, she had no incentive to testify against him. Third, lawmakers concluded that many women seeking abortions acted without full knowledge, having been coerced by boyfriends, family members, or society into making a wrong choice.
One of Gruber’s objections, though he doesn’t lay it out in quite these terms, is that we are rapidly moving towards an abortionist-free future. Not an abortion-free future, mind you, but abortionist-free. This is why my enthusiasm for the ongoing slate of abortion clinic closures is less than it would have been even a few years ago. The abortion pill—delivered by mail—is putting both abortionists and abortion clinics out of business. The difficulty is this. If there is no abortionist, and you categorically refuse to charge the mother, then how can you prosecute the crime of abortion? You can’t, Gruber argues. “A pregnant mother in (even) the most conservative state in America,” he reasons, “can abort her baby at any point in pregnancy by any means and face zero legal consequences, so long as she performs that abortion herself.” Gruber concedes that America isn’t ready for the passage of equal protection bills but insists they should be pursued anyway. He writes:
It’s true our culture is likely “not ready” for the criminalization of abortion, wherein little babies are actually given the same protections against being murdered [that] you and I and our children have. Our culture is no more ready for that than it was for “gay marriage” in 2015, for legal porn in 1973, or for full-term abortions also in 1973 [but] sexual liberationists and occult feminists never WAIT for the culture to be “ready”… They create culture and change it according to their whims THROUGH their political engagement. They go all-in and mobilize their relatively small portion of the public who are willing to sacrifice nearly everything on the altar of “orgasms without responsibility.” They understand and understand well that “statecraft is soulcraft.”
I find this passage extremely compelling and true. Those who promote wicked causes do not wait for opportunity; they create opportunity. Gregg Cunningham has been saying this for years. Specifically, that those seeking to advance the banner of abortion are far more willing to do the necessary legwork than those who oppose it. That, however, is not the point of contention, and I feel compelled to point out that Gruber has subtly adjusted the parameters of the debate. Did you notice that? The disagreement is not over whether our culture is ready to criminalize abortion. Numerous states have already done so. The disagreement is over whether or not it would be advisable to charge aborting mothers with murder. Nothing Gruber wrote above speaks to that specific point.
You might argue that if unborn babies were actually given the “same protections” as born children, then mothers would be charged for their murder, but that’s not necessarily the case. Because mothers who kill their born children are almost never prosecuted as they would have been if they were not the mother. A 2024 Canadian study reports that “most child homicides are committed by [parents or stepparents]” and further notes that “maternal perpetrators are less likely to be convicted (in general), less likely to be convicted of murder, less likely to receive a prison sentence, and receive sentences that are shorter on average compared to paternal perpetrators.” Many countries formally grant leniency to murdering mothers through infanticide laws. Those that don’t, like the United States, still tend to sentence mothers differently. Haven’t we all seen news stories of women who directly or indirectly killed their infant child only to receive what seems a grossly-inadequate sentence? I’m not saying that’s how it should be. I’m just pointing out that the precedent of treating mothers with kid gloves already exists.
It’s also true, according to the law given to Moses, that prosecuting different types of murders according to different legal standards may be perfectly appropriate. Why is this important? Because it counteracts the assertion that charging mothers with murder is the only way to adequately account for the humanity of unborn children. Though this is one of those passages I might prefer not be found in Scripture, Exodus 21 makes a legal distinction between killing a slave and killing someone who is not a slave. The specific context is an ox with a history of violence. We read the following in verses 29-32:
But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death. If a ransom is imposed on him, then he shall give for the redemption of his life whatever is imposed on him. If it gores a man’s son or daughter, he shall be dealt with according to this same rule. If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.
There is plenty here to offend my Western sensibilities, but the material point is this. The slave and the freeman are both human beings. They’re both made in the image of God. On this front, they are equals—and yet the law treats their deaths differently. It was a capital offense to kill a free man, woman, or child (even indirectly). It was not a capital offense to kill a slave. I am not saying that unborn children are the moral equivalents of slaves. I’m simply pointing out that prosecutorial distinctions are not unbiblical as a matter of course. I’m open to the idea that we should be charging aborting mothers with murder, but I’m not open to the idea that the Bible (or the humanity of unborn children) requires it. That’s simply not the case. And is it really fair to legally single out the aborting mother while ostensibly giving the father a pass? Just because she’s the one who physically carries their child?
Over the last few years, virtually all pro-life ballot initiatives have failed. “We might wish it weren’t so,” Klusendorf writes, “but the relentless drumbeat of stories claiming that women will die from abortion restrictions or be prosecuted for suffering miscarriage resonates not only with the general public but also with marginally pro-life voting blocks.” And donors, I would add. One of the things I discovered in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs verdict is that there is a class of people who are morally opposed to abortion but want it to be legal. Abort73 lost donors who suddenly realized that they weren’t anti-abortion in the way they’d assumed themselves to be. Some of that owed to misinformation surrounding the purported unavailability of miscarriage care, but I suspect there was more in play than just that. What they really want, it seems, is a society that discourages abortion through culture and education—but doesn’t prohibit it by law. That may sound nice in theory, but it’s a pipe dream in practice. Gruber points this out quite persuasively. He writes:
[Andrew] Breitbart [argued that] “politics is downstream of culture.” So change the culture, you change the politics. True enough. But only half true. Culture is also downstream of politics… And abortion is in fact the best example for this. The median number of illegal abortions before 1973 in America was 98,000. Within just a handful of years following Roe, the annual total of murdered babies was 1.6 million! That cultural change was due solely to the political change. And this despite the fact that in 1973, the Democrat Party was largely pro-life.
The dramatic year-over-year increase in abortions following Roe is something I point to every time someone suggests that laws have no bearing on a woman’s willingness to have an abortion. History tells a very different story. In large measure, it was the supply of abortion that created the massive uptick in demand. Like so many of the technologies that society can no longer live without, abortion is not necessary. It is merely convenient. And deadly (in more ways than one). “Can we change enough hearts and minds through cultural engagement alone,” Gruber asks, “to create a sufficient enough shift that the people will ‘be ready’ for the criminalization of abortion?” In his words: “Not likely.” Even though Abort73 does work “through cultural engagement alone,” to change the way people think about abortion, I am sympathetic to Gruber’s claim. Because, having been at this for a generation now, I can admit to underestimating both the difficulty of educating the masses about abortion and the possibility that said education will fail to produce the desired result.
That being said, I’m not aware of any pro-life leaders or organizations that are opposed to abortion bans in general. It’s only prosecuting the mother that some take issue with, but this distinction gets lost throughout Gruber’s Substack piece. “What will happen,” he asks, if we take Klusendorf’s advise and refrain from demanding and fighting for full legal protections for the unborn in America’s red states and focus on the culture (instead)?” But Klusendorf isn’t opposed to giving full legal protection to unborn children. He simply believes the punishment should fall on the provider alone. While Klusendorf opened with the assertion that not prosecuting mothers is the historical norm, Gruber asserted the opposite, using an in-article headline to declare that “Equal Protection Is the Historic American Position.” But he then skips over the point of actual contention to argue again for something that is not being disputed. Gruber writes:
The position that preborn children should have legal protections is more traditional in American jurisprudence than the position of Mr. Klusendorf. By the time of ratification, nearly every state had criminal legislation proscribing abortion. Twenty-three states and six territories referred to the fetus as a “child” in their anti-abortion statutes. Twenty-eight jurisdictions classified abortion as an “offense against the person.”
Here again, Klusendorf explicitly affirmed the fact that criminalizing abortion was the historic norm. So in order to counter his actual position, Gruber would need to demonstrate that these 23 states and six territories did, in fact, prosecute aborting mothers for murder. But that key piece of the puzzle is left off the table. I’m no apologist for the pro-life establishment. I’ve been on the outside looking in for as long as I’ve been doing this work, but I’m leery of the idea that anyone who proposes immunity for aborting mothers has made some sort of deal with the devil. It’s one thing to say, I disagree with your tactics. It’s another to say, you’re not really pro-life. Or, you must not be a Christian. Gruber doesn’t go quite that far, but he’s close. He accuses numerous pro-life leaders and organizations, by name, of being “co-opted by the GOP Republican Establishment” and lays the blame for red state medical abortions at their feet. They “serve as incumbent protection programs” (for abortion?) he argues, whose “subversion” of pro-life principles cannot be tolerated.
It’s certainly possible that there are some bad actors within the ranks of professional pro-lifers. How could there not be? But while “pro-life” politicians may want to maintain the status quo for political reasons, it’s hard to imagine there’s enough money or prestige in vocationally combatting abortion to entice the blackguard class. I do not begrudge Seth Gruber his passion or impatience. One of the most credible accusations you’ll hear leveled against we who oppose abortion goes like this: our rhetoric and our actions don’t match up. If we really believed abortion was murder, if we really believed thousands of babies were being slaughtered in America every day, we’d be doing a whole lot more about it. Our relative indifference is a tell. It indicates we’re not as torn up about abortion as we pretend to be. In Gruber’s mind, we can say abortion is murder, but if we’re unwilling to prosecute as such, is it all just a charade?
Now for the moment of truth. Is Scott Klusendorf right, or is Seth Gruber right? Does justice demand that we prosecute mothers for the crime of abortion, or does wisdom demand that we take the victories we can get? And the answer is… I have no idea. Time will tell, or it won’t. That’s part of the difficulty. There are compelling arguments on both sides, but there are no control groups. There is only an endless stream of shifting variables. All of which makes it impossible to know with any certainty whether taking a different tack would lead to better results. Or worse. Fortunately for me (and for most of you), it doesn’t matter who is right. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this debate doesn’t matter. I’m just saying it doesn't matter to the vast majority of those who hate abortion and want to see it relegated to the dustbin of history.
Outlawing abortion is almost certainly the most effective way to eliminate abortion. Wherever abortion can be outlawed, it should be outlawed. I suspect Scott and Seth would both agree. But that still leaves all the places where abortion can’t be outlawed (apart from miraculous intervention). What do we do there? Especially in our current political climate where support for anti-abortion policies continues to hemorrhage. Klusendorf referenced a study indicating that “only 43 percent of churchgoers now identify as pro-life, a 20-point crash in just two years.” Yikes. His advice: we should follow the lead of Lincoln and Wilberforce who achieved ultimate victory against slavery by not seeking for too much too soon. On the other hand, we’ve already been at this for more than 50 years. At what point does patience become cowardice or dereliction? Nor do I much care for the practice of publicly sabotaging the efforts of fellow pro-lifers for putting forth a bill you’re strategically opposed to. Tactical disagreements are one thing. Turning those disagreements into public grievances is another. Didn’t Paul say something about it being better to be wronged than to bring public shame on the cause of the gospel? And isn’t it somewhat disingenuous to assert that since a bill won’t pass, we’re going to ensure that it doesn’t pass? Here are two additional Scriptures that come to mind:
One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind… (so) why do you pass judgment on your brother? … For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.” (Romans 14:5-10)
If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. (Romans 12:18)
One of the reasons C.S. Lewis is so universally beloved is because he didn’t miss the forest for the trees. We Christians can be as sectarian as they come, but Lewis transcended denominational divisions by reminding us that there is more that unites us than divides. There’s a lesson there for pro-lifers. Unless you’re a lawmaker or lobbyist, you can content yourself with being merely pro-life. You needn’t be able to articulate exactly how the crime of abortion should be prosecuted—or even have a definitive position on the subject—in order to be a meaningful public witness against abortion. That’s worth remembering. There is no one right way to combat abortion. The best we can do is to be faithful to both our reason and principles. Let each one be fully convinced in his own mind.
How can the average American be a witness against abortion? My suggestion is this. Focus first on your family and your neighbors. Make sure your kids have a working knowledge of prenatal development. Share with them what makes abortion anathema. Reaching your neighbors is admittedly trickier, but Abort73 can help. That’s where our T-shirts and bumper stickers come in. And even if you’re not a T-shirt wearer, imagine with me what might happen if you added one of our stickers to your car. Is it possible that after seeing “Abort73” drive through their neighborhood for days, weeks, or months, some or all of your neighbors would finally be compelled to Google Abort73? And if you have the financial wherewithal to invest in the elimination of abortion, find the organization that most closely aligns to your own convictions and objectives. And give! Remembering as you do that the horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord.
]]>The existence of evil has never been a philosophical problem for me. How can there be wickedness in a world created by a good God? Because he gave his creatures the freedom to rebel. Or at least the angelic and image-bearing ones. We did (rebel, that is) and here we are. That’s enough explanation for me. It’s the problem of faith that I struggle to get my head around. If you have the faith of a mustard seed (ie a very little), Christ told his disciples in Matthew 17, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will obey you. Or in the less poetic and well-known rendering from Luke: If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be planted in the sea, and it will. Though we might question the practical value in transporting mountains or planting trees in the ocean, the basic takeaway seems pretty clear. If you have faith, the normal laws of nature are no longer binding.
Some years ago, my wife and I planted a small tree in the corner of our backyard. But then we decided we wanted it smack dab in the middle. So with tremendous faith, I approached the tree and told it in no uncertain terms to move from here to there and be planted in the center of the yard—which should be far simpler than planting itself in the sea. And do you know what happened? Nothing, of course, because I’m jesting. It never dawned on me to command the tree to move. And every time our dogs dig holes in that same backyard, we don’t command the mounds of dirt to relocate. We send our 12-year-old out with a shovel. “Faith Can Move Mountains,” is a message that adorns all manner of Christian kitsch, but when it comes down to it, I don’t even have the faith to move a sapling 30 feet or flatten a pile of dirt. I could easily argue that it would be sacrilegious to employ prayer in such silly, self-serving ways—for things I am perfectly capable of doing myself, but that doesn’t solve the bigger problem.
I John 5:13 is a verse I hear quoted fairly often—including this past Sunday. “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” Verses 14 and 15 are quoted with less frequency. Same goes for verse 18. The gist of them is this. We can know we have eternal life if we receive “whatever we ask” in prayer and “[do] not keep on sinning.” A few chapters after Christ rebuked his disciples for lacking the faith to cast out a demon (which prompted his moving mountains quip), Jesus returned to the same word picture—this time after cursing a fig tree and witnessing its demise. “If you have faith and do not doubt,” he told them in Matthew 21, “you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.” And just to make perfectly clear that this authority goes beyond casting inanimate objects into large bodies of water, Jesus added the following. “Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”
I am perfectly willing to accept the existence of evil in a world made by a good God, but how can evil exist in a world where believers with even a modicum of belief are promised anything they ask for in prayer? That’s the question that does a number on me. Because the implication is that nobody has the faith of a mustard seed. I heard Francis Chan say back in 2011 that his life, since he was a little boy, has been one long string of answered prayers. “Everything in [my life],” he said, “is just this crazy, supernatural answer to prayer.” He went so far as to modify the world’s most famous Sunday school song as follows: “Jesus loves me, this I know, because [his answered prayers] show me so.” I was tremendously encouraged by Chan’s testimony, but I don’t think it mirrors the experience of most Christians. Because if it did, how could there still be such a thing as Planned Parenthood? Or Mifepristone? Or “gender affirming care?” Christians who claim to receive everything they ask for in prayer are either being less than honest, or they’re praying for the wrong things.
There is no shortage of whatever you ask for promises in Scripture, and they come almost exclusively from the mouth of Christ. The only qualification for nearly all of them is faith. “Whoever believes in me,” Jesus said in John 14, “will also do the works that I do.” Then he takes it further. Whoever believes in me will do even “greater works than these… (for) If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” Jesus makes statements like these throughout the gospels. I’ve already referenced Matthew 17:20, Luke 17:6, and Matthew 21:22. Here are a few more:
Collectively, the conditions for receiving whatever we ask for in prayer include asking in faith, without doubt, in Jesus’ name, in agreement with another, for the purpose of bearing fruit, while abiding in Christ (as his words abide in us). And sometimes, according to the mostly-redacted Matthew 17:21, it must be accompanied by fasting. James and John may well have had these prerequisites in view when they approached Jesus to demand, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Their request, you’ll remember, was that they should each sit next to Jesus in his coming kingdom—which didn’t sit particularly well with the other disciples. Matthew’s account attributes the question to their mother, but when the sons were asked if they were able to drink the cup prepared for Christ, they said without hesitation, “We are able.” They boldly asked in faith, but their request was denied. “You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus responded.
Years later, another James warned against the dangers of requests motivated by “selfish ambition.” The reason “you ask and do not receive,” he wrote, “(is) because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Prayer is not intended nor authorized to be a means for achieving selfish gain, so maybe we can write off the Sons of Thunder for being nakedly self-interested in their request. But what do we do with Paul’s petition for the removal of his proverbial thorn in the flesh? “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this,” Paul wrote, “that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
There’s no indication that Paul’s request was selfish or devoid of faith. And perhaps if he’d continued making it, he could have finally worn God down. Isn’t that the lesson of the persistent widow in Luke 18? Whatever the case, Paul did not get what he asked for because it was not in accord with God’s intentions—which means it was not within Christ’s purview to grant. This was the second problem with the request made by James and John. “To sit at my right hand or at my left,” Jesus told them, ”is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
John himself would make this caveat explicit in his first epistle. “If we ask anything according to [God’s] will,” he wrote, “we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” He further asserted that obedience is also necessary. “Whatever we ask (of God),” it says in I John 3, “we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.” In like fashion, James would assert that it is only “the prayer of a righteous person” that has power. David and Solomon said the same. “When the righteous cry for help,” we read in Psalm 34, “the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.” Proverbs 15 adds that “the LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” In the words of Peter, “[the Lord’s] ears are open to [the] prayer(s) (of the righteous), but his face is “against those who do evil.”
Is it possible, then, that the reason why even the apostles did not get everything they asked for is because there was disqualifying sin in their lives? It’s possible but not likely. Because we know of one man who prayed in faith, without any sin, but was still not granted that which he requested. “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” Those were the words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. So not only was Jesus tempted in every respect as we are, he also had the experience of not receiving what he asked for in prayer.
On the one hand, Jesus said whatever you ask for in faith is yours. On the other, not even Jesus got whatever he asked for in faith. Nor did the apostles. What should we make of that? Was Jesus being hyperbolic in his over-the-top promises? It doesn’t feel that way. Here’s one theory. If there is a risk in both asking too much and asking too little, Jesus would prefer we error on the side of asking too much—even as he modeled an explicit yielding to the unknown purposes of God. “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” That’s how the close of Christ’s prayer is rendered in Luke. One of the tensions here is that James explicitly warned his readers against asking for something with doubt. The person who doubts, James wrote, should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. But how can you pray for something without doubt while also declaring, not my will but thine be done? Isn’t the declaration itself an expression of doubt—an allowance for the possibility that you might not get what you ask? The key, I believe, is this. In yielding to the wisdom and authority of the Father, Jesus was not doubting his ability to do what was asked of him. Jesus was merely doubting the merits of his own request. There’s a Josh Garrells song I’m quite fond of that includes this line: “Let every man be considered a liar, if he doubts the goodness and faithfulness of God.” That is the doubt we should be guarding against.
Since God, in the end, only acts according to his will, we might wonder what the point of praying is at all. Is it for the good of our own souls, or is God actually altering the normal course of cause and effect? In either case, there is something in the mechanics of prayer that honors God and is grounding for us. He could accomplish his purposes and give us all we need without prayer, but he inaugurated it none the less. Biblically, there is some wiggle room between what God intends to do and what he’s willing to do. And that, apparently, is where our prayers—and labors—actually make a difference. We see this in Abraham’s pleadings for Sodom, Moses’ pleadings for the Israelites, and on the negative side, in Jesus’ inability to do many miracles in his home town. Mark writes that “he could do no mighty work” in Nazareth “because of their unbelief.” Make of that what you will, but faith, it seems, operates as a sort of fuel for miraculous intervention.
For the last 30 years, I have been trying to harmonize what the Bible says about prayer with what I observe on the ground. It’s a difficult task because of this disconnect between the lavish promises we find in Scripture and the bitter disappointments we so often encounter in real life. But whenever I come up against something in Scripture that doesn’t match my experience, or the experience of those I know, I don’t assume Scripture is wrong. I assume my understanding is wrong, or worse—that my faith is simply deficient. A faith that can be aptly summarized by the words of the desperate father in Mark 9, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” I suspect all who claim the name of Christ live with this tension, just as all who came before us. Jesus spoke in very binary terms—no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit—but James notes that it’s more complicated in practice. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” Jesus said it can’t be; James said it shouldn’t be. We find something of the same duality in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. He praises them in chapter one for a faith known round the world, then follows it up in chapter two with a brutal tongue lashing towards those who presume upon God’s kindness and forbearance. Here’s how it looks side by side:
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. (1:8) But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. (2:5) For, as it is written, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you." (2:24)
What do we make of that? Was Paul speaking to good trees or bad trees? The answer is both, I suspect, since most all congregations are comprised of some unknown combination of sheep and goats. Good trees and bad. How do we recognize them? By their fruits. That’s what Christ says in Matthew 7. “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.” In Luke 6, he makes it even more explicit. “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.” This brings us to the real difficulty because it’s not as if some people in the church are producing only good fruit and some people are producing only bad. We all seem to be producing a mix of both. When I examine my life, I do find what I believe to be genuinely good fruit. But there’s some bad fruit in there too, and good trees aren’t supposed to be able to bear bad fruit.
The standard explanation is that it’s the pattern of our lives that matters, not perfect obedience. I don’t disagree with that, but it does raise another problem. One of the things we evangelicals frequently assert is that Christianity is the only religion in the world that doesn’t require you to earn salvation. Every other religion, it’s argued, boils down to trying to do more good than bad. And yet here we are essentially saying that the way we can know whether our faith is genuine is if our good deeds outweigh the bad. They don’t outweigh the bad morally, of course. A single bad deed is disqualification, but we still wind up against a sort of Catch 22. We can’t do anything to earn salvation, but the only way to know we have salvation is to do something.
Paul said in the book of Acts that if you believe in the Lord Jesus, you will be saved. John said in his first epistle that we can know we believe in the Lord Jesus if we keep his commandments (I John 5:1-3). Since nobody is keeping Christ’s commandments perfectly, we’re left hoping that we’re keeping them enough. It’s an if-then equation of monumental proportions: If you believe, then you will be saved. But how do we verify the if when the then is still in the future (the one who endures to the end will be saved)? This is made more pressing by the fact that if we get it wrong, there is no opportunity for a redo (it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment). Jesus added a second means of testing our faith when he said, if you believe in me, ask me anything in my name, and I will do it. Taken together: If you believe, then you will obey the commandments AND you will receive what you ask for in prayer.
We can insist until we’re blue in the face that salvation comes through faith and not works, but where does that leave us if we don’t actually have the faith Christ describes as being requisite? The faith of a mustard seed. The faith to move mountains. My takeaway is this. We each of us have less faith than we’d like to imagine—which puts us in a bit of a precarious situation if we believe that faith and works can be cleanly separated. There is a sense in which we’re saved by faith, and there is a sense in which we’re saved by works. When we pound on one exclusively and ignore the other, all sorts of dangers arise. Paul writes that Abraham was justified by faith when he believed that God would provide him a son. James writes that Abraham was justified by works when he showed himself willing to sacrifice that son. Both are right, so long as we understand saving faith and saving works to be manifestations of the same Spirit.
Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac is one of those biblical stories that doesn’t shock us nearly as much as it should because we’ve simply grown familiar with it. And we know how it ends. But my youngest son has not yet been inoculated. So he asked me recently what I would do if God commanded me to sacrifice him. For my part, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which I could be convinced that God wanted me to kill my child. Would even the appearance of an angel do the trick? Or would I assume it to be a devil in disguise? Imagine what that must have been like to live through as a father. Or a son.
I once walked out of a college art class because we were being shown a movie I deemed to be pornographic. It was about a suddenly disabled husband who insisted his wife have sex with other men. My punishment for vacating early was having to write an essay about Abraham and Isaac, which the professor deemed a parallel account. Namely, the instruction to act immorally as a sign of devotion. It’s been a few decades since I turned that paper in, but I believe my essential contention was that while God had the authority to make such a request of Abraham, the cinematic husband did not.
The bounds of God’s moral authority are stretched even further in the first book of Samuel—which has recently come alive for me through Jon Erwin’s streaming television series, House of David. It is an epic retelling of King Saul’s fall from grace and King David’s near-impossible rise to the throne. I cannot recommend it enough. That said, there is nothing feel-good about it. It is brutal and heartbreaking, but it has made Samuel, Saul, and David more real to me as people than they’ve ever been before. Ditto for Jonathan and Michal. How easy it is to forget that the characters we encounter in the Bible were real people, who lived through real trials, and had no idea how those trials would conclude.
By the end of season two, David is on the run. He has received shelter—and the sword of Goliath—from the priests at Nob. But he was seen there by the dastardly Doeg the Edomite, Saul’s chief herdsman. Though David had lied to the priests about his reasons for coming to them as he did (claiming to be on a secret mission for the king), Saul ordered the priests killed anyway for abetting his enemy. When his men refused to lift their swords against God’s anointed, Doeg was happy to oblige. The show’s depiction of the ensuing violence is not overly graphic, but the weight of what is happening is palpable. It’s even worse in the text:
And the king said to the guard who stood about him, “Turn and kill the priests of the LORD, because their hand also is with David, and they knew that he fled and did not disclose it to me.” But the servants of the king would not put out their hand to strike the priests of the LORD. Then the king said to Doeg, “You turn and strike the priests.” And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep, he put to the sword.
House of David makes no reference to the slaughter of Nob’s women, children, and infants. Perhaps it would have been too much for the audience to bear, but that is what happened. And while killing the women and children might seem like next-level depravity, there is a complicated backstory to this saga. Do you remember what Saul did in the first place to lose God’s favor? His sin was failing to utterly destroy the Amalekites. These were God’s instructions to Saul through Samuel:
Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Saul, apparently, executed all the Amalek men, women, children, and infants but stopped short of killing the king and the livestock. When confronted, he dubiously claimed to Samuel that he had only spared the sheep and oxen in order to sacrifice them to the Lord, to which Samuel famously replied, “To obey is better than sacrifice.” And then Samuel himself “hacked [the Amalek king] to pieces.” As someone who is in the business of trying to spare babies from the sword, I would much rather there weren’t passages in Scripture where God decrees their destruction. It offends my Western sensibilities. But what was God’s warning to Job and his friends? Who are you to question the wisdom and prerogative of the Creator? “I am the first and the last,” he told John, “I have the keys of Death and Hades.” God condemned the Amalekites to destruction because they were an exceedingly wicked people. The Amalek infants didn’t deserve to die for their own sins, but they were bound up in the sins of their fathers. And there is no greater punishment to be leveled upon a people than the annihilation of their progeny.
Abortion, as I’ve said before, is both deserving of God’s wrath and a manifestation of God’s wrath. If a foreign adversary was doing to our unborn children what we are doing to our unborn children, the full fury of the American war machine would be unleashed against them. But since it is not China, Russia, or Iran annually killing a million American babies in utero, we barely notice. Saul was commanded to devote the Amalekites to destruction. He didn’t. He wasn’t commanded to devote Nob to destruction, but he did. He would not annihilate God’s enemies, but he would annihilate God’s anointed. That is how perverse and corrupt the mind of Saul had become.
The reason I am bothered by the notion that God would decree that even the Amalek babies be put to the sword is because I do not sufficiently appreciate the holiness of God or the evil of men. Perhaps if I did, I would be more bothered by evil in the world. When God shut the door to Noah’s Ark, he condemned to death every man, woman, and child not on that boat. Including the born and unborn babies. The reason I am less troubled by this account, I suspect, is because God carried out their destruction himself. He didn’t lay the charge upon his chosen people. But why should it matter which tools the Creator uses to carry out his will? Didn’t Jesus say something to the effect of, “I have not come to bring peace (to the earth), but a sword”? This is a metaphorical sword, some will say, and maybe so, but there is nothing metaphorical about Luke 22:36.
One of the things that is missing, I believe, in the average evangelical church in America is fear. The fear of the Lord, to be precise. In the parlance of C.S. Lewis, we have contented ourselves to worship a very tame lion. We jauntily approach his throne without any sense that he has the power and authority to tear us to pieces. It is not the love of God that brings wisdom. It’s the fear of God—which we could probably all use a lot more of. Ours is a nation that poisons and mutilates its unborn children. Would any pending judgment be too severe? Have we somehow missed the standard by which we shall be measured? Believe it or not, this comes from the apostle Paul:
He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” That’s the question Jesus asks following the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18. It’s a rather haunting one, no? I’m not sure I’ve ever considered it in context. Here is the statement that immediately precedes it: “Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.”
Not getting what we ask for in prayer may owe to any number of things. I’ve already laid them out from Scripture. But for men and women of faith, unanswered prayer is meant to be the exception, not the rule. That should trouble us on many levels, but here is an exceedingly tangible and practical point of application. Don’t ever stop crying out to God for justice, day and night. This is how faith manifests itself. From our perspective, nothing is happening. The judge is silent and indifferent. From God’s perspective, “[I] will give justice to them speedily.” Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. So it may simply be that the reason God is not answering more of our prayers is because we are giving up on them too soon.
]]>When I first saw Massachusetts’ abortion total for 2024, I assumed there was a mistake. Based on historical data, it simply wasn’t plausible. In 2023, a reported 20,008 abortions took place in Massachusetts. For 2024, Guttmacher put the state total at 20,990—and their estimates are almost always too high. In fact, among the 23 states where abortion remains legal and 2024 abortion totals have already been reported, the Guttmacher estimate was higher than reported 23 times. That’s 100%. Their overall abortion estimate for those 23 states was inflated by 27%. But all that changed last week with the publication of the 2024 Massachusetts Induced Termination of Pregnancy Report. Guttmacher’s estimate, it turns out, was 81% too low. The actual 2024 abortion total for Massachusetts was 49,450. That’s more than twice what it was in 2023 and three times what it was in 2020.
In 2020, there were roughly 16,000 abortions in Massachusetts against 66,000 live births. In 2023, it was 20,000 abortions versus 67,000 live births. The next year, 2024, there were 49,000 abortions and 68,000 live births—which prompts the question: What changed between 2023 and 2024 to account for such a drastic increase in abortion? That would be the onslaught of telehealth abortion, which is the practice of sending out abortion pills through the mail. Green-lighted during our abysmal Covid response, telehealth abortion seems to be rearing its ugly head wherever I look. Two weeks ago I reported that, thanks to this new phenomenon, England now aborts 32% of its unborn populace. To that, Massachusetts said, “hold my beer.” The percentage of pregnancies aborted in Massachusetts went from 20% in 2020 to 42% in 2024, at least in theory. The reality is more complicated and troubling.
Among the 49,450 abortions Massachusetts reported in 2024, 62% were performed via telehealth. But state residents accounted for “only” 21,407 total abortions. That means close to 28,000 “Massachusetts” abortions were performed on out-of-state (OOS) residents. How many of those were performed via telehealth? We don’t know yet. Maybe all of them. There is more demographic data available for 2023, when there were a reported 5,744 telehealth abortions in Massachusetts. Seventy five percent were performed out of state—bringing Massachusetts listed 2023 abortion total up to 24,355. Among 2023 abortions that took place in person, the percentages were reversed. Only 25% were performed on out-of-state residents. In 2022, there were no telehealth abortions reported in Massachusetts and just 5% of abortions were performed on out-of-state residents. Which is to say, in the course of two years, Massachusetts has transformed itself into the nation’s leading exporter of abortion.
New Mexico and Kansas are abortion destinations. Women travel to them from other states to have abortions because, in the case of New Mexico, abortion is illegal in Texas, or in the case of Kansas, there are few other late-term options available. Out-of-state residents account for more than 60% of abortions in New Mexico and roughly 70% in Kansas. Massachusetts, it seems, has become an abortion distributor—a category that has never existed before. Historically, there have been two ways to tally state abortion totals. There is the resident total and the occurrence total. The resident total is the number of abortions procured by residents of a particular state, no matter where the abortion takes place. The occurrence total is the number of abortions that occurred within the geographical bounds of a particular state and includes abortions performed on out-of-state residents. But now Massachusetts has introduced a third category. That is, abortions that are provided by one state but performed in a different state on women who live in a different state. And yet those abortions still show up on Massachusetts’ ledger. At the very least, this will require a change to the way we record and report abortions.
One of the primary ways Abort73 has reported state abortion data over the years is by listing the average number of children a state aborts on any given day. It’s the total number of abortions that occurred within a given state, in a given year, divided by 365. As you can see, this metric no longer works for Massachusetts. If 75% of its 2024 telehealth abortions took place out-of-state, as they did in 2023, that would mean that almost half of Massachusetts abortions took place in another state. It also throws a wrench into the model I use to estimate our nationwide abortion total each year. This estimate is necessary, you’ll remember, because California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have not reported state abortion totals for decades. And now Michigan and Washington are following suit.
Prior to the publication of Massachusetts abortion data for 2024, 36 states had already published their 2024 totals. According to Guttmacher, those 36 states account for 36% of America’s abortion total. If that’s true, we can estimate that approximately 801,000 U.S. abortions occurred in 2024. But if I add Massachusetts into the equation, the new estimated nationwide total jumps all the way to 890,000 abortions. I don’t know what to do with that. According to Guttmacher’s 2024 estimates, Massachusetts makes up 2% of America’s abortion total. If that were actually the case, the nationwide abortion total for 2024 would be 2.5 million. Massachusetts is such an outlier that it renders the model almost useless. If we knew the number of abortion pills that Massachusetts sent out of state, we could deduct that from their total. But we don’t. And would those abortions show up on the ledgers of the states in which they occured? I don’t see why they would, unless Massachusetts is notifying those state of their arrival, which seems unlikely. Then there’s the fact that telehealth abortions are measured by the number of pills that are sent out, not by the number of abortions that occur. There is, apparently, no follow up.
In 2023, Planned Parenthood killed more babies in Massachusetts than anyone else. Their Boston abortion clinic ended the lives of 4,811 tiny human beings. Planned Parenthood of Western Massachusetts added 1,875 more, and Planned Parenthood of Central Massachusetts tallied another 1,675. That’s 8,361 abortions amongst the state’s three Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, or 34% of the state’s 2023 abortion total. In 2024, those same three Planned Parenthoods managed to increase total abortions, as they always seem to do, but thanks to telehealth, their market share was cut in half. It fell to 17% of total abortions, which Planned Parenthood cannot be happy about. I suppose it’s possible that this billion-dollar non-profit is so devoted to the nobility of killing children in the womb that they can celebrate it no matter who gets paid for its execution. But I suspect their interests are more pecuniary than that. Medical personnel who sell their souls to the devil tend to want as much financial compensation as they can get.
Who is getting paid for the telehealth abortions that are taking over the industry? That’s a question no one seems able to answer. Ostensibility, it is the drug manufacturers. In America, there are only two. That would be Danco Laboratories, the company that first brought medical abortion to the U.S. on behalf of the aptly-named Population Council and GenBioPro, a recent upstart offering a generic alternative. Both entities manufacture a single product which has but a single application—the killing of human embryos and fetuses. The drug’s name: mifepristone. Danco Laboraties operates anonymously out of a P.O. Box in New York City. GenBioPro hails from that other bastion of moral virtue: Las Vegas.
My efforts to learn more about these rather opaque entities led me to a 2023 L.A. Times article headlined, “Why you’ve never heard of the company behind the abortion pill.” Here are some of the takeaways. Danco Labs “has fewer than 20 employees,” is not listed on any public exchanges, and “doesn’t make any of its sales figures public.” Nor does it share the name of its CEO, its board members, or its investors. Danco Labs was expressly formed to distribute the abortion pill on behalf of The Population Council, which secured the U.S. rights in 1994. FDA approval for mifepristone was secured through a secret off-site meeting, the public record of which has been largely redacted. What is the reason for this concerted lack of disclosure? According to the article, which reads like something generated by AI, “All of the secrecy around Danco exists because of fear about what antiabortion activists might do.” It’s our fault, you see, though there is another explanation to consider. It’s not as if Planned Parenthood is hiding out in the shadows.
Mother Jones also published an article about Danco Labs in 2023. Its version was titled “The Abortion Pill’s Secret Money Men.” It’s subtitle: “The untold story of the private equity investors behind Mifeprex—and their escalating legal battle to cash in post-Dobbs.” There’s more in that title than in the whole of the L.A. Times piece, and you can already feel the tension. Namely, Mother Jones’ love for abortion versus its contempt for capitalism. “Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs,” their website proudly proclaims. To Mother Jones’ credit, their exposé on the decades of infighting and deception that have marked the development and distribution of the abortion pill is not a flattering one. It’s not a good look for the men who believed in both “the social benefits of mifepristone, and in the enormous financial potential.” Here’s an excerpt:
Over the last two decades, mifepristone’s dramatic origin story has made its way into books and the pages of the New York Times. But the tale of who funded this effort to legally bring it to women across the country, and what benefits the funders might reap from their investments, has been mostly kept quiet… The small group of investors who backed the Population Council’s drive to manufacture and distribute the drug since its earliest days have made a lot of money on the mifepristone business—tens of millions of dollars, according to court filings. Their windfall has come through a byzantine corporate structure set up in the 1990s by a private equity fund, now called MedApproach Holdings, to allow investors to pour money into Danco Labs—until 2019 the only US retailer of mifepristone—without disclosing their identities. As states have imposed ever-stricter limits on abortion access, their investments have generated hefty returns… The potential is so promising that two of the primary investors (Joseph Pike & Brad Daniel) have engaged in a bitter court battle to take control of the investment, and Danco itself.
As Danco’s investors fight amongst themselves, their competition is less averse to the public spotlight. GenBioPro’s CEO, Evan Masingill, looks more like a frat boy than a scientist, but was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most-influential people for health in 2025 (along with health care luminaries like Seth Rogen, Colin Farrell, and Dwayne Wayde). When I went to the GenBioPro website to see about ordering abortion pills online, I found that I couldn’t. Not directly, at least. There’s a login portal for prescribers and pharmacies but patients are told they need a prescription first. And that prescription, apparently, can be obtained through the magic of “telemedicine.” To that end, GenBioPro links to Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, Abortion Care Network, Abortion Clinics Online, I Need an A, and AbortionFinder.org. So perhaps Planned Parenthood is getting a cut of the telehealth pie in Massachusetts, but the competition has certainly become more cut throat. When you can sell abortions without a facility, without an abortionist, and without having to worry about disposal or liability, the barriers to entry become a whole lot more manageable. And the profit margins become a whole lot more attractive—which may explain why it isn’t feminist women we see leading this revolution. It’s business men.
This past weekend while selling T-shirts at a local food festival, I found myself right next to a booth that was far more vocal in calling out to passers by than I am (despite my surname). They announced themselves as a woman-owned business hundreds of times over the course of the afternoon—causing me to wonder what kind of chaos I could unleash by calling upon the crowd to come support a man-owned business. Would my neighbors have laughed or raged? And how long would the event organizers allow such subversive behavior to continue? In all seriousness, I would be curious to hear my neighbors’ response to this question: Why is it better to buy from a woman-owned business? Because that is the implication of their ongoing proclamations.
Polite society doesn’t require anyone to explain why it’s morally superior to transact with a woman-owned business or a black-owned business. It’s just something we’ve been conditioned to believe. It goes without saying, but if someone did have to answer for it, I suspect the most mainstream explanation would go something like this. Women-owned businesses or black-owned businesses aren’t necessarily better than those operated by white men. They just face more obstacles to success. But that argument has a problem. Because if it were still the case that being a woman or being black was a detriment to success, wouldn’t business owners who check those boxes try to hide their identity instead of announcing it to the world?
The reason my festival neighbors so relentlessly trumpeted their credentials as a woman-owned business is because they were confident that such knowledge would make people more likely to buy from them, not less. And they’re probably right. But here’s the thing. If there is something about you as a business owner that has nothing to do with your product or service but makes people more likely to buy from you, that’s called a competitive advantage—not a disadvantage. It’s the same thing we see in both education and hiring. Characteristics that are advertised as disadvantages turn out to be the opposite. And by suggesting that a certain sex or race deserves special consideration, you wind up reinforcing the very notions you’re supposed to be combatting.
I bring this up to highlight the widespread cultural assumption that businesses owned by women are more virtuous than businesses owned by men. This has ramifications for abortion because the abortion business is likewise cloaked in nobility for its perceived connection to women. To maintain their carefully-curated public persona as a woman-led organization, Planned Parenthood hasn’t been helmed by a man since 1978 and that man (Alan Guttmacher) has been scrubbed from their website’s history page—probably because he is the president who both got Planned Parenthood into the abortion business (against the explicit wishes of the woman who founded it) and authorized its distribution of the birth control pill. I would suggest that the reason the public hears so little about Danco Labs or GenBioPro owes to much the same thing. It’s not because of any supposed threat of violence. It’s because their principles are men (probably white men) who see “the desperation of pregnant women” as their “golden ticket.” That’s how Mother Jones put it.
If you want to assign primary credit or blame for legal abortion in America, you can lay it at the feet of four white men. Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington played their part, but my Mount Rushmore of abortion includes Alan Guttmacher, Lawrence Lader, Harry Blackmun, and Bernard Nathanson—three of whom had a clear profit motive. Lawrence Lader co-founded NARAL. He also wrote the book on abortion. That book became a blueprint of sorts for Justice Harry Blackmun whose infamous ruling in Roe v. Wade cited Lader more than a half dozen times. Bernard Nathanson showed that abortion-on-demand could efficiently work at scale. His NYC abortion clinic operated almost around the clock, killing roughly 100 babies per day in the run up to Roe. Were these men unscrupulous monsters? They didn’t think so. They were simply doing what needed to be done. The means hardly mattered. For Lader, who was instrumental in bringing the abortion pill to America, those means included traveling to London in 1992 with a pregnant West Coast anarchist (this according to Boston's GBH) to obtain mifepristone, but convincing her not to take it until returning to the states—knowing full well the pills would be confiscated by customs officials. He got the publicity he wanted—and a Supreme Court case—while also sneaking a second set of pills into the U.S. He didn’t give those pills to his abortion mule, of course. He sent her for a surgical procedure and reverse engineered those pills instead. His team—“which included a doctor who lived 1,000 miles away and asked to go by Dr. X; a Columbia University chemist working for free; and two assistants”—told anyone who asked that they “were working on a new treatment for cancer.”
When Larry Lader died in 2006, the L.A. Times called him a “standout” for being “a man in a feminist’s world.” But you could just as easily argue that the women he brought in to sell abortion were feminists in a man’s world. Why do I say that? Because abortion-on-demand aligns quite well with the interests of men who want cheap and easy sex. The availability of birth control and abortion makes it much easier for these men to get the sex they want without being on the hook for the women they impregnate or the children they conceive. Nobody benefits more from women’s “liberation” than libertine men. “Free love,” the fictitious Inspector Thursday observed, “[is] the most expensive kind there is.” At least for women.
I’ll grant that women have never had more doors open to them than they do right now. I would simply point out that women have also never been more miserable. Depression in American women has risen to unprecedented heights and is twice as common as depression in men. The CDC reports that roughly one-quarter of American women over 40 take anti-depressants. PBS calls it “the women’s health issue no one is talking about.” And lest anyone try to pin the blame for this on the fall of Roe or the rise of Donald Trump, sorry, this article is from 2016. Between 2020 and 2022, the increase in trajectory of antidepressant use among teen girls ages 12 to 17 increased by 130%, according to the American Psychological Association. Again, this is pre-Dobbs. If abortion has made life better for women in America, someone forgot to tell the women. Meanwhile, venture-capitalist men are cashing in. For them, and I’m quoting Mother Jones again, “[the abortion pill] was another opportunity to make some real money—and do some good along the way.”
The opportunity to make some real money is a consideration you’ll never hear from those on this side of the abortion debate. Even from those whose opposition to abortion has earned them a fair measure of public notoriety and personal wealth. Live Action now has three executives who make a quarter million dollars or more, but I can say with near certainty that Lila Rose didn’t go into this work to get rich. She simply proved so adept at exposing the depravity of Planned Parenthood that the donations started pouring in. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s current CEO makes a reported $900,000 for a simple willingness to keep abortion front and center. Her predecessor, Leanna Wen—an actual medical doctor—was removed in less than a year for trying to shift Planned Parenthood’s focus away from abortion. Its board, according to Wen, decided instead to “double down on abortion rights advocacy.” The reason nobody goes into the anti-abortion business to make money is because it isn’t a business at all. Opposing abortion doesn’t make money; it consumes money. And while both sides claim the moral high ground, only one side is growing rich along the way.
I still don’t know who is cashing in on the tens of thousands of telehealth abortions that are now being initiated annually in Massachusetts. Who are the middlemen in The Bay State that are connecting out-of-state drug companies with out-of-state mothers who then self-administer out-of-state abortions? The only real connection I could find between mifepristone and Massachusetts is the late Lawrence Lader himself. Lader earned his B.A. from Harvard, and The Lawrence Lader Papers are housed at Smith College—a women’s college in Northampton, MA (which I assume to be far superior to any college that would enroll a man). Whoever these new abortion profiteers are, my hope is that their financial ambitions will set them on a collision course with each other, which we’re already seeing in part. Could it be that the democratization of abortion—which gives more people more access to its filthy lucre—will wind up destroying the industry from the inside out? For a business built on decades of lies and subterfuge, what a fitting end that would be.
]]>I have never been to England. In fact, I have never set foot on any continent but my own. I am neither young enough nor rich enough to travel the globe, but I’ve always been rich enough for books and television—which have allowed me to vicariously cross the pond for going on half a century. I have almost religious affection for Austen and Dickens and hold C.S. Lewis in even higher regard—as does virtually every literary Christian of every liturgical stripe. Only Jesus is more popular among the brethren, by a hair’s breadth. I never turn down an invitation to 221B Baker Street (on screen or on the page), and though Agatha Christie lacks the critical acclaim of her compatriots, there’s a reason she’s outsold everyone to ever walk the planet. Then there’s J.K. Rowling, the once broke single mom who is so talented that she built a global empire with nothing but her words. And if streaming television has added anything to my life, it’s been a slew of British crime dramas that have taken me across Jolly Old England, both past and present. Like many Americans, I have a fondness—or even a reverence—for Great Britain. Which is why it’s hard to watch its demise with anything like indifference.
It was two recent headlines that put England in my abortion crosshairs, one from The Free Press (“Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?) and one from Life News (“UK Kills a Record 300,000 Babies in Abortions”). Since it had been several years since I updated Abort73’s statistical pages for Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the path before me was clear. I’d neglected the rest of the English-speaking world for long enough. Then again, Abort73 is just me, and the CDC can’t even keep up with U.S. abortion totals despite a staff that numbers in the thousands and states that are literally sending in the data they need. Maybe I should offer them my services. In the meantime, here’s where things stand for Britannia. In 2023, a total of 277,970 abortions occurred in England and Wales. That’s up 50% in 10 years. If you compare 277,970 abortions against 591,072 live births, you’ll discover that almost one-third of British children are killed in the womb. A decade ago, it was 21%. England’s 2023 abortion percentage is higher than the 29% that are killed in Scotland, the 23% that are killed in New Zealand, the 22% that are killed in Canada, the 17% that are killed in Ireland, and the 13% that are killed in Northern Ireland.
The fact that 32% of English unborn children were killed by abortion in 2023 is disturbing enough, but how they were killed bodes still worse for the future. And I doubt you’ve seen this anywhere else before. Even if you were aware of the fact that 87% of English abortions took place medically, you probably didn’t know that 83% of those abortions took place without an abortion clinic. That is, both sets of abortion pills were taken at home. Said differently, 72% of the abortions that took place in England and Wales in 2023 did not occur in a hospital, doctor’s office, or abortion clinic. They occurred in the mother’s own bathroom—and her baby was flushed down her own toilet, or loo if you prefer.
Why is it worse to kill babies at home than in a clinic? It’s worse because it’s easier. And because there’s less oversight, less accountability, and less shame. It also means that the sewage system in England is annually carrying the remains of more than 200,000 human embryos. That has ramifications, both physically and spiritually. The mothers in 5,740 of those abortions were less than 18, and since England does not require parental consent, I suspect a large number of these abortions took place surreptitiously by minors who were too scared to tell their parents they were aborting their grandchildren. The future I feared in an article published this past December is already the reality of today in England.
Here’s something else that jumped out at me from the Department of Health and Social Care report. “Overall, 98% of abortions were funded by the National Health Service (NHS), while the remaining 2% were privately funded, consistent with trends over the last decade.” In other words, England paid to kill 272,411 of its own citizens before they were born. They are the most innocent and helpless members of the human community, but they are executed en masse because their existence is exceedingly inconvenient. To justify the violence, they’re written off as somehow less than human—which is always the way those in power dehumanize those who aren’t.
Countries that allow babies to be killed bear one type of culpability. Countries that pay for babies to be killed bear another. But it gets even worse for England. Why, you may have wondered, were 2% of English abortions paid for with private funds? Isn’t every Brit eligible for free abortions? Yes, but despite that fact that healthcare in England is “free” for all, somewhere around 14% of the English population still pays for private health coverage. The problem with public health care, it turns out, is that it’s not very good. So those who can afford to pay for their own, do. They pay twice, in fact. They’re taxed for the services they don’t use and billed again for the services they do—much like American parents who send their children to private schools.
The next question is, if 14% of English residents pay for private health care, why weren’t 14% of English abortions paid for with private funds? I’m sure you already know the answer. Abortion disproportionately targets and kills the poor, and it is the rich who disproportionately utilize private health care. Hence, the 2%. So not only is England paying to eliminate the most innocent and helpless members of the human community. They’re paying to eliminate the poorest among the most innocent and helpless. If a society wanted to dare God to actually execute its demise, it could hardly do more. Scoff, if you will, but the wrath of God in this case requires no fire or brimstone. It’s built into the practice. A nation that kills its children kills itself. And even progressives are starting to raise the alarm.
The Telegraph reports that declining fertility rates are “a growing threat to Britain’s population, which can only remain stable if the total fertility rate is around 2.1 children (per woman).” What is England’s total fertility rate right now? That would be 1.4 children—the lowest ever. The total fertility rate in London is less than one. As a result, “primary schools across swathes of London are closing due to a lack of demand,” while the NHS “spend[s] more to cope with the ageing population [than it does on] maternity facilities.” Keir Starmer can’t bring himself to admit that England has a fertility problem, but Bridget Phillipson, the U.K.’s Education Secretary, has taken to publicly pleading for more births. She wrote an article for the The Telegraph last summer calling Britons to have more children, but she struggles to connect the ideological dots.
Phillipson’s article opens with a celebration of the fact that three-quarters of British moms now work outside the home, then laments the fact that child care is so expensive. She doesn’t seem to realize that if mothers were not working outside the home, there would be no need for exorbitantly-priced child care. Nor is she reckoning with the fact that the influx of mothers into the workforce is one of the primary factors that has caused wages to fall. When the supply of workers goes up, wages go down. And when the demand for child care goes up, so does the cost to acquire it. It’s not rocket science. What is Phillipson’s solution? Government-provided child care, of course, because what’s wrong with saddling working-class people with even more of a tax burden? And with all those empty schoolrooms, she reasons, why not use them for childcare instead? If only it were that simple. U.K. residents already pay tax rates far in excess of those in the U.S. They fund all manner of social programs, but as the percentage of residents consuming those benefits is increasing, the number of residents paying for them is decreasing. For the first time in 50 years, there were more deaths in England than births—causing the Office for Budget Responsibility to speculate that this new norm will “cause the national debt to soar over the next 50 years.”
Phillipson publicly declares that she “want(s) more young people to have children,” but this misses a crucial reality. The problem is not that England and Wales are not having enough children. The problem is they’re killing those children in the womb. Here it is by the numbers. A total fertility rate of 1.41 would have to increase by 49% to reach replacement level. What would that require in terms of actual births? It would have required an extra 289,248 births in 2023—a number that is strikingly close to the 278,000 children who were aborted that same year. “Families are the bedrock of our society,” Phillipson opined, and “as Education Secretary, I am determined that we support every child, in every family, in every part of the country.” Except in the womb, that is.
Bridget Phillipson is a Catholic, apparently, but both her party affiliation and voting record show her to be a staunch advocate for abortion—which may be why she makes no mention of abortion in trying to explain England’s plummeting fertility rates. In 1967, the year abortion was made legal in Great Britain, total fertility stood at 2.65. By a decade later, it had fallen to 1.66. One would almost think there’s a connection. Phillipson says it’s the cost of living that’s to blame, but the cost of raising children has always been vastly more expensive than the alternative. People did it out of duty or desire. The notion that life has become too expensive for the bearing of children is a thoroughly modern one. Modern and dishonest. According to Kara Kennedy, in The Free Press article I referenced earlier, the cost of living has almost nothing to do with Britain’s abortion boom. It’s merely a convenient excuse. She writes:
Experts have attributed the rise (in abortions) to an increase in the cost of living… But the idea that rising abortion rates are primarily the result of financial desperation is, to put it generously, incomplete… I spoke to a dozen British women of different ages across the country about their abortions. The cost of having a child did not come up. Not once, even among younger or working-class women… What emerged (instead) was a pervasive belief that parenthood is a high-risk opportunity to do irreversible harm, and that opting out entirely is the responsible choice. The fear in these women was palpable.
Ann Furedi, the former chief executive of Britain’s largest independent abortion provider, calls the appeal to financial distress a convenient excuse for those who are morally uncomfortable with abortion. She considers this a weakness; I consider it a revelation. Furedi’s position is that since there is nothing wrong with abortion, women shouldn’t feel compelled to explain why theirs was necessary. My position is that this incessant compulsion to do so is further evidence that there is something wrong with abortion. Women don’t bend over backwards, after all, to justify a tooth extraction. Even in a country where 87% of the populace purportedly believes abortion should be legal, Furedi notes that “the cost-of-living explanation [reveals] a certain cultural discomfort with abortion.”
One woman whom Kennedy interviewed has had three abortions. The reason she’s not on birth control, she says, is because it’s “nearly impossible to get a doctor’s appointment.” Welcome to the world of socialized medicine. Getting an abortion, she maintains, is “so much easier… than 10 minutes face-to-face with a doctor.” Doctor visits are expensive; putting drugs in the mail is not. It’s the same profit motive driving grocery stores who would rather not pay someone to scan and bag your groceries if you will do it for them. And so, while the expense of raising a child may not be the driving factor for the British mothers who are having abortions, it does seem to be a driving factor for the state. Because when a government pays for the health care of its people—and most of them have no viable means of opting out—it is in the state’s interest to pay as little as possible. It wants a preponderance of healthy tax-payers and a dearth of “useless consumers.” That would be the old, the young, the sick, and the poor. This is why countries that pay for health care are so amenable to assisted suicide. And abortion. Killing the old, the sick, and the young is much cheaper than caring for them.
In a culture that “presents motherhood as an almost unbearable responsibility,” Kennedy posits, where “the most supported, least terrifying option is the one that ends a pregnancy, is it unsurprising that so many more women are choosing it?” Another mother she spoke to said that “Having a child feels irreversible (but) abortion doesn’t.” To that I would say, give it time. Abort73 has published nearly a thousand abortion stories that feel painfully irreversible. Anyone who forgoes the bearing of children on the assertion that the world is too messed up is condemning the world to the very fate they complain of. They are declaring in practice that the world is good enough for them but not good enough for their children. And so they casually break a chain that goes all the way back to the beginning of human history. Is there any higher expression of hubris? It is the bearing of children that saves the world. It is voluntary barrenness that destroys it.
When the English Parliament passed the Abortion Act in 1967, did its members know it would come to threaten the English people with their very extinction? I doubt its human agents had any such premonitions. This was the era of Paul Ehrlich’s ominous Population Bomb, after all, when overpopulation was seen as the real threat. But what of the darker forces at play? Those who prowl about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour? The Bible is not insensible to those who commit crimes of desperation, but abortion in Great Britain is increasingly less about desperation and more about self-absorption. Ironically, as Jordan Peterson frequently points out, the more you think about yourself, the more depressed you become. English women, it seems, have become too neurotic to have children. And the reason they’ve become so neurotic, is because they’ve stopped having children. It’s a vicious cycle, but there is hope.
Eight years after abortion was legalized in England, America followed suit. For many years, the trajectory of our demise looked to be much the same. But then something happened to change the status quo. A petulant and persistent opposition movement rose up, and the unthinkable took place. After nearly 50 years, federal protection for abortion came crashing down. Abortion remains legal in most states, but there are now bastions of light and life in an otherwise dark landscape. As 32% of English babies are killed in the womb, the estimated percentage in America is 18%—but even that can be misleading. Among the 36 states that have reported 2024 abortion totals, the percentage of aborted pregnancies is 12%. That’s 286,000 abortions against 2.2 million births. It’s the states that have yet to report, states like California, New York, and Illinois, that kill a quarter or third of their unborn children. That’s no less of a problem for these localities than it is for the U.K.
In another article Kara Kennedy wrote for The Free Press, “Progressives Can’t Bear Pregnancy,” she noted that “though the majority of young Americans still say they want children… Democrats seem incapable of presenting a positive vision of pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting.” Batya Ungar-Sargon calls it a PSYOP. “What is so disgusting about [the thought leaders on the left],” she says, “is they will produce culture in which marriage is (denigrated as) a patriarchal institution, but they all get married (themselves) and have children in wedlock, which gives them an enormous economic advantage while sentencing working class people of all stripes to the immiseration of broken homes and children born out of wedlock.”
Coleman Hughes calls the birthrate decline—“happening in every single western, capitalist country in the world”—one of “the most important [problems] of our lifetime.” When your whole welfare state is built on a pyramid scheme, he warns, it is entirely dependent upon “each generation [having] enough workers to create enough tax revenue to take care of grandma.” That is no longer happening. Andrew Klavan noted last Friday that there is no top-down solution for the fertility problem blanketing the West. It’s not going to be solved through government programs or giving people money to have babies. It will come down to individual men and women “redeveloping the sense that each one of them is sacred, and their joining together in marriage is sacred, and the bodies they produce through that marriage are sacred.” It is only the short-sighted or naive who think that the rejection of normal family relations can fix society rather than destroy it.
In an earlier version of this article, things started to go off the rails right about here when I suggested that the marriage advice offered by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians 7 is equally shortsighted. That earned me a swift and thorough rebuke from a beloved friend. One who knows the Bible better than I and jealously guards its reputation. Why would I make such an audacious claim? Or consider myself qualified to question the counsel of God’s anointed? These are precisely the questions I’ve been trying to answer for the last several days. My inability to leave well-enough alone frustrates even me at times, so let me walk you through the process. Hopefully with more humility, more grace, and less cynicism than I showed the first time through.
If I had to summarize our cultural move away from marriage and child bearing, I would put it like this. A growing portion of society—mostly on the left—frames marriage as an institution that has run its course, a relic from the past that has little to no relevancy for the future. And they see children as either things that get in the way of worthier pursuits, or things that are too precious to bring into such a messed-up world. In either case, barrenness is celebrated—for the first time in history. I reject this world view completely but am struck by the notion that there is a troubling parallel in some of Paul’s remarks to the church in Corinth. Here is a selection of those remarks from I Corinthians 7:
To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion… Now concerning the betrothed, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is… Do not seek a wife… those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none… For the present form of this world is passing away.
Paul’s only mention of children in this chapter is in reference to divorce. He urges parents to stay together lest their children become “unclean.” This surprises me because I would have expected the bearing of children to lead the list in reasons for marriage, but Paul doesn’t go there. His reasons for not getting married include the maintenance of more singular devotion to the Lord and the avoidance of worldly troubles. His reasons for getting married begin and end with a reluctant concession that it may be necessary for the avoidance of sexual sin. It is better to marry than to burn.
The only way I can account for Paul’s leaving the bearing of children out of the equation is to conclude that Paul believed Christ’s return to be so imminent that it rendered having kids superfluous—along with marriage itself, at least for those able to exercise self-control. I see support for this premise in phrases like “the appointed time has grown very short,” and “the present form of this world is passing away.” That being said, the men I have conferred with this week, men who far exceed me in their time spent studying Scripture, have more assurance in the veracity of their position than I have in mine. That’s not nothing. Paul was not encouraging the Corinthians to forgo marriage and child bearing because they were in the end times. The “present distress” he spoke of, I’m told, was more likely a reference to something specific that was happening in first-century Corinth. Something that made the putting off of marriage advisable.
It’s also been pointed out that Christ made a similar argument in Matthew 19, though Jesus never said he would prefer everyone to be unmarried as Paul did. Rather, Jesus’ remarks came after telling the Pharisees that it was impermissible for a man to divorce his wife, causing his disciples to wonder if it wouldn’t be better in that case to not marry at all—which strikes me as a strange conclusion to draw. Was divorce really that commonplace in ancient Israel? Jesus’ response was that most people are not able to forsake marriage—because they do not have the gift of celibacy. “Only those to whom it is given,” can do so. I’ll grant that Jesus doesn’t say anything here about the bearing of children, but it is at precisely this point in the narrative when children are brought to Jesus, and he rebukes the disciples for trying to send them away. The kingdom of heaven, Christ tells them, belongs to little children.
I could certainly be wrong in my impression that Paul thought the return of Christ to be imminently near, but I wouldn’t think any less of him if he did. Not even Christ knew the hour or day, but the assertion that Paul’s ambivalence towards marriage owed to something then going on in Corinth does not negate my central argument. In some ways, it strengthens it. If Paul was suggesting that things had gotten so bad in Corinth as to merit the leaving off of marriage and the bearing of children, how is that materially different from what we’re hearing on the left today? The underlying reasoning is not the same, of course, but the conclusion is. In view of the present distress, it is better not to marry.
Paul assured his readers that it is not a sin to get married, but his preference is clear. “He who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.” The inclusion of the term “his betrothed” strikes me as further indication that Paul didn’t believe God’s people were long for this world. He doesn’t say, he who marries does well, he says, “he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from [marrying her] do[es] even better.” This is a man who is already betrothed to be married, but Paul still advises him—assuming “his (sexual) desire (is) under control,” to not marry her. How do we make sense of that, apart from the assumption that Paul believed their time on earth to be nearing its end? When you don’t think humanity has much earthly future, whether it’s 26 AD or 2026 AD, what point is there in having kids?
Underlying this entire discussion is a much deeper question. Whose opinion is being expressed in I Corinthian 7? Is it Paul’s or the Lord’s? For my part, I’m inclined to take Paul at his word. The reason I’m willing to question the sagacity of Paul’s marital advice is because Paul was willing to repeatedly concede that he was speaking for himself—not for God. Those who disagree might counter that even though Paul didn’t know he was communicating the literal words of God, he was. But this creates a problem all its own. Because if Paul is claiming not to speak for God when he is in fact speaking for God, then that is an untruth. And God does not author untruths. So doesn’t that mean that Paul is either telling the truth, and not speaking the words of God, or not telling the truth and thereby still not speaking the words of God?
I am more than willing to grant the possibility that I have misunderstood and misrepresented Paul’s arguments. We might even call it the more likely possibility since, as the apostle Peter observed, Paul wrote things that are “hard to understand, things that the ignorant and unstable can twist to their own destruction”—which is not a warning to be trifled with. I try to take the Bible as I find it, not as other men tell me to find it, but Peter and Paul were not just other men. It is a fearful thing to commit to a contrarian position. Fearful because there’s a better than even chance you’re wrong, and even if you’re right, you’re still likely to be excoriated for it. Opposition to abortion is a case in point. But while offending your enemies is one thing, offending your friends is quite another. It makes me physically sick. It makes me long to keep quiet and keep my head down. But then I think, what if this needs to be said? What if I’m the only one to say it? What if this relentless internal prompting is not me being ornery? What if it’s the Spirit of the living God?
As a young man, my reading or misreading of I Corinthians 7 created two not-insignificant problems. One, it gave me the impression that sexual self-control is not possible for most men. Victory over lust could only be achieved through an accommodating wife. And two, it gave me the impression that “ministry” is more important than marriage. The first conclusion caused me to take a “grit your teeth and bear it” approach to sexual temptation. I didn’t make much effort to reform my desires because I assumed the time would come when lust would no longer be an issue. I managed to marry as a 25-year-old virgin, but marriage is not the cure-all for lust I’d assumed it to be. I suspect no married man in the world gets to have sex whenever he wants—unless he is rich and immoral. Which is to say, victory over sexual sin is not achievable through mere accommodation. It takes the fostering of superior passions and a fair bit of discipline. I wish I would have known that sooner. On the second front, my conviction that marriage should take a backseat to ministry did untold harm to my wife and children—because I subtly saw them as a potential interference to ministry rather than ministry itself. To be fair, when Paul said the married man should live as though he is unmarried, I suspect he was speaking hyperbolically—just as Christ did with great frequency. Paul is not saying to ignore your wife as you dash about in a mad frenzy to save the world. He is reminding us that our primary devotion should be to the Lord.
The reason I find it difficult to sign off on the assertion that God would prefer people not to marry and bear children is because it does not align with the Lord’s oft-repeated creation mandate. Be fruitful and multiply! The admonition to be single and barren seems more in line with the thinking of those who hate God than those who love him. But even if Paul was expressing the Lord’s opinion, when encouraging the church in Corinth not to marry amidst its present distress, I know of no believers who would say that this reflects God’s revealed will for all people in all places—which brings us back to the joy of common ground. There are no warnings in the Bible against having too many children. Solomon proclaimed instead that children are a reward from the Lord. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with enemies at the gate.
“All of us possess knowledge,” we read in the first verse of I Corinthians 8, but “this ‘knowledge’ puffs up.” It is love that builds up. “If anyone imagines that he knows something,” Paul warned, “he does not yet know as he ought to know.” To me, that is both an encouragement and a warning. May we not get discouraged when we encounter things in the Bible that are hard to understand. That’s an exceedingly long list, and may we not pretend to understand more of it than we do. In the context of this article, may God grant you the grace to glean from it whatever is true and helpful and to reject whatever is not.
]]>The Horse and His Boy is my favorite Chronicle of Narnia. That’s almost certainly a minority position, but I have a soft spot for hidden gems—which may explain why Rogue One sits atop my Star Wars pantheon. It’s so good that it doesn’t even need lightsabers, just as The Horse and His Boy is so good that it doesn’t even need children from our world to capture the imagination. The reason I bring it up is because there’s a scene about halfway through that presents a rather foreign dilemma to we Americans. The story’s intrepid young quartet must enter and pass through the Calormen city of Tashbaan without being noticed and captured. This would be a fairly simple endeavor were it not for the fact that the entire city is surrounded by a wall. There is only one way in from the south, one way out to the north, and the city gates are locked at night. Something of the same difficulty is faced by Jean Valjean when he must gain entrance to Paris without being discovered by the relentless Inspector Javert. And even the rebels in Rogue One could only gain access to Scarif by circumventing its “walls” and gate.
I grew up in The Valley. That is, the San Fernando Valley, on the wrong side of the Santa Monica Mountains. My dad had a small office at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. He often worked late, but he never had to worry about getting locked into or out of the city. Because Los Angeles is not surrounded by a wall. Its “gates” are not locked at night. But that is not the historic norm. It’s a modern and almost uniquely-American privilege. What use is a wall for those who aren’t threatened by attack? C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia while living in Oxford, England, where the remains of a two-mile, 700-year-old wall could still be seen surrounding the city. London was surrounded by a similar bulwark for some 1,500 years, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens with said city under attack. Lewis could appreciate the value of strong defenses. And so could King Solomon, who fortified Jerusalem through the building of a wall (I Kings 3:1).
“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” That’s the last verse of Proverbs 25. In the chapter before, Solomon speaks of passing “by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,” and discovering it to be “overgrown with thorns… covered with nettles, and its stone wall… broken down.” The implication is this. Wise men—and wise administrators—properly maintain their walls. Fools do not. Even in today's landscape, when city walls tend to mostly be of the metaphorical variety, a city without walls is still a very bad thing. Unless, of course, you're referring to Tim Walz. It’s ironic that the governor of Minnesota—whose negligence has exposed his people to unprecedented levels of violence, fraud, and abuse—should be named Walz. And ironic (or perhaps sadistic) that he would call Minnesota “an island of decency” in a nation of increasing cruelty. Governor Walz hasn’t noticed, apparently, that the common denominator for the “chaos and disruption” he complains of is Minnesota itself. His is not the only state in which federal ICE agents are operating, but it is the state most likely to throw them under the bus.
I think it’s fair to assume that the reason such a disproportionate amount of violence and unrest is coming out of one particular state is the same reason why that same state has been crippled by such a disproportionate amount of fraud. Poor governance—be it simple ineptitude or outright malfeasance. Whichever the case may be, it would be more accurate to call Minnesota an island of corruption in a nation of increasing fortitude. And while California’s Governor Newsom is quite believable in the role of evil mastermind, Governor Walz is not. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, he is “a man of rapid passions and sluggish intelligence.” Tim Walz strikes me as an earnest but incompetent man who is vastly out of his depth. In his recent address to the people of Minnesota—just before his “island of decency” quip, Governor Walz offered the following:
Minnesotans believe in the rule of law, and Minnesotans believe in the dignity of all people. We're a place where there's room for everybody, no matter who you are or who you love or where you came from. A place where we feed our kids, we take care of our neighbors and we look out for those in the shadows of life.
Walz’ statement is rife with contradiction, whether he has the wherewithal to recognize it or not. You cannot simultaneously claim allegiance to the rule of law while also welcoming and rewarding those who break the law. And, I’m sorry, there is not room for everybody in Minnesota. Neither physically nor logistically. It might make for a nice soundbite, but the practical ramifications of these nonsensical policies are now coming home to roost. CBS News reports that since 2018, Medicaid fraud in Minnesota could well exceed $9 billion and has been perpetrated almost exclusively by refugees from other countries. Whenever investigations have been mounted, we read in the current issue of Imprimis, “government overseers were easily scared off by absurd claims of racism”—which is the same claim leveled by Tim Walz in his recent diatribe. “Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door,” he declared, “ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took up the same theme in accusing federal agents of “terrorizing people simply because they're Latino or Somali.”
It’s hard to say whether these men know they’re lying about the administration’s motivation, or if they’re simply that obtuse. Calling it racist to enforce state and federal law is precisely what allowed the Minnesotans who these men ostensibly represent to be robbed of billions of dollars. That’s billions, with a “B.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who has spent his entire career as a fraud prosecutor, says “the depth of fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.” He calls it “not a handful of bad actors,” but “staggering industrial scale fraud [that is] swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state”—that island of decency, as Governor Walz calls it. When Mayor Frey told ICE agents to “get the F- out of Minneapolis,” he was essentially echoing the 60-year-old messaging of those Alabama politicians who really were racists. Walz and Frey no doubt fancy themselves to be carrying the torch of Dr. King, but it’s actually the mantles of George Wallace and Bull Connor they’ve taken up. When JFK deployed the National Guard to forcibly integrate Alabama schools, Wallace and Connor reacted in much the same way as Walz and Frey—doing everything in their power to prevent Washington from enforcing the federal laws that they wouldn’t.
It’s been a few weeks now since professional agitators entered and disrupted a church service at Cities Church in St. Paul—accusing its congregants of being too rich, too white, and too supportive of federal ICE agents. One of the event organizers, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is a former president of the Minneapolis NAACP and CEO of the now-defunct Wayfinder Foundation—a non-profit group “dedicated to giving grants to anti-poverty community initiatives.” I bring this up because the organization received millions of dollars from corporate donors like the Walton Family Foundation, but gave far more of that money to Armstrong herself than to any community projects. By the time it shuttered in 2024, Armstrong was making close to a quarter million dollars per year. “She has also been a key organizer of the (recent) boycotts against Target,” Fox News reports—which seems a fitting use for all that Walmart money.
The event’s other organizer, Chauntyll Allen—who leads Black Lives Matter Twin Cities and sits on the Saint Paul School Board—said the invasion was necessary and justified. “My mother’s a pastor,” she explained, “so I grew up in Christianity, and one of the things I remember about Jesus Christ himself is that when things weren’t going right in the church, he went in and he flipped tables." What was wrong at this particular church (aside from their spending Sunday mornings in a sanctuary rather than protesting on the streets)? That would be one of its associate pastors, who apparently also works for DHS. Allen’s comments give the impression that she left the church long ago, an assumption bolstered by her school board bio where she boasts of being married to a woman. But like so many who are hostile to Christian teaching and practice, Allen does remember enough to know exactly what Jesus would do in any given situation. And so does William Kelly, the bearded man who wandered through the sanctuary filming and berating church members. These are some of his remarks:
All these pretend Christians… All these comfortable white people who are living lavish comfortable lives while children are dragged into concentration camps. You’re living real nice lives with your lattes doing absolutely nothing for your Latino and Somali brothers and sisters… Why do I not see you out at Whipple every day protesting this attack on humanity? You’re sinners. You’re pretending to be Christians, but we know you’re living easy lives. A very easy life while people are starving. Shame! You come here to (listen to) a man wearing a suit? Did Jesus wear a suit? Did Jesus profit off the words? No! Jesus would dine with immigrants…
It is precisely at this point in the video, while asserting that Jesus dined—or would dine—with immigrants, that someone apparently touched Kelly. “Do not touch me!” he spun around and screamed. “Touch me again and see what happens,” which is an ironic outburst for someone purporting to be the mouthpiece of Christ. Jesus was touched by strangers wherever he went, but I don’t recall him ever issuing such threats. “Touch me again and see what happens” is not something Jesus would say. It’s something Kip Dynamite would say. Did say. William Kelly, I’ll point out, is a white man who is at least independently wealthy enough to travel the country as a circuit-riding rabble rouser. He condemns those in the church for their “comfortable lives,” but it’s hard to imagine many of them make more money than Nekima Levy Armstrong. Their pastor surely doesn’t.
That being said, I am actually sympathetic to the claim that the visible church is full of fake Christians because it’s almost certainly true. I’ve spent most of my adult life fretting over the possibility that I’m a fake Christian—in light of Jesus’ warning that for every three people who hear and accept the “word of the kingdom,” two will eventually walk away. And some additional number more—Jesus calls it “many”—will be turned away on the day of judgment. I’m sympathetic to the idea that Christianity is more about the way you treat other people than where you spend your Sunday mornings and sympathetic to the claim that the average American Christian cares more about lattes and creature comforts than they do about taking up their cross and following Christ. I wrote a book about the church’s reluctance to care for the least of these, but I also happen to know something about Cities Church in particular. Their teaching pastor, Jonathan Parnell, was once on staff at Desiring God, and Desiring God was once a regular promoter of Abort73. Back in 2012, I got an email from Parnell urging me “to keep pressing on in this great work.” Our correspondence would continue off and on for the next few years. He helped publicize Abort73 through Desiring God’s media channels and got my as-yet-unpublished book to someone at Crossway. They would ultimately pass, arguing that books on abortion don’t sell, but that didn’t stop Parnell from lobbying Lifeway to carry my book at the following year’s Desiring God National Conference. In light of their turn down, he invited me to author a guest post for the Desiring God blog.
There are plenty of celebrity pastors who could be credibly accused of being in it for the money. John Piper—Desiring God’s founder—is not one of them. And I suspect Jonathan Parnell is cut from the same cloth. William Kelly referenced the suit Parnell wore as evidence of his unseemly “profiting off the word,” which proves almost beyond a doubt that Kelly has never visited a predominantly-black church. When I walked through the doors of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist back in 2010, I was the only man not wearing a suit. I don’t own a suit, but that’s not something I’m proud of. To my thinking, wearing a suit to church is not a sign of avarice; it’s a sign of respect. And when the NBA stopped requiring its coaches to wear suits—in a strange concession to COVID—it inadvertently cheapened its product in the process. I and most of the country had already stopped watching NBA games by then, but doing away with suits only makes the league look less serious, less professional, and less substantial. Our incessant yielding to comfort isn’t always a good thing. Would’t you agree, Mr. Kelly? I can understand in theory the move from high church to low church. I get the appeal of a more casual and accessible worship experience, but something is still lost in the exchange. When you do away with the sacred and serious, you’re left with something far less compelling. The Spirit of God, I believe, is more likely to be encountered in the silence than the furor.
And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.
The still small voice of God can be hard to hear in many worship settings. And we sometimes seem to forget that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, not to the loud and boisterous. We purveyors of casual church must guard against approaching the throne of God with too much flippancy. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And wisdom. But you don’t encounter much fostering of fear in the evangelical church today. So if a pastor’s wearing of a suit can help create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity for his people, I’m all for it. Because sometimes what’s most needed is not easy access. Sometimes the bar for entry isn’t too high; it’s too low. When people are looking for something transcendent, something more than the everyday, they might prefer a church that feels like something more than the everyday. Remember that Jesus has prescribed narrow gates over broad paths. And while broad paths know nothing of walls, narrow gates are entirely contingent upon them.
Wisdom cries aloud in the street (in the streets of Minneapolis!), in the markets she raises her voice… “How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Because I have called and you refused to listen… because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind… They hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD… therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.
Wisdom calls from the street, but wisdom does not suffer fools. And when fools turn their backs on wisdom, by turning their backs on the Lord, wisdom laughs at their calamity. God is merciful; wisdom is not. When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind—which is precisely what we see playing out in Minnesota: The public and private forsaking of wisdom. Sooner or later, there’s a price to pay. We can debate whether the recent deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were justified, but there’s one thing that isn’t up for debate. Their deaths were entirely unnecessary and avoidable, which is what makes them so tragic. Because even if law enforcement should have shown more restraint, their use of lethal force was brought about by Good’s and Pretti’s own belligerence. I’m not saying they got what they deserved, except insomuch as we’re all sinners deserving of death. But they played with fire and got burned. They poked the bear, and the bear bit back. When you try to bait officers into violence, as Pretti had been doing for days prior, you run the risk of being injured or killed by the very violence you incite. These officers are not playing games.
I reread the book of Nehemiah this week since its narrative is so inextricably tied to the sanctity of walls. Nehemiah’s task was to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that Israel would “no longer suffer derision,” but Nehemiah was not a soldier or a builder. He was the exiled cupbearer of a foreign king that God used to do the impossible. The first chapter offers a beautiful encapsulation of the gospel: sorrow, conviction, confession, repentance, and faith in the restoring mercies of God. It’s telling that Nehemiah and his followers didn’t start with rebuilding the city. They started with rebuilding the walls, and it was no easy task. Israel’s enemies sought the blood of Nehemiah and the abandonment of his project. His workmen famously held a weapon in one hand and a tool in the other. Nehemiah writes:
Half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and coats of mail. And the leaders stood behind the whole house of Judah, who were building on the wall. Those who carried burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other. And each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built.
In the midst of their enemies schemes to “fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion,” Nehemiah records that “we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.” And that is a fair encapsulation of the life we’re called to. Prayer and work. It is through both that God’s provision is delivered. Do not passively call out to the Lord, and do not trust to your own devices. Some of us don’t want to build a wall, and some of us don’t want to pray—yet each is integral. We read in the text that the remnant in Jerusalem who had survived the exile were living “in great trouble and (great) shame.” And the culprit for both was the same. Their wall lay in ruins. It was both the literal cause of their capture and a picture of their having lost the favor of God. The absence of walls is not a city’s glory. It’s a city’s shame. And a people whose walls have failed will find their own demise to be close at hand.
In case you noticed that all three of the examples I opened with were stories of walls interfering with the plans of the “righteous,” allow me to clarify something. Walls can be used for ill purposes, but that doesn’t make them unnecessary or evil. I wouldn’t even call them amoral. Walls are a positive good, so we shouldn’t allow the walls of Jericho—or the Berlin Wall—to give walls a bad name (Tim is already doing that). Nor should we call it a virtue that Narnia didn’t have walls. I’m not sure Narnia had anything that could rightly qualify as a city, and perhaps if it had done a better job fortifying its defenses, the country would not have been lost to the Telmarines. Walls are a mercy of God—a manifestation of God’s first directive to mankind: to fill the earth and subdue it. If you doubt that, just imagine your own home without walls. How long would it survive the ravages of man, beast, and nature? Walls keep out the chaos and danger. Israel’s journey through the Red Sea would have been a very different one had God not turned the waters into “a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.”
It is hospitality to invite people into your home, but it is an invasion for people to enter your home unbidden. And that invasion would become qualitatively worse if they refused to leave. Perhaps your family could survive the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing one more person. Lots of families have voluntarily done precisely that through adoption. My own family is one of them. We have adopted one child. It’s an exceedingly small number, but the initial and ongoing cost is still quite high. Lots of bills, and for us, a fair bit of debt. No regrets, but we’re frequently stretched beyond our means. Could we have adopted two children? Probably. Three? Maybe. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but how about 10? Or 100? At some point, it becomes a problem of scale. At some point, a family, a city, a state, or a nation can’t take in any more people—without ceasing to exist in any meaningful way. Slow organic growth is not a problem. It’s a blessing, in fact. But the massive influx of entire foreign populations is—not because America is racist (I suspect it’s the least racist country in the world), but because so many of the people coming here are racists. They are hostile towards America’s founding vision and hostile towards assimilation.
If you think Jesus didn’t recognize the legitimacy of national boundaries, you may need to read the gospels again. There is no Jew or Greek in the kingdom of God, but there certainly is in the kingdoms of men. And that is not a bad thing. “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans,” Jesus told the twelve, “but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And when a Canaanite woman came to Jesus to beg for the life of her demon-oppressed daughter, he ignored her completely. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he explained to the disciples. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But rather than taking offense and calling Christ a racist, the woman simply pleaded that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” For her faith and humility, Jesus healed her daughter instantly. To the woman at the well, Jesus proclaimed that Samaritans worshiped God in ignorance since “salvation is from the Jews.” Jesus of Nazareth loved people of all tribes and tongues, but he was not inclusive in any modern sense of the word. He did not negate national distinctions nor does he simply throw the gates of heaven open wide. In the parable of the wedding feast, invitations went out to all. But those who entered the feast in an unworthy fashion were cast into the outer darkness. Just because someone gets in doesn’t mean they have the right to stay in. Many are called; few are chosen. Make of that what you will.
In a sinful world, walls are necessary. This has been true since Eden. Once sin entered the Garden, the walls went up—in the form of a cherubim with flaming sword. Jordan Peterson, in We Who Wrestle With God, calls this barring of the way back to the tree of life “both inevitable and right.” Those still mired in sin “cannot attain the heavenly reward (because) Paradise would simply not be Paradise if it contained anything unworthy.” In the war between good and evil, it is neither loving nor Christlike to roll out the red carpet for evil. In another obscure Narnian Chronicle: The Magician’s Nephew, there is a scene of a sacred walled garden with a golden gate. “Come in by the gold gates,” its inscription reads, “or not at all.” Entrants were invited to take of its fruit for others but were forbidden from eating it themselves. Much like the interlopers in The Pilgrim’s Progress, who came in over the wall rather than through the narrow gate, the White Witch climbed into the garden and then ate the fruit. As the gate forewarned, she found her heart’s desire… and despair.
When David begs God’s favor in Psalm 58, he beseeches him to “Do good to Zion… (and) build up the walls of Jerusalem.” In Psalm 122, David blesses Jerusalem and wishes her “Peace… within your walls and security within your towers!” But when God is displeased with Israel, he warns through the prophet Isaiah that he “will break down its wall, and it shall be [devoured].” (Is 5:5) Isaiah would later say that “the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall.” (Is 25:4) The storm is chaos. The wall is what holds chaos at bay. Isaiah then compares sin to a breach in a wall (Is 30:13). It compromises our security and defenses. Finally, speaking of a coming future in which “violence shall no more be heard in your land,” Isaiah proclaims, “you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.” (Is 60:18)
When the bad kind of Walz heaps scorn upon the good kind of walls—insisting that Minnesota is open to all comers (no matter their history, intentions, or legal standing), he appeals to Christian virtue. Walz referenced care for neighbors no less than five times in his televised address, but isn’t all leftist social policy merely a perversion of the divine call to love your neighbor? Those who reject virtually every tenet of the Christian faith but preach “love for neighbor” as the basis of all their diabolical, God-forsaking schemes are attempting to climb into the garden over the wall rather than through the narrow gate. It’s an effort to game the system, an attempt to wear the garb of Christianity—and get the moral credit for doing so—without having to yield to any of its more exacting demands. They want the fruit, but they don’t want to pay the price.
The clearest evidence that this is moral posturing rather than legitimate concern for purported victims like Pretti and Good is the fact that whenever innocent people are unequivocally victimized by those who have entered the country illegally, virtually nothing is said about these neighbors. These, apparently, are not the neighbors Jesus cares about. And when Iryna Zarutska, the Ukranian refugee, was fatally stabbed in the throat on a Charlotte train, progressives did not erupt in protest. Despite checking off two of their favorite boxes—Ukrainian and refugee, barely a peep was made. That’s because her killer was a black man, a career criminal with severe mental illness, who’d been continually put back onto the street. He declaratively targeted her for being white, and so there was no political angle in which they could profit from her death.
We each of us begin our lives surrounded by walls. The uterine walls. There is one way in and one way out. And those walls are remarkably adept at protecting us from the chaos and danger that exists beyond them. Except, of course, when those sacred walls are penetrated by the steel or poisons of the abortion industry. The left’s commitment today is to accept all comers, except for those comers that you actually have a moral obligation to protect and provide for. It is moral subversion in the highest order. It is calling evil good (abortion) and calling good evil (protecting your borders). Virtually everyone who utters the nonsensical slogan, “No human being is illegal” supports the right to kill human beings in the womb. This is nothing less than sophistry.
I made reference earlier to Crossway’s disinclination to publish my book, Love the Least (A Lot)—since books on abortion don’t sell. “Most evangelical Christians already [know],” their representative explained, “(that) abortion is dead wrong.” I do not disagree with that assessment, but here’s what evangelical Christians may not know—which happens to be what my book is about. Failing to do something about the horrific evil of child sacrifice not only risks the survival of our nation, it risks the survival of our souls. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. Plenty of dear brothers have warned me against it, but Jesus did say things like that. What you fail to do for the least of these, you fail to do for me. And the penalty for that failure appears to be a severe one.
“Keep my commandments and live.” That’s Solomon’s declaration in Proverbs 4:5. We want the living part; we’re not so keen on the keep my commandments part. We want the pleasant fruit that comes of obediences without the moral inconvenience of having to actually obey. Karl Marx famously said that everyone should be provided for “according to his needs,” but Jesus said that everyone will be provided for—ie judged—“according to his works.” Does that mean we’re working our way to Paradise? Yes. But it doesn’t mean we’re earning our way to Paradise. Because the work we do is simply a manifestation of the faith we have (or don't have). “Show me your faith apart from your works,” James declared, and I will show you my faith by my works.” And the work isn’t simply or even mostly fighting against the sins of our nation. It’s the daily putting to death of our own personal sins. That is a far more difficult task, but God’s people must defend their borders—their physical borders and their spiritual borders too.
]]>I like listening to Batya Ungar-Sargon—who shows up with some frequency on The Megyn Kelly Show and The Free Press. She is charming and energetic and generally full of astute analysis, but her takes on abortion and gay marriage are less commendable. Batya’s argument is essentially this: The country wants gay marriage. The country wants abortion. It’s time to move on. Perhaps I should expect such thinking from a self-described "MAGA leftist,” but it’s her framing of the issues that irks me the most. By attributing to both more cultural support than either actually enjoys, she infers for herself a dubious moral loophole. It’s the Pontius Pilate approach to avoiding culpability. I do not support this miscarriage of justice, but who am I to thwart the will of the people? Batya said something to Megyn Kelly back in November that prompted me to DM her the following:
I was dismayed this week when you equated support for gay marriage with opposition to transgender ideology. “The right side of those two issues won,” you argued. “The country is very pro-gay and really not into this trans-extremism.” Have you not considered that gay marriage is to marriage what a transgender woman is to a woman? Both are fraudulent redefinitions that can’t stand up to basic reality. Gay couples can be many things, but they cannot be married. It’s not biologically possible. Just as a man can be many things but not a woman. Thoughts?
I never heard back from Batya. No doubt she’s still wrestling through the questions I raised. Or my message was simply lost in the sea of correspondence she no doubt receives. But I did post the same premise to X last week and attached a poll for viewers to respond to. It read, “Gay marriage is to marriage what a transgender woman is to a woman. Agree or disagree?” It’s an interesting framing because neither response reveals anything of the participant’s position on gay marriage or transgenderism. It merely measures how you understand their relationship to each other. One commenter posted, “they're both the same thing; gay marraige is marraige (sic), a trans woman is a woman.” Another said, “Both gay marriage and trans women are an abomination to the real thing: marriage and women.” These two people take diametrically-opposed positions on the issues, but they both agree with the premise and put both issues on the same side of the ledger. One opposes both; one supports both. But Batya takes it as a matter of course that reasonable people will see nothing wrong with gay marriage but will see something wrong with pretending a man can be a woman.
All told, some 2,534 votes were cast in my X poll. Forty-three percent of respondents agreed with my premise that “gay marriage” and “trans women” are moral equivalents; 57% disagreed. And based on comments from the 75,000 people who saw the poll, lots more lacked the capacity to even understand its premise. “Logic!” I say with the erudite Professor Kirke, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” Of course, poor schooling isn’t the only reason so many people are now done in by a once-basic formula for expressing parallel relationships. There’s a disturbing cover story by Liel Leibovitz in the January-February issue of County Highway which talks about the various ways smartphones have rewired our brains—making us far less capable of maintaining focus or engaging in analogical reasoning. On average, the article maintains, we Americans are interrupted by our phones every seven minutes. Sometimes it is via explicit notification. More often, it is our own incessant impulse to “check something.”
Twenty years ago, the average American attention span was 20 minutes. Today, that average has reportedly fallen to 47 seconds—which is about the maximum amount of time any of us are willing to wait in line or sit on a couch without reaching for our dark master. “No or little attention,” Leibovitz writes, “equals no or little formation of long-term memory, which, in turn, leads to an inability to solve complex problems, connect ideas, build mental models, regulate emotions, form relationship or do just about anything else a human being needs to do to remain, recognizably, a human being.” The primary threat of the interruption machines living in our pockets is not the insidious content they can deliver or the ideological echo chambers they can trap us in. It’s much deeper than that, and if we’re not yet considering how we might metaphorically cast them into the fires of Mordor, we don’t sufficiently grasp the threat. But I digress.
According to the admittedly-limited results of my X poll, Batya’s position on gay marriage and transgenderism appears to be the more mainstream one—despite its philosophical inconsistencies. It’s also the one held by Joe Rogan, who takes umbrage when men pretend to be women in the context of sport or bathroom visits but sees nothing wrong with men pretending to be women in the context of marriage. Shouldn’t keeping men out of women’s spaces also include keeping them out of wives’ spaces? This is where homosexuality and transgenderism overlap. In public discourse, transgenderism is often framed as a threat to homosexuality, and at some level it is. Hence the growing push to remove the T from the LGB. If young boys who think they’re girls were left alone, it’s frequently asserted, they’d simply grow up to be gay men. But this argument has never sat well with me because it feels disingenuous, as if those making it are just trying to score points with our wildly gay-affirming culture. And I wonder if the distinction isn’t something of an artificial one in the end.
What is the difference between a gay man and a transgender woman? One ostensibly tries to look the part of a woman; one doesn’t. But at the end of the day, they are both men who are sexually attracted to other men. Except, of course, for those who only pretend to be a woman so as to gain intimate access to actual women. Or girls. Perhaps you could argue that in a gay relationship, neither man is supplanting a woman or pretending to be a woman, but this is certainly not the case in a so-called gay marriage. Because marriage, by definition, is one man and one woman. So one of the men in a gay marriage is playing the role of a woman, because he has replaced the wife. To those who expressed confusion over this framing in my X poll, I offered the following explanation:
The existence of gay marriage and transgender women are philosophical equivalents. Both rely upon subverting established norms. Until recently, it was universally understood that two men could not get married and a man could not become a woman. Now both have become open questions. But it is essentially the same question in both cases. As such, they must be accepted or rejected in concert. That is what we were asking people to agree or disagree with.
Gay marriage pretends to be a real marriage just as transgender women pretend to be a real woman. The first pretense maims an institution. The second pretense maims a person. Lots of persons, in fact. And while Batya, Rogan, and a world of others recognize the danger of the latter, they fail to see its connection to the former. I think that’s a problem. And when Batya appeared more recently on The Andrew Klavan Show, she employed something of the same playbook—this time with regard to abortion. Here is what she said:
On an issue like abortion, when you have 80% consensus in a country like ours, which is filled with the most-tolerant people in human history, I kind of think a democracy would prioritize that… Your democracy is broken if 80% of your country wants something and it’s impossible to get it. And I think the fact that 80% of Americans think abortion should be legal somewhere in the 6-8, to 10 (or) 12 weeks (range), and pretty much illegal after that, unless the mother is dying. That seems to me to be the common-sensical (position). As a populist, I want to see policy reflect the inherent goodness of the American people.
Exposing the injustice of abortion has been my primary vocation since January of 1999. That’s 27 years, but never in nearly three decades of closely monitoring this issue have I seen any indication that 80% of the country supports abortion. I have no idea what Batya is talking about. For the last half century, Americans have been pretty evenly split on the ethics of abortion—which is why we've been stuck in such a legal and cultural quagmire. On the one side, there is a pretty stellar moral argument. On the other side, there are billions of dollars to be made and the undeniable appeal of being able to extricate oneself from the practical difficulties of licentiousness. On one side, principle. On the other, pragmatism. Klavan’s response to Batya was a good one. It speaks to the importance of ventures like Abort73, but he took the accuracy of her 80% assertion for granted, saying:
I would like to see no abortions. I think abortion is an atrocity. But when 80% of the people want it, the only way to get there is through culture. It’s by explaining to them, this is what [abortion] is. This is what it looks like. This is what it does.
That, in a nutshell, is what Abort73.com has been doing for the last 20+ years—explaining what abortion is, what it looks like, and what it does. The website focuses on what is wrong with abortion; my articles focus on what is wrong with indifference to abortion. Ours is important Ephesians 5:11 work, no matter where the country’s opinion currently stands, but Batya’s assertion is once again dangerous. Because it aims at giving good people—who have qualms about abortion—the moral cover to look the other way. Assuming Batya must have actually seen the number somewhere, I queried, “Do 80% of Americans support abortion?” The first return in the affirmative was a 1979 article—with no listed authors—from PubMed headlined, “80% of Americans believe abortion should be legal.” But Batya wasn’t yet born in 1979, and when you look at the article’s abstract, you’ll find that “80% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances.” That little caveat, it should be noted, makes the initial assertion all but meaningless. The same Gallup poll referenced in the article, which polled fewer than 1,200 Americans, reported 60% support for Roe v. Wade. Sixty percent, I would argue, is not 80%.
Listed just below the 1979 PubMed article was one from those stalwarts at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. This one comes from 2024 and is almost certainly to blame for Batya’s confusion. Its headline: “Over 80% of Americans believe abortion care should be legal.” Note the insidious inclusion of the word care—as if you can just apply it to anything. Holocaust care, slavery care, sex-trafficking care. Ugh. I’m reminded again that these are not good people. On what basis do they say that “58% of conservatives” believe abortion should be legal? That would be a March 2024 poll conducted by Impact Research—who doesn’t even try to hide their political bias. Their homepage features the massive smiling mug of President Obama and two hero shots of Joe Biden. “Impact Research,” their website declares, “is a proud ally and asset to progressive causes and campaigns around the globe.” How many people did they survey for this massive nationwide poll (conducted entirely online and via text)? That would be a mere 1,000—which is even fewer responses than I get in a $50 X poll—and 200 of those participants were Asian American, 200 were black, and 200 were latino. In other words, they vastly oversampled minority populations, which are vastly more-likely to support abortion. If it strikes you that those who conducted the survey are a bunch of dishonest scoundrels, well, you may be giving them too much credit.
Here’s another thing I discovered. Participants in this survey were queried, then subjected to a round of pro-abortion propaganda, then queried again. For one particular question—the only one I can find any public record of—this resulted in a 21-point swing. Here’s the question: Do you support or oppose ensuring that access to abortion is protected throughout pregnancy, including later in pregnancy? The first time this question was asked, 31% of respondents strongly supported access to abortion throughout pregnancy while an additional 20% somewhat supported access throughout pregnancy. On the flip side, 27% of respondents strongly opposed access to abortion throughout pregnancy while an additional 15% somewhat opposed access throughout pregnancy. Adding those numbers together, we find that 51% of respondents somewhat or strongly support access to abortion while 42% somewhat or strongly oppose access to abortion. After being subjected to the pro-abortion messaging, support for access to abortion rose to 62% while opposition fell to 32%. This proves, the pollsters maintain, that messaging in support of abortion is “incredibly potent.” And so is the ability to entirely control the narrative.
Unlike more-reputable polling bodies, Impact Research does not publish their polling questions. I spent hours looking for them, but not even Google’s built-in AI could turn anything up. Instead, all Impact offers are carefully-curated interpretations, but even this is enough to demonstrate how entirely bogus their 80% claim actually is. Even after subjecting their exceedingly small pool of participants, who were already disproportionally favorable to abortion, to another round of abortion propaganda, they were still only able to push abortion support to 62%. On what basis, then, does Planned Parenthood say that more than 80% of Americans believe abortion should be legal? That would be the first bullet point in Impact Research’s dubious summary report. Forty-nine percent of Americans, they tell us (aka, 49% of their 1,000 left-leaning respondents) “support abortion being legal and available without caveats.” Another 32%, they continue, oppose abortion but believe it should be legal (with caveats, by implication). What are those caveats? They don’t bother to say. They just add up 49% and 32% and get “over 80%.” Voila. It’s no wonder that even Batya’s explanation of the findings was so maddeningly imprecise. Her contention, you’ll remember, was that 80% of Americans want abortion to be legal until sometime after “the 6-8, to 10 (or) 12 week” range. Huh? Which is it? Because banning abortion after six weeks would eliminate up to 60% of all abortions while banning abortion after 12 weeks would eliminate less than 10%. Batya’s sliding of the bar from six to 12 weeks is hardly an insignificant adjustment.
Batya calls it common sense to yield to the 80% on abortion, but that assumes Planned Parenthood’s 80% claim passes muster. It doesn’t. Nor is there anything middle-of-the-road about leaving abortion legal through 12 weeks. That would be like the South calling it a middle-ground proposal to have only banned slavery in North Carolina, which accounted for roughly 8% of America’s slave population in 1860. Since almost all abortions happen during the first trimester, the true middle-ground position would land much closer to a 6-week abortion ban—like the one passed in Florida in 2023 and enacted in 2024. The year before that 6-week limit went into effect, there were 84,052 abortions reported in Florida. In 2025, the year after it went into effect, reported abortions fell to 44,206. That’s not to say a 6-week abortion is any less abhorrent than a 12-week abortion, but neither should we turn up our abolitionist noses at a law that almost halved a state’s abortion total. The work in Florida is by no means done, but a 6-week ban is a whole lot better than a 12-week ban and is vastly superior to no ban at all.
Last week, on what would have been the 53rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I posted a nationwide abortion estimate for 2024. To date, I’ve been able to obtain 2024 abortion totals from 31 state health departments. The totals from those 31 states, which account for roughly 30% of U.S. abortions—according to Guttmacher—were then extrapolated to arrive at an estimated abortion total for the entire country. For years, California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have failed to record or publish statewide abortion totals. And New Jersey only reports abortions performed in hospitals. Now Michigan and Washington have joined their ranks, deciding they’d rather not keep track of how many unborn children are killed within their borders. Not surprisingly, the more states who opt out of abortion reporting, the less reliable our nationwide totals become. This is the reason Guttmacher’s abortion estimates have become the standard bearers. Because the CDC data is perennially incomplete and does not include the most populous state in the Union. But Guttmacher’s 2024 abortion estimates for the 31 states that have now reported turned out to be 27% too high. In fact, they significantly overestimated the abortion totals for all 31 reporting states. In my state, South Carolina, Guttmacher estimated 6,930 abortions for 2024. The actual count was 2,986.
As such, my 2024 U.S. abortion estimate is significantly lower than Guttmacher’s. They put the number at 1,047,740. I put the number closer to 800,000. I could be wrong, of course, but so could they. And I trust the reliability of hard counts more than soft estimates. For the last 15 years, I have gathered, assembled, and published state-by-state abortion data, much as the CDC does. But my reporting has typically preceded theirs by 10 months. What I publish in January will be published by the CDC in November. Until now, that is. The 2023 Abortion Surveillance report that the CDC should have published two months ago is still MIA. That means there has been no official federal reporting on abortion in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. Is that intentional? It’s hard to say, but I was struck by something Andrew Klavan noted on Friday. “The fight to know what’s real is the fight we’re (now) in.” And there seems to be a concerted effort to keep us away from anything like real abortion numbers.
CNN reported last month that former CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry shut down the abortion surveillance data project before resigning in protest over the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez. According to HHS officials, Houry “directed staff to return state-submitted abortion data rather than analyze it” and unilaterally decided to shelve the program. Houry denies both claims, stating that she didn’t have the funding or staff to maintain the program and that all her superiors knew that. Having essentially done myself the work Houry complains of, without the benefit of a staff or the convenience of having state data automatically sent to me, her excuse feels pretty thin. And vindictive. The CNN report indicates that the CDC hopes to publish a 2023 Abortion Surveillance report by this spring, but even if the Centers for Disease Control has not formally abandoned their abortion-reporting function, their data—and ours—will be even less complete moving forward. What’s the solution? I don’t know. But I did read this today in Proverbs over my morning tea: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” And that is something we can and should be doing even if we don’t know how much of the country supports the slaughter or how many children are stumbling towards it.
]]>Earlier this month, new #WeCount abortion estimates were published for the first half of 2025. With barely contained glee, they reported that more U.S. abortions were performed in January 2025 than in any single month since their tracking began (in April 2022). That led them to publish the following neener, neener headline: “Abortions in the US have increased since Dobbs.” I can almost hear their smug self-satisfaction. Who is the “they” behind the #WeCount numbers? That would be the perversely-named Society of Family Planning. I say that because “family planning” organizations seem to all have the same plan. Namely, the elimination of family—through birth control and abortion. God says to be fruitful and multiply. The family planning business much prefers sterility. And though that may seem a foolish longterm strategy, I’ve noticed that the devil isn’t overly concerned with human longevity.
If you feel I’ve overstated the case, the Society of Family Planning is helmed by 15 women and one man. There is a personal bio for each of the 16 board members. Only one of them appears to be married. Only two appear to have children. That would be April Lockley, a New York abortionist who identifies herself as a mom that wants to “liberate abortion training and care from white supremacy” and Rana Barar who says that what she loves best in life is “traveling with her husband and young adult children” and “talking about abortion.” That’s not a joke. The only man on the board is Bhavik Kumar. “As a gay man of color,” his bio reads, “Dr. Kumar works to highlight the intersections of queer and reproductive rights.” In addition to being a traveling abortionist, he is also described as “an outspoken advocate for trans care.” So, that’s the male voice in the group.
I’ll grant that it’s possible there are others on the board who are married or have children, but if you direct a family planning organization and make no mention of your own family in your personal bio, that tells me everything I need to know about the value you place on marriage and children. But I suspect these really are just mostly single, childless women who have dedicated their lives to keeping other women as childless as they are. Additional board members include Kate Shaw, who is working to decrease barriers to 2nd-trimester abortions, and Alisa Goldberg, who says that mentoring abortionists “brings her much professional joy.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that anyone who is in the business of planning families should have a family of their own. But that, apparently, is not how the Society of Family Planning operates. They’re like financial planners who’ve never bothered to do any saving or investing of their own but still deem themselves qualified to manage your finances. Actually, here’s a better way of putting it. They’re like financial planners whose sole purpose is to leave you bankrupt. Seems a little counterintuitive, no?
The Society of Family Planning, on their prominently-featured DEI page, explicitly condemns “institutionalized, exclusionary, and oppressive systems such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, nationalism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, and other discriminatory practices” that limit “the full participation of all contributors to the field of family planning.” They also humbly “acknowledge the interconnectedness of these oppressive systems.” But despite checking every nonsensical box in their supposed commitment to diversity—and ensuring that all 16 board members dutifully list their personal pronouns, you’ll notice that there are no heterosexual men on the board and no one who has any ethical qualms about abortion. Theirs is the kind of diversity which requires everyone to believe the same thing.
Whenever you come across an organization led by 15 mostly-single and mostly-childless women (and one gay man), you may want to keep a wary eye. Because while men are prone to corruption, women are prone to being deceived. At least that’s the argument Paul made in explaining his refusal to allow women to preach. “Adam was not deceived,” he wrote to Timothy, “but the woman was deceived.” That’s not to say Adam was any better. His sin was worse for his not having been deceived, and he is held primarily responsible for the fall. But that doesn’t change the fact that Eve is the one the serpent got to. She is the one who took his lies to heart. Adam is the one who took the path of least resistance. Eve forsook the truth; Adam forsook his post.
Though this is admittedly speculative, Paul seems to further imply that childless women are susceptible to being deceived in ways that mothers are not. “The woman was deceived and became a transgressor,” Paul continued in his letter to Timothy, “yet she will be saved through childbearing.” Though he’s talking specifically about Eve, his assertion seems to encompass all women—since it took generations of births to finally reach the birth of our promised Savior. And Paul’s use of the future continuous tense (will be saved) indicates an application that is ongoing—as if the bearing of children itself has a salvific effect in the lives of women. It could be that in giving them a proper outlet for their motherly instincts and a proper object for their devotion, children thereby provide a measure of inoculation against the standard litany of cultural lies. Perhaps if more of the women running the Society of Family Planning had families of their own, they would be less obsessed with planning the families of everyone else. But as it is, they have mostly forsaken the bearing of offspring and are doing their damndest to insist that others do the same.
For all these reasons, I am skeptical of the numbers published by The Society of Family Planning. Their love for abortion is too great, and the interests of their board are too narrow. Like Guttmacher, they fancy themselves objective researchers, but their baseline commitment is to abortion—not to truth. If anyone epitomizes the end justifying the means, it is those who have dedicated their lives to promoting this vile practice. Guttmacher reported in early 2024 that an estimated 1.03 million U.S. abortions took place in 2023, but when the actual counts came in (from states that actually bother to count), Guttmacher’s estimates turned out to be 14% too high. Based on the actual abortion totals for the 46 states (+DC) that record and publish them (along with Guttmacher’s and #WeCount’s own estimates for the four that don’t), an estimated 888,000 U.S. abortions took place in 2023—down from 913,000 in 2022, and 974,000 in 2021. Meanwhile, #WeCount’s 2023 abortion total was even higher than Guttmacher’s at 1.06 million—an overage of 18%.
Having spent decades insisting that outlawing abortion would not reduce a woman’s willingness to choose abortion, I suppose it’s only natural for the abortion industry to pad its numbers in the aftermath of Roe. As to any presumption of institutional integrity, allow me to remind you what industry these institutions represent. Anyone who is willing to celebrate the mass execution of the most innocent and helpless members of the human community may also be willing to fudge the data. It’s not as if their moral compass points north. But the abortion increases #WeCount claimed in 2023 were as child’s play compared to the increases they’re claiming for 2024 and 2025. And it all owes to a terrible new talisman that’s become the centerpiece of their abortion toolkit. In the world of data collection, it’s a magic bullet. It operates almost entirely outside the law and can neither be checked nor verified. What do they call it? Telehealth abortion.
Until recently, whether a mother chose to kill her unborn child surgically or medically, the process had to occur—or at least begin—at a physical abortion clinic. In the case of medication abortion, the first round of drugs was taken at the clinic. The second round was taken at home. But with telehealth, in which abortion pills are mailed directly to the aborting mother, the era of virtual abortion clinics has officially begun. That is very bad news. Abortion clinics are as insidious a destination as any place on the planet. Truly, and yet virtual abortion clinics are even worse. Because they remove what may be the last practical obstacle to abortion: the shame of having to drive to an abortion clinic and walk through its doors. Sadly, we’ve seen this film before.
When a man had to actually visit a strip club or walk into an x-rated bookstore to illicitly view a naked woman, the buy-in was high enough to keep most men from suffering the degradation. But when porn went virtual, the pragmatic obstacles fell away and our true character was revealed. At least to ourselves. Essentially, there are only four things that might keep a man from viewing pornography: Moral conviction. Reputational concern. Physical cost. And the lack of opportunity. I suppose lack of desire might be a fifth, but that strikes me as rather hypothetical—even amongst men with an active sex life. For red-blooded males in general, in the absence of a beautiful and accommodating wife, it comes down to these four. And these are the same four things that might keep a woman from having an abortion. In fact, these are the same four things that might keep any person from any longed-for vice. It would be great if moral conviction was enough, but that is often not the case—which is why the other three bulwarks are so valuable. It is good when sinful behavior results in public shame. It is good when sinful behavior has a physical cost, and it is good when sinful behavior is not easily accessible. Because all of these things act as restraints for those who lack the conviction to restrain themselves. I’ve noticed it’s quite easy to condemn the moral failings of celebrities, without considering that we may well have done the same—if we’d only been afforded the opportunity. What a mercy it is to be spared from the temptations that regularly buffet the rich and the famous.
The threat that telehealth abortion poses to all that is good and beautiful is twofold. First, it removes the inherent shame of having to enter an abortion clinic while catering to the emerging class of agoraphobes who won’t even deign to pick up their own takeout. Second, and this is the one that has #WeCount in such raptures, telehealth abortion has the potential to entirely circumvent the law. When you kill someone, it turns out, you don’t want an audience. And when you kill someone illegally, you really don’t want an audience. Telehealth abortion manages to accommodate both of these objectives—which is what makes it so damnable and dangerous. How dangerous? Let’s take a look at some of #WeCount’s published numbers—starting at the beginning. That would be Alabama.
By the grace of God, it is no longer permitted to poison or dismember unborn children in the Heart of Dixie. By law, an “abortion shall only be permitted if an attending physician licensed in Alabama determines that an abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child's mother.” In 2024, the Alabama Department of Public Health reports that only three abortions took place within the state. What was #WeCount’s abortion estimate for Alabama in 2024? That would be 5,640. According to the Society of Family Planning, every one of these abortions was performed via telehealth and every one took place within the “formal healthcare system.” One could argue, of course, that if these abortions actually had occurred within the healthcare system, they would have been included in the state health department statistics. But they’re not. Because of some vague and opaque shield laws, so says the Society of Family Planning, it is legal for these abortions to take place even in states where abortion is illegal. How do we know their numbers are accurate? We don’t.
Here’s what we do know. The Society of Family Planning pays its participating abortion clinics for the data they provide. How much? That’s not disclosed. Do they give more money to clinics that report more abortions? Again, we don’t know. The Society also concedes that for their 2025 numbers, “28% of abortions were imputed.” That means more than a quarter of the abortions #WeCount reported were not counts. They were guesses. And because of that, the Society suggests that their abortion counts are likely too low. And these “counts,” they’re careful to remind us, “do not include abortions that take place in the US outside of the formal healthcare system.” Implying, again, that telehealth abortions do take place within the formal healthcare system. In Texas, another state where abortion is illegal with few exceptions, there were 78 reported abortions in 2024. But according to #WeCount, there were actually 35,960 abortions in Texas that year. In Florida, where abortion is banned after six weeks, the state health department reports that an average of 3,698 abortions occurred each month in 2025. #WeCount put that number at 6,137 per month.
You see the problem. #WeCount is publishing seemingly outlandish abortion totals that cannot be independently verified. So, I have no idea whether Texas’ 2024 abortion total was closer to 80 or closer to 36,000. The discrepancies are huge, and here’s one more thing that leads me to regard that #WeCounts abortion totals as something less than veracious. When abortion is outlawed, fewer abortions take place. Both history and common sense unequivocally bear this out. In May of 2022, the month before abortion was outlawed in Alabama, #WeCount estimated that 620 abortions occurred within the state. But in June, 2025, the most recent month with published data, #WeCount put the number at 800. We see something similar in Louisiana. In May, 2022, #WeCount says 380 abortions occurred within the state. In June of 2025, after abortion had been banned in Louisiana, they put the total at 940.
What #WeCount’s 2025 numbers essentially require you to believe is that women are more likely to get an abortion when it’s against the law than they are when it’s not. Since that is entirely implausible, one of three things is happening. Either the Society of Family Planning is manufacturing their numbers out of whole cloth (for the good of the cause!), or something has happened culturally or economically to dramatically increase the demand of abortion, or the ease of obtaining a telehealth abortion—and the states’ inability to punish those who break the law by doing so—has served to make abortion more accessible rather than less. It’s also possible that the real culprit is some combination of all three. I should also point out that virtual abortion clinics don’t provide any sort of follow up. They send out the poisoned pills but have no idea if they were actually taken. In other words, #WeCount is purportedly counting the number of abortion pills that were sent out—not the number of babies that were killed.
“In the first half of 2025,” #WeCount tells us, “27% of all abortions within the US healthcare system were provided via telehealth.” We know these abortions weren’t provided within the U.S. healthcare system in any true sense of the term. But if they were performed at all, this is a devastating development. And if they weren’t performed—or at least not at the levels reported, the threat still looms. Because the cheaper and easier and more anonymous it is to have an abortion, the more abortions will be had. Such is the nature of sin. And while the closing of abortion clinics, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the outright outlawing of abortion are all things to celebrate, it won’t matter much if virtual abortion clinics become the norm and states prove incapable of enforcing their bans. Unless, that is, we’re able to come at it another way.
Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. That’s the counsel King David offered in Psalm 37. And because David delighted in the Lord, God gave him the desire of his heart. Namely, Bathsheba. Except that’s entirely backwards. The fact that David desired Bathsheba is evidence that he wasn’t delighting himself in the Lord. Delighting in the Lord doesn’t sanctify sinful desires. It destroys and replaces them. Which is to say, the law—including the condemnation of adultery—is just as likely to arouse rebellion as obedience. Just laws are infinitely better than the alternative, but they’re still incapable of reforming the heart. It is only when we are renewed from within that external constraints become superfluous.
The law cannot solve ultimate problems. And neither can a website. But what a website can do is to shine the light of knowledge and revelation upon the darkness of abortion. For when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. Combatting abortion at the heart level is even more important when the external barriers fail and sin is right there for the taking. Public protests and the petitioning of politicians are good things, but they are not ultimate things. They cannot hold the line when abortion is free and easy and anonymous. So the task of Abort73 is much the same as it’s ever been. It’s not primarily to change the law. It’s primarily to change the way people think. Because the surest way to destroy sin is to destroy the appetite for sin, and the surest way to destroy the appetite for abortion is to expose it for all the world to see.
]]>My 22-year-old daughter has become a fan of Dancing with the Stars, which just wrapped its 34th season. It’s only been airing for 20 years but has found a way to cram multiple seasons into a single trip around the sun. Why hasn’t the NFL thought of that?! A few episodes in, my daughter invited me to join her. Since it’s not every day that she asks me to do something, I was happy to oblige. And so Tuesday nights were set aside for our weekly father/daughter watch party. The basic premise of DWTS is the pairing of professional dancers with B- or C-list celebrities who are eliminated couple-by-couple as the show progresses. Since the judges give out perfect scores like candy, viewers are allowed to vote too—which means that sometimes the worst dancers get voted through and the best dancers get voted out. There are complicated reasons for this phenomenon which my daughter has wearied of trying to explain.
The reason I bring any of this up is because I noticed something a few episodes into Dancing with the Stars that struck me as rather revealing. In addition to their outfits, that is. As you may imagine on a show populated by professional dancers and pseudo celebrities, DWTS has no qualms about being gay. One of their three judges is flamboyantly so. Ditto for at least one of the “celebrity” contestants. But there’s one thing you won’t see on Dancing with the Stars. You won’t see two men or two women paired up on the dance floor. And the more I thought about that, the more significant it became. Because in a world like ours, on a network like ABC, what is the explanation? Why would a wildly gay-affirming show like DWTS not trot out any same-sex couples? They’re certainly not doing it on moral grounds.
If you were to press the producers for an explanation, they might try claiming that America isn’t ready for same-sex couples on the dance floor, but that would be a cop out. That argument hasn’t stopped the relentless promotion of homosexuality in any other context. Gay pride is forced down our throats at nearly every turn. No, the real explanation is a much simpler one—no matter how loathe they’d be to admit it. Namely, dancing doesn’t work when it’s two men or two women. It’s grotesque, incongruous, and brutal. Dancing is about the yin and the yang. The balance and interplay of opposites. The pairing of the male and the female.
So far as I can tell, none of the professional dancers on Dancing with the Stars are gay. That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe dancers, more than anyone else, are able to value “the union of opposites that characterizes the dynamic between male and female.” That’s how Jordan Peterson puts it in We Who Wrestle with God. He calls the interactions between the sexes “a contest of dance or play.” The powers that be have managed to excise traditional gender roles from every other realm, but not from this one. The judges even blithely accept the age-old notion that the man must lead—which is why it’s so much harder for the male contestants. Outrageous, right? Whatever happened to Down with the Patriarchy?!
We’ve arrived at this bizarre point in history where we understand on the dance floor what we fail to understand in the marriage bed. We’ll accept the nonsensical pretense that two men or two women can be spouses even as we hold the line at dancing. The dance floor, it seems, is the last place where society is still sane enough to recognize that men and women are not interchangeable. My brethren, this should not be so. Unlike in marriage, there are no strictly pragmatic reasons why two men or two women can’t dance together. Our repugnance to it is strictly visceral. Which is to say, if we can understand the inherent degradation of placing same-sex couples on the dance floor, why can we not understand it in the context of marriage? Men and women are complementary halves that make up a single whole. Men and men are not. The distinction between male and female is what Jordan Peterson calls the most fundamental in the universe. Male and female he created them.
Last month I made the assertion that God prescribes only two options when it comes to sex: marriage or celibacy. I stand by that, but I’m also leery of casually asserting anything on God’s behalf (and leery of sounding like a smug fundamentalist). If I could have provided quick scriptural corroboration, I would have done so, but demonstrating the immorality of premarital sex is more complicated than most evangelicals realize. And I didn’t want to get bogged down on a massive aside. But now I’ve given myself free rein to get bogged down, because this is a question I’ve wanted to run to ground for a while now. I do believe that God is opposed to sex outside of marriage, but how does one demonstrate that from Scripture? Which passage would you point to? Because while the Ten Commandments certainly prohibit adultery, they say nothing of fornication. And neither does the ESV.
The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is the one I have read the most over the last 20 years. I probably owe that to the influence of John Piper (and to its being the easiest to access via web or device). I grew up with the NAS, switched to New King James with the release of the MacArthur Study Bible, and eventually landed on the ESV. But the ESV does not contain the word "fornication." Neither does the NAS. They use instead phrases like “sexual immorality” or “whoredom,” which have the disadvantage of being much less precise. But even in the New King James, the word “fornication” doesn’t show up until the book of Isaiah, and its first usage is entirely metaphorical. In the New Testament, the greek word (porneia) that is sometimes translated “fornication” is apparently a broad one. Strong’s says it encompasses “any [and every] distortion of God’s design for sexuality.” And while that suggests that “sexual immorality” may be a more accurate English translation than “fornication,” it also means we must put in the work to chase down what God’s revealed design for sexuality actually is.
One of the difficulties in studying Scripture is that it strenuously resists easy encapsulation. It alternates between providing way too much detail and not providing nearly enough—at least to our limited sensibilities. The Bible will devote page after painful page to the building of the tabernacle, the proper way to perform ritual sacrifices, and seemingly obscure genealogies while offering up precious few paragraphs on little things like the creation of the universe. There is so much left unsaid in the first few chapters of Genesis, and we don’t even learn who the serpent was until the book of Revelation. But since nature, and Bible readers, abhor a vacuum, we stuff those gaps full of clever theories and speculations until the line between what the Bible says and what we think the Bible says becomes indistinguishable. As such, we run the risk of honoring God with our lips but teaching as doctrine the traditions of men, which is why I decided to go back to the beginning—Genesis 1:1—in an effort to chronicle and better understand the explicit instructions God gave to mankind. Here goes... something.
When you read through Genesis in search of divine marching orders, you’ll soon discover that specific directives are shockingly sparse. You’ll read of polygamy, incest, prostitution, slavery, rape, and drunkenness without anything in the way of endorsement or condemnation. You’ll also discover that there are essentially two creation accounts. The first runs from Genesis 1:1-2:3. The second goes from 2:4 through the end of the chapter. In the first account, only one command is given. Be fruitful and multiply. God gives it to the birds of the air, to the fish of the sea, and to us who bear his image. For whatever reason, he does not extend this charge to the beasts of the earth—or at least there’s no record of it. Make of that what you will. To mankind, God adds the following addendum: “Fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth”—all of which is anathema to the godless globalists who consider the masses of humanity little more than a plague upon the land. Be fruitful and multiply is God’s command. Be sterile and die is the devil’s.
Surprisingly, there are no explicit prohibitions in the first creation account. Every piece of fruit was on the menu. And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.” To “everything that has the breath of life,” God continued, “I have given every green plant for food.” We might infer a prohibition against the shedding of blood—since plants are the only named food source, but that is as far as God’s instructions go in the first chapter of Genesis. Make love; have children; subdue the earth. That’s it. The greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbor, but the first commandment is to bear children. That, I believe, is worth remembering whenever your pastor suggests that we shouldn’t get distracted by cultural sins like abortion.
It is not until the second creation account that Adam is named and the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is delivered. The reason I call this a second creation account rather than a continuation of the first is because the tone and timelines don’t match. Genesis 1, with its parallel structure and repetition, has a poetic feel; Genesis 2 reads more like straight prose. Genesis 1 says "And God..." 24 times. Genesis 2 doesn't use this pairing at all. Rather, it says “Lord God" 11 times, which is entirely absent from Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis uses the designation “male (zā·ḵār) and female (ū·nə·qê·ḇāh);” The second chapter opts for “man (’ā·ḏām) and woman (’iš·šāh).” Genesis 1 says “beasts of the earth;” Genesis 2 says “beast(s) of the field.”
The first creation account famously speaks of six days. The second speaks of only one. Vegetation precedes the creation of animals and man in the first account. Man comes first in the second. God spoke man into existence in the first. God formed him from the dust in the second. Male and female were created in conjunction in the first account. Man precedes woman in the second, and she is made from man. All of these discrepancies are difficult (I would say impossible) to reconcile if you try to make these two accounts out to be one and the same. In the absence of explicit attribution, Moses gets credit for authoring the Pentateuch, but the stylistic differences and timeline anomalies make it unlikely that Genesis 1 and 2 were written by the same person. So perhaps Moses acted more like an editor than an outright author. Again, we just don’t know how these accounts were first communicated or passed down (Scripture's first reference to the existence of a written language doesn’t come until Exodus 17).
The Genesis 1 account highlights man's central place in the created order by placing him last in the timeline. The Genesis 2 account highlights his centrality by placing him first. Movie credits use this same convention. The essential takeaway from both accounts is that God is the creator and what he created was good. The explicit takeaway from the Genesis 2 account is that a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife. That's how the chapter ends. And though Christ’s own life was an exception, this appears to be the rule. God’s design is not for us to leave our parents and enter an extended season of singleness. It’s to leave our parents so as to live with our spouse. One of the things that makes this diversion from the narrative so significant is the fact that at this point in history, mother and father don’t yet exist. Nor do we exactly know what a wife is.
Eve (who isn’t named until chapter three) is called Adam’s wife in the absence of any marriage ceremony. The same Hebrew word for “his wife” in Genesis 2:25 (wə·’iš·tōw) is rendered “his female” in Genesis 7, referring to the female half of the animal pairs included on Noah’s Ark. At the most basic level, then, a wife is a man’s woman. Specifically, his sexual partner for the bearing and raising of children. Sorry, feminists, that’s what these verses indicate and is why “man and wife” is such a common linguistic pairing while “woman and husband” is not. You might even say that it is not marrying a woman that makes her your wife. It is intercourse itself. So, in this context, fornication is something of a foreign concept. But that begins to change as the generations stack up.
The Bible’s first reference to marriage occurs in Genesis 19, when Lot warned the men who were to marry his daughters that Sodom was about to be destroyed. And we know from Lot’s monstrous offer to the mob of men trying to break down his door that his daughters were still virgins—reinforcing the idea that sex is what initiates a marriage. But the next reference to marriage comes in Genesis 34, after Jacob’s daughter Dinah is violated by a foreign prince. This prince, who “loved (Dinah) and spoke tenderly to her” asked his father to “get me this girl for my wife.” So, even though he’d already slept with her, there was an understanding that they were not in fact married.
There is no explicit condemnation of fornication or rape in Genesis, but Dinah’s brothers were furious when they learned what had happened. They were “indignant and very angry, because [Shechem] had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter, for such a thing must not be done.” To say that something “must not be done” is to reveal the existence of an established moral code, whether that was verbally communicated by God or simply written on their hearts. Shechem’s father tried to make amends by asking that Dinah be allowed to marry his son and promised to pay whatever bride-price was demanded. “Make marriages with us,” he proposed, “Give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves… and the land shall be open to you.”
Jacob, who had a long history of fleeing conflict, apparently left the negotiations up to his sons. They accepted Hamor’s proposal on the condition that every man in his city be circumcised, which was shockingly agreed to. But after the circumcisions took place, “on the third day, when they were sore,” Simeon and Levi attacked the city, killed every male and took back their sister. The other brothers captured and plundered the rest of the city, taking their flocks, their herds, their wives, and their children. Jacob, who was more concerned about his own safety than any code of ethics, rebuked Simeon and Levi for “[bringing] trouble on me” and potentially inviting the retribution of other kingdoms, but the brothers answered, “Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?”
This is one of those stories where nobody comes out looking very good. And no divine commentary is offered as to what should have happened following the violation of Dinah. But if we fast forward to the giving of the law in Exodus, we do find what seems to be a suitable comp. “If a man seduces a virgin,” we read in Exodus 22:16, “who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins.” The complication, of course, relates to Dinah’s culpability in the affair. Was she raped or seduced? It’s not clear from the text. The word “seize” implies rape, but the fact that he “loved her” and “spoke tenderly to her” implies seduction. About one third of English translations explicitly accuse Shechem of rape. The rest hedge their bet. The King James says “he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.” The ESV says “he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.” The NAS says “he took her and lay with her and raped her.” Once again, more details would be helpful, but we don’t have them. We run up against the same dilemma in Deuteronomy 22:28:
If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.
This text matches that found in Exodus 22 almost exactly, but instead of saying “seduces and lies with her,” it reads “seizes and lies with her.” So the question becomes, is this a depiction of fornication in general or rape in particular? Roughly 20% of English translations say rape, but why would the penalty for rape be identical to the penalty for fornication, as such an interpretation would require? And how could a father allow his daughter to marry a rapist? On the other hand, what were the prospects for a raped woman in that day and age to marry another? We read in 2 Samuel that David’s daughter Tamar was raped by her half-brother Amnon. The text, in this case, leaves no room for doubt but also reveals that she lived out the rest of her days a desolate woman. Further along in the same chapter of Deuteronomy (22:23), the punishment for sleeping with a betrothed woman is as follows:
If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
According to the law given in Deuteronomy 22, the penalty for fornicating with a woman betrothed to another was death—for both participants—while the “penalty” for fornicating with a non-betrothed woman was marriage. The first sentence may seem overly harsh and the second overly lenient (depending on your perspective), but both reinforce the notion that the physical act of becoming one flesh initiates a bond that is sacred and permanent. This is why fornication that leads to marriage is treated with less severity than fornication that supplants marriage. And though the Bible makes some allowance for spontaneous moral failure, it dries up quickly when the marriage option is forsaken. The notion that you could continue in fornication, even with someone you intend to marry, is entirely foreign to Scripture. Then there’s this, if a woman was discovered by her husband to have slept with another man before they were married, the penalty (for “whoring in her father’s house”) was death (Deut. 22:21). The modern notion that it’s no big deal to sleep with someone before you’re married is one I would call biblically precarious. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so let’s back up.
By my count, there are only two universal commandments given in the book of Genesis: Be fruitful and multiply and Do not shed innocent blood. The first also entails leaving your parents, clinging to your spouse, and subduing the earth. It was given to all of humanity in Genesis 1, repeated to Noah in Genesis 9, and finally directed to Jacob in Genesis 35. The second commandment comes after God told Noah that “every moving thing that lives shall (now) be food for you.” It was delivered not as a direct edict but as a warning: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Male and female he created them. Both commandments, you may have noticed, have tremendous implications for anyone wishing to wash their hands of abortion or claim that it is only of secondary importance. But even though these are the only explicit directives we find in Genesis, that doesn’t mean they were the only laws in operation. Evidence for an existing moral code abounds.
When Cain killed Abel in Genesis 4, he tried to hide his sin—just as his parents had done in the garden. So, he clearly knew it was wrong to kill his brother, and he even knew that his own life was forfeit. You’ll remember from God’s warning to Noah that Cain deserved to die. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God declared, but as is so often the case, God deferred Cain’s punishment and showed him mercy instead. He placed a hedge of protection around him which allowed Cain to marry and multiply. Five generations later, his descendent Lamech took two wives. It’s the first recorded instance of polygamy, and though there is no recorded prohibition, it seems reasonable to infer that “holding fast” to your wife precludes the taking of another. Lamech was six generations removed from Adam. Noah was nine, and by the time Noah arrived on the scene, God was ready to burn the whole project to the ground:
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
Whatever specific behavior triggered the anger of God, the Bible doesn’t say. “Violence” is the overarching culprit named in Genesis 6:11. In addition to the bizarre aside that directly precedes this declaration—in which the daughters of men were apparently intermarrying with angels or demons, and bearing children—the only specific events we have to go on are Cain’s murder of Abel, Lamech’s polygamy with Adah and Zillah, and his boasting of having killed a man who opposed him. Ten generations later, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Genesis 18:20 declares that their sin was “very grave,” but it does not specify what their wickedness entailed. Because of the scene that would soon play out, where the men of Sodom sought to force themselves upon angels who had taken the form of men, the sin of Sodom has been understood to be the sin of homosexuality. Jude called it the indulgence of sexual immorality and unnatural desire. That sin would be formally codified in Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the law of God being written on the hearts of all people comes in the person of King Abimelech, whose land Abraham and Sarah journeyed through. Abraham, you’ll remember, was an unscrupulous fellow who did for the second time in Genesis 20 what he had already been chastised for in Genesis 12. In the first instance, Abraham (then Abram) made his wife tell the Egyptians that she was his sister because he was afraid they would kill him and claim her as their own. That’s how beautiful she was. Because of his lie, Pharaoh lavished Abram with wealth but also brought Sarai into his house and “took her for [his] wife.” I believe that is biblical shorthand for and slept with her. Because Pharaoh had taken Abram’s wife as his own, the Lord afflicted his entire house “with great plagues.” When Pharaoh learned Sarai was Abram’s wife, he rebuked Abram for his deception and returned Sarai to him.
Not having learned his lesson, or perhaps valuing his newly increased wealth more than the virtue it cost his wife, Abraham deceived King Abimelech in the exact same way. And his excuse was the claim that “there is no fear of God at all in this place.” But as it would turn out, the behavior of King Abimelech was far more exemplary than Abraham’s own. Having been warned in a dream that Sarah was Abraham’s wife, Abimelech pleaded with God for his life. And God granted it. “I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart,” God answered the king, “and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.” Abimelech’s argument wasn’t, I didn’t know it was wrong to take another man’s wife. It was, I didn’t know she was his wife. The next day Abimelech rebuked Abraham for “[bringing] on me and my kingdom (such) a great sin.” The Bible doesn’t declare adultery to be a capital offense until Leviticus 20:10 (& Deuteronomy 22:22), but even among pagan kings, this was already understood to be true.
The conclusion to Abraham’s encounter with Abimelech reads as follows: “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For the LORD had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” We learn something about Abimelech here that he shared in common with most other ancient rulers. He was a slave-owning polygamist, just like Abraham. And while a continued reading of Scripture will eventually uncover the explicit condemnation of prostitution, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, fornication, and adultery, you won’t find a similar condemnation of these two.
It’s difficult to reconcile the allowances God made for both polygamy and slavery, though you’ll notice that the biblical laws governing the two, like those found in Exodus 21, were written with the protection of the more vulnerable party in mind. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that polygamy and slavery were temporary concessions in a brutal, sin-cursed world. They were allowed, perhaps, because so many men and women simply didn’t have the resources to survive on their own. To be housed and provided for, even in the absence of freedom, was better than the alternative.
God’s original design was one man and one woman, living in near perfect freedom. They were beholden to no one but God and each other. But with the entrance of sin and the curse it brought upon creation, the land would no longer yield its fruit willingly. Scarcity became a real problem. And while slavery and polygamy may have been introduced as necessary provisions, they would devolve into practices that caused far more problems than they solved. That which can be corrupted will be corrupted. In Abraham’s case, the consequences of his bringing a slave woman into his house, and then making her a wife are with us to this very day. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman.. for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” Those offspring, it turns out, have been warring against each other ever since.
Genesis 38 offers numerous insights regarding sex and the law of God. The chapter opens by revealing that Judah—one of Dinah’s brothers—obtained a wife in much the same way as Shechem had attempted to do with Dinah. Judah saw a foreign woman, then promptly “took her and went in to her.” But whereas Shechem was killed by the woman’s brothers; Judah was left with a son. Is this a double standard, or do we assume that there were details in the taking and consummating that separate one from the other? I’m not sure. But after Judah’s son grew up and took a wife, God killed him for unspecified wickedness. So Judah told his second son to “go in to [his] brother’s wife, Tamar, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for [his] brother.”
What’s interesting about Judah’s instruction to his surviving son is that it predates God’s giving of the same law (found in Deuteronomy 25:5) by a wide berth. There’s no record of this command having been given to Noah or Abraham, but Judah somehow knew it. And it’s so singular in nature, that it seems unlikely to have been the kind of thing merely written on the human heart. The implication is that somewhere along the line, there was a giving of the law that we are not privy to. Judah’s son Onan followed Judah’s instructions up to a point, but notoriously pulled out so as to prevent conception. He didn’t want to raise up offspring for his brother, so God killed him too. Then things really went off the rails.
After promising Tamar that she would marry his third son when he came of age, Judah quietly reneged on his promise, leaving Tamar still in his house and still childless. So she took matters into her own hands by disguising herself as a prostitute. She intentionally put herself in Judah’s path—knowing, it seems, that he was the kind of man who would always avail himself of a harlot. Sure enough, this is precisely what he did. When Tamar asked, “what will you give me, that you may come in to me?” Judah promised to send her a goat. When she demanded a pledge be left in the meantime, he acquiesced by leaving her his signet, his cord, and his staff. “So [Judah] gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him.”
The pledge Tamar demanded of Judah strikes me as a high one, but he paid it without balking. Such was his eagerness to proceed with the transaction. When he sent the promised goat back, however, Tamar and his pledged items had vanished. And all his inquiries failed. No one knew of the prostitute he sought. Three months later, Judah was told, “Tamar your daughter-in-law has been immoral. Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.” Judah, being the fine upstanding man that he was, ordered that Tamar be burned at the stake.
I cannot account for someone who would so publicly and shamelessly visit a prostitute. Or so casually condemn a pregnant woman to execution. How do you trust the moral judgment of such a man? But Judah’s initial reaction to the discovery of Tamar’s immorality does indicate that fornication was deemed a capital offense. It certainly would be in time. But there’s no indication that killing a pregnant woman was in accord with God’s will. I say that because, unlike his other sons, the child Judah conceived with Tamar was not killed by God. In fact, you’ll find that child amidst the genealogy of God’s own Son. Which is to say, God has more patience for sexual sin than many of his proxies on earth. Just because someone can be executed doesn’t mean they should be.
We sometimes like to imagine that Jesus is less rigid in his moral expectations than the God revealed to us in the Old Testament, and lots of people point out that Jesus didn’t stone the woman caught in adultery. This is gloriously true, but Jesus also said that exceedingly inconvenient thing about lust in which he equates the imagining of sexual sin with its actual consummation. Though the story of Christ’s interaction with the adulterous woman was a late addition to the Bible—it isn’t included in the earliest manuscripts, the reason it rings so true is because mercy to those caught in sexual sin has been God’s M.O. from the beginning. Lot and his daughters were not killed for engaging in incest. Judah and Tamar were not killed for engaging in prostitution, and King David and Bathsheba were not killed for engaging in adultery. So far as I can tell, there isn’t a single instance in the Bible of a woman being executed for sexual sin, or any sin for that matter. The burning of Samson’s wife by the Philistines was something else entirely. That’s not to say these executions never happened; they were certainly on the books, but there’s no record I can find of them actually taking place.
Jesus said it is not what goes into a person that defiles them. It’s what comes out. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts," Christ says in Matthew 15, “murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, (and) slander.“ These are what defile a person. Everything on that list is pretty straightforward, except one. Sexual immorality. And perhaps the most compelling indication that this does include good old-fashioned fornication comes from an interaction Jesus had with his most faithful adversaries. After Jesus graciously told the Pharisees in John 8 that they were children of the devil, they answered that at least they were not “born of sexual immorality”—as Jesus was clearly believed to be. How it became generally known that Jesus’ conception was suspect is not revealed. Perhaps they simply did the math and realized that Mary’s pregnancy had to have preceded her marriage. However they arrived at this conclusion, they’re assumption was that Jesus was conceived in sin, and Joseph was the father (Matt 13:55) The Pharisees may have been duplicitous scoundrels, but they did know the law. Do as they say, not as they do, is what Christ admonishes. The point is this. Their use of the term “sexual immorality” demonstrates that it doesn’t just apply to prostitutes, homosexuals, and libertines. It applies even to good Jewish carpenters sleeping with their betrothed. And it applies to good American Christians sleeping with their boyfriend or girlfriend.
If you cannot control your sexual appetites, Jesus warned, you would be better off maiming yourself and entering heaven than leaving your sexual immorality unchecked and entering hell. That’s what’s at stake, apparently, in the sexual choices we make. We don’t know what happened to the woman caught in adultery after Jesus let her go, but if she didn’t follow his admonition to “go and sin no more,” we do know where she likely ended up. Which is why I feel justified in saying that when it comes to sex, our Creator sanctions only two mutually-exclusive options: marriage or celibacy. If you’re not married, you should not be having sex. And if you are married, you should not be celibate.
I do not envy the husbands and wives who must watch their spouses compete on Dancing with the Stars—as they spend weeks on end hanging all over another (usually an extremely desirable another). It feels like a recipe for adulterous disaster. Because God created us male and female, and he created us to copulate. That’s actually very good news, so long as you cling to your spouse. But when we cling to another, or lots of others, that which was meant to secure life becomes a vehicle for death. Both literally and figuratively. In a country where close to 90% of abortions are performed on unmarried women—and some unknown percentage more are performed on wives who’ve been impregnated by someone besides their husband, reserving sex for the marriage bed would all but eliminate abortion—without the passage of a single law.
]]>Thanks to America This Week, I’ve been on a top-ten kick of late. Novels, movies, songs, TV shows… There’s something satisfying and exceedingly challenging in trying to narrow such broad fields down to your ten favorites. Not the ten best, mind you—that’s a thoroughly impossible task—but favorites is at least manageable. I’ve tried to rope in friends and family, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (which reminds me, I need to rank drinks next). My ten favorite novels are fairly conventional. Lots of classics. They are, in no particular order: The Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer, Les Miserables, That Hideous Strength, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings, and East of Eden. There’s a good chance we share some in common, which is more than can be said of my songs list.
Coming up with my ten favorite songs, it turns out, was a far more difficult task. I’ve read hundreds of novels in my 50 years, but I’ve heard thousands of songs. And how do you rank hymns or worship songs against radio fare? I don’t think you reasonably can, so I limited the field to pop songs. My first pass yielded roughly 25 contestants. To move forward, I axed everything less than 30 years old. Sorry, “Lullaby.” Sayonara, “Some Nights.” My apologies, “All Too Well.” That took me down to 15 songs, then 12, and finally… ten. In the end, my entire list is comprised of songs released between 1984 and 1987, but didn’t include anything by Prince, Madonna, Hall & Oates, or even the King of Pop. In other words, these songs weren’t chosen for their objective merit or overall popularity. They were chosen because they transport me back more than any others, and three of them are almost too poignant to even listen to.
Conventional wisdom says we’re all drawn to the music of our early teens, but in my case it was earlier—which must speak to my incredible maturity. I was eight years old in 1984. Pop music wasn’t exactly on my radar (or radio), but then my older cousins came to town for the Summer Olympics. At 15 and 17, they were the epitome of cool, and so was their music. For two weeks I followed them around my grandparents’ winter home in Newport Beach, which was essentially my home every summer. And what a home it was, though the reception was rather dismal—especially in the guest bedrooms. They were blocked by a cliff to the east and by three stories of house to the north. If you wanted to listen to the radio, your best bet was the garage, which happened to be on the top floor. I would spend a lot of time in that garage over the next few years, beside my beloved dual-cassette boombox. The last two songs to miss the cut came from that summer, before I even had a radio of my own. Namely, “I Love L.A.” and “Cruel Summer” (which happens to be featured in one of my top-ten movies), but 1984 still managed to land one hit on my top-ten list (after the songs of summer had gone).
Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” may be the least controversial choice on my entire list. It has to be among the most played tracks in the world, but it’s actually Don Henley I want to talk about. Along with his daughter Sara—and her mother, Stevie Nicks. You may have seen mention recently of Nicks’ abortion—which occurred sometime in the late seventies. It was used this month by the Center for Reproductive Rights to celebrate abortion. “Access to abortion,” they tell us, “made [Nicks’] life, her art, and her voice possible”—and they included a clip from an interview she did last year with CBS’s Tracy Smith to drive the point home. Having a baby, Nicks confidently declared “would have destroyed Fleetwood Mac.” Why? According to Nicks, it wasn’t the demands of pregnancy in general. It was that pregnancy, in particular. Because while she thinks she could have endured being in the studio every day as an expectant mom, her bandmates—specifically Lindsey Buckingham, her erstwhile lover—could not have endured her carrying Don Henley’s baby. “It would have been a nightmare scenario for me to live through,” Nicks concluded, and so their child wasn’t allowed to live at all.
Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for National Review, noted last week that Nicks’ interview is not quite the slam-dunk for abortion the Center for Reproductive Rights makes it out to be. The clip opens, in fact, with an admission the abortion industry normally works hard to suppress. Stevie Nicks had “a great gynecologist,” she tells us, and an IUD. She was “totally protected”—or so that gynecologist led her to believe. “How [could] this [have] happened?” she asks indignantly. Hadn’t she done everything she was supposed to do? Yes and no. The use of birth control does result in dramatically fewer pregnancies, so long as it doesn’t alter the frequency of intercourse. But the use of birth control always alters the frequency of intercourse. That’s the rub. There are things you can do to increase or decrease the likelihood of conception, but in the final reckoning, it is wholly beyond your control. Which is why God prescribes only two options when it comes to sex: marriage or celibacy. Our petulant rejection of both is why millions upon millions of innocent human beings have been casually torn to pieces in the womb. It’s the price we pay for demanding a third way.
I can find no indication as to how Don Henley felt about Nicks’ pregnancy, but it was Henley who first made the abortion public. That in itself is telling. Women who don’t reveal their personal abortion history don’t generally want others doing it for them. Especially women who are world famous. So Henley was either incredibly naive—which I don’t think he’s ever been accused of—or he was intentionally trying to stir the pot. Even the strange framing of Henley’s revelation may have been a calculated effort to cause pain. “To the best of my knowledge,” Henley told Christopher Connelly in a 1991 GQ interview, “(Stevie Nicks) became pregnant by me. And she named the kid Sara, and she had an abortion.” To the best of my knowledge… What does Henley mean by that? Is he saying that maybe Nicks didn’t get pregnant, didn’t name their child Sara, and didn’t have an abortion? No, he seems to be implying that Nicks may have gotten pregnant by someone else, which is hardly a flattering conjecture when you consider the nature and length of their relationship. Henley would go on to assert that Fleetwood Mac’s song “Sara” was written "to the spirit of [their] aborted baby” and believes the “build your house” line was a reference to him.
Nicks denied the allegations at first, calling it wishful thinking on Henley’s part, but if you look at the lyrics, it’s not hard to see where Henley was coming from. “Sara” is a song that is initially about a man—a singer, in fact, who rides the wings of a storm. “I think I had met my match,” Nicks croons, which seems apropos since Henley was the singer for perhaps the only band in the world that was even bigger than Fleetwood Mac. And that, apparently, is how they met, during the summer of 1976, when Fleetwood Mac opened for the Eagles at several stadium shows. But then the song shifts and Nicks starts singing to a “Sara” who she describes as “the poet in my heart,” whose heartbeat “never really died,” who she hopes is still dreaming. Was there a born Sara somewhere in the world that Nicks’ could have reasonably spoken of in these terms? Not likely.
“Wait a minute, baby. Stay with me awhile.” That’s how “Sara” opens, and it’s hard to know whether Nicks is addressing her lover, or a literal baby who she fears won’t be with her long. “But now it's gone,” Nicks continues, “it doesn't matter what for.” Here again, she could be referring to the “sea of love” she was drowning in or to an aborted baby. Or even both. The first time Nicks sings, “When you build your house, then call me home,” it seems to be addressed to a lover—which is how Henley interpreted it. But after the focus shifts to “Sara” and Nicks keeps singing that same line over and over, it betokens to me a different house. And a different home. The one Jesus spoke of in John 14.
Stevie Nicks would concede decades later that Don Henley’s assertion about “Sara” was essentially correct. “Had I married Don and had that baby,” she told Billboard in 2014, “and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara.” Isn’t it interesting that a self-avowed feminist like Stevie Nicks would mention marriage here at all? She could have easily left the “married Don” part out altogether. But she seems to know, despite herself, how God intends this whole thing to play out. It also leads me to believe that Nicks and Henley probably did talk about getting married. But one or the other, apparently, was unwilling to tie the knot. Years later, Nicks would amend her story again. “I [could] not have married Don Henley,” she rationalized, “he was in a bigger band than me [and] nobody in that band was ready to get married and have children.” But the band was ready to break up entirely, it turns out.
Lydia Harvey asserted in a 2014 piece for the Tampa Bay Times that “There's only one place perfect enough for a baby created by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley, and sadly for us mortals, heaven (if you believe in it) is exactly where that unborn child has been all this time.” I’m sure Harvey meant well, but this is greeting-card sentimentality—shared by Christians the world over who use the imagery of heaven to justify their indifference to the violence of abortion. Like all of us, Stevie Nicks and Don Henley are profoundly broken people. They would not have had a perfect child, but they did have a child. And that child was killed for a host of vacuous reasons that only get worse with age. “If I had not had that abortion,” Nicks told the Guardian in 2020, “I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac”— ignoring the fact that the band’s best days (and their GRAMMYs) were already behind it when the abortion took place.
Stevie Nicks ostensibly aborted her baby to save a band that was splintering and spare the feelings of bandmates she could barely tolerate. When asked in the Guardian interview if Fleetwood Mac got along, or were friends, or ever saw each other when they weren’t touring, her answer to all three was an emphatic, no—which she says had been the case since 1976. And yet, this band, Nicks argued had to be held together because “I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy… That was my world’s mission.” A band that hated each other, teaching the world how to love. Do you see the irony? And in her determination to never need a man, Nicks exposed herself completely to being used by men. Before they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, Nicks tells of toiling as a waitress and cleaning lady to pay for the apartment she shared with Lindsey Buckingham because Buckingham—who could’ve “play[ed] four sets (a week) at Chuck’s Steakhouse [for] $500”—refused to sell out.
Meanwhile, Don Henley was enduring something of the same thing in his own world—the disintegration of the band he headlined along with a drug-fueled meltdown that he barely survived. In 1980, paramedics were called to Henley’s Los Angeles home where they found a naked 16-year-old girl who’d suffered a cocaine-induced seizure. Henley claimed not to have known she was underage and says he’d only called for a sex worker "to escape the depression [he] was in.” That depression has always been credited to the breakup of the Eagles, but I can’t help but wonder if Nicks’ abortion was also a contributing factor. The timeline certainly fits, and I know from the testimony of Kelsey Grammer, another 70-something celebrity (and sometimes wearer of Abort73 T-shirts) who also lost a child to abortion in the 1970’s, that abortion regret can be just as bitter for the father. "I know that many people do not have a problem with abortion,” Grammer wrote in his new book, “and though I have supported it in the past, the abortion of my son eats away at my soul.”
Stevie Nicks’ first solo album released in 1981. Henley’s followed a year later. And just like that, two of the biggest bands in the world, linked by a single abortion, suddenly found themselves full of members all looking to go their own way. Fleetwood Mac would limp on for a few more years, but with all three singers pursuing solo careers, the writing was on the wall. I’m not saying that Nicks’ abortion is responsible for all the carnage that ensued, but there’s no denying that the lives of Stevie Nicks and Don Henley both spiraled out of control in the years to follow. Nicks was doing so much cocaine in the early 80’s, she told Billboard, that a doctor warned her that just one more line might cause a brain hemorrhage. There were corollary culprits, to be sure, but to blithely assume that the abortion was a non-factor is rather obtuse.
“I'd have been a great mom,” Nicks proclaimed in her CBS interview. If she hadn’t had her daughter killed, that is. That’s not how she sees it, I’ll grant, but ignorance can only be an excuse for so long. Eventually Stevie Nicks will face a judge far more discerning than those who work for CBS or the Guardian. A judge who will rightly discern her degree of culpability. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul repay man according to what he has done?
At one point in his 1991 GQ interview, Don Henley speaks of seeing a father and his young daughter Christmas shopping together and getting all choked up. Was her name, Sara, perhaps? Having no siblings or cousins of his own, Henley had a sudden longing for family but then rationalized, according to Connelly, that it would be “irresponsible to bring a child into this screwed-up world.” Nicks took something of the same tack in claiming to have had the abortion for the good of her child. “I am not the kind of woman,” she told Rolling Stone, “who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years.” I wouldn’t do that to her. So she handed her baby over to an abortionist instead. When Nicks was asked last year whether she ever regretted not having a child, she answered “never” before the question was even finished—a response that was far too quick and unequivocal to be plausibly honest. Here’s her explanation:
I knew then that I had to [remain] in Fleetwood Mac, a huge band that was on its way to being legendary, to be able to be the lighthouse. Not only did [my abortion} allow me to follow my dream of being this rock & roll woman, but it allowed me to be this person that just wrote this song. I wanted to write something that would be helpful in this situation, because this could be my finest hour. This could be the most important thing I’ve ever done, this song.
The song in question—the most important of her career, apparently—is 2024’s “The Lighthouse,” which she boasts of having written in a single morning. And it sounds like it. “Abortion rights,” Nicks tells us, “was really my generation’s fight.” She was “so happy” when abortion was legalized in 1973 but now urges women in song to be angry and afraid as they fight the fascists. Here’s a sampling, which somehow manages to ape both Michael Jackson and Troy Bolton:
You've gotta get in the game
You've gotta learn how to play
You've gotta make a change, you've gotta do it todayAll the rights that you had yesterday
Are taken away
And now you're afraid
You should be afraid
Should be afraidBecause everything I fought for
Long ago in a dream is gone
Someone said the dream is not over
The dream has just begun, or
Is it a nightmare?
Is it a lasting scar?
It is, unless you save it
And that's that
Unless you stand up
And take it back
Not surprisingly, “The Lighthouse” cannot be found amongst Nicks’ most-popular songs—not by a Landslide. “Edge of Seventeen” has been listened to 600 million times on Spotify; “The Lighthouse” clocks in at 1.6—which is still an absurdly high number for a recording of this… quality. Though you may think I’m still quoting song lyrics, Nicks declared in last year’s Rolling Stone interview that she is the lighthouse because she is the wisdom—along with Kamala Harris (yes, she actually said that). “We are the women that [shine the light]… we bring the ships in so they don’t crash… we save lives every day”—which calls to mind something spoken by the prophet Isaiah. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.
As outspoken an abortion apologist as Stevie Nicks has become, it’s worth remembering that she hid her abortion for decades and would still be hiding it today had she not been outed by the father. “[Don Henley] let that one out of the bag,” Nicks conceded last year. “I probably would’ve never (made it public). Why would I say anything? Everything was totally legal.” But that’s a strange argument to make. You hide things that are illegal. You don’t hide things that are legal—especially ones you purportedly celebrate—unless you’re actually ashamed. Unless your professed enthusiasm for abortion is not what you pretend it to be.
Don Henley, who has dedicated much of his life to the preservation of Walden Woods said in a decades-old interview with Whoopi Goldberg that “mankind should live in harmony with nature and not try to conquer it.” Since Henley has also reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party, he clearly doesn’t apply this maxim to the issue of abortion. Because abortion is the antithesis of living in harmony with nature. It is emphatically anti-nature. Abortion enters nature’s most sacred and protected space and turns what is supposed to be the cradle of life into a chamber of death. Henley is critical of Civil War memorials, which he calls “monuments to violence,” but if you want a true monument to violence, look no further than your local Planned Parenthood. Their nefarious business model is right in the name. The children who aren’t planned, they kill.
When Henley suggested to GQ that it would be irresponsible to bring children into the world (which may be the single most asinine assertion in a world full of asinine assertions), he wondered aloud, “And where would [I] raise a child? Not in Los Angeles, certainly…“ Not in that cesspool. But here’s the thing. I grew up in Los Angeles, at the same time Henley’s daughter would have grown up. And you know what, it was pretty great. Despite being an only child. Despite having a dad who left, my life in the City of Angels was more than enough. Had Sara Henley been born, she would have driven the same streets as I did and listened to the same music. She may even have gone to the same school. And I bet she would have loved it—no matter how dysfunctional her parents were. Because life is infinitely preferable to the alternative.
Don Henley, it turns out, got married in 1995. Thirty years later, he’s still married with three grown children—who were all raised in Texas, just like their dad. The man who once morally eschewed the bearing of offspring now calls his family the most important thing in his life. That doesn’t mean I’m a fan of his politics, but that is worth celebrating. Meanwhile, the most important thing in Stevie Nicks’ life, you’ll remember, is the song she wrote to shill for abortion. “I am a totally free woman,” Nicks gushed to the Guardian, “and I am independent, and that’s exactly what I always wanted to be.” But the other word for being entirely free and independent is… alone. A prisoner of her own device, which is the saddest fate of all. Stevie Nicks has spent a lifetime trying to convince herself that she’s better off without children, but I suspect she’d renounce all her rhetoric for the nonsense it is, if she could only get her Sara back.
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