Fifty Years after Roe, the Job Isn’t Done
Author: Stan Guthrie
January 20, 2023
Ever since C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer pricked our consciences, abortion has been on the front burner for socially minded evangelicals. Fifty years since Roe v. Wade, it’s time to ask whether it should remain there.
Claiming to represent the new center, an increasingly self-confident wing of sincere evangelicals thinks not.
In The Scandal of Evangelical Politics, Ron Sider, echoing a common complaint that pro-lifers believe that “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” defined the terms of the debate by asserting that starvation and second-hand smoke are also “sanctity of life” issues.
In other words, they seem to be saying that fighting legalized abortion—the deliberate, state- sanctioned taking of 60 million unborn human lives from their mothers’ wombs since 1973 (and the accompanying national guilt)—should simply be one item among many on an ever-expanding evangelical to-do list.
Yes, we have multiple responsibilities as Christians, and different callings. Starvation is indeed an important issue (one that many Christians are already faithfully addressing). But if everything is a priority, then nothing is.
Imagine an advisor telling Martin Luther King Jr. that he won’t be participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery because there is a “broader social agenda.” Rightly might King retort, “But we’re not finished!”
Jesus never turned his back on children. Will we?
Thanks to pregnancy care centers, ramped up adoption efforts, increased access to ultrasounds, and the judicious use of pro-life laws across the country, culminating in the recent Dobbs decision that finally overturned Roe vs. Wade, the number of abortions fell steadily for 30 years in America. Tragically, in the last few years we’ve seen an alarming reversal of this trend.
The job is far from finished. No, we will not all be called to picket or pray in front of an abortion clinic or pass legislation or support an unwed mother in practical ways or adopt a child or write letters to the editor. But we all can do something.
Opposing abortion is not simply one more item on crowded evangelical agendas. It is our sacred duty. As Scripture says,
Rescue those who are being taken away to death;
hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
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 know it,
and will he not repay man according to his work?
Whatever other good deeds we are called to do—and there are many—we cannot say abortion is someone else’s business. It’s our business.
Stan Guthrie is minister of communications for New Covenant Church of Naperville.
Photo by Liv Bruce on Unsplash
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