In 2020, COVlD ravaged the world, and people died by the millions. The Center for Disease Control reports that in the United States in 2021, the year in which COVID deaths peaked, COVID “was associated with approximately 460,000 deaths.”[1] That is the worst year the United States had with COVID.
In 2020, the United States aborted about 930,000 children.[2] Thus, if COVID was a problem (and it was), abortion is more than double the problem. In its down years, abortion takes the lives of far more people than COVID ever did in its worst year. If you considered COVID to be bad, you should consider abortion to be worse.
And yet, as big a problem as abortion is, it is really just a symptom of a deeper problem. The West is inundated with thinking that drives the push for abortion on demand, and that thinking rises out of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution did not invent sexual immorality, but it normalized it and made it more palatable. The sexual revolution encouraged sexual exploration and significantly lowered the standard for sexual activity from committed marriage between a husband and wife to mere consent. It says we should be able to have sex when and where we want as long as there is consent. In the West this thinking has increased sexual activity outside marriage and has cheapened the meaning of sex. Consequently, the sexual revolution has also created a greater number of crisis pregnancies and, thus, in its own thinking, a greater need for abortions.
One of the biggest consequences of free sex is unwanted pregnancy, and this is problematic to free sex because it means that sex isn’t free. Sex has consequences. Abortion, however, is a perceived remedy to the problem of pregnancy. Have sex when and where you want, and if you get pregnant, no problem – get an abortion. This is the way much of American culture thinks. It’s a vicious circle. Free sex creates more crisis pregnancies, which we resolve through more abortions so that we can be free to engage in sex as we wish, which then creates more crisis pregnancies, which we resolve . . . We have to break this circle. The sexual revolution has exacerbated the problem it wants abortion to remedy. It increases crisis pregnancies and then complains that we have too many of them. The sexual revolution is itself the problem.
The sexual revolution wants dearly to reduce crisis pregnancies because crisis pregnancies interfere with free sex. Of course, there is a way to significantly reduce crisis pregnancies, but that solution is not something the sexual revolution will consider because it involves the rejection of its main premise. If we return sex to its proper place within the confines of a committed marriage between a husband and wife, we will significantly reduce unwanted pregnancies.
If my proabortion friends really cared about sparing women from many difficult and unwanted pregnancies, there is an easier way to do that than abortion. If the women are single, they could just say no to sex. And the culture could teach single men to do the same. I understand that that solution won’t cover every situation, but it will cover a boatload of them. The proabortion position talks much about choice, but other than situations involving rape or incest, the mother has already made a choice. She has chosen to participate in an action whose main purpose is procreation. In the majority of those situations, the mother could have chosen not to get pregnant simply by abstaining from sex. The prochoice position needs to consider the consequences of a woman’s choice before sex and not just after.
Today, what I have suggested is considered ridiculous. People read what I just said and laugh. And that is precisely the problem. Their ridicule illustrates my point. A hundred years ago, the culture considered sex to be reserved for marriage. That thinking was mainstream. Today it is ludicrous.
Our problem is deeper than abortion. Abortion on demand is merely a symptom of the sexual revolution. Western society thinks a certain way about sex, and that thinking produces a perceived need for abortions and with it a strong motive for dehumanizing unborn children. Much of the West does not recognize the unborn as human because it does not want to. The lives of the unborn interfere with free sex, and we want free sex. These are some of the consequences of the sexual revolution, and we need to reject it. It has been an abysmal failure.
The sexual revolution is a deeper problem than abortion, but there is a problem even deeper than the sexual revolution. It’s called self. Self is what drives the sexual revolution. In the West today, sex is about me, my pleasure, my desires, my happiness. I decide. I make my own rules. And who are you to challenge me? Only Christ and the Cross can deal with self. We will not change the abortion problem until we change how we think about sex, and right now, sex in the West is so self-centered that we will never change how we think about it until we realize that our self is not the center of the universe. Scripture has an answer to that problem. It is called the Cross. It is there that we die to self and that Christ by His grace gives us a new self.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm?s_cid=mm7117e1_w
[2] https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2022/06/long-term-decline-us-abortions-reverses-showing-rising-need-abortion-supreme-court
