Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry 22 January 2025 | Topic: The Roots of Roe Still Grow
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The Roots of Roe Still Grow
Pro-Life Challenges in the New Administration
Pro-life advocates waking up last November 6 could be forgiven for thinking it was 2016 all over again. Now, as then, a candidate and her political party sworn to promote abortion wholesale was defeated in favor of a candidate and party that might limit the evil done. For many pro-life advocates, the result was not exactly a decisive victory, only a stay of execution, warding off something far worse.
However, pro-lifers today are awakening to serious worldview challenges that went largely unnoticed when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. These challenges don’t replace the ones I wrote of during the previous Trump presidency; they represent additional challenges for 2025 and beyond.
Challenge 1: Roe Is Gone, but Support Remains
Roe v. Wade was bad law, so reversing it was good in principle for the nation. However, that reversal has not translated into pro-life wins at the ballot box. Indeed, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Americans in selected states have voted seventeen times on abortion, and the pro-abortion cause has won fourteen times and lost only three. In most states, pro-lifers aren’t just losing; they’re getting clobbered. Ohio is a case in point. The state is reliably Republican, yet in 2023, by a whopping 54 percent to 43 percent margin, a majority of Ohio voters insisted that abortion rights should be written into the state’s constitution, immune from being amended by the state legislature. Meanwhile, in the recent 2024 election, ten states voted on the issue. Pro-lifers won only three states (Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota) and lost seven (Missouri, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, New York).
Our problem at the ballot box isn’t marketing or laziness; it’s worldview. In our nation, a sizable majority of our fellow citizens have talked themselves into believing that if they don’t have a fundamental right to kill their unborn offspring, they have no rights at all. However, it took the demise of Roe to discover this painful truth. In the years leading up to the Dobbs decision, many well-intentioned pro-life leaders told their students, “You’re the generation that will abolish abortion.” The claim was and is more hype than substance, and it sets students up for disappointment leading to disengagement each time we suffer setbacks (and there have been and will be many).
Moreover, the sentiment doesn’t account for current cultural realities. Younger generations are indeed engaged on abortion, but not in a pro-life direction. According to the latest Pew Research survey, 76 percent of young adults under age thirty say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 61 percent of adults in their thirties and forties. Pro-life leaders blundered when they confused energetic opposition to abortion among pro-life students with energetic support for the pro-life position in general.
These votes and polls bring to the surface a divergence of worldview that has been with us for decades. The majority of Americans do not agree with pro-lifers on two foundational questions.
Can we know moral truth?
First, a majority of Americans are not with us on the question of moral truth — namely, is moral truth real and knowable, or is it mainly a preference, like choosing chocolate over vanilla? The popular bumper sticker that says, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one!” captures the prevailing American sentiment exactly. For many voters, the abortion debate is not about right and wrong but about likes and dislikes. The relativistic worldview premises that make abortion plausible to millions of our fellow citizens are cemented into society and have been for decades, even before Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. As a result, nearly every societal institution — academia, corporate America, the entertainment industry, the mainstream media — actively opposes the pro-life position.
This broad opposition didn’t happen by accident. Postmodernism — a worldview asserting that right and wrong and human nature itself are socially constructed from place to place — is deeply entrenched in society and is not going away anytime soon. Pro-lifers who think we can dislodge it with a slick marketing campaign, with feel-good ads, or by trying harder to be liked are living in a dreamworld. Just ask any abortion-choice advocate you know the following question: If pro-lifers were nicer and took on every injustice you demand they fix, would you oppose abortion? The answer will be “No! Women have a right to make their own choices.” Of course, what exactly that choice is or where the alleged right to exercise it comes from is seldom spelled out, but many Americans don’t care to ask. Asserting choice is good enough.
What makes humans valuable?
Second, many Americans do not agree with pro-lifers on the question of what makes humans valuable in the first place. What drives the abortion controversy is not who loves women and who hates them. Rather, it’s a serious philosophical debate about who counts as one of us. Either you believe that every human being has an equal right to life, or you don’t.
As Christopher Kaczor points out in The Ethics of Abortion, the underlying controversy is one of philosophical anthropology. Pro-life advocates, following Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, hold to an endowment view of human value. That is, humans are valuable by virtue of the kind of thing they are, not some function they perform. Although humans differ immensely with respect to talents, accomplishments, and degrees of development, they nonetheless have an equal right to life because they share a common human nature that bears the image of their Maker. Their right to life comes to be when they come to be. Abortion-choice advocates more or less espouse a performance view of human value. Being human is nothing special. What matters is your ability to immediately exercise an acquired property, like self-awareness or sentience.
Notice that both positions — the endowment view and the performance view — use philosophical reflection to answer the same foundational question: Are humans valuable by nature or function? Pick a side. There is no neutral ground here.
Challenge 2: Loss of Support from Major Political Parties
The political realities confronting pro-lifers in 2025 are not as favorable as they once were. Of the two major political parties, one promotes abortion wholesale while the other is walking back its principled opposition to the practice.
“For many voters, the abortion debate is not about right and wrong but about likes and dislikes.”
It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, the pro-life movement in the early seventies and eighties was broad and bipartisan. For example, in the early aftermath of Roe (1973–1986), pro-lifers advanced no less than seventeen bills or amendments consistently stating that the unborn are human from conception, and there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. These bills and amendments were introduced when pro-lifers had strong tailwinds — when the cultural and political realities were much friendlier than what we face today and when the pro-life position had supporters in both major parties.
Shocking though it seems today, in 1977, Jessie Jackson penned an op-ed for National Right to Life News where he pointedly asked, “What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the abortion of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?” Democrat Ted Kennedy wrote in 1971 that while he sympathized with women facing crisis pregnancies, abortion-on-demand conflicted with the value our civilization places on human life. “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” Meanwhile, House Democrat Dick Gephardt was a co-sponsor of a proposed 1977 human life amendment aimed at overturning Roe. He said, “Life is a division of cells, a process which begins at conception.” In 1981, then-senator Joe Biden voted for a human life amendment specifically designed to give states freedom to reverse Roe. And three years later, Democratic senator Al Gore voted for an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that would have protected unborn humans at conception. That amendment defined “unborn children from the moment of conception” as “persons” who were entitled to the full protection of federal civil-rights laws.
At the same time, Catholic bishops actively rallied the Catholic vote in favor of these bills and amendments. And, for a period, a pro-life president (Ronald Reagan) championed them through his writing and speaking.
Despite strong political and cultural tailwinds, each of these bills and amendments failed to become law. If that weren’t bad enough, by the late eighties, nearly all of the once pro-life Democrats left their alleged pro-life principles, forcing pro-lifers to fight a partisan war of attrition aimed at limiting the evil done. With this history in mind, we can see that conservative evangelicals did not make a partisan deal with the GOP; instead, Democrats ditched their pro-life principles.
In 2025, pro-lifers now find themselves without principled support from either party. Many pro-lifers do not yet feel politically homeless, but they could be if the GOP platform is not brought back to its previous stance. While rank-and-file pro-lifers must remain committed to protecting all unborn humans, the political debate remains about what to do in a real, fallen world when we cannot immediately secure that protection. The answer to this troubling tension is not to check out of politics, but to apply a biblical worldview at the ballot box aimed at limiting evil and promoting good insofar as possible given current political realities.
Though our bipartisan political strength is vastly diminished from the seventies and eighties, our situation is far from hopeless. Despite having the dominant influence in every major societal institution, the pro-abortion movement has failed to settle the abortion debate once and for all in its favor. Abortion remains a contentious, divisive issue politically and culturally thanks to pro-life efforts aimed at keeping the issue alive. Meanwhile, all is not lost with the GOP. If pro-life advocates can recapture the GOP Central Committee, the pro-life plank can be restored to the GOP platform in 2028.
Ultimately, despite widespread acceptance of abortion, believers are never without hope because this is the same world where God raised Jesus from the dead. Though we may not understand why God allows (for now) evil to tarry, we can reason from what we do know (God raised Jesus, and he is not only redeeming the world but will one day restore it) to what we don’t know. As the hymn writer so eloquently puts it,
This is my Father’s world:
Oh let me never forget
That though the wrong is often strong,
He is the ruler yet.
Challenge 3: Lies and Misconceptions
We are seeing a great deal of deception regarding women allegedly dying from pro-life laws restricting abortion. While pro-lifers certainly grieve the death of any woman from an abortion — legal or illegal — the claim that women die as the result of pro-life laws is not only false but question-begging. That is, it assumes the unborn are not human (which is the very point under dispute in the abortion debate). Otherwise, their objection amounts to this: “Because some humans may die or be harmed attempting to intentionally kill innocent human beings, we should make it safe and legal for them to do so.” But why should the law be faulted for making it riskier for one human to intentionally kill another innocent one? As abortion-choice advocate Mary Anne Warren points out, “The fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of forbidding it.” In short, when people say abortion should be safe, the question is, “Safe for whom?” Is it safe for the unborn? Again, unless one assumes the unborn are not human, the argument is absurd.
Meanwhile, groups like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists are fact-checking the lies in the media. For example, in the state of Georgia, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller did not die because of pro-life laws; they died after taking abortion drugs obtained through the mail without physician oversight.
Sadly, sometimes Christians hesitate to clear away misconceptions and expose the evil of abortion. I grow weary at the number of Christian leaders (pastors, pro-life leaders, Christian school chaplains, and conference leaders) who refuse to allow abortion-victim imagery to be shown during pro-life presentations. They are stripping us of our most effective tool both in terms of persuading critics and inspiring our own people to greater sacrifice. As pro-life veteran Gregg Cunningham points out, “When we show pictures of abortion, abortion protests itself.” The pictures, Cunningham argues, change how people feel about abortion as a predicate to changing how they think and ultimately behave. It is time for the pro-life movement to stop apologizing for exposing what is being done to unborn humans.
Christian leaders unwilling to show abortion-victim imagery can at least humanize the unborn with revolutionary new imagery of children in the womb. Sites like the Education Resource Fund show dramatic video of unborn humans with beating hearts at three-weeks gestational age. As Cunningham points out, “Americans will continue to support abortion as long as they think of babies as blobs.” Imagine if a large number of evangelical leaders showed this imagery in conjunction with biblically grounded teaching on abortion.
Stay at Your Post
Instead of waiting for more favorable political winds, Christian leaders can equip rank-and-file pro-lifers to dig in for a decades-long fight of refuting misconceptions and arguing persuasively for their views. We should tell pro-life advocates the truth: “Barring unforeseen events, victory will not be had in your lifetime. Rather, you are here for another purpose — to lay the groundwork for eventual victory. So stay at your posts! Like Allied paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines ahead of D-Day, your job is to keep the roads and bridges open, to make sure our ideas stay viable in the public square.” Instead of hyping pro-life advocates with a false sense of victory, we need to get to work arming them with persuasive arguments that can compete in the marketplace of ideas. That must happen no matter who occupies the White House.
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