Pro-Life gaining ground

in Australia.

Small piece on big news.

The End is Nigh. Twenty years ago it was a perfectly viable, even courageous political position to defend abortion as birth control. Indeed, safe, legal abortion was viewed by many as the crowing achievement of women’s liberation. This remains the doctrine of the women’s activism for this reason – something so long fought for cannot be immoral, right?

Today, the doctrine is doomed, and despite the fact that Christians lead the charge, the anti-abortion movement has very little to do with Christian doctrine or practice over the last two thousand years.

There is simply no moral standing on which to defend the choice of abortion resting solely in the hands of the mother. It is a human life. Period. End. There is no moral counter argument. By any, any, objective account – an unborn human child has the rights of any other human child, and deep down there is no mother on earth that doesn’t know this to be true.


NOW and then. Feminists have failed on abortion for the same reasons many highly enthusiastic groups fail after the first, fast successes are won. Namely, groupthink. Because feminists were successful in empowering women on a massive scale, feminists began to view all women as feminists, and all feminists as a monolithic whole. Feminism was once defined as ‘liberation’ for women, be it in sexual relationships, workplace or in societal roles. Feminism is now defined more often as "empowerment," which is actually quite different. Arch-feminists completely underestimated the trauma that an abortion has upon a woman. There was also no anticipation of the reality that any woman who even had an abortion would never wish such a thing upon her daughter.

Abortion is actually far more fundamentally against humanism than it is against Christian doctrine. The Christian embrace of "life begins at conception" is a spectacular achievement of Christians to recognize the benefits of technology and incorporate them into a theological position. We can now tell the moment of conception. We can see the moment a human embryo’s heart begins to beat. We can detect numerous congenital defects in the first weeks of pregnancy. These also revealed to us as humans that this process is staggeringly miraculous and its termination is to be abhorred. For centuries, Christian thought and teaching held that the soul was not imparted into the child until birth. That the wholly humanistic pro-life position is now the bailiwick of Christianity reveals a choice by Christians to accept new knowledge into its moral compass, and a corresponding refusal of the pro-choice to acknowledge that they have forfeited their own.