How moral decline whispers until it eventually wins.
Decline rarely announces itself — it whispers until it eventually wins. This is what happened in the House of Lords last week in Great Britain — another whisper.
In case you missed it, last week in Great Britain, the House of Lords voted to advance proposals that would remove criminal penalties for women undergoing abortions after 24 weeks. It does not negate the Victorian-era law that establishes that late-term abortion is not legal, but it does eliminate the possibility of investigation or prosecution against any woman choosing to have a late-term abortion.
At face value, this development does not seem surprising. There is a reason for the lack of shock. Without tracing every step of how abortion language became normalized, the fact is that legislation in the U.K. criminalized abortion at any stage of pregnancy in 1861, and 106 years later, it was legalized in 1973. The same can be said for the U.S. — abortion was outlawed in every state by 1910 and was legalized only 63 years later in 1973.
The moral fade took time.
While the U.S. took an overdue step back from nationwide legalized abortion through the Dobbs vs. Jackson case in 2022, ruling that abortion is not federally protected, the fact is that the ruling significantly expanded abortion access in some states. Several states, including Colorado, Oregon, and New Jersey, now allow abortion with few or no gestational limits in law.
What does this brief history reveal? The premise of abortion went from a criminal act to a legalized ending of unborn life in a relatively short period of time. Furthermore, the last 10 years have reshaped the language around abortion by changing the verbiage to “women’s health,” and even more bizarre, not acknowledging that women are the ones who give birth to babies, to “reproductive health.”
As the culture of death has bulldozed forward, legislation has continued to expand to accommodate it. For instance, running in tandem with abortion, assisted suicide has continued to expand, with reports documenting cases in Canada where individuals seeking assisted death cited factors such as isolation, housing insecurity, and other forms of social suffering.
Where does it stop?
Given these legislative shifts, where will the issue of abortion be in 10 years? If legislation does not push back on the issue, the U.K. and liberal states in the U.S. risk moving the needle even further, even to horrifying levels.
Ten years from now, the conversation may not be about whether abortion can happen during any part of pregnancy, but how long it can happen after pregnancy.
Think about that.
Before you begin to think that the premise of post-pregnancy abortion is ludicrous, remember that the idea of abortion at any point was completely criminalized. Even fewer years ago, the legal viability of euthanasia was extremely rare. Now, both of these issues are common and allowed.
What once seemed unthinkable can, over time, become discussable — and eventually defensible. History shows that when moral boundaries are steadily redefined, yesterday’s impossibilities can become tomorrow’s policy debates. How long before the conversation of post-pregnancy abortion is discussed because of unscreened deformities or non-diagnosed diseases?
Again, as insane as the question above may be, over time, the culture of death will normalize it and push for it to be law.
For Christians and those who are pro-life and believe in the sanctity and inherent worth of every life, it is imperative to continue to not only push for pro-life legislation, but also to vote for Bible-believing politicians who are dedicated to using the power entrusted to them to be a thick line of defense against the advancement of such drastic moral decay.
The whisper will continue. Sometimes it is loud (“reproductive health” marches and the like), but many times the shift is found on the inside pages of the national news, the ones you typically gloss over.
The whisper is a whisper, until it is not. By the time you hear it, it has progressed to a scream. And in many of those cases, by the time it is heard, it is already too late.
Joseph C. Stewart is a doctoral researcher in applied theology whose work explores religion, ethics, and society. CP.
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