The Exultant Nature of Today’s Abortion Advocacy

A Planned Parenthood mobile clinic has been offering free abortions just a few blocks from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which concludes today. The DNC is not officially involved, but that is a minor detail, given that abortion has the status of a creedal non-negotiable in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. The clinic is simply actualizing the central plank of the Democrats’ election campaign. Its proximity to the convention is entirely appropriate—as is the presence of an eighteen-foot-tall inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb,” erected by the group Americans for Contraception. It is a stark reminder, along with the performances of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention last month, of how unserious today’s American politics has become. Where, one might ask, have all the grown-ups gone?

But there is a deeper issue with the grandstanding of abortion that goes well beyond the problem of showcasing moronic entertainers at a political convention. The move from abortion being sold to the public as “safe, legal, and rare” to being celebrated as a necessary social good is revealing. In part it is a reaction to the overturning of Roe. But it is more than just a reaction; the celebration of abortion as something to be proud of started long before 2022. Something deeper must have taken place within our culture. And this brings me once again to the inadequacy of characterizing our modern world as “disenchanted.”

The glee with which abortion is advocated and the anger that any restrictions upon it provoke indicate that we need a different category to capture our current cultural ethos. In a disenchanted world, one could imagine abortion being seen as a necessary evil. The demands of the workplace, the economy, and society at large might make it so. In a world where rape and incest exist, sometimes the options for addressing such evil might themselves involve a degree of evil. I disagree with that logic, but it seems consistent with the regretful moral resignation that disenchantment might involve. 

We all know, however, that abortion advocates invoke exceptional cases of rape and incest as a rhetorical ploy to win the public over through emotion, not argument. Otherwise, they would argue that abortions should be restricted to such cases, or that, in a world without rape and incest, abortion would no longer be necessary. But that is not the case.

Which means that something deeper than disenchantment is involved here, a point confirmed by the exultant nature of today’s abortion advocacy. The abortion debate is not driven by mere disenchantment, the notion that the baby in the womb is just a clump of cells and nothing more. It is driven by the desire for desecration—to destroy what is sacred. We live in a world where we are taught to prize our individual autonomy and to throw off anything that might curtail or impinge upon it. That makes us feel like gods.

Crossing lines that are sacred has always been exhilarating. One reason why Protestantism succeeded is that it enabled the shattering of what previous generations had venerated as holy. Nobody ever found it hard to motivate crowds of young men with the promise of smashing up churches, stained-glass windows, and religious artwork. But Protestantism had a sacred book by which to regulate the Reformation, a sacred order to give substance to that modern cliché, “creative destruction.” It harnessed youthful iconoclastic impulses for the cause of what it regarded as consecration. 

Today’s progressivism recognizes no such thing. Nothing is sacred but the godlike power of the autonomous self-creator, defined by the repudiation of whatever previous generations have considered sacrosanct. And the slaying of a human being is surely the most dramatic demonstration of such. That is why abortion is now not merely regarded as a necessary evil but as something exhilarating, something to be proud of and rejoice over. It may be an individual tragedy for many of those who seek one, but ideologically it has become the poster child of a world marked by desecration, a symbol of—even a rite of passage to—exhilarating liberation.

There is a deep problem, however. Human beings, made in God’s image, find themselves by recognizing the image of God in others. This underlies biblical anthropology. Adam knows himself when he recognizes Eve as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. The Good Samaritan is truly human when he sees that the man lying injured in the road is his neighbor, even though he does not know him personally and should regard him as an enemy. Thus, when abortion advocates dehumanize the baby in the womb, they dehumanize themselves too.  

Ours is an age when so much of our culture encourages us to treat others made in God’s image as less than human. This is true, from the comparatively trivial trashing of others that is the favored idiom of those who seem to live online, to those at the DNC in Chicago this week, exulting in the slaughter of innocents. Our problem is thus much deeper than disenchantment. It is desecration. We need not re-enchantment so much as repentance. But that requires grown-ups.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. 

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by Mark Schierbecker, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.