A pro-choice demonstrator stands outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 1, 2021. | Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
While most Americans say they’re opposed to overturning the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, most Americans support limits on abortion after 15 weeks gestation, a new poll has found.
The Harris poll, conducted in conjunction with Harvard University’s Center for American Political Studies, found that 54% of Americans opposed overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, while 46% support a reversal of the controversial ruling. The poll surveyed 1,989 registered voters between Nov. 30 and Dec. 2, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a case surrounding Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
However, the poll also showed a majority of Americans support limiting abortions to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, The Hill reported. When respondents were given additional context, namely that Roe v. Wade allowed women to have abortions within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, 38% expressed support for letting the decision stand while 32% supported repealing the decision entirely, thereby letting each state decide whether to ban abortion altogether. Another 24% of respondents said they wanted abortion limited after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Combining the 32% of Americans who want to reverse Roe v. Wade and its allowance of abortions until 24 weeks into a pregnancy with the 24% of Americans who want Roe v. Wade amended to only permit abortions within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy reveals that 56% of Americans want to limit abortions to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy or sooner. On the other hand, an additional 8% of Americans want to allow abortions up to 36 weeks into a pregnancy.
The Harvard-Harris poll yielded similar findings to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, conducted in June, shortly after the Supreme Court announced that it would take up the Dobbs case. In the June poll, 57% of Americans said that they wanted abortion to remain legal in all or most cases but support for the legality of abortion was lower in later stages of pregnancy.
Sixty-one percent of Americans believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases in the first trimester of pregnancy. That number dropped to 34% when asked about the second trimester and 19% for the third trimester.
In Dobbs, a ruling in favor of the state of Mississippi, which is asking the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision striking down the state’s 15-week abortion ban, would significantly weaken the precedent set by Roe v. Wade and upheld in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Depending on how the decision goes down, it might uphold the Mississippi law while not scrapping the central finding of the longstanding decision, that women have the right to obtain an abortion up to a certain point, entirely.
Based on questions asked by the justices during oral arguments last week, pro-life advocates seemed optimistic that they will rule in their favor. Following the oral arguments, pro-lifers praised Chief Justice John Roberts, a swing vote on the court, for bringing up how permissive U.S. abortion laws were compared to other countries. They also appreciated Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s listing of examples where the Supreme Court overturned precedent, seen as a rebuttal to the pro-abortion argument that the precedent of Roe v. Wade is sacrosanct.
The Supreme Court consists of six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three appointed by Democrats. Some expect that a majority of the Republican-appointed justices will side with Mississippi while all of the Democrat-appointed justices will likely find the state’s 15-week abortion ban unconstitutional.
If the justices decide in Mississippi’s favor, states will have more freedom to limit abortion to the first trimester, but abortion will not automatically become illegal in all 50 states. States that have permissive abortion laws on the books will continue to do so unless and until lawmakers in those states pass laws with stricter limits on abortion.
The Harvard-Harris poll also comes as less than one month remains in 2021, which pro-abortion activists have characterized as “the most devastating antiabortion state legislative session in decades.” Analysis from the Guttmacher Institute concluded that 61 pro-life bills were passed in the first four months of 2021. Updated statistics provided by the Guttmacher Institute in the middle of 2021 found that 90 “abortion restrictions” had been passed at the state level in the first half of the year.
Perhaps the most notable pro-life law passed at the state level in 2021 is Texas’ six-week abortion ban. The Supreme Court has allowed the law to go into effect while litigation continues. A decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is expected by June 2022 at the latest.
What does it mean to be pro-life? Is that different (is it better, is it worse?) than being pro-birth? Is being “just” pro-birth a bad thing? What about being “anti-abortion?”
In light of the Dobbs case being argued before the Supreme Court, the conversation about what being pro-life really means has kicked up again in Christian spaces.
The Dobbs case is the greatest challenge to the core holdings of Roe v. Wade in history thus far. At stake is the question of whether or not states have the constitutional right to impose pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions. This is the culmination of 50 years of blood, sweat and tears by the pro-life movement. There is a real — though not guaranteed — hope that the new conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the Mississippi law at the heart of the Dobbs case and possibly even overturn Roe and its follow-on ruling, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.
I’ve often said, hoped and prayed that I would be a part of the “pro-life generation” — the generation to end the ghastly horror of Roe and Casey, which, as Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart argued on behalf of Dobbs, “haunt our nation.” By God’s grace, and by President Trump’s election and Supreme Court picks, we appear to be on the cusp of just such a momentous occasion.
But back to the question at hand (after all, it’s been very patient as I worked through my preamble): What does it mean to be pro-life?
The question is raised because there is a certain group of Christian commentators out there who will attempt to denigrate the political activism of pro-lifers by throwing this phrase in their face: “You’re not really pro-life, you’re just pro-birth — you don’t even care what happens to the baby after it is born.”
You can see this argument here by Jemar Tisby, here by Scott Coley and here by Thabiti Anyabwile, who argues that “being anti-abortion is not the same as being pro-life.”
What do these accusations really mean? How should Christians respond? Two points to consider.
1. The pro-life movement is about stopping the legalized killing of babies in the womb; it’s not an economic agenda.
First, these Christian commentators are essentially arguing that unless you support an ever-expanding government-administered social safety net, funded by taxpayer dollars, you aren’t really “pro-life.” This is misguided for a variety of reasons. The white-hot pressing moral question at hand in our nation is not, “Will there be government-funded pre-K?,” but rather, “Are unborn children full persons deserving of life and equal protection under the law that they currently do not have in the United States?”
The debate isn’t over post-maternal care, it’s about whether or not an adult woman (or even a minor girl) is legally free to kill her child on-demand and at any moment, in some states even up until the moment of birth.
In other words, to conflate the question of stopping the unmitigated slaughter of the unborn with economic conditions or a social safety net is to miss the point. It’s essentially the same thing as arguing that we shouldn’t have rescued the captive prisoners in Nazi German concentration camps, living under the threat of imminent death in the gas chambers, unless we also supported the Marshall Plan to rebuild the European economy. Such an argument is preposterous, but let’s draw out the analogy.
Today, in America, unborn children are essentially living in the concentration camp of their mother’s womb. How so? Because at any moment the mother can take them to a Planned Parenthood or another abortion clinic — the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi gas chambers — and put them to death.
Pro-life advocates want to put an end to that. We want to remove the threat of death that hangs over the unborn. We want to liberate the modern-day Auschwitz of the womb, ensuring that children who are conceived are given the guarantee of life — enduring life in the womb and subsequent birth.
Imagine, if you will, running up to the Soviet army right before they liberated Auschwitz in 1945 and shouting, “Wait! What’s your plan to provide government-funded social safety net services for these captives? Are you really pro-life or just anti-gas chambers?”
Do you see how absurd that sounds? But that’s exactly how these Christians sound when they pillory those whom they pejoratively label as just being pro-birth.
Jon Harris in his excellent book, Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflictexplains the historic background of this misguided argument. He traces it back to social justice advocates like Ron Sider. He explains:
“Another tactic of social justice evangelicals is to attach ‘quality-of-life’ issues to the ‘pro-life’ movement. Because evangelicals have a strong tradition of opposing abortion it is very difficult to convince them using the standard secular pro-abortion arguments. Instead, political progressives try to hijack the movement by adding social justice concerns and treating them as if they are just as important as breaking God’s direct command not to murder. Things like systemic racism, environmental issues, and even personal decisions like smoking are considered pro-life issues. Sider, in his 1987 book ‘Completely Pro-Life,’ was one of the first to make this argument to evangelicals. Sider defined being ‘completely pro-life’ as ‘defend[ing] human life wherever it is threatened.’ That is how he could go after pro-life Sen. Jesse Helms for inconsistency since he opposed abortion but also supported government subsidies for tobacco.”
But Harris counters Sider’s rationalization, arguing that:
“The mistake in this thinking is comparing something like smoking, a quality-of-life choice made by adults who probably also eat cheeseburgers and fail to exercise at times, with actual murder. The unlawful taking of another person’s life is very different than choosing to drink soda. One is a sin in and of itself and subject to a civil penalty in God’s law. The other could potentially be negligent, but it is an issue of personal jurisdiction and does not usually accompany an intent to immediately end one’s life.”
In other words, don’t let anyone try to tell you that you aren’t really advocating for the unborn unless you support cradle-to-grave government spending to take care of every child ever born. Quite frankly, that’s an anti-family policy on its own merits. And supporting such an expansive, socialistic vision for government is in no way a prerequisite for being pro-life.
2. Being pro-life does mean more than being pro-birth, but not how they mean it.
To recapitulate, I’m essentially arguing that being pro-life is the same as being pro-birth and it is the same as being anti-abortion. A pond, a lake and an ocean are all made of water. They might be found in different shapes and sizes, but the content is the same, salt levels notwithstanding.
But in another sense, being pro-life does mean more than being pro-birth, but not how the hecklers mean it. How so? Well, the horrifically sad reality is that quite a few abortions involve a birth — it just involves the birth of a dead baby.
Thus, when we say we are pro-life, we are acknowledging that the baby inside the womb is alive before it is born. We aren’t just advocating for “birth” — we are demanding that the laws of the United States protect the living child in the womb up until birth.
And this is a crucial distinction because once a baby is born, it is afforded all the rights and protections of U.S. law applicable to its right to life. But as it stands, those constitutional rights and protections are not afforded to the unborn. Their humanity, their dignity and their Imago Dei are wrongly denied by the unjust laws of our land simply because they haven’t completed gestation. They are out of sight, out of mind and outside the law. This must change.
So, when most Christians — those who “understand the assignment” of overturning Roe v. Wade as the sin qua non of the pro-life movement — use the phrase “pro-life,” they do mean pro-birth, but they also mean a living birth and legal protections afforded to the baby before birth.
You can’t go to school unless you are born — and born alive. You don’t need a school lunch unless you are born — and born alive. You don’t need to be adopted unless you are born — and born alive.
And you certainly don’t need social services if you are dead, dismembered and discarded in a trash bag.
So, let’s stop polluting this conversation with unhelpful distractions like “you’re just pro-birth” or “you’re just anti-abortion.” To that I respond: Yes.
As Pastor Andrew Murch recently explained in his blog post entitled “Pro-Life vs. Pro-Birth“:
“If you are not Pro-Birth, you are Pro-Insert-A-Tool-Into-A-Mother’s-Womb-To-Crush-The-Head-Of-Her-Baby-So-That-The-Baby’s-Life-Less-Body-Can-Be-Vacuumed-Out-Of-Her-Uterus. … Don’t give me your mindless platitudes about Pro-Life vs. Pro-Birth.”
So, Christian, take heart and take courage. Be proudly pro-life, pro-birth and anti-abortion. And don’t let anyone else try to shame or blame you for unapologetically advocating for the end of Roe, and the illegalization of abortion, as exponentially more important than whether or not we have taxpayer-funded social services from womb to tomb. We need to make sure the womb isn’t a tomb before we even have that conversation.
The goal of the pro-life movement is to change the law, first and foremost. Anything after that is icing on the cake. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
So, right now, we need the law changed so that it stops mothers from killing their unborn children. Until that happens, there isn’t much else to talk about. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty important.
William Wolfe served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College, and is finishing his Masters of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Follow William on Twitter at @William_E_Wolfe
November 3, 2020, the entire world anticipates the outcome of the United States election; an election that will impact the entire world, not just the United States. Of paramount importance is the election of United States President, a choice between incumbent Donald J. Trump, and Joe Biden. As of this writing, four days after the election, a winner has yet to be announced. It looks likely that Joe Biden will win, which will have serious consequences for Christians. It’s time we wake up people!
Four years of Donald J. Trumps presidency has brought us lower taxes, a booming economy, building a wall, our continued right to own guns and worship our God, not to mention moving our embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel. The Bible tells us God blesses those who bless Israel, and curses those who curse Israel.
If Donald J. Trump wins a second term, there’s a chance Roe vs. Wade would be overturned, ending the slaughter of millions of babies each and every year. This is unthinkable to the left who defends a “women’s right to choose”, up to and including right up to the time of birth. There has been talk about the right to kill an “inconvenient” child up to the age of two.
It’s time I quit mincing words, any true Christian will vomit at the thought of killing babies. I don’t care how much you hate Donald Trump, the slaughter of even one baby far outweighs any hatred you have for the man. There is simply NO excuse for voting for Joe Biden, who promises to make law a women’s right to choose if the Supreme Court overturns Roe Vs. Wade.
If Joe Biden wins it will only be the result of blatant widespread election fraud. I really feel sorry for you if you don’t see what’s really going on, because Joe Biden’s agenda is another step in Satan’s plan to “be like the most high God” that has been in the works since the Garden of Eden. We know who wins in the end, Jesus Christ.
