If you find yourself teetering close to the edge of almost believing there might be some faint glimmer of truth or reason left in liberalism, just remember abortion. If ever you’re feeling generous enough to assume that liberalism, while morally bankrupt, really means well in the end, simply recall abortion. Think of abortion whenever that polite part of your brain tells the gullible part of your brain to tell the reasonable part of your brain that liberalism isn’t really so bad after all.

Abortion—a cancer in the bloodstream of American society; a depraved, nefarious, shameful practice; a travesty of historic proportions, and one that should be garnering an enormous amount of your attention and anger.

There is no more important national “issue” than this. Abortion unravels the fabric of society, subverts the sacred institution of the family, and turns parents into something like alligators eating their young. Many civilizations have made victims of some vast group or another, but ours is the first to turn the propagated into the prey of their propagators. It takes a depraved culture to simply kill its children, but it takes an especially sadistic one to hand the gun to the mother and say, “Here, you do it.”

I have no doubt that if the Devil came to Earth in physical form and wanted to find a job, he’d certainly apply to become an abortion doctor at Planned Parenthood. That is, unless Democrats moved to elect him president first.

But if I can give the disgusting practice of abortion any credit, I’ll say that at least it does the valuable service of providing us with a daily reminder of modern liberalism’s true nature. Like its author, Satan, progressive doctrine often comes coiffed, hip, pleasant, wearing trendy hats, and saying dumb, popular things like “Tolerance for all” and “Love wins” and “Heteronormativity causes the otherization of non-cisgendered communities” and so on. Yet at its core lies a deep animosity toward life itself.

If you peek under liberalism’s shiny veneer—the happy slogans, the catchy hashtags, the rainbow flags—you’ll find the corpses of fifty million dead children, decaying, ignored, forgotten by our culture of emasculated narcissists. What you see there, so gruesome and infuriating at the very rotting heart of modern liberalism, is an indictment of our entire society.

The legalization and cultural acceptance of mass infanticide is, to this day, liberalism’s crowning achievement. The killing of children is considered even holier and more sacred to its disciples than gay marriage or genital mutilation. It is now the rock and foundation of the movement, and the centerpiece of its cultural agenda. Like the primitive pagan cultures that preceded it, liberal culture looks upon the sacred rite of child sacrifice with a deep reverence. Liberals venerate it for the same reason Catholics venerate the Eucharist and Muslims the Koran—because it is the centerpiece of their worship, the core, the soul of the thing.

A progressive can perhaps deviate from the script on gun rights or economic concerns, but on abortion he must be an extremist, or he will be disowned. We should emphasize that all “pro-choice” advocacy is, inherently, extremism. It is impossible to be moderately in favor of abortion, just as it is impossible to be moderately opposed to it. Seeking a middle ground on abortion is like searching for a middle ground on child rape. It doesn’t exist, and those who wish to find it will inevitably end up in favor, and those in favor of murderous atrocities are always extremely in favor of murderous atrocities.

Whether you know it or not, your acceptance—however moderate—of a deep and depraved evil will send you barreling into a darkness that will utterly distort your moral compass. What you thought was a celebration of your own precious life will lead you to bow at the altar of the Culture of Death.

Your conscience is not a lunch tray, with all of the different components neatly separated into their own compartments. Your conscience is more like a bucket, and everything you dump into it will mingle and mix with everything else. The point is, if you pour an acceptance of child murder into your bucket, it will poison everything, and soon even the good parts will be colored and tainted by your tacit endorsement of violence against the innocent. It changes you, and how you see the world. This will happen. There is no way around it. Anyone who celebrates or endorses abortion but then pretends to recoil at any other form of murder is lying. They are lying to themselves, and to you.

AN ALL-OR-NOTHING PROPOSITION

It can be said that if liberalism were right about abortion, it would be right about everything else. If it were right about abortion, the value of human life would be relative to how desirable that life is to those around it. And if human life is relative, then the ideas at the root of our country—inalienable rights and dignities endowed by a Creator, yadda yadda, et cetera—can’t be objectively true. God Himself cannot be true.

If we can determine the worthiness of human life, then we are gods, and truth is whatever we say it is. For this reason, liberalism has long established abortion as the primary platform for its campaign against truth, God, and reason. Abortion, as we will see, sets the stage for every other cultural battle.

MORE THAN A SIDESHOW

Many on the right still don’t understand this central fact. Conservatives often pretend they can sufficiently debunk liberal ideology without addressing its holiest sacrament. They treat abortion like a sideshow, a topic of moderate importance—one that can be debated but is better avoided.

A lot of these people—those in the ever-growing Irrelevant Wuss Faction (IWF) of the conservative camp—insist that matters of human life, family, sex, and marriage are merely “social issues,” which should be considered less essential than the more serious topics of debt and spending.

Indeed, according to the IWF, one can be soft on the technical matter of the fate of human civilization but still be considered “conservative” so long as he likes guns, hates taxes, and listens to country music. There’s nothing wrong with liking guns, hating taxes, and listening to country—unless it’s Luke Bryan we’re talking about—but we are not defined by our degree of affection for these things. And it’s certainly impossible to launch any coherent defense of economic or Second Amendment freedoms if you haven’t first explained why we have the right to exist in the first place.

All liberties spring from our inherent worthiness as human beings. If you’re willing to concede that such worthiness is conditional, or not worth arguing about, then you’re willing to concede that all of our liberties are similarly frivolous and debatable.

This is what makes abortion a defining issue. It gets right down to the fundamentals of who you are and what you believe. It plants you either firmly on the side of objective truth and human dignity or firmly against it. Everything—whatever else you believe—will grow from this root. This is the epicenter of America’s vast ideological divide and the Father of the Left’s Unholy Trinity.

A MODERN SLAVERY

Every era seems to have its own collection of creeps insisting that an unfortunate segment of the human race isn’t quite as human as the others. In this era we call them “pro-choicers”; in previous eras they were Nazis or slave owners.

The comparison of slave owners to abortion advocates is particularly apt, since both peculiar American institutions defy the universal moral principle that all human beings should be treated like human beings. Really, all of human history can be divided down this line. Those who say “Humans should be treated as humans because they are human” on one side, and those who say “Chill, bro, not so fast” on the other. Whether the member of the latter group is a feminist, a concentration camp guard, a slave trader, or Genghis Khan is only a matter of semantics. The evil is the same. The bloodshed is inevitable.

Moreover, both slave owners and abortion enthusiasts share the distinction of having had their views officially sanctioned by the Supreme Court. In Dred Scott, the Robed Ones decided that slaves weren’t people, that because they weren’t people they were property, and that because they were non-people property, they would be granted no constitutional protections. In Roe, a different set of Robed Ones came to the same conclusion, but this time applied it to babies. They were wrong each time, and it should be noted that blacks made out poorly in both cases. There have been over sixteen million black children killed by abortion since Roe. If not for abortion, the black population would be significantly larger than it is today. If liberals really want to form a diverse nation where minorities are no longer in the minority, they should probably stop encouraging those minorities to extinguish themselves.

Abortion has accomplished what the most passionate racists of yesteryear could have only dreamed. And if you investigate the arguments those racists made to justify their own favorite institution, you’ll find they sound an awful lot like the arguments made by abortion enthusiasts of today. Just go right down the list:

Appeal to privacy: “Who are you to tell someone what to do with their own property/body?”

Appeal to the superseding right: “My property/body rights come before the rights of a slave/fetus.”

Appeal to inevitability: “Slavery/abortion has been around for thousands of years; it’s never going to go away. We might as well have a safe and legal system in place for it.”

Appeal to pseudoscience: “Slaves/fetuses aren’t really people. They aren’t like us. Look at them—they’re physically different. Therefore, we are human and they are not.”

Appeal to socioeconomic concerns: “If slavery/abortion ends, most of these slaves/babies will end up on the street without a job.”

Appeal to the courts: “Slavery/abortion was vindicated by the Supreme Court. It’s already been decided; there’s no point in arguing it.”

Appeal to faux compassion: “Slavery/abortion is in the best interest of Africans/babies. The world can be a cruel place. It’s best to protect them from it by keeping them enslaved/killing them.”

Appeal to the Bible: “Slavery/abortion isn’t specifically condemned in the Bible. If it’s wrong, Jesus would have specifically said so.”

Slavery is, it turns out, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of abortion.

But the family resemblance is only partial. Slavery, whether in America or anywhere else in the world, subjugated only a select sample of the human species. It animalized and oppressed members of a certain race or ethnicity or nationality or social class. It didn’t dehumanize humanity itself but particular sections of it. This, of course, doesn’t lessen the sheer brutality and horror of slavery; it just perhaps sheds some light on the paradoxical fact that slaveholding societies still contributed enormously to the general enlightenment of mankind. They often demonstrated a profound understanding of human dignity and Natural Law, our Founding Fathers being a prime example.

Modern Americans, liberals particularly, often remark on the fact that our founders fought so valiantly for human rights yet apparently lacked the wisdom to see how these concepts should apply to Africans. Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the most insightful and inspiring political documents of all time, the Declaration of Independence, but evidently couldn’t see how the notion of “independence” ought to apply to his own slaves.

To his credit, Jefferson forcefully opposed slavery in the abstract, although he practiced it personally, even making one slave his concubine. This was an extraordinary sin, obviously, yet not a sin that prevented him from seeing the deeper truths outside of slavery. He was not alone here. Indeed, scores of the greatest, wisest, most virtuous thinkers and philosophers of all time—Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas among them—either viewed slavery as in keeping with the natural order or thought it at least inevitable.

How could men so good and so intelligent have been so wrong about slavery? Well, not to oversimplify the issue, but nobody is perfect. More crucially, however, it appears these ancient people didn’t need to dismantle their entire moral framework to justify, rationalize, or ignore the atrocity of slavery.

CATACLYSMIC REPERCUSSIONS

Abortion, on the other hand, is a more jealous evil. It will not allow its proponents to otherwise maintain their moral reasoning. While slavery existed as an accepted practice around the globe for thousands of years, abortion has been a legal institution in the United States for less than fifty. Legalized abortion has been around the longest in places like Sweden and Denmark, and even there it’s barely eighty years old. Yet in this short time, especially in Western culture, there has been a complete moral collapse. The Judeo-Christian values that formed and shaped our civilization have been almost entirely erased—a process that directly correlates with the legalization of abortion. For millennia, societies have been able to maintain a sense of goodness and virtue despite their acceptance of various evils, but that is no longer the case. In the West, we have renounced virtue entirely, not just in practice but in theory.

Over the decades, we have shown ourselves quite adept at innovating new technologies and consumer goods, but in the realm of morality and spirituality, there has been a constant, precipitous decline. Our culture produces genius inventors and salesmen, but idiot philosophers and moral teachers. There is a gaping abyss where our soul should be, and I believe abortion lies at the center of it all, as both a cause and an effect.

I think part of the reason why our moral senses cannot survive if we accept abortion, even though they did survive humanity’s acceptance of slavery and other sins, is that abortion doesn’t debase certain people, but all people. It says that we—everyone—are parasitic and expendable throughout our earliest, most innocent, and vulnerable stages. In a sense, it deprives humanity of its humanity.

AN UNEQUAL IMPACT

I don’t mean to suggest that abortion victimizes all people equally. Yes, our acceptance of the practice robs the dignity from all of mankind, yet it has had a disproportionate impact on some communities. Because of abortion, being conceived black in this country is a dangerous proposition. As I mentioned, sixteen million unborn black children have been slaughtered in the past four decades. African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the population, but they account for almost 40 percent of all abortions. Abortion doctors—whether by surgery or prescription—kill more black people in a week than the Ku Klux Klan has in the past century. Hundreds of black lives are ended by abortion every single day in the United States. Try to reflect on this statistic: abortion kills more black people than heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and respiratory illness—combined. Throw cops in there, too, and it’s still not close.

Black people aren’t just suffering individualized dehumanization and extermination at the hands of the infanticide industry; they are being fundamentally weakened as a race, as a people, and as a culture by the mass slaughter of the younger generations.

At the bottom of every social ill that afflicts any group, you will find the deterioration of the family unit. From poor and black to rich and white to every combination in between in America, we are all at some stage of collective self-destruction because we have all allowed our foundation—the nuclear family—to decay. But for black Americans the situation is far worse, the disease more advanced, and the prognosis much bleaker.

Maybe you’ve heard the numbers. Some 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock. A full 50 percent or more grow up in fatherless homes, and for black children in the inner city, that number is close to 90 percent. I’m no anthropologist, but I think it’s safe to say that no group in human history has seen its family structure plummet into such deep disarray. This is one of humanity’s greatest tragedies, and it is greeted mostly with silence.

The acceptance and practice of abortion both fuels and is fueled by the destruction of the family unit. The two feed each other, like a two-headed beast that eats itself from both ends. Because of abortion, there are fewer black men and women available to make a difference. Fewer around to raise families. Fewer in existence to right the wrongs and steer the ship. Because of abortion, there is more death and discord, more grief, more loss. Because of abortion, the idea that black lives don’t matter settles into the minds of many, especially the black mothers who are so much more likely to decide to have their own children exterminated.

Therefore, if we celebrate abortion, we celebrate the self-destruction of African-Americans, and the dehumanization of all people. We might limply suggest that upon our physical passage through the birth canal, we magically inherit the value and dignity of human life. But this is the rationale of people not yet able to directly confront the hideousness of their own beliefs. If you believe that you began life as an empty, arbitrary blob of matter, you must believe, even if you will not face it, that you are still nothing more than an arbitrary blob—if perhaps more formed and functional. Our dignity and worth are either innate or they are not. And if they are not, then in the end, we are left with nothing but nihilism and materialism.

Abortion degrades and hollows out everyone. It robs children of their lives, mothers of their children, and society of its purpose for existing in the first place. And from the people who accept it, abortion demands the abandonment of belief in the dignity of man. It requires its defenders to become, as C. S. Lewis said, men without chests.

With this in mind, it might seem odd that liberals would go to such lengths to preserve “abortion rights” when that preservation comes at such an intellectual and spiritual cost. But this is precisely the point. Abortion is central to liberalism exactly because it is so devastating to Natural Law. It is crucial to their agenda; you might say that in some ways it is their agenda.

For progressives, abortion establishes and reinforces, at the beginning, their three primary tenets.

MAKING ALL THINGS RELATIVE

First, relativism. Progressivism is an ideology not of progress but of relativism. Indeed, it certainly can’t be both; relativism makes progress impossible. Progress requires fixed points and measurable distances. To go from one place to another, you need to have a start, an end, and solid ground along the way. With relativism, though, the whole world moves as you do. The realities and definitions of things change with your opinions, and your opinions with your desires, and your desires with your mood. A country steeped in relativism cannot possibly make progress north or south, east or west, because all of our compasses are aligned not with Earth’s magnetic field but with our individual emotional states.

We become like a group of maniacs trying to give an injured man directions to the hospital. Some of us tell him to turn left and drive for two miles, others say to go right for eight, others say to go straight, others say he should sprout wings and fly to the moon, others deny that there is a hospital, others have no idea but randomly take sides in the debate anyway. Finally, the guy collapses and dies and we go back to running in circles, shouting at each other, each of us sure of our correctness because in our worlds there can be no such thing as “incorrect.”

It is moral and intellectual anarchy. We argue over the truth while simultaneously denying that it exists. Relativism rips out humanity’s heart, soul, and brain, and leaves the shell floating there in the void, entirely susceptible to the ideological trends of the day.

Western civilization, up until recently, had been grounded in the confidence of absolute truth, which was born of belief in an absolute God. Liberalism’s great project, then, is to abolish the absolutes and create a world of grays. There is no tool more effective in this effort than abortion.

It relativizes the deepest and previously most concrete moral concepts by suggesting that murder itself can be justified if committed by a mother against her child.

It’s probably worthwhile to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that abortion advocates have largely stopped arguing that the child is not human. This is still an argument in the arsenal, but it’s no longer primary. In fact, often they will admit that the child is human, or at least that it could be, yet propose that killing it can be permissible if that’s what the child’s mother desires. They would obviously never use the word murder, but if they aren’t bothering to argue that the “fetus” isn’t human, then they are, in effect, admitting that the act is murder.

Last year, an online campaign called “Shout Your Abortion” took social media by storm. Women were encouraged to log on to their Twitter and Facebook accounts and, in effect, brag about their abortions. Hundreds of feminists happily took part in this celebration of infanticide, unapologetically “shouting” about their wonderful abortion experiences. Many offered their reasons for having one, but few cited the biological, ethical, or legal standing of the “fetus” as a reason. Most simply asserted that they had an abortion because it was the right thing for them at the time.

For abortion proponents to offer any other justification would be to leave the door open for, if not legal, then moral parameters on the practice. If abortion is permissible because the baby is not a person, then it stands to reason that if we can scientifically prove that the baby is a person, abortion would no longer be acceptable. Abortion advocates cannot allow for even the possibility of restrictions or moral implications. So they have largely settled on a more encompassing rationalization: abortion is good because that’s what the woman wants. Period.

A little while ago, a pro-life student at the University of North Georgia wrote to tell me about a pro-choice demonstration that had been staged on her campus a few days before. She said the pro-abortion group had printed out flyers with the phrase “I support abortion rights because…,” and liberals were invited to come and fill out their own personal reasons. The student sent me a picture of what one young pro-choice woman had written: “I support abortion rights because my vagina is too pretty to let a fetus crawl out of it.”

In other words, I support abortion because I want to have abortions. My reasons for wanting one are not relevant. If I must give you a reason, I’ll choose the vilest and most flippant one imaginable, just to make the message exceedingly clear. This is about what I want. And abortion is right because I want it.

In March of 2016, an article was published on Fusion.net with the headline “I Had an Abortion and It Was a Totally Joyful Experience.” The column was accompanied by a giant image of a smiley face and champagne emojis. The author, Kristen Brown, detailed her own abortion tale, but noticeably did not offer a thesis on the personhood of the child. She skipped right over that part and spent most of the article explaining how her abortion made her life so much better.

“The ability to choose for myself when and if I want children was empowering—it affirmed for me that I am in control of how I choose to live my life,” she wrote. Whether the “fetus” was living or not living, human or not human, is irrelevant. It was her choice. It was her life. And that’s all that needs to be said.

This is an incredibly significant development on the pro-abortion side. After all, many civilizations have, as we’ve discussed, legalized the oppression, abuse, and destruction of certain sorts of human beings, but generally the murderers have at least had the decency to offer the rationale that the beings aren’t human. They recognized Natural Law and felt the need to work around it. That certainly doesn’t excuse anything, but it shows that few societies until modern times have explicitly legalized murder. Some did legalize the killing or subjugation of humans on the basis that the humans weren’t humans. Some did legalize murder and call it something else. It was still murder, but they were compelled to rationalize it. The rationalizations were faulty, of course, but it is significant that they were made, that these societies were working around Natural Law rather than just rejecting it outright.

Rarely has a civilization looked upon the death and bloodshed it has wrought, shrugged its shoulders, and said, “Well, this is what we wanted, so it’s OK.” Rarely have the murderers said, “Yes, these are people, we have killed them, and so what?”

But with abortion it seems we have reached that virtually unprecedented point in history. In fact, undercover footage captured by the Center for Medical Progress in 2014 revealed abortionists and abortion industry insiders saying exactly that. In one video documenting a panel discussion among abortionists at an abortion industry conference in San Francisco, a woman tells the crowd, “Let’s just give [pro-life activists] all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing. Let’s just give them all that. And then the more compelling question is, ‘So, why is this the most important thing I could do with my life?’ ”

This isn’t a Natural Law work-around. This is a total rejection of morality as we know it. This is relativism at its darkest and most extreme.

Of course, the pro-aborts will still try to find hairs to split, insisting that the unborn human, though it might be made of human tissue, isn’t a person. Here, once more, the matter is relative. Abortion advocates will often say that a baby is a person if the mother thinks it is or wants it to be, but not if she doesn’t. Melissa Harris-Perry, a former host on MSNBC, told her audience in 2013 that the woman’s “feelings” are the real marker for when life begins. “When does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents. A powerful feeling—but not science. The problem is that many of our policymakers want to base sweeping laws on those feelings.”

By this line of reasoning, personhood itself is relative and contingent upon “feelings.” She, and many liberals just like her, proudly deny that science has any bearing on the abortion question at all. Personhood is relative, they insist. We’ll deal more with that line of reasoning in the next chapter.

MAKING SEX SELFISH

Second, abortion establishes and reinforces the liberal narrative about sex. There have been, throughout history, two competing claims about human sexuality. One says that sex is, first and foremost, a recreational activity to be enjoyed between two adults (or five adults, or an adult and a farm animal, or whatever other combination). In this view, the sexual act is self-focused. I am concerned with what I can take from my partner, what she can give me.

Sex becomes analogous to something like playing a video game. I may be playing with someone because playing by myself gets boring after a while, but I’m certainly playing for my own sake. If the other person derives enjoyment out of it, good for them, but that’s not my primary concern. And, obviously, I am not pursuing anything nobler or holier than mere enjoyment.

That gives rise to the second claim. Christians, and adherents to other theistic faiths, propose that sex is quite a bit more consequential and profound than video games. We are engaging with another human being on the most intimate level possible, and our emotions, our desires, our spirits are tangled up in the act. And from that act—this is what sets it apart from all other activities—a whole new human life can be formed. Video games are getting more advanced these days, but as far as I’m aware they still haven’t developed one with that feature.

Sex is an enjoyable activity, but enjoyment is not the final end of the act. It is not the purpose. The purpose is to give yourself to another, to express your love and devotion to your spouse, to deepen and strengthen the marital bond. And if we are of the right age and right health, and if we give ourselves totally, without reserving anything or putting any artificial barriers between us, there is always the possibility that the unitive sexual act becomes, at the same time, a procreative act. Both the unitive and procreative aspects of sex are essential. They are dimensions of the whole, and if we destroy one, we deny the other.

This notion of love and sex was beautifully illustrated in the Song of Songs:

My lover speaks; he says to me, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come! O my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret recesses of the cliff, let me see you, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and you are lovely.” My lover belongs to me and I to him. He says to me: “Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for stern as death is love, relentless as the nether-world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away.”

For comparison’s sake, the modern, progressive idea of love and sex was succinctly captured by Beyoncé in her 2013 hit “Drunk in Love”:

Park it in my lot, 7-Eleven,

I’m rubbing on it, rub-rubbing, if you scared, call that reverend.

Aside from being nonsensical, this, and virtually any other pop song recorded since about 1958, sums up the progressive sexual philosophy. Let me have fun. Let me get mine. Or, as the modern Shakespeare puts it, “Park it in my lot, 7-Eleven.”

Abortion is needed to maintain this idea of sex. If sex is supposed to be a frivolous, self-centered pursuit of enjoyable physical sensations, then babies must be seen as “accidents.” Unintentional and unwelcomed by-products of an encounter that had nothing to do with them.

But this is like planting a seed in the ground and calling it a mistake when a tree begins to sprout, claiming that you thought the soil was infertile. You may have believed this, but still the seed is doing exactly what seeds are supposed to do, and you did exactly what a person is supposed to do if they want to make a tree grow. You may be a fool, but this was no accident.

Next, you cut down the sapling and toss it in the fire, and then you continue to plant seeds. Each time, you cry that all of these damned trees keep shooting out of the ground. When someone comes and tells you to stop planting until you’re ready to deal with a forest, you weep and accuse the person of being cruel and judgmental simply because she’s articulating the basic rules of botany.

Of course, this metaphor fails for one reason: everyone agrees that you shouldn’t kill baby trees for no reason. No such consensus exists when it comes to baby people.

When a culture accepts the notion that babies are accidental by-products of intercourse—usurpers intruding on a couple’s sexual recreation—we end up with an idea of sex that is not only selfish, but fearful.

This is where our current obsession with “safe sex” originates. We grind it into our kids’ heads from a young age, especially in public school health classes, and it fosters in them a pessimistic, reductionist view of human sexuality. Today, kids never hear anything positive about sex because the positive aspects have been recast as negatives.

Positive: sex creates human beings. This is a great good, but it isn’t a good that humans should pursue until they are married and prepared to care for the life they’ve formed.

Positive: sex is an expression of love. This is the primary thing that separates human sex from sex between beasts. It is a profound good.

These are the two most beautiful things about sex, but we have decided to teach our children that they can and should begin “exploring their sexuality” one or two decades before they’ll be able to truly embrace every magnificent dimension of it. So for the next ten or fifteen years, they will learn to see the two greatest things about sex as among the worst. Unsurprisingly, this attitude will often stay with them, permanently.

Not to wander too far off the subject, but this is why the abstinence-before-marriage plan is better. It paints an affirmative and uplifting picture. It says, “This is something so good and so important and so joyful that you should leave it be until you grow up and find one special person to share it with.”

The “safe sex” model, however, tells a paranoid story. It says, “This is something so frivolous and so joyless that you can do it with whomever, for whatever reason, even if just to alleviate boredom. By the way, though it is just a recreational activity, like Parcheesi or air hockey, it can also lead to broken hearts, chlamydia, pregnancy, and AIDS. So, in that sense, it’s a little different from a board game. Hey, let’s look at some super-magnified images of genital warts!”

And, somehow, that version gets to pretend it’s the “positive” and “encouraging” one. The only comfort it offers is that sex can be fun, but, in lieu of introducing morality, responsibility, and delayed gratification into the conversation, it has to guide the child’s behavior by warning them of the dangers of pubic lice and teenage pregnancy.

Abortion rights are necessary for progressives because they solidify this version of sex in the public conscience.

MAKING HUMANS GOD

Third, abortion elevates human beings above God. This is the ultimate goal of what we call progressivism. As we’ve seen, progressivism is just the modern term for the movement that started back before the beginning of time, when Satan turned away from God and said, “I will not serve.” That’s what all of this is. That’s what this book is about. That’s what our “culture war” is being fought over: Will we serve ourselves or God?

There probably isn’t anything that answers that question more definitively than abortion. When God hands us a life and we say no and throw it aside, we are saying no to God Himself. We are saying that the power to grant life or death ought to reside with us. We are saying that we will not serve God’s will, even if it means murdering our own young.

MANHOOD AND WOMANHOOD DESTROYED

And, in the process of rejecting God’s will, we reject ourselves. This is one of the great tragedies of abortion: it destroys not only lives but motherhood itself, womanhood itself. Manhood itself. Or it may be more accurate to say that liberalism has set out to conquer and destroy these things, and abortion is just a vehicle—the most effective vehicle—to that end.

However you put it, it’s clear that you cannot support abortion without sacrificing your femininity and masculinity. Feminine women—real women—are compassionate, merciful, and nurturing. That is the beautiful gift they give to their families, and to society. Men, for our part, give justice, protection, and moral leadership. Now, that isn’t to say men can’t be merciful and compassionate and women just and protective, but men by their nature are especially inclined and equipped to provide justice, protection, and moral leadership, and women compassion, mercy, and nurturance.

Families can only properly function when there is a man and a woman working together, providing that careful balance of justice and mercy, compassion and protection, leadership and nurturance. But men and women in our country have begun to lose these traits, and I believe our culture’s acceptance and advocacy of abortion is a catalyst for this regression.

It is, after all, impossible for a woman to be a fountain of feminine grace and mercy while condoning the murder of children. A man, likewise, must be vacated of his instinct and passion for justice, his urge to protect the innocent, and his desire to provide moral leadership if he is going to be an effective apologist for infanticide. Both are emptied of what makes them distinct and important, creating the sort of hollow, androgynous society we currently see developing around us.

As a side note, any man who has gone shopping for pants recently is deeply aware of our collective slide into androgyny. I couldn’t help but shake my head at the state of modern masculinity recently as I stumbled flabbergasted through the department stores in my local mall, unable to tell if I was in the men’s section or the women’s section or the toddlers’ section or the section where weirdos buy clothes for their cats and poodles. At one point, I stood in horror and stared at a rack full of men’s camo denim spandex pants. It looked like something a twelve-year-old girl would wear to go paintballing, but this is what men wear nowadays, apparently.

This may not be the most serious symptom of the underlying problem, but there has been, in our shopping malls and far beyond, a breakdown in society’s understanding of what men and women are supposed to be doing, what role they ought to be playing, and what they ought to be providing in their families and their communities. Abortion isn’t the sole cause of this—you might say it’s as much an effect as a cause—but it’s all tied together, either way.

This is to say nothing of what the act of abortion does to the women who participate. As angry as I am about the practice, I always make sure to remember that post-abortive women are victims, too. Clinics often target the young, the poor, and the scared, feeding on their fear and desperation, whispering to them like the snake in the Garden of Eden, promising that if they only refuse the gift they’ve been given, everything will be OK. These clinics spread the most insidious and most popular deception in modern culture: that women can be “empowered” precisely by rejecting their greatest power. That by ripping the fruit from their womb, violently denying the beautiful truth of motherhood, they can be made whole again.

This is not true. The death of a child can never ultimately benefit his mother. And she is his mother, whether he’s dead or alive. The abortion factories tell women they can somehow undo the past and return to their days of not being a mother, but no such option is actually available. Once the child is conceived, motherhood has occurred.

If she aborts the baby, she will simply become the mother of a dead child. This is a tragedy in and of itself, and one that ought to fill us with incredible compassion and pity for the women who are taken in by the lie only to be left abandoned, alone, confused, and guilt-ridden, mourning a life they were told never existed.

This is abortion. It breeds regret, emptiness, and shame. It deprives women of the love and joy of motherhood. It deprives children of their lives. It deprives the world of the hope and promise every new life brings to this Earth. It leaves a giant hole, a chasm, a silence where these millions of human beings were supposed to be.

It is a tragedy on a cosmic scale.

Abortion is meant to make us gods. But, in the end, like the Father of Lies, it reduces us to nothingness.