The End of Roe: Celebration Without Qualification

Imagine a brother in Christ saying in 1865, just as the Civil War was ending and chattel slavery was taking its dying breaths, “You had better have a plan for all these slaves before you celebrate the end of slavery.” How much moral credibility would you give that statement? Right. 

When a Christian in 2022 chastises the celebrations of his fellow Christians over the end of federally protected infanticide, saying Christians had better be prepared to take on all these extra children before delighting in the end of Roe, he’s displaying an incredible fault in his moral thinking. To be sure, Christians do a very Christian thing when they adopt, and I would love to see every baby who isn’t poisoned, crushed, or suctioned out of a womb in the coming years adopted by Christian parents, but think for a second about what such a person is saying. “You shouldn’t be happy about the bloody, violent killing of these humans being more illegal than it was. That should not make you glad.” Would we say people shouldn’t have rejoiced at the end of Hitler’s Holocaust unless they were prepared to deal with the Jews who hadn’t been murdered? 

The reason this defective moral calculus carries the veneer of credibility is that the cool kids of the American landscape are for abortion being legal. So when a Christian chides his fellow Christians on their celebrating the end of Roe, he is (wittingly or unwittingly) soliciting the favor of the movers and shakers in American life. For many in big cities or in academic (even Christian academic) or elite circles, there is little cost to bemoaning the rubes in Alabama or east Texas or Appalachia who are happy about the end of federal protection for abortion. But a Christian would be deemed a leper, a fool, a troll, or (gasp) a Trump supporter by those cool kids if he expressed gratitude and joy over Friday’s Supreme Court ruling. “You can oppose abortion, Christian, but have the decency to be ashamed of it. The same with homosexuality. We do, however, expect you to be full-throated in your moral bromides against sins involving gun violence.”

No one American political party will be the answer to righteousness and justice in America. Donald Trump is a bad man, and I say that as someone who voted for him in 2020. But we have murdered more than 60,000,000 babies in America since 1973. That’s more than the populations of Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Iowa, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, Arizona, New Jersey, and Tennessee combined. We poisoned and crushed with metal forceps and vacuumed the flesh of thirteen states’ worth of human beings under our government’s blessing since Roe v. Wade. I celebrate its end, and President Trump’s appointing Supreme Court justices who effected its end, because we are drowning our society in the blood of ten Holocaust’s worth of children. I am overjoyed that states will begin to make it illegal to murder babies in the womb. If a Christian is unwilling to rejoice at the end of this country’s warfare on helpless infants (a war that has killed 180 times more than the number of Americans killed in combat in World War II) because he must qualify it with what Christians haven’t done or aren’t doing or will have to do for humans who aren’t aborted, he has forfeited his moral credibility.

This holocaust has been dealt a body blow. As God calls us to faithfulness in whatever endeavors are before us next, let’s sing songs of thanksgiving for it. It is glorious and right that Roe has been overturned. Full stop.

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But What Was Left Behind