Bristol Palin
This is a story that both sides of the abortion debate point to as proof of their position. On the one hand pro-life folks can look at her and see a brave young woman who made a positive choice for life when so many choose death. She and her boyfriend have decided to marry and raise their child. It is a beautiful act of self sacrificing love. Something we as Christians are all called to do.
On the other hand, pro-choice people look at her and see someone whose future has just gone from very bright to very dim. Teen marriages don’t typically do well. Sure they are facing it bravely but they are not ready to do this. They are to immature to function well as a family. They are too uneducated to provide well for themselves. As heroic as their choice is do we really want all pregnant to be forced down this road?
Of course they are right. Yes, there are other options, like adoption, but the simple fact is that teen pregnancy is so common that eliminating the abortion option seems unworkable. This is true if we leave everything else the same. You need to ask why teens are having sex when they are not ready to marry or raise children. The obvious answer is because they have hormones. But 100 years ago teens had hormones and most didn’t have sex. Even today in Moslem countries we see very few sexual active teens. So it is possible for teens to abstain. Why don’t they?
Think about drinking and driving. That used to be very common. As a society we decided to make that socially unacceptable. To a large degree that has worked. There was a time when people said that was impossible. People would always go out to drink and they would always have to get home. Nobody says that anymore. It is assumed that you must avoid driving drunk no matter what the circumstance. Sure there are some that still do but it is very rare compared to 25 years ago.
Could we do the same with premarital sex? Could we as a society decide to make it socially unacceptable? If you take abortion off the table then something like that would have to happen. Otherwise you would have to many Bristol Palin’s around. Even today, with abortion as an option, the emotional and spiritual devastation of premarital sex is huge. Not everybody sees it but deep feelings of lonliness, abandonment, degradation, and humiliation are way too common in society. You add to that post-abortion trauma and you get something way more damaging to society than drunk driving ever was. Why can’t we decide we won’t accept it? Mostly because society is rebelling against Christian morality. They can embrace moral rules that Christians never really had. But rethinking the precise moral principles they ridiculed during the sexual revolution is a little too much. So it becomes easier to accept millions of deaths than it is to accept sexual purity.
There’s definitely a link between fornication and abortion; as long as the former is acceptable the latter won’t be outlawed. Actually, back it up: there’s a link between contraception and abortion. Even if you allow contraception only within marriage, you’ve established that you can use the sexual powers for your own pleasure without reference to God’s will or the human design. That leads directly to all sorts of selfishness and sexual perversion; look what it’s done to our country in forty short years.
The Supreme Court said as much in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
“In some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception. … For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
November 20th, 2008 at 6:20 am