Published August 16, 2024
The Republican Party’s recent abandonment of important pro-life commitments in its platform has provoked voluminous commentary and anguished hand-wringing among social conservatives. It is a particularly bitter pill to swallow just two years after Dobbs, when pro-life Christians were ecstatic over what seemed to be the stunning triumph of a five-decade effort to roll back abortion “rights” in the United States. In human affairs, few such victories turn out to be quite what they seem, and this was no exception, as the months following Dobbs witnessed numerous defeats for the pro-life cause in the states that had now been empowered to legislate against abortion.
Depressing as this moment may seem, we can at least be grateful for the clarity the present moment provides: You cannot have pro-life politics without a pro-life culture. For the past few decades, even as we used the language of the “culture war,” we have often been tempted to view the abortion fight as an essentially political battle. To be sure, law can shape culture, and it is clear that the Supreme Court’s enforced legalization of abortion via Roe v. Wade in 1973 helped dramatically shape a culture of complacency toward unborn lives in much of America. But it did so because the legal change itself took place within a broader cultural philosophy of law, one that expected legal change to always take place in one direction: the expansion of individual rights. A legal change that dares try and reverse this flow of history is likely to be swept away in the cultural tide rather than stem it.
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
