Those of us who hold a pro-life worldview must be increasingly careful and wise about how we articulate our views, fight the War for Life, and invest our time and resources. We must constantly remind ourselves that abortion is not an “issue” – it is the taking of a human life and, on a national scale, a holocaust.
There is great danger in allowing abortion to be portrayed as a political, social, or judicial “issue.”
An issue is impersonal. We talk about peace in the Middle East as an issue. It happens half way around the world to people we’ve never met.
An issue is typically big – bigger than us. Congress is debating our national debt and our fiscal budget issues. We can’t conceive of the dollar amounts they are discussing. It’s just too big.
An issue can often become so impersonal and big that it eventually causes fatigue and our emotion drains away. We become numb.  Global warming, pornography, violence on TV, drug cartels in Latin America. These are all issues that perhaps initially shocked or concerned us. But with time, constant media coverage, and repeated arguments of competing viewpoints, we eventually tire of the issue. We get bored. Small segments of the population remain emotional and engaged but the majority of people move on to other new issues.
When the killing of an innocent baby becomes an issue, it also allows us to leave the responsibility of fixing it up to someone else. We abdicate our role in addressing the problem to a higher authority, a governing body, or a person in power – something or someone who can deal with an impersonal, big issue.
This is a clear danger in the pro-life movement today. Many pro-life proponents have abdicated their personal responsibility to Congress or the courts. We want Roe v. Wade overturned. We want a pro-life Congress to draft new legislation to protect us from years of future bloodshed.
Don’t misunderstand me. We need to fight the War for Life on many fronts. We must pray and support pro-life politicians and judges. I certainly hope and pray our governing bodies restore sanctity of Life in our nation.
However, we must remember that Roe V. Wade was not the inception of abortion in America. One court decision made it legal but decades of cultural erosion made it possible. Our culture of death did not magically start in 1973. It grew for a hundred years before that in the hearts and minds of Americans who allowed it to happen.
I’ll share my fear with you. My fear is that most Americans who call themselves pro-life go about their day not remembering that we kill a child every 25 seconds in this country. My fear is we trust institutions to stop abortion – the very institutions that made it legal and acceptable in the first place.
I fear that we have become numb to the number 50 million. I fear we have become numb to the fact that every single one of us knows someone who has had an abortion, and may even now be suffering as a result.
Whether we choose to accept it or not, abortion has touched each and every American. We have lost an entire generation to the abortion holocaust, yet we as a society act as if it is an issue the government should solve.
The truth is if every American who claims to be pro-life acted like it, we would stop abortion tomorrow. If every American saw the horror of an abortion on film, spoke with a woman whose life had been destroyed because of an abortion, or counted the sheer economic cost of killing a generation of working Americans, we would see the end of abortion in America.
That is if we stopped treating abortion like an issue and starting treating it personally with compassion, urgency, truth, and love.