The rites and ‘rights’ of the church of abortion

Consider the scene on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States on June 27, 2016, following the announcement of the decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a decision about Texas abortion clinics that amounted to a victory for proponents of abortion. … Videos documented the outdoor revelry that resulted, spilling from the court steps out into the nation’s capital: a gyrating, weeping, waving, screaming sea of people, mostly women, behaving as if they were in the throes of religious ecstasy…. their kind of religious ecstasy, in which abortion on demand becomes the gnostic equivalent of a central sacrament, the repetition of which is judged essential to their quasi-religious community.

Or consider another snapshot: the so-called Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. [The] only women disinvited from this supposedly universal “women’s march” were pro-life. When forced to choose between women and abortion on demand, the women in charge chose abortion. That happened because, within this new church of secularism, pro-life women, and men, amount to heretics: despised transgressors of a religious community’s core teaching and norms.

The passion on display before and after the leaked opinion in the 2022 case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was of a piece with the same frenzy. This time around, fealty to abortion was spiced with real and threatened violence, ranging from increased vandalism, the doxing of the home addresses of some justices, chilling references on social media to their children and their children’s schools, and a threat on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.  

If the so-called right to choose were truly an exercise of choice — if the rhetoric of the people who defend it matched the reality of what they actually believe — one would expect its defenders to honor choosing against it here or there. … That this does not happen unveils something noteworthy. For secularist believers, abortion is not in fact a mere “choice,” as their values-free, consumerist rhetoric frames it. No, abortion is sacrosanct. It is a communal rite — one through which many novices are initiated into this new faith. ... Each individual story is a secularist pilgrim’s progress into a new religious community united by this bloody rite of passage.

Christianity today, like Christianity past and Christianity to come, contends with many enemies. But the adversary now [is] the absolutist defense of the sexual revolution by its faithful, and the chilling effect of their words and deeds on Christians themselves.