The year was 1953. The average cost of fuel was 28 cents per gallon, while the average cost of a house was just slightly above $18,000. The post war economy was booming and the vast majority of the men went to work to support their family, while 2/3 of the women stayed home and raised their children. Prayer and Bible reading were still allowed in public schools. School shootings were unthinkable, and the teacher's worst complaint was kids chewing gum in the classroom.
To be sure, we don't need to be disillusioned by thoughts of the "good ole days." The 50's definitely had issues, namely in the area of segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South. But one thing is undeniable, whether white or black, the family unit was the bedrock of society in America. More than three out of every four children grew up with both their father and mother in the home. So it comes as no surprise that no one was out passionately protesting in favor of abortion, or holding up signs saying that abortion is a human right, or "my body my choice". At best they wouldn't have been taken seriously. At worst they would have been seen as crazy. It would have been unthinkable in the mind of the American family.
However, 1953 was the year that everything changed. In December of that year Hugh Hefner released the first issue of Playboy magazine. The first issue featured Marilyn Monroe and quickly sold out of the 50,000 copies of the original printing. Hefner didn't even date the magazine because he wasn't sure that there would even be a second issue. He didn't know if it would sell, or if there would be a public backlash against such open lewdness. He had no idea that his magazine would become a multi-million dollar empire.
Now, I'm not so naïve as to believe that sexual sin wasn't taking place prior to Hugh Hefner. It was. However, it wasn't celebrated. Pre-marital sex was seen as taboo and immoral. Hefner changed all of that. His whole life was dedicated to presenting a persona of the "bachelor life." Playboy changed sex from an intimate, procreative union between a husband and wife into a pleasure act. If you get hungry, you eat. If you're in the mood, you have sex. Sacred wedlock was being challenged by a doctrine of care free, commitment free, "guilt free" sex.
It is no coincidence that less than a decade after the release of Playboy that the sexual revolution of the 60's blew in like a hurricane. All of this, coupled with the release of the first FDA approved birth control pill in 1960 was a perfect storm. Not only were people buying into the idea of commitment free sex, but now they could do it without the fear of unwanted pregnancy. "The pill" changed the game in that it separated sex from procreation. The idea of getting married, having children, and raising a family was becoming more archaic by the year.
But as we know, the pill isn't full proof. This created an avalanche of unwanted pregnancies. Babies are the enemy of the bachelor life. Babies mean responsibility, dedication, commitment, financial burden and sacrifice. That simply can't be tolerated in such a loose society. So what could be done about that? Enter Roe.
I keep using the word "coincidence", but I think that the reader is clearly seeing the sequence here. But it is no coincidence that immediately following the sexual revolution of the 60's that Roe vs. Wade was passed in 1973, making abortion a constitutional right. Prior to that time, such a legal opinion would have been scorned as pointless and evil. But thanks to the sexual revolution, abortion was now in high demand. There is no doubt that cultural pressure, and the new epidemic of fatherless babies played a major role in the SCOTUS' decision.
A few facts about Roe need to be pointed out. First, the whole case was based on a lie. The attorneys for Jane Roe (Norma McCorvey) claimed that she was pregnant due to being gang raped. Roe admitted years later that this was a flat out lie. Her attorneys played on the heart strings of the SCOTUS. How could she be expected to carry and give birth to the child of her rapist? Even is she had been raped, and even if SCOTUS concluded that Roe should not have to carry the child of her rapist, it doesn't follow that abortion on demand should become a constitutional right. (A side note; because SCOTUS took so long to pass Roe vs Wade, Roe gave birth to a daughter and gave her up for adoption. No one knows where she is or even if she is alive. No one even knows if she or the adoptive parents know that she is Roe's child.)
Even in this brief history of the sexual changes in the U.S., it is clear that abortion is a multi-layered problem. It is also clear that abortion is evil. There is no way to sugarcoat it. Everyone knows that it is the death of a baby in the womb, a baby with its own DNA and heartbeat. Abortion is a crime against nature itself. A mother's natural instinct is to risk her life if need be, in order to protect her children, not to kill her own flesh and blood while in the womb.
It is for this reason, among many others that we can rejoice that Roe vs Wade was reversed this past Friday after almost 50 years. Even apart from its sinister implications, Roe vs Wade was just a bad law. Regardless of where someone falls on the issue of abortion, we should all agree that we don't want the SCOTUS reading things into law that simply aren't there. The word "abortion" isn't found anywhere in the constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor is it implied. And nobody would attempt to claim that our founding fathers could have envisioned such a thing. When the judicial branch begins to invent law instead of simply interpreting it, we're all in trouble.
The reversal of Roe vs Wade is a huge step in the right direction, but it's extremely naïve to think that the battle is now over. The question is, what do we do now? I will attempt to answer this question with another question, why is abortion so celebrated and revered? Think about it. Even if a woman had an unwanted pregnancy and she went to get an abortion, why not just do it and keep it hush hush? The reason is that in the last 70 years, the culture has bought into the idea that marriage and motherhood are forms of slavery, and abortion offers a way to break those chains. Women now believe that it is honorable to work for an employer for 40 plus hours a week, but slavery to serve her husband and children. Abortion also provides freedom for men to be promiscuous without the fear of having to step up and be a father. In this way abortion is seen as liberating and empowering.
This is why we can't simply trust the reversal of Roe vs Wade to end abortion in this country. The depravity of man will find a way. Abortion is a multi-layered problem that requires a multi-faceted approach. So again I ask, what is the church supposed to do now? For starters, we need to fall on our face and repent for over a century of apathy. The reason that the church is losing the culture war is because we're the only side that hasn't figured out that we're actually in a war. This war can't be won at the ballet box alone. Again, we must change the culture.
We must ask God to help us do the following things. First, Christian men must grow a spine and be willing to go against the flow of culture. Single men need to respect women and treat them as sisters. Commit to honoring your future wife by saving yourself for marriage. Refuse to be a slave to pornography and commit yourself to purity by God's grace. Married men need to be the prime example of faithfulness, commitment and love towards their spouse. We need to be the priest of our home and lead our families in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We need to love and cherish our daughters so that they won't fall for the first goofball that pays them some attention. There is a famine of strong, Godly men in this country. We need to make family great again. Make marital sex great again. Make church attendance, family devotion, and public service to the Lord great again.
Single women need to respect themselves and be confident of their value in Christ. If a man isn't willing to commit his life to you in marriage, respect you, love you, work a job and care for your needs, and be a father to your children, don't go to bed with him. Married women need to teach their daughters that the most empowering thing that a woman can do is to raise her children. It’s unthinkable that the church has bought into the feminist idea of women keeping up with men to the point that they have come to feel ashamed about literally the only thing that women can do, that men can’t, bringing life into the world. In all of human history, there has never been a single man that has given birth to a child. What greater place of power and influence could there be? There has never been a king, president, doctor or anyone else that didn’t have a mother who brought them into this world.
It would have been unthinkable even a hundred years ago for a woman to hire someone to murder their children in the womb for the purposes of independence, career or anything else. So either today's feminists have it completely wrong, or they are literally the only ones in history to get it right. I’m going with the former. Only the modern feminists would celebrate a woman for working forty plus hours a week for an employer, and yet criticize that same woman for choosing to have children, and opting to raise them and serve her husband instead.
I will say it again. WE MUST CHANGE THE CULTURE. It won't happen over night. But we must make steps to call a spade a spade, live God's truth and defeat the lies of the enemy. Think about it. Our culture glorifies laziness, lewdness and a lack of moral courage as "empowering". We must change the narrative. How did this country come to the conclusion that commitment free sex is empowering, but committed marital love is weak and undesirable? Why is sacrifice seen as slavery, but selfishness is seen as courageous? Why is sacrificing your own child seen as heroic, while sacrificing for your child is seen as degrading? This backwardness is highlighted well in a recent interview with Stevie Nicks. Think about the insanity of what is being said here.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, famous Fleetwood Mac singer and abortion rights advocate, Stevie Nicks, talked about the early days of her career when she was dating Eagles singer, Don Henley. She became pregnant in 1979 and chose to have an abortion. This is what she had to say about that event, “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.” Earlier in this same interview she stated that “Abortion rights were my generation’s fight” The incredible irony in these statements is that Nicks is bragging about her empowerment, based on something that she couldn’t do. She openly admits that she could not raise a child because she was a slave to drugs, and to her career. This isn’t a story of empowerment, it’s an admission of weakness. The story would have been much more powerful and praise worthy if Nicks had gotten clean and been a mother to her child. What a story of empowerment that would have been. However, instead of taking a chance of sacrificing her career, she chose to sacrifice her child on the altar of her career.
Forty one years later, the glory days of Fleetwood Mac are long gone. In fact, it’s been almost two decades since they released a studio album. Now at age 72, Nicks lives alone and childless in her Santa Monica mansion, when she could be enjoying a house full of grandchildren.
The mistake that Nicks and the feminist movement make is that they equate empowerment with the ability to make a choice, instead of the moral fortitude to make the right choice. The renowned German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel wrote extensively about this form of “empowerment”. He said, “The common man thinks that he is free when he is allowed to act arbitrarily, but this very arbitrariness implies that he is not free.” In other words, the truly empowered person doesn’t need permission or popular support in order to make their decisions. Their choices are based on internal convictions, rather than external circumstances. This is very telling, considering that the very essence of bondage is to be controlled by external circumstances. Yet, feminists have found a way to champion this bondage as a form of empowerment. Hegel went on to say, “A person who does something perverse gives the greatest prominence to his particularity. The rationale is the high road which everyone follows and no one stands out from the rest.” Put into modern terms, if the decisions that we make are dictated by immediate gratification and the easy way out, or if our movement is backed by the media, the vast majority of academia, and society as a whole, then we’re not the resistance. To walk down the smooth path in lockstep with popular opinion regardless of its morality, and then claim the empowerment status of a martyred rebel is the epitome of arrogance and hypocrisy. This is real bondage. Again, we have to change the narrative and promote healthy, honorable goals.
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