Episode 78: The Current Status of Abortion and Pro-Life Laws in America

Join us as we take a look at what is happening across the country in a Post-Roe America.  We'll look at some important things to remember as Christians moving forward in our society. 

Show Notes:

• https://christianliferesources.com/2022/10/13/take-a-deep-breath/
• https://christianliferesources.com/2022/06/28/statement-on-overturning-roe-v-wade/
• https://christianliferesources.com/2022/06/24/court-decisions-legalizing-u-s-abortion/
• https://christianliferesources.com/ideas-to-help-others/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

On today's episode.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Those of us who are old enough to remember pre-Roe days prior to Roe v. Wade, we live a little bit of an illusion that those were the best of times, but they weren't. There was all sorts of things going on there from the anti-war effort, the anti-Vietnam War effort to the uh sexual revolution and so forth. All of that just constantly reflects this constant battle that's going on between man and God. So I think Christians need to walk into this, you know, try not to ride the roller coaster of legislation and judicial rulings, but rather keep looking for opportunities in every circumstance to be a beacon of hope.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Welcome to the Life Challenges Podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Hi, and welcome back. I'm Christopher Trust, and I'm here today with Pastors Bob Fleischmann and Jeff Samelson. And today we are gonna take a look at the current stance on abortion. As we're probably all familiar with, it's been uh a few months now since the summer double decision. And so now we are kind of in this place where we're a few months out and there isn't a lot happening now. And I think sometimes maybe uh if we're not just reading things about it all the time, we don't maybe know what's what's going on. And so we really wanted to have an episode to currently get all of our listeners just knowing what is is going on. And so uh where we want to start then is just generally speaking, what is the status of abortion in America right now legally?

SPEAKER_03 2:07

Well, it's really all over the place. It's hard to give a a single answer to that question. As uh listeners might remember, the Roe v. Wade decision and by the Supreme Court in 1973, what that did was it created, and we would say created out of nothing, a constitutional right, a federal right to abortion throughout the United States and effectively uh through all nine months of pregnancy. Therefore, what happened last summer with the Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court is that undid Roe v. Wade, it didn't suddenly ban abortion. What it did is it eliminated the fiction that there was a constitutional right nationwide to abortion. And effectively, therefore, what that did is it kicked the abortion issue back to the individual states. And that meant that any state that had uh restrictions on abortion on the books at that time, those restrictions uh went into effect after the Dobbs decision. And any state that didn't have restrictions or had even high-level permissions for abortion, those remained in effect after the Dobbs decision. And so it really is uh you know different things in different places, and and as a result of that, we've got lots of uh pro-life people on one side and the pro-abortion people on the other side. They are very active politically right now, uh either to solidify gains that have been made or to undo gains that the other side has made uh in order to uh move things uh to what they consider a better, better situation. Uh practically speaking, what it means is that the number of abortions nationwide has undoubtedly gone down, but not by anywhere near as much as we would want them to go down, or or really would have expected them to go down even uh immediately after the Dobbs decision.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Aaron Powell The real challenge that they're facing right now is that uh obviously surgical abortions have dropped because the states like Wisconsin have gotten rid of them. But what has not been measured real well is what's considered to be a spike in what they call chemical abortions, which is the explosion we've seen in terms of distributing uh the abortion pill. Now, the headlines uh most recently have been that Walgreens has announced that in states that don't permit surgical abortions, they were not going to be distributing uh pills for abortion. I got a feeling that that's not going to be a position that they'll hold to for long just because there is all sorts of pressure going on uh in in that regard. What we have here is that we've got a clash between people who want to engage in an abortion practice which determinates a human life, and so what they have to do is you you have to say that some human life is expendable. The court, and that was I think a little bit of the criticism that uh they gave themselves, is that maybe they need to address should human life be protected. But this is not this is not a new argument that I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out that these kinds of debates have been going on for hundreds of years. The abortion rights people began to cut the argument by saying we recognize it's a life, but it's not a person. And by detaching personhood from life and then putting that at some place in the pregnancy, they're trying to to allow for uh abortions. And not just that, I mean this affects IVF, um artificial reproductive technology, working with uh embryos and a petri dish. All of this comes is at stake when the Dobbs ruling came down, but because they didn't tackle the core question of is it human life, they just simply said there wasn't a federal right to abortion. I think Jeff used the right terminology too when he said it was a fiction. Uh it truly was a fiction to have created this constitutional right. Uh there's it was unprecedented, there's no common law justification for it. And so it came out. So the court corrected that error. But the problem is it didn't correct anything in the heart. So the people who want abortions still want abortions.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

And for the most part, a woman in the United States who is determined to get an abortion, she's going to be able to find a way to do so. There are various organizations, you know, pro-abortion organizations that are offering monetary assistance, you know, travel assistance or whatever, uh, to get the woman someplace where it's legal. There's a whole network. I read about this a few months back in uh the Washington Post, I think, whole network that has been set up to send, surreptitiously send uh abortion pills from Mexico, Mexican pharmacies to people who want them in the United States. And there's even just a matter of proximity. As Bob mentioned, a current Wisconsin law does not allow for surgical abortions, or really, you know, I I think technically probably not the others either, but the state of Illinois has extremely uh permissive abortion regulations. And uh so a bunch of the abortion clinics just basically moved south of the border, and uh they advertise to you know women in the southern part of Wisconsin, hey, if you're if you want an abortion, just come down here. It's quick and easy. And uh so it's still unless you're very poor and stuck in the middle of uh taxes or something like that, generally speaking, a woman who is determined to get an abortion will will still be able to get one.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Jeff, I think you mentioned too that there's just a lot of action, so to speak, on both sides. What kind of things have we seen and do we see right now with legislation, judges, and referendums?

SPEAKER_03 8:02

Well, uh I think one of the first things I'd mentioned is that we've we've seen overreach already from the pro-life side. Last summer, yeah, I believe it was last summer in Kansas, uh, there was a uh something on the ballot of a statewide thing that was uh meant to basically simply say that the the Kansas Constitution uh held no right to an abortion. It was going to basically specify that for purpose of law in in Kansas. And they thought that with Dobbs' decision that that that would be pretty easy to do. Kansas is considered a pretty conservative state, but there was such a pushback from that from the pro-abortion side that uh that didn't pass. And uh, although you'd say, oh, well, it just didn't pass, it didn't really change anything. Well, once something like that doesn't pass, it's very hard to come back and say, let's try again, or uh or to convince the the courts there that it's uh that you should go the other direction or anything like that. And we've had some similar efforts in Michigan uh last fall. They um there was a constitutional amendment this time from the pro-abortion side saying we're going to allow abortions here in in Michigan. And uh that passed, whether it was a matter of poorly informed voters or just voters that overwhelmingly were pro-abortion, it's hard to say. Uh but there have been all sorts of things like that. And there are still various uh referendums or referenda. I'll just for the grammar pedants out there, I'll tell you both are correct, uh referendums and referenda. Then there's also uh things going on on the court of all trying to uh there's I believe it is South Carolina that has a had some pretty severe restrictions on the books, but uh it got challenged in court, and they got a friendly judge who basically just froze the law in place, which means that uh the abortion is continuing as it had before.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Well, uh a lot of what you see going on too is translated in terms of pendulum swinging. So now judicial races have become very much sounding like legislative races, and legislative races are sounding very much like battles. Everything seems to be magnified as they're trying to accomplish their agenda. And I think uh Jeff, I think correctly called it overreach. Some have suggested the pro-life community overestimated their the wealth of support that they were going to get from the general public. I remember early on uh there used to be the comment used to be made at different uh regional pro-life rallies about it's just a matter of time because the pro-abortion people are aborting their children, and so as a result, the pro-life people are reproducing. It's just only a matter of time before the pro-life mentality wins out. And of course, post-stobs now the the reality is hitting that that's not the case because even people that have been calling themselves pro-life, we've gotten feedback here in the office, some some concerns expressed by pastors and so forth that members of their congregation are saying, Well, maybe we went too far. Part of it is that you can't exist in a culture of abortion for 49 years without aduling your senses. And that's uh exactly what has happened. When you study the history of abortion, just in America, not not even looking at world history, just in America. This is this has been a battle that's been going on since the Mayflowers. I mean, the stories of of w women finding themselves pregnant, and they already had potions that they were giving women to abort back then, and then you would get laws that would enforce it, and then the the constable wouldn't enforce it, and then the the doctors would be coming fighting back, but then some doctors in more urban areas didn't want to touch it. And then of course what happened is when in 1973 and the Supreme Court ruled in Roe versus Wade, all of a sudden it carried the strength of the Constitution behind it. And it truly was a fiction, it uh it wasn't the right there. But what has happened is I I my my premier uh fear, Krista, is that the pro-life community thinks that laws are going to change hearts. It's time and time again proven that it's failed. It's failed miserably. And that doesn't mean I mean Diane and I we're still supporting the pro-life groups and that kind of stuff, but that's not where the change has to occur.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

No, I I agree. I think one thing too that we really try to do just with this podcast and everything, too, is just to bring awareness to people. And one of the things too that we might be hearing in the news is this term codifying abortion with with the the legislation and the referendums and the laws. And so what does what does that really mean? What is maybe the strategy on the pro-abortion side right now?

SPEAKER_03 13:00

Well, they're um you know, recognizing what the Dobbs decision did, that it turned everything back over to the states. They are often deciding that, well, if we get a right to abortion uh enshrined in our state law, or you know, even better from their perspective, the the uh the state constitution, then they're basically saying nothing can happen. We're good for forever. That uh there'll never be any laws passed that will restrict abortion. There'll be no practices that restrict abortion, it'll be free to anybody who wants it whenever they want it. We've already seen that happen. There are numerous states uh like uh New York and Vermont and Illinois and California where they pretty much have whatever abortion you want, you can get there. And there are other states that are trying now to do that, you know, get that codified into law so that it's no longer just a court decision that had secured it, that it could be undone by another court, but that's actually black letter law, you know, written in the books, in the law codes, that either can't be undone or can only be done undone uh at uh great and unlikely effort.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

And I think, you know, and Bob said too, just talking about how our mission as Christians then is to really try to change hearts and everything. And so what should be the attitude now of a pro-life Christian towards the states where abortion uh is legal or even very popular?

SPEAKER_00 14:34

My first suggestion would be um stay calm, kind of like what the apostle Paul said to Peter, you know, all this is happening around you, but you keep your head. Stay calm. This is I you know, we live in a world that is naturally opposed to God, the inclination of the heart. And and all of this is spoken about in scripture. We're warned time and time again that it's it's a hostile environment to God. And those of us who are old enough to remember pre-Row days, you know, prior to Roe v. Wade, we live a little bit of an illusion that those were the best of times, but they weren't. You know, there was all sorts of things going on there from the you know, the anti-war effort, the anti-Vietnam War effort to the uh sexual revolution and so forth. All of that just constantly reflects this constant battle that's going on between man and God. So I think Christians need to walk into this, you know, try not to ride the roller coaster of legislation and judicial rulings, but rather keep looking for opportunities in every circumstance to be a beacon of hope. I you know, I I I said it 30 years ago, and I still believe that if the pro-life Christian community truly focused, you you make abortion the least desirable of all options. You take care of mothers, single mothers, you take care of their children, you provide options. It's I mean it's quite a it's quite a mess now. If you sit back and think about it, you know, the r remember that there used to be this recoil against uh women working outside of the home. Yeah, women's places in the home. She should be taking care of children. And so, you know, so there's some drum beating about that. Meanwhile, society continued to progress. Now to almost every family needs some measure of two incomes eventually. You know, a lot of lot of mothers, wonderful mothers, are working from home, you know, they'll stop their career to raise their children and so forth, but they need to get back out there, you know, because right now they're making house payments, but they can't get retirement, all that kind of stuff. So they're trying they're trying to do that. So now we have a culture that has both parties working. Okay. You uh you should try to check out what it costs for child care. I mean, I I sat down with the mothers on my staff and talked to them about what they what they have to pay for child care when when they can't find family to watch their children. And it's astronomical. I mean, uh it's possible for a mother of four, and you would know about this, Krista, uh, for a mother of four, I mean, you almost have to work for uh for babysitting. You work to hold on to a career, but really you're just paying for babysitting until the kids are old enough to get into school and so forth. And um that's a problem. You a lot of people today will look at that and say, Why put up with the headache? I'll just have an abortion and I'll just wait until the time's better. And and I think the pro-life community and the conservative community needs to start acting a little bit more conscientious of that. That maybe we can help. And that's a problem at new beginnings for crying out loud. We've got this this beautiful home for single mothers, and they um we can't sometimes find babysitting for them so that they can continue their schooling. We can't find babysitting. The the child care agencies are full, and we even if we want to pay for it, we can't find it. That's a problem. And when you throw obstacles like that against career-minded mothers and so forth, the baby is always the one who's going to lose because they're not sensitized by the word of God that life is sacred from conception onward.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

And back to back to your question about as as a Christian, as you see these things going on in your state uh or in other states, you know, what do you do? Well, the f the first thing is is find out what is actually going on in your state. There are plenty of uh pro-life Christians out there who uh are completely unaware of what is actually going on in their state uh as far as abortion goes. They may thought, well, didn't Dobbs undo all of that? Think that you know there is no more abortion? When in fact there is. They may not be aware of some of the things. We just had a um uh primary for the Wisconsin Supreme Court uh race here uh last month. And I know there were lots of pro-life Christians in Wisconsin that just didn't understand why they needed to go to the polls in that election. Hopefully, when when the the full election is held in in April, they'll they'll know why and and go. But as much as you might think, thank God that well, you know, I don't leave live in one of those wicked states where abortion is you know legal all the time for any reason, that doesn't mean you just retreat and say, Oh, thank God this isn't happening to other people, but not to me. That's not a Christian attitude. We want to be as involved as we can. Maybe it's gonna be political activity of some sort, maybe it's just gonna be the way you vote, maybe it's gonna be mainly the way you pray and you talk to other people, but you can't pretend just that it's it's somebody else's problem somewhere else. If things are good in your state, well then that's wonderful. Then you know, see what you can do to support people in other states with your prayers, with your donations, uh, with your your encouragement, whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yeah, I think sometimes with these big issues, or if we see something that's not going our way, the first reaction is just to almost just kind of get deflated and just think, oh man, that's just terrible. Oh, like what, you know, our society, what what's going on? And just uh we look at the the the I guess the big picture first instead of just maybe realizing, okay, we, you know, as an individual, what is God calling me to do? What can I do to help? And I just think of my mom and other women too, or men also, but um, that have just uh decided, okay, I'm gonna work at a pregnancy center, or I'm gonna give a little time to do this and I'm gonna, or you know, get donations together or pray or do something. I guess that would maybe just be my encouragement too, to people that instead of just looking at this big, huge mess and getting overwhelmed with it, just look at the part that that you could do.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

Yeah, and that ties things back to to Bob's earlier point about the heart, too. I mean, that's that's how you really make a difference by reaching people heart to heart, person to person, face to face. And you don't win just by getting legislative wins. You you you win really when when you win hearts over. And uh and that's how minds are changed.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Well, you know, and very few of us are in a position to make dramatic, large-scale changes on the federal level or on the state level, or even on the municipal level. Most of our work's going to occur between us and our neighbor, between us and family members. And we need to find a certain contentment with that, because that's that's where God has placed us in those social circles with the idea that um that's where he wants us to be, and that's where he wants us to talk. You know, if you've got if you've got the ability and the um the genes to uh uh take on politics and so forth, knock yourself out. But even even the the most powerful and influential politician still has a Ministry assigned to him by God to tend to the soul. So we're all to be engaged in heart ministry. First of all, we can talk about starting by yourself, but let's let's approach it a little bit differently. Look at your congregation. How how friendly is your congregation to a single mother? How friendly are they? Well, you know, we'll say, Well, anybody can worship here. We allow anybody and so forth. Do you know how many uh single mothers and married mothers I there are out there who will say, I just have difficulty going to church. My kids just can't sit still and they they cause a ruckus and I don't want it to bother others and so forth. Uh, you know, the the pandemic kind of forced a lot of us to go online. Uh, that was that was perceived by many mothers to be a blessing. They were able to sit with their children in their own home, watch worship services, but then they still need to be you know somehow encapsulated in the ministry of the congregation. And sometimes they need help babysitting. Sometimes they could they could use a um an experienced ear to talk to about you know different challenges they face with their children. So we look at our congregation, but then there's things you can do individually. We have a on the Christian Life Resources website, if you do a search for, oh, I think of something like Things I Can Do or something along that line, uh we've just created a document that we put up there with just a ton of ideas on what you can do on a just a basically a pro-life ministry as an individual and as a congregation. In other words, don't say there's nothing I can do. I mean, there's a lot you can do.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Sometimes I know people just wonder all right, is it still worthwhile to try to present pro-life arguments in the public square? Um, you know, can you just present these arguments to people that just don't I mean seemingly seem to care?

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Well what what's interesting is um two weeks ago I was preaching in western Minnesota, which which meant for a long drive. And while I'm driving from La Crosse, I went up through Rochester up to the Twin Cities, and then headed west from there. It was incredible how um the uh I think it's the Pro Life Action League or something has just a series of billboards just very positively exhibiting life in the womb. You know, and there is a segment of the pro-life community that that has taken it upon itself to try to keep educating people that when we're talking about an abortion, we are really talking about ending the life of a person, a child. So I think that they they play a valuable role in talking about that. But we have to realize that in a from a policy perspective, uh the uh the people who are policymakers have moved on beyond that argument. Like like I had mentioned earlier, back in 19, I think it was 1995, when Naomi Wolfe wrote her article about we have to be honest with women that in a an abortion a child dies. Because because that they're acknowledging that, they're accepting that some life is not worth living. Now we've had horrible testimonies of that throughout history, uh, whether it's the Holocaust or the things that were done during slavery and so forth, that you know what happens when you start to lessen the the value of some lives over against others, the the results are disastrous. And yet uh we have to keep pounding home the reality. The other thing that I think is important to remember, it's important for me to remember, is you're not gonna win everybody. You know, you can present this perfectly logical argument, you can present the science, the biology, the beating heart, the brain waves, the fingerprints, you can do all of that. You can you can explain scripture and you can make it as clear as possible. And there are just some that don't care. You know, they they just feel that the predominant issue is control of your body, and sometimes that may mean I have to kill someone.

SPEAKER_03 26:00

Yeah, but that doesn't mean that we give up entirely or that we can you know cede the the field of battle to the enemy. Um, you know, we just recognize, yeah, we're not gonna win everyone, we're not gonna win every battle, but that doesn't mean we stop. Uh we we we have uh something really important here. It's life which God has entrusted to us. Uh we are its stewards, and to the extent that we are able, we are going to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves and speak up for the the the voiceless and try to stand against uh the the the culture of death uh that uh we we see in the society around us. But um we we still speak, yeah. Maybe it's gonna change the way we talk. Or maybe it's gonna change uh who it is that we we choose to talk to or the way that we do it or whatever. Well, you know, we can still be strategic about it, but but we don't just give up. We don't just throw up our hands and say, well, I guess that's over. There's still things to do, and as long as God is with us, and he certainly is in the pro-life movement, um, you know, we we trust that he can turn things around. God very well can give us victories that we you know never would have dared dream of in the past. And um we we can't just uh faithlessly assume that he's given up, and so therefore we will too.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

As we uh close out the episode a little bit here, is there anything else we should keep in mind, especially maybe just from uh a biblical perspective to with all this and moving forward?

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Well, I think first of all, um just taking off from where Jeff left, and that is we play a powerful role in encouraging each other. Over the weekend I did a Bible class uh in St. Joe Joseph, Michigan, and uh uh they were expecting about 60 people for Bible class. We had over a hundred and incredible encouragement. And part of the uh gathering together is uh let's not give up the practice of gathering together, but encourage one another. The idea of forming groups and sometimes you just gotta hear and you gotta see other people recognize that yes, you're not crazy, this is wrong, what's going on, and and so you kind of encourage one another. I think that's really, really important to do it. Secondly, I and I've those who've heard me preach have heard me say this a number of times, and that is if you find being a Christian is going well for you, you're probably doing it wrong. If you're out there and you think, well, I'm pro-life, and you know, it you know, and I every once in a while I throw a couple of bucks towards, you know, a diaper drive in our community or something like that. The the reality is is that in order to take care of someone, in order to make sure that um you've given them every incentive not to take life, um, oftentimes it's inconvenient. I mean it's it's inconvenient for me to have to break up my day to run over to the polling booth uh to vote. It's a pain in the neck. Why can't I do it on my computer? You know, stuff like that. But but you do it, and then it gets more complicated because now, you know, you've got a single mother and she calls you up and she says her car broke down. Well, that means that maybe I have to adjust my schedule and help Carter around and help her get groceries and so forth. None of that sounds easy, none of that sounds fun, and then that sinful nature in all of us is going to start going, well, if they had made better decisions before, they wouldn't be in this mess. But that's irrelevant. They are in this mess, they are facing these challenges. And they provide tremendous opportunity for us to love as we've been loved by God through Christ, and to also provide a bridge for us to talk about Jesus and you know, to help them calibrate their lives.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Thank you both for for talking to us today. And we thank all of our listeners too. And if you uh anybody listening has any feedback on this episode, um, please reach out to us, let us know. You can reach us at lifechallenges.us and uh thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you back next time. Bye.

SPEAKER_02 30:07

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Life Challenges Podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it, and sharing it with friends. We're sure you have questions on today's topic or other life issues. Our goal is to help you through these tough topics, and we want you to know we're here to help. You can submit your questions as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes at lifechallenges.us or email us at podcast at ChristianLife Resources.com. In addition to the podcast, we include other valuable information at lifechallenges.us, so be sure to check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit Christianlife Resources.com. May God give you wisdom, love, strength, and peace in Christ for every life challenge.