A day after The Washington Post splashed its website with the extra-large headline “Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Clinic Restrictions” — complete with images of college-aged women celebrating the decision with pithy placards and congratulatory embraces — the Post featured a stomach-turning story about a college-aged woman sentenced to life in prison for killing her newborn baby in the bathroom of her sorority house. The jarring juxtaposition of these stories underscores how schizophrenic — and scrambled — our culture is.

Mother and Child

A little background: What the Post described as “abortion clinic restrictions” were actually requirements in a Texas statute designed to protect women’s health. Under the Texas law struck down by the court, physicians who perform abortions at clinics were required to have “admitting privileges” at a nearby hospital, and abortion clinics were required to meet “hospital-like standards of surgical centers.” These regulations would ensure that if something unexpected happened during an abortion, the woman would be assured of emergency care.

As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained, his state was trying to “to protect innocent life, while ensuring the highest health and safety standards for women.”

But the court declared the health and safety requirements in Texas posed “a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions” and created an “undue burden” on their “constitutional right” to abortion. Moreover, abortion clinics viewed the requirements as “prohibitively expensive,” according to the Post. Heaven forbid that a few bucks or safety concerns slow down America’s abortion machinery.

The concerns about women’s health were not contrived. Texas cited the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist convicted in 2013 on one count of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of first-degree murder. The manslaughter conviction was in response to the death of Karnamaya Mongar, who died from lethal doses of painkillers and sedatives after having an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic. (A grand jury report called Gosnell’s abortion mill a “house of horrors” — and rightly so: blood-covered floors, reused disposable medical supplies, body parts stuffed in plastic bags.) The murder convictions came in response to three post-birth abortions performed by Gosnell. The babies were not so fortunate as to be sedated to death.

That brings us to what happened at the sorority house. The case centered on Emile Weaver, a student at Muskingum University in Concord, Ohio. After Weaver secretly delivered a baby in the bathroom of her sorority house, there was so much blood that it looked “like a murder scene,” according to the house manager. And indeed it was.
Some of Weaver’s sorority sisters suspected the worst, and after searching in and around the sorority’s garbage bin they found a dead baby girl in a trash bag. It was later learned that Weaver never wanted the baby and tried to end the pregnancy by taking alcohol, drugs, and labor-inducing medicines. When those failed, she delivered the baby, stuffed her in a trash bag, and allowed the newborn to suffocate.

“No more baby,” she wrote in a text message to the man she thought to be the father. His response: “I would like to know how you killed my kid.”

Note that both Weaver and her boyfriend used words that reflect what we all know to be true: This was a baby — not a choice. This was a kid — not an unviable tissue mass.

Note that both Weaver and her boyfriend used words that reflect what we all know to be true: This was a baby — not a choice. This was a kid — not an unviable tissue mass.

Indeed, no matter how hard we try to avoid the truth, no matter how many times we whitewash and euphemize it with pleasant words like “choice” and “family planning” and “reproductive rights,” we cannot escape what abortion is and what it does. Even in the Roe v. Wade decision, which started us down this path to infanticide, Justice Harry Blackmun used phrases such as “outside the mother’s womb” and “health of the mother.” His use of the word “mother” in the very decision that birthed America’s abortion industry was an unintended admission that pro-lifers have it right: This is a child. After all, there can be no mother without a child.

Emile Weaver realized this too late, sobbing in court over “my beautiful daughter Addison.”

Did God Really Say?

Sadly, there’s nothing new here. In 1997, Melissa Drexler delivered her baby during a high school prom, tossed him in the lavatory trash can and then returned to the dance floor. When a friend, hearing Drexler gasp behind the bathroom stall, asked if she was all right, Drexler matter-of-factly said, “I’ll be done pretty soon. Go tell the boys we’ll be right out.”

In other words, nothing — more accurately, no one — would get in the way of her doing what she wanted to do.

In 1999, Sen. Barbara Boxer, struggling to defend the indefensible procedure known as partial-birth abortion, was asked if a child — once “born” and “separated from the mother” —was entitled to all the rights of anyone else born in the United States. In response, she shockingly declared, “When you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.”

In other words, the question of when life begins and whether a baby is a baby will be answered not by God or common sense, but rather by us — vote-hungry politicians, agenda-minded judges, frightened mothers, cowardly fathers, embarrassed grandparents.

In 2004, Ron Reagan (President Reagan’s youngest son) dismissed human embryos as little more than lab worms because, in his words, “They have no fingers and toes, no brain or spinal cord. They have no thoughts, no fears. They feel no pain.”

In other words, no matter what the timeless truths of faith tell us, they aren’t really human because that’s what we have decided.

From 2011 to 2016, the Obama administration fought religious groups all the way to the Supreme Court to preserve its mandate requiring employer-provided health insurance programs to cover abortion-inducing drugs such as Ella. When the court finally smacked down the administration, the White House meekly said all it ever wanted was to “allow millions of women across the country to continue to get the health care coverage that they need … including contraceptive coverage.” In other words, those of us who believe in religious freedom and the sanctity of life were confused.

In all of these rationalizations and contortions, we hear an echo of the very first lie: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

As a matter of fact, He did. And He also said that each of us is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” As the psalmist explained, without the advantage of ultrasound imaging or Fetal Doppler devices, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. … Your eyes saw my unformed body.”

Even when our tiny, helpless, fragile bodies were hidden from the world, even when we had no fingers, no toes, no brain, no spinal cord, we were not hidden from the Creator. And even when someone treats us like trash to be discarded or a tumor to be excised, the Creator embraces us and welcomes us and loves us.

God sees human life the way it really is — as a seamlessly connected story that makes no distinction for trimesters or chromosomes, handicaps or silver hair.

God sees human life the way it really is — as a seamlessly connected story that makes no distinction for trimesters or chromosomes, handicaps or silver hair. Human life means so much to God because humanity is made in His image; an expression of His boundless creativity. And that’s why the enemy has worked so relentlessly to destroy life. There’s a reason Jesus called Satan “a murderer from the beginning.”

A Protective Impulse

After 43 years of abortion on demand, the only thing surprising about Drexler, Gosnell, and Weaver is that anyone is surprised by what they did. After all, what they did is what every abortion does: end the life of the weakest among us. Yet their actions still shock and anger Americans.

Why is that? Why do Weaver’s actions repulse Americans and trigger a murder conviction, but when the very same thing happens 2,500 times a day at abortion clinics Americans don’t shrug? Why are Americans outraged by Gosnell killing four people but unmoved by the loss of 50 million? Why do Americans celebrate the Supreme Court overturning laws that limit abortions but then condemn to prison a woman who, in effect, aborts her baby a few seconds after birth?

The answer lies, I think, in what we are: As selfish and callous and hard-hearted as we humans are, there remains an impulse to protect the weakest among us, a sense of right and wrong, a desire for justice. These things are written on the human heart by the Creator Himself. And so when we are confronted with such brutality and cruelty, such bloodiness and ugliness, we demand that Emile Weaver and Kermit Gosnell be punished.

However, when we don’t see the cruelty or the victim — when the killing is surgical and clinical and clean, when it’s kept safely out of sight — most of us are unmoved and uninterested. This, too, is a function of what we are. Whether it’s the horror of war in a faraway land or the horror of abortion here at home, our fallen humanness allows us, enables us, tempts us, and encourages us to keep those things that are out of sight, comfortably out of mind.

Jesus expects more of His people. He wants us to mourn over abortion, to pray for its end, to rescue the unborn, to reason with our neighbors by pointing out the inconsistency and hypocrisy and schizophrenia, to share His love with all those affected by this plague, and to remind those with ears to hear and eyes to see that the right to life is the first of all rights and the last frontier of human rights. As long as we ignore this truth, there’s no reason for celebrations on the steps of the Supreme Court.

Alan Dowd writes at the crossroads of faith and public policy.