This morning brought a once-in-a-lifetime experience: history being made in the form of a Supreme Court decision which overturned decades of legal precedent.
I’ll be honest: I have been crying tears of joy and exchanging texts with prayer warriors who see this event in terms of God’s mercy, goodness, and justice. This day is an answer to our prayers – and celebrating as we give God the glory is not only the logical response, it’s the only possible response!
Praise the LORD!
But many find today’s events a cause for deep grief and profound anger. Reading what they have to say – looking at pictures of their faces as they protest – sobers me.
And those folks aren’t just “out there.” Friends and / or family members may see today’s Supreme Court decision as an outrageous thing – even an “act of violence against women.” Their emotions may strike us as unreasonable, but they are feeling them – powerfully! – nonetheless.
Maggie mused at the breakfast table, “You are crying because you are happy, Mom, but there are a lot of people who are crying because they feel attacked by this. How do we love people who will probably hate us because of today?”
I think that a different kind of blog is in order today than simply the euphoric celebration my exultant heart prompts.
Here’s my premise: Now that this part of the battle to protect unborn children has been won, how might Christians engage with those who feel despair over this outcome – in a way that offers them sympathy but also glorifies Jesus?
I have a couple of ideas:
First, let’s know and talk about legal specifics…
In 1973, Roe v Wade enshrined access to abortion as a Constitutional right.
Forty-nine years and over 63 million abortions later, the current Court acknowledged the illegitimacy of the legal argument which had been the basis of the Roe ruling.
Contrary to many public statements on the part of folks who should know better, this decision has not suddenly made abortion illegal in the United States.
Rather, authority to determine the legal status of abortion access has transferred to state legislatures… where the will of the people electing the legislators can be codified.
(Predictably, the different perspectives which predominate in different states mean that there will be different degrees of legal access to abortion in different states. But even these differences offer encouragement that our democracy still works the way the Constitution was written to enable its working.)
What may not be apparent: the Court’s decision has little to do with the issue of abortion and much to do with the issue of governmental function. Specifically, the Court’s decision acknowledges that the Court was never intended to make laws.
Any child with a basic understanding of the tripartite construction of American government understands that Congress is the legislature, not the Court.
The Supreme Court’s job – its only job – is to interpret laws that already exist, measuring them against the Constitution to determine whether they are enforceable according to the bedrock principles of our nation.
Roe was a clear over-stepping on the part of the Court – an imaginative interpretation of Constitutional mandates which gave the Court tremendous (un-Constitutional) powers – a dangerous precedent in terms of establishing political over-reach as a normal Court prerogative.
Scholars invested in abortion rights often concurred with scholars who disagreed with them on abortion –when the topic was the legal basis of Roe. Their shared contention was this over-reach by the Court.
Regardless of whether one agreed with Roe in principle or not, educated citizenry recoiled from the chilling reality of a Supreme Court – unaccountable to voters and tenured for life – which had empowered itself to do the job of the legislature.
Second, let’s know and talk about historic context…
A historic precedent which illustrates the deadly danger of a Supreme Court making laws rather than adjudicating them was the Dredd Scott case in 1857.
In that case, a plurality of Southern (Democratic) Justices from slave-holding states ruled that an enslaved person had no Constitutional rights whatsoever. The Scott v. Sanford decision caused such outrage that it empowered the rise of a certain Republican Presidential candidate (Lincoln) and acted as a catalyst for Civil War.
After the War, the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution rendered the Scott decision null and void.
Historically, when the Supreme Court reverses bad decisions, the system of checks and balances which tethers it to the rest of the government works to incorporate correctives and re-establish equilibrium.
For example, the Court overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that allowed state segregation laws, when it found for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (ending racial segregation in public schools).
The Civil Rights movement, empowered by this reversal, gained momentum and won victories which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Framed this way, Roe’s overturn counts as a victory for individual and states’ rights, and as a sign of three-branch- government health and function.
Third, IF there is openness, know and talk about Christian teaching…
The pro-life movement has been overwhelmingly Christian from the beginning. Why? Because our Lord emphasized “life” to such an extent that He sometime sounded redundant. A sampling from just the gospel of John proves my point.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. … Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life but must endure God’s wrath.
(John 3:16, 36)
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
(John 4:13 – 14)
“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.”
(John 10:28)
“I am the way and the truth and the life.”
(John 14:6)
“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
(John 17:3)
This emphasis on the life that believers could find in Jesus – life that begins in the here and now and extends throughout eternity – connects seamlessly to the Old Testament teaching on human life.
And Old Testament teaching makes clear that life begins in the womb.
Psalm 139 spells out the intimate, tender connection between God and unborn child. God bestows everything from physical attributes to lifetime destiny on the “unformed substance” of the Psalmist:
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.My frame was not hidden from you,
(Verses 13 – 16)
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
Jeremiah echoes the understanding that God tenderly creates each person, and that God’s specific purposes for each person predate birth:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
(Jeremiah 1:5)
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
The Apostle Paul echoes this language in his letter to the Galatians, explaining the inevitability of his own Christian witness as something accomplished by God before he took his first breath.
“When the one who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace…”
(Galatians 1:15)
My favorite biblical story which underscores the full humanity of unborn babies occurs in the gospel of Luke. This remarkable passage describes the way the unborn Jesus provokes the unborn John the Baptist to worship, in utero:
“In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.’”
(Luke 1:39 – 44)
Elizabeth, herself the carrier of a miracle-baby, recognizes Mary’s anointed pregnancy based on the witness of her own unborn child!
The Incarnation, as a central doctrine of the faith, makes valuing life from the moment of conception an imperative: God, Himself, chose to be a fetus, chose to be born of a woman… Can there be any clearer indication of the sacredness of pregnancy and delivery?
Fourth and finally, GET BUSY…
This morning’s decision is a victory. It is also a mandate.
Jesus Christ is entrusting His Body with the task of protecting and advocating for women and unborn children on an even larger scale than before!
What a privilege. What a responsibility.
We mustn’t miss the moment. We must translate our gratitude into acts of service. We must literally seek to be the hands and feet of Christ for women needing support and encouragement, and for babies needing adoptive homes.
They will know we are Christians by our love (John 13:35), and we must love not in words and speech but in deeds and truth (1 John 3:18).
May Christians be found faithful as we seek to steward the freedoms that come with our earthly citizenship to serve and glorify the One who reigns over us here and now, and also forever!
