Today, I read articles by both Karen Swallow Prior and David French regarding making abortion “unnecessary” and “unthinkable.” In both cases, they give token acknowledgment to the fact that Christians for hundreds of years have actually done the hard work of caring for those in need. But, their solution isn’t to praise that work and call for churches to keep doing the same.

Rather, it is that Christians simply have not done enough to address those issues, so we must now abdicate that responsibility and give it to the government. Both articles advocate for government-sponsored social and financial programs, appealing to the sense that women who are pregnant seek abortions due to societal and monetary issues.

Both Prior and French call for society at large to be responsible to fund and care for pregnant women through government-enforced taxation and redistribution of resources. What I find interesting in both articles is that neither is willing to recognize that it has been government-based programs that have caused much of the societal and financial decay in our nation.  Welfare programs have repeatedly made women and minorities dependent on handouts. They do so by punishing recipients the moment they obtain any kind of self-sufficiency by ending those benefits. Social and financial programs are very much not an opportunity to provide a “leg up” but force people to live on the meager dolling of what the bureaucrats give them.

Also, rampant sexual immorality in our nation can be traced to the government-sponsored promotion of “safe sex” education over abstinence. And it is the government force-feeding acceptance of “alternate lifestyles,” teaching sexual perversion as virtuous and freeing.  Nowhere in either article do Prior and French call for churches to hold the government accountable for helping to further the depravity that has resulted in “unwanted pregnancies,” yet we are called upon to make this same bureaucracy responsible for solving the problem it helped cause.

Also interesting is their appeal to statistics which say abortion has decreased since Roe. Yet, neither address that abortifacient contraceptives have risen in use (i.e. “the morning after pill”). Countless numbers of babies have been aborted after conception because these “medications” prevent implantation after initial conception. Children that are conceived, yet lost because the pill caused them to be flushed away are still murdered, even if they were not injected with saline, burned, and dismembered.

Both Prior and French want to lecture Christians and take the “moral high ground” by saying we can’t really be pro-life unless we endorse government-based solutions. Yet, their arguments are spurious and vapid. They mostly ignore the work done for centuries by the Church, use statistics slanted in their favor to make their case, and conveniently fail to address the government’s own hand in our current mess.
In short, their solution is no solution at all.