Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Promoting a Culture of Life

from the mom

I used to have a pastor that would say that culture is upstream of politics. You have to change the culture if you want to change the law. He encouraged us to promote a culture of life in our lives and in our work.

At 35 years, Roe v. Wade is unfortunately still law. And while I hate it, ending Roe v. Wade won't end abortion.

The good news is that a culture of life is proliferating and abortion is at an all-time low. Statistics show that the generations after the Boomers are increasingly prolife, particularly women. Recent popular culture has shown a prolife bent, particularly in movies like Waitress, Juno, Bella, and Knocked Up.

Even better, young doctors show a reticence to be involved in the abortion industry. In Britain this is causing quite an uproar.

And still at the heart of the problem is selfishness and the failure to take responsibility. If the law were changed, the young who oppose abortion would be forced to hear horror stories/scare tactics of back-alley abortions with coat hangers. This would probably affect many of them to recant their previous positions.

We're off to a good start. We are promoting a culture of life; the pro-life movement has made progress at doing more than talk and providing abortion alternatives and support for unplanned pregnancies. Our youth are properly horrified at what we've allowed to be legalized.

Now we just need to be certain we are teaching them to take responsibility for all their actions, not place blame for their own mistakes, and to think of others first. If that happened, we could probably eradicate the problem without a law change.

4 comments:

the Joneses said...

Yes! Thank you for posting this. There's so much more to the "end abortion" question than overturning Roe v. Wade. After 35 years, there's too much of an abortion mindset to just "stop it." It is encouraging that many of our generation recognizes what abortion has done to us (there's a third of our peers who were going to, but now don't, exist).

I was going to add more, but, well, you already said it.

-- SJ

SES said...

Great post R! Thank you

Anonymous said...

Absolutely terrific post...thank you!

Amy K said...

I think you're right about there being a battle to change hearts, aside from the law. However, I think that it's a horrible tragedy that any law would deny protections for the most vulnerable and innocent lives in our society. Abortion laws deny unborn children the right to life by submitting that they are not "persons." This is an unspeakable injustice. Our laws MUST be changed to protect those children too.

Liberals enjoy using the back-alley abortion scenario in contending that abortion should be kept legal, stating that "people will have abortions regardless of what the law says." The argument that we should legalize everything that people will "do anyway" is ridiculous. The same argument is being used in the euthanasia debate.

Lastly, laws DO affect public opinion. It has been shown that people were largely against abortion until Roe v. Wade, but afterwards, the majority viewed it as okay. Like scripture says, the law is a schoolmaster.