When Roe v. Wade got overturned in 2022, we felt the same way as when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. This vast monolith of evil, caked with innocent blood, now lay in heaps of rubble. As someone who joined the pro-life movement at age 11 — waving off my mother’s fearful objections and going door to door collecting signatures — it was one of my happiest moments. No other political issue is half as important in God’s own eyes.

It’s also paramount for us as a country. It’s no exaggeration to say that legalized abortion has hung over our land like a generational curse in the same way that slavery did. So don’t blame people for doing a victory dance when they heard about the Emancipation Proclamation — or when they heard about Dobbs v. Jackson.

But has the curse really lifted?

We all know that it took two more years of fighting, then the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, to finally free the last American slaves after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. And it took another full 100 years for black people to receive equal treatment under the law. Did we really expect that the child-hungry demons behind abortion would be exorcised through the first drops of holy water?

To our bitter disappointment, the abortion rate hasn’t dropped. Pro-abortion victories keep happening in the states. And now we face the grim reality of a GOP platform that’s less pro-life than it was in 1980.

I’m angry about that, of course, and resentful. I don’t like the thuggish way this new platform got imposed, which Tony Perkins exposed on X:

My statement on the 2024 Republican Party Platform. pic.twitter.com/DbHdnB7yY2

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) July 8, 2024

We Have Less Influence Than Dylan Mulvaney

It’s sickening to see previously pro-life politicians like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance sell their souls for pennies on the dollar, then watch pro-life groups pretend the miserable half of a moldy loaf tossed to them by the Trump campaign is a wedding cake. It’s both morally repulsive and deeply humiliating.

The Republican Party knows we have nowhere else to go — that at best we can stay home in November, not vote, and leave our country in the hands of a Deep State that is still actively importing tens of millions of illegal voters. That galls us, exposing the fact that we have less leverage in our country than the transgender-grooming fanatics whom the Democrats dare not displease.

I’m tempted, deeply tempted, to refuse to vote for Donald Trump — to pretend that I am Samson deciding to tear down the temple. You want a depraved country built on child sacrifice? Then go ahead and choke on the ISIS operatives the Democrats are smuggling in. Enjoy your crumbling cities full of looters and human waste. I hope that when Antifa finally burns down your gated neighborhoods, you realize you deserve it.

And so on. The tantrum writes itself.

But we must resist that temptation, because we are patriots. We must yell our heads off now, try to bluff Trump and his lowbrow cronies into thinking we might sit the election out … and then quietly go ahead and vote in our own self-defense. That’s how the far left always got through its periods of weakness, such as the first Clinton administration. We can get our payback later.

Given that Joe Biden is drooling into his lap and muttering about Corn Pop, we can afford a little chaos, both before the convention and during it. I’ll be contacting my congressman and telling him what I think. You should go on social media and signal your disapproval as well. Respond to fundraising appeals from the Republicans with complaints about the platform. And maybe boycott Fox News for … I dunno, the next 500 years? Pro-life delegates at the GOP convention should stage a demonstration that’s sufficiently disruptive to make the mainstream media cover it. Don’t let Trump’s “coronation” go off without a hitch. 

Immigration Decides if America Survives, Abortion if She Deserves To

With all of that said, I think it’s worth stepping back and surveying our grim situation through the cold eye of the historian. Let’s consider what Americans really faced in our last deep moral crisis — the one over slavery — and compare it to what we face now.

One of the most effective arguments slavery advocates made was (sadly) this one: “What are you going to do with all those people if you set them free?” Very few Abolitionists had ready or worthy answers to that question. Many, including Abraham Lincoln, proposed deporting freed slaves to the Africa they’d never seen. Others simply shrugged.

A tiny, outcast sect of Christian “extremists” like William Lloyd Garrison argued that freed slaves deserved full rights as American citizens, of the kind that would someday be guaranteed by the Civil Rights Act. It took more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation for that act to get passed. In the meantime, the victorious North tried to impose Reconstruction and black voting rights on the South — but it quickly grew bored of the issue and walked away. Meanwhile in Northern cities, black people faced segregation and bias little better than what would later come under Jim Crow. Mankind is, after all, a fallen species.

As I wrote in my new book, No Second Amendment, No First, it took a great upsurge of Christian social activism in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust to stimulate the last great Gospel-driven initiative in our history to succeed: the Civil Rights movement. And that was quickly hijacked and perverted into affirmative action quotas, then mimicked by the feminists and the gay activists.

And today we pro-lifers face the very same kind of question: “What will you do with all those babies if you let them get born?” And behind that a more urgent issue: “How will people carry on their modern sex lives if abortion isn’t available as back-up form of birth control?”

And we don’t have any good answers. Make no mistake: If you thought the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement were disruptive, that was nothing compared to what it will mean to really ban abortion.

It Took 100 Years to Unwind the Evils of Slavery

I don’t just mean banning the grotesque late-term procedures it’s easy to say you oppose, but chemical abortions done early via pills that now GOP “pro-life” senators claim to support. And IUDs, which turn women’s wombs into abortion factories. And “emergency contraception.” And those birth control pills that rely on causing early abortions as a back-up mechanism. And IVF, which consigns hundreds of thousands of embryonic Americans to a man-made frozen Limbo.

When hysterical feminists keep citing the sloppy propaganda series The Handmaid’s Tale, they aren’t entirely wrong: Eliminating abortion in America would amount to a revolutionary change. People’s lives would alter radically. Our dating habits would have to change. So would the way we marry. We’d have to live much more like our ancestors, for better and worse. Women would once again see the very high cost of promiscuity and start teaching their daughters to avoid it — reviving the shame once associated with it.

I’m not surprised that Republicans trying to stop a massive Third World invasion of our country and its subsequent transformation into a dictatorship by the Deep State don’t want to have justify all those changes to the voters.

But I do worry how long God will continue to spare us if we don’t change. Countries that don’t deserve to be saved rarely are.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.