The President’s Supreme Court pick, that is. Yes, it’s about much more, as I’ve written previously in The Stream. But for the left, abortion is what drives their opposition to anyone Mr. Trump nominates.

People of the left are not speaking or writing or demonstrating about property rights, the Second Amendment, public financing of elections, racial issues, voting rights, religious liberty, or other hot issues. Overwhelmingly, it’s about abortion.

Democrats Distrust State Governance

Consider: an op-ed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the New York Times. He writes of “a woman’s freedom to make the most sensitive medical decisions about her body.”

Sending Roe v. Wade back to the states would claw back a constitutional freedom to abortion that all American women have had for over 40 years. There are at least 20 states poised to ban abortion immediately if the 1973 decision is overturned, and legislatures in Iowa, Mississippi and Louisiana have already passed strict anti-abortion laws that could trigger challenges to the decision.

First, I know of no one who doesn’t want women to make their own “most sensitive medical decisions” about their own bodies. But abortion isn’t just about a woman’s body. It’s also about the body of a person with value independent from her mother’s: that of an unborn baby.

As to Mr. Schumer’s political diagnosis, think for a moment about what he’s against: People governing themselves in their own home states. This is called “federalism” and is part of the basis of the Republic.

Mr. Schumer’s unintended admission of his distrust of state governance shows that the federal courts are the left’s means of achieving political goals they can’t get through the Congress. Or, as William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal, “The Supreme Court is the Democrats’ preferred legislature for social issues.”

Watch the commentators on any news channel you want. They hiccough Roe, abortion, a woman’s right to choose, coat hangers, turning back the clock, and so forth almost involuntarily. Their tone is raw terror mixed with barely-restrained rage.

It’s About Power

Why? Why is a “woman’s right to choose,” so called, the source of liberal terror over who will assume Justice Kennedy’s seat? Or, put another way, why is abortion so profoundly important to the left?

Abortion is about power. It is about the ability to avoid responsibility and not allow another being — a baby — to disrupt one’s life. It does this through something so decisive and horrifying that it twists the soul it supposedly empowers.

Abortion is the ultimate rite in the cult of the self. Imagine — supplanting Deity, shaking our fists at Him! That posture is also as old as Eden, where the serpent told Eve that should she defy God, she would become like Him.

The great majority of women having abortions never think in these terms, of course. But the liberating sense of empowerment they might get from allowing the little ones growing securely in their bodies to be dismembered and “evacuated” is the same as that felt by “the mother of all the living.”

Abortion is the ultimate safeguard when it comes to “free” sex, as well. A woman (of whatever age) decides to be intimate with a man. She becomes pregnant.

She does not want to be pregnant. She has educational and career goals. Or she has limited financial resources. Or she fears what her parents or peers might say. She is embarrassed and ashamed.

So, the local abortion center welcomes her with open arms and sharp curettes.

A Nation That Doesn’t Affirm Life Isn’t Free

Christians need to do all they can to offer love and support and post-birth help. Many believers do this, whether through the quiet love of bringing the woman into their homes or through pregnancy care centers or through the gracious, beautiful act of adoption.

For women who want good jobs or degrees more than their babies, I have limited sympathy. That’s blunt but perhaps it needs to be said. A job and a title and college are never more valuable than human life. That we have not taught this to — and lived it before — our daughters is grievous.

Again, abortion is an act of power, power achieved through killing. A new Supreme Court majority might not say this. It might just recognize that there’s no constitutional right to an abortion (which there’s not). But even in this, they will be tacitly affirming the right to life without which our national independence is a farce.