Prolifers: Practice What You Preach!

Prolife Christians consider themselves a caring and supportive lot. They do all the right things any conscientious Christian would do to help another in need, especially when another life is potentially hanging in the balance. However, there are countless respectable, solid Christian couples who, raising (or having raised) one or two solid Christian children, are yet promoting a wordless pro-abortion mentality, a zero-population-growth ideal. These are people who will stand and pray outside of Planned Parenthood or the local abortion clinics. They give no small amount of their income to prolife charities. It is their mission to provide a constant influx of stories and articles to local newspapers and Christian magazines. Dedicated Christians are hard at work promoting a safe and protecting atmosphere to so many situations where welcoming a new life is a difficult and lonely proposition. And yet they are condemned by their own actions.

This is the grave incongruity within the abortion debate: the disparity between being anti-abortion and being prolife. The term “prolife” adheres to the theory that all life is good and should always be welcomed by society, regardless of circumstance. However, there are many Christians who are willing to stand up for the prolife cause only insofar as it remains a state of affairs that does not directly affect them.

Many Christians do not consider birth control a prolife issue. If a couple has decided to restrict their family size, then they consider it a topic unsuitable for the public arena. If a happily married couple is content to check their family size before the issue of unborn children comes into play, it is their own decision. This is true insofar as a couple is not willing to tell anyone else how to handle his own fertility, including the animated proceeds of someone else’s womb. However, once they initiate their own prolife activism, they put all of their own decisions to the same test.

Limit in family size is something we are trained not to notice. Couples stroll into church with their “replacement children” and we are taught from an early age not to be judgmental. We are not privy to the secrets of their home life. We cannot always know if there is a health risk that keeps a particular couple from bringing forth another child. We do not know if there are financial or psychological issues that stem from (what one hopes is) an overwhelming desire to grow a family past the point of the “bookends” they are already blessed to have. We are taught to give couples the benefit of the doubt.

There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of couples who consider themselves prolife but who are merely anti-abortion. America is awash with couples who are solvent, successful, and happily married, and who claim to reject the reigning Culture of Death. Yet many of these same couples also show themselves content to blithely turn aside from the simplest way possible to confound the hedonistic culture in which we reside. They refuse to have one more child.