Abortion is about sex. Duh.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 26, 2024

Maybe it’s because I am from Connecticut. Specifically, because I am a pro-life activist from Connecticut. But nothing about the setbacks suffered by the pro-life movement in the two years since the repeal of Roe v. Wade has surprised me.

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Here in deep blue pro-abortion Connecticut, we have always known what some of our pro-life brethren in other states apparently did not. Many Americans are deeply committed to having the option to kill their unborn children. Even many politicians, and rank-and-file citizens, who said they were pro-life did not really know what the phrase meant.

In a New Year’s Eve 2019 post on my personal Facebook, I wrote: “And, hoo boy, just wait until we overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s coming. Not next year but soon. You can feel it. But I think we pro-lifers will be in for a few nasty surprises once it happens.”

Why did my prediction come true?

For 49 years we told ourselves that abortion on demand was forced on the country by the U.S. Supreme Court. That it was a departure, not a fulfillment, of the great American civil rights tradition.

This is true. But it’s not the whole truth. By the end of the Roe regime, there were other factors.

You cannot have something as evil as mass abortion on demand for decades and not have it change a people. We saw that already in 1992 with the Casey vs. Planned Parenthood decision, which reaffirmed Roe’s central holding of an alleged right to abortion.

Many remember Casey for Justice Kennedy’s notorious “mystery” passage, which claimed that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Such were the metaphysical pretzels into which people twisted themselves to justify abortion.

But it was Justice O’Connor that really hit the nail on the head when she said abortion had to stay legal because women had, by then, organized their lives for decades around the fact of its legality. She was wrong to support the killing of the unborn and to twist the U.S. Constitution to accomplish it. But she was not wrong about the cultural logic of the thing.

And it is that very logic that we are up against, now that Roe has been overturned. It is that logic that led to our defeat in several referenda these last two years. And that has caused some of our political allies to back away from us.

Indeed, O’Connor’s logic goes way beyond the issue of women’s professional careers. For both men and women.

As much as I hate to see the Statue of Liberty on NARAL’s logo, it is true that for many people abortion is as American as apple pie. America is a consumer society. We think we have a right to shiny new objects. And those objects sometimes include other human beings.

Of course, as Pope St. John Paul II taught, the person is a subject, never an object. But try telling that to a society after 49 years of legal abortion has underwritten their ability to view human beings as objects.

This is why the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s repeal has not been pretty. Its overturn was the right thing to do, because there is nothing less pretty than the slaughter of sixty million unborn children. But now that it has happened, it has exposed the darkness that has crept into the consumerist American soul under the Roe regime.

In the most important article of the last two years on this topic, Ryan Anderson discusses all this and charts “The way forward after Dobbs”.

Ryan sees some of the same things I saw in my pre-Dobbs foreboding. He quotes Bill Maher, who put it right out there: “They [pro-lifers] think it’s murder. And it kind of is. I’m just okay with that.” Maher claimed to “be okay with that” because of overpopulation. But Ryan Anderson gives the real reason why so many are okay with that.

“Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion,” Ryan writes. “Four percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside of marriage. Meanwhile, 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, and 87 percent are unmarried.”

Ryan gets to the heart of it: “the real root causes of abortion are the sexual practices in which Americans have been habituated for generations.” And “So long as nonmarital sex is expected, large numbers of Americans will view abortion as necessary emergency contraception.”

Ryan is exactly right. Looking back from the perspective of 52 years since Roe, it seems to me that pro-choicers were lying and pro-lifers were naïve. Every pro-choicer’s claim to be agnostic about the personhood of the unborn child was a lie. They knew abortion was killing. They were “just okay with that.”

Pro-lifers were telling the truth when they compared the plight of the unborn child to that of the slave in the antebellum South or the Jew in the Holocaust. What they missed, though, is that American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust have nothing to do with sex. Abortion has everything to do with sex. Particularly nonmarital sex.

“Our primary task isn’t to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn—anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows all about that—but to change how people lead their sexual lives,” writes Ryan. We have a pro-life movement and its work should continue. But to win this fight long-term we need what Ryan calls “a pro-marriage or pro-chastity movement.”

How do we get there? For that, you will have to read Ryan Anderson’s article. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It should be our blueprint for the next fifty years.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

Show 9 Comments? (Hidden)Hide Comments

• Posted by: Randal Mandock - Sep. 28, 2024 11:31 AM ET USA

  I agree with Mike Timmer about the total collapse of Western society. The self-gratifying Bill Clinton began this collapse in the open forum, Obama brought it into the economic and homosexual spheres, and Biden has carried on the program through his characteristic bullying, cowardice, and anti-Catholicism. A couple of European countries, much of Asia, and half of the "Global South" are pushing against the self-destruction, but the Vatican and much of the Western "North" are railing against them.

• Posted by: mooreshi7489 - Sep. 28, 2024 10:57 AM ET USA

  The glaring omission in Mr. Anderson’s article in First Things is failure to address the ongoing corruption of medical research and health care. Those who refused the vaccine in 2021, a product of fetal cell lines, stood in isolation. The bishops offered ethical loopholes as did the EPPC. After the Dobbs decision 50 health/research groups bemoaned the loss of fetal material for research. But I guess there is no political solution to a failure to witness when the time comes as it did then.

• Posted by: FredC - Sep. 28, 2024 10:38 AM ET USA

  The bishops, priests, and pro-lifers should emphasize the dignity of women. They should remind the women that extra-marital sex is beneath their dignity, especially some of the unnatural forms of sex. Don't let men abuse them. Virtue will attract good men.

• Posted by: FredC - Sep. 28, 2024 10:29 AM ET USA

  MikeTimmer is right on target. I wrote to the bishop with a letter asking that the effort against extra-marital sex be as strong as against abortion. Response? Thank you. More of us need to write.

• Posted by: winnie - Sep. 28, 2024 9:34 AM ET USA

  I maher’s quite says it all. Great if depressing article

• Posted by: feedback - Sep. 28, 2024 3:08 AM ET USA

  For the hoi polloi abortion is all about sexual gratification without, or with minimal, consequences but for the movers and shakers from behind the curtain abortion serves as means of social control, limiting the population, and human sacrifice to the demons. One of the major problems is that the buzzwords of mass deception: bodily autonomy, woman's right to choose, reproductive justice, women's healthcare, etc., are almost never challenged by anyone in the press, or from church pulpits.

• Posted by: DrJazz - Sep. 28, 2024 12:05 AM ET USA

  Wow, is this right on! Yes, 50 years of legalized abortion has changed the character of the people of our nation. The law is a teacher, and Roe v. Wade taught people that disposing of babies is legal and acceptable. And the connection of non-marital sex to abortion is important to note. Sex outside of marriage has been accepted by large portions of our society for almost 60 years, and not many people who participate in it want to live by Christian moral standards.

• Posted by: philtech2465 - Sep. 27, 2024 10:41 PM ET USA

  Ohio has been a mostly "red" state in recent years. But yet, when presented last fall with an abortion rights issue that went beyond Roe, voters passed it, 57% to 43%. To me, that underscored how "normal" abortion has become. Holy Mary, pray for us.

• Posted by: miketimmer499385 - Sep. 27, 2024 10:30 AM ET USA

  My entire adult life encompasses this timeline and I can testify to the energetic acceptance of recreational sex by the burgeoning throngs of college students in the latter half of the 1960s. It became de rigueur for every generation thereafter and the story continues as you have told it. I'll read Anderson's article, but I must say beforehand I can't imagine anything less than a total collapse of society as we now know it will provide an antidote and new starting ground for the better.