Friday, January 19, 2007

This Monday marks the thirty-fourth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. On January 23, 1973, the New York Times reported that the Court had “settled” the dispute over abortion. Thirty-four years later, there is no more intensely contested issue in our public life. This is in itself a powerful tribute to pro-life conviction and determination. When Roe v. Wade came down, it was cheered by every major opinion-making institution in the country—the mainstream media, the prestige academy, the legal establishment, the medical establishment, the philanthropic world, and all the major religious institutions, except one.

Among the religious institutions of national influence, the Catholic Church stood alone in protesting the immediate evil and long-term implications of Roe v. Wade. Although it is largely forgotten today, evangelical Protestantism was in support of Roe v. Wade. Years after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant association in the country, was passing resolutions in favor of a woman’s “right to choose.” (See Timothy George’s 2005 Erasmus Lecture, “Evangelicals and Others,” reprinted in the February 2006 issue of First Things.) Evangelicals viewed the protection of the unborn as a “Catholic issue,” and anti-Catholicism in evangelicalism was much stronger than it is today.

Thanks to the indefatigable labors of Francis Schaeffer, importantly assisted by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, evangelicalism was in the late 1970s being brought around to understand the evil of the abortion license and what it portended for the future defense of the dignity of the human person. Today evangelicals and Catholics stand solidly together, but by no means alone, in the defense of innocent human life, as witness, for instance, the recent statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, “That They May Have Life.”

posted by Shaun Kenney | 1/19/2007 07:26:00 PM | 0 comments

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