Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stumpp. Back in the nineteen ninety s, advocates of abortion would often describe it as a regrettable necessity, one to be kept safe, legal, and rare. Not anymore. Today, women are encouraged to shout their abortions.
Advocacy is treated as something heroic. Abortions are provided by male. The arguments for safe, legal, and rare abortion back then were very often focused on the physical and mental health of the mother. Similar arguments have also been made in reaction to the trial of Lindsay Clancy. Many have defended her choice to kill her kids as understandable, perhaps even excusable and justified because of her mental state.
Now, the reaction to Clancy is much different than it was to Susan Smith back in 1994, after falsely reporting that her car had been stolen by. A man with her two small children inside. Smith later admitted that her kids were dead. She'd strapped them into car seats, drove them into a lake, and left them to drown.
Now, back then, there was no question whatsoever that Smith was guilty and deserved to be punished. Questions about mental health, level of support, medication—these were not part of the national discussion. There was no suggestion that any of those kinds of difficulties made her crimes anything less than the horrible evil that it was. Much less justifiable. Today, there's far more understanding of the mental distress that young mothers can actually experience, and the kind of support that they need, and that is a good thing.
We should never dismiss all that we've learned about such things.
However, the public discourse surrounding the Clancy trial should alarm all of us because the very same reasoning that was used for decades to justify the killing of preborn children has been used to explain and even justify the horrible killing. Of Clancy's. Born children, an argument often employed by pro-lifers is nicknamed "trot out the toddler." The basic idea is this: When someone claims that an abortion is justified because of a unique set of circumstances, we should ask whether those same circumstances would also justify the taking of the life of a toddler. Because, after all, there are no substantial differences, as pro-life apologist Scott Clusendorf argues so well, between the person that I once was as an embryo or pre-born child. In the person that I am now, that would justify killing me.
The only differences can be remembered by using the acronym SLED: size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency. But neither what size I am nor where I am changes what I am. And every single person is always developing and is always, to one degree or another, always dependent on others. None of these factors alter someone's value, much less justifies killing a. Person, whether in the womb or out, it's worth noting as a mark in time of where our culture of death has now devolved to.
That in reaction to the Lindsay Clancy story, it was the other side trotting out the toddler. Essentially, the claim has been that if mental health struggles legitimize abortion, well, then it should also shape how we think of similar struggles and pressures on women who have borne children.
Now, this is not to suggest that we're somehow a society on the verge of legalizing infanticide.
However, it is to suggest that this slope is really slippery. Arguments long used to explain the choice for an abortion have now been used to explain the horrible choice. To kill a child outside of the womb as well, John Paul II warned long ago that the West was becoming a culture of death; that abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia would return us to a kind of state of barbarism. Mother Teresa also claimed abortion provided irrefutable evidence. That we were a culture of violence, saying, and I quote, "The greatest destroyer of peace today is the cry of the innocent unborn child.
For if a mother can murder her own child in her own womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other?" Similarly, Francis Schaeffer challenged the church by saying, "If we do not take a stand here and now, we certainly cannot lay any claim to being the salt of the earth in our generation." Where neither preserving moral values and the dignity of the individual, nor showing compassion for our fellow human beings, cultures are dynamic. They're not static. They're either evolving or they are devolving. The Clancy trial and the reactions to it, in the end, may just turn out to be a horrible and otherwise insignificant footnote in our history, or it could be more evidence that cultural slopes are indeed slippery. An idea, as normalized by a society, can push them in truly terrible directions.
Abortion's already poisoned our society in so many ways. We ought not be surprised when what it has planted and watered for so long continues to bear terrible fruit. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Paget.
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