A Pro-Life Message for a Post-Roe World

As I sit in my rocking chair, my six-month pregnant belly protruding significantly, I can’t help but reflect on this season of Advent, pregnant with waiting, and of the volatile time we are living in as it relates to pregnancy in this post-Roe world.

Just today I was faced with this headline: “Texas woman asks judge to let her terminate pregnancy after lethal fetal diagnosis.” Then, one hour ago, I read this update: “Judge says Texas woman may abort fetus with lethal abnormality.” Add to that, last month a majority of voters in Ohio supported a change to their state constitution with an amendment that enshrines a right to abortion there.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022 in the Dobbs case, pro-lifers rightly celebrated a decision which undoubtedly protected some pre-born children. And yet, abortion is now being battled intensely at a state level, as the above examples show. With some states broadening support for, and access to, the killing of the youngest of our kind, the pro-life movement needs a new emphasis on each individual pro-lifer taking fresh and bold steps to help shift the conversation on the person-to-person level.

As I convey in my forthcoming book My Body for You: A Pro-Life Message for a Post-Roe World, at a time when the slogan “My body, my choice!” is shouted louder than ever, the words of sacrificial love desperately need to be heard. Living out Christ’s words – “This is my body, given for you” – is the only path to victory for life. That was the essence of His mother Mary’s own fiat when she consented to the Holy Spirit overshadowing her and filling her womb with the life of Christ, He whose birth we are mere weeks away from commemorating.

In this season of Advent, my two-year-old has been enjoying frequent readings by husband and me of Raymond Arroyo’s book The Wise Men who Found Christmas. In it there is a rather dramatically illustrated page of a large and terrifying King Herod who is angered at the news that there is a competing king to be born in his midst. Although he does not succeed in killing the Christ child, he does subsequently release terror on the peers of Jesus, ordering the killing of “all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16).

Although my pre-born child is safe in my womb, many other pre-born children are in danger of a deadly fate unleashed by modern-day Herods. This reality is a call to men and women of good will to rise up to spiritual motherhood and fatherhood and to protect, speak for, and nurture the youngest of our kind, while inspiring others to do the same. Now is the time to be further equipped to engage others winsomely and persuasively as the abortion debate only heats up in the months and years to come.