The judgment behind the abortion numbers

For decades, we have been told that we may not be able to end abortion, but we can reduce it. Political reality requires patience. Incremental laws, strategic compromises, and careful coalition-building will, over time, bend the curve downward.

Fewer abortions this year than last. Fewer still the next. This is what we’ve been told, but the numbers are not bending in the right direction.

The same movement that insists on the humanity of the unborn defends strategies that refuse to treat that humanity as legally binding.

In 2020, the United States saw roughly 930,000 abortions. By 2024, annual abortions had surpassed 1 million again. Monthly averages have continued to rise, moving from roughly 88,000 per month in 2023 to nearly 100,000 per month by 2025 — estimated at over 1.1 million abortions a year.

This is not the trajectory we were promised.

Even in a post-Dobbs world — after decades of work, millions of dollars, and countless political victories — abortion remains not only legal in much of the country, but increasingly accessible.

According to the standard used to justify compromise, the results of our efforts have been thoroughly unimpressive.

If compromise is justified because it reduces abortion, what happens when it does not? If the entire framework rests on pragmatic outcomes, then those outcomes must be honestly measured. If they fail, the justification collapses with them.

The central question, though, was never whether compromise works. The central question is whether compromise is obedience.

Scripture is not silent on this. “To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (James 4:17). That statement assumes that what is right is already understood — and then confronts the refusal to act on it.

That is where the abortion debate now stands.

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For decades, the pro-life movement has argued — rightly — that the unborn child is fully human. Not partially or potentially human. Not a life that becomes valuable later. A human being, made in the image of God, from the moment of conception.

And yet, that premise is not applied in law.

Equal justice is withheld. Justice is knowingly delayed. Entire classes of human beings are acknowledged in rhetoric and denied in practice — through heartbeat bills, 20-week bans, and fetal pain bills.

The same movement that insists on the humanity of the unborn defends strategies that refuse to treat that humanity as legally binding.

To know that a child is fully human and yet defend a legal framework that allows that child to be killed is not a lesser evil. It is a greater evil — because it is compounded.

Scripture goes further. When knowledge increases, so does accountability. When leaders teach truth, they are bound to it. And when they fail to act on what they teach, they do not merely err — they invite judgment.

We have been told to evaluate abortion policy on outcomes alone. But Scripture does not separate outcomes from obedience. It ties them together. God does not bless disobedience because it is politically strategic.

When disobedience is institutionalized — when it becomes the operating principle of a movement — the results should not surprise us.

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Abortion does not decrease under compromise because compromise is not a neutral tool. It is a moral decision. It trains a culture to tolerate the very evil it claims to oppose. It teaches legislators to delay what they confess is urgent. It forms a people who say that the unborn are fully human, while structuring their laws as though they are not.

This is why the numbers do not tell the story we were promised. Not because the strategy was insufficiently refined, but because it was fundamentally misaligned. The issue is not that we have failed to compromise enough. It is that we have compromised at all.

God does not require political feasibility. He requires obedience.

Obedience does not ask how much injustice can be tolerated while we make progress. It asks what justice demands — and then establishes it.

Until that shift is made, the pattern will remain. More laws, more campaigns, more assurances of progress — and the same or worse results. Not because we lack the power to change it, but because we refuse to apply what we already know to be true. Until we do what is right, we should not expect the numbers to change — because God does not bless disobedience. He judges it.

That is why we must fight to establish equal justice under the law for our preborn neighbors — not by regulating abortion, but by abolishing it.