The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

When it comes to ethical decision-making in America right now, our leaders give every evidence of having their feet firmly anchored in mid-air!  The result is confusion, dysfunction and an abandonment of the clear, ethical guidelines provided for us in Scripture.  Permit me a few examples of this ethical confusion:

• First, youth gender medicine of all kinds is a controversial and important issue at the national, state and judicial levels.  For example, on 24 June, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case challenging a Tennessee law that prohibits “gender-affirming care for transgender youths.” United States v. Skrmetti addresses whether the state ban violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  This will be an important decision when it is handed down.

Furthermore, as Casey Hough of World Hope Ministries International reports, the Biden administration’s recently announced opposition to gender transition surgeries for minors. “But Christians would be mistaken to let this news make us less vigilant on this issue.  The announcement only came after The New York Times reported [in late June] on efforts by the administration to ‘remove age limits for adolescent surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors.’ And the White House clarified that the administration still supports ‘gender-affirming care for minors, which represents a continuum of care,’ and respects ‘the role of parents, families, and doctors in these decisions.’  Tennessee’s law currently differentiates the rights of a minor for treatment of a ‘congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury’ from treatments rendered for ‘gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, gender incongruence, or any mental condition, disorder, disability, or abnormality.’ Even so, medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association (AMA) oppose such laws based on the claims that such medical procedures have reduced suicide attempts and decreased rates of depression and anxiety among minors who identify as transgender.  The neglected question is whether that’s true. What has been overlooked in these debates is that the well-being and long-term health of minors is taking a back seat to appeasing activists and politicians.”

Such procedures, whether they be puberty-blocking medications or various surgeries, are misguided attempts by medical professionals who sincerely believe that they are helping children. To even speak of “gender-affirming care” in an unqualified manner betrays a Christian’s fundamental convictions about the dignity of human life. “Medicine heals the body; gender reassignment surgery disfigures it.”  In fact, while American activist and medical groups claim that “gender-affirming care” works, other medical groups in Europe are questioning these claims, raising serious concerns about the ongoing health impact of these procedures, which is giving pause to medical professionals and lawmakers alike around the world. Recently, UK researcher Hilary Cass released her review of relevant studies and flagged the unstudied long-term impact of such medical procedures on minors, especially regarding “cognitive and psychosexual development.”

As Hough acutely observes, “these procedures are steeped in the demonstrably false idea that our gender has no relationship to our biology. If we desire to offer compassionate care to those who are in distress, we are best to counsel our children on the goodness of their created bodies as those made in God’s image. God’s design for his creation is very good (Gen. 1:31). The compassionate and loving course of action in these cases is not found in embracing a lie but in speaking the truth in love (Eph. 4:15).  With children experiencing gender dysphoria, we must be patient, listen to them, pray for them, teach them, and, when necessary, connect them with a professional Christian counselor . . . Doctors and surgeons currently perform these irreversible procedures with near impunity due to poorly researched studies that suggest there is some immediate benefit conferred to the child suffering from these mental disorders. Long-term studies, however, show that people ‘with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population’. . . The Biden administration’s opposition to surgery is a start, but it’s only a start. Christians should support comprehensive bans on these treatments out of regard for God’s good design for humanity and his express purpose for governments in society (Rom. 13:1–17). Such laws guide our governing authorities and serve a good purpose that benefits all of humanity. We should desire and support such laws, for they prevent irreparable harm to the most vulnerable people among us and affirm that God has created and ordered us for his glory and our good.”

• Second, the new Republican National Convention platform endorsed by Donald Trump is missing the strong pro-life stance evangelicals have come to expect from the GOP. Instead of calling for a concerted national push to curtail abortion, as the official party platform has done for the past 40 years, the new document removes that language and deems the matter best left to individual states to decide.  Harvest Prude of Christianity Today summarizes that “The new platform document takes a softened approach on many social issues and is less detailed overall on exact policies than previous versions . . . In 2020, Republicans chose not to write a new party platform, merely carrying over the 2016 platform. For the past two campaign cycles, the platform devoted over 700 words to abortion and the life issue. It endorsed the ‘sanctity of human life,’ weighed in on policy specifics such as congressional legislation and court decisions, and pledged that the GOP would seek a federal abortion ban that limited the procedure after 20 weeks gestation. In contrast, the considerably pared-down platform for 2024 gives the issue 110 words. The new platform argues that the 14th Amendment, which says that states may not deprive any person the right to life, liberty, or property without due process, means ‘the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.’  The document goes on to voice opposition to ‘late term abortion’—the only time the word abortion is used—and says the Republican Party will support policies that support mothers and prenatal care, as well as access to birth control and in vitro fertilization (IVF).”  The New York Times reported that Trump was laser focused on watering down the language on abortion. Finally, the platform also dropped language condemning the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage and omitted references to “traditional marriage.”

Evangelical leaders thereby joined together in a chorus of criticism and disappointment:

1. “A moment when the abortion industry has been knocked on its heels is no time to shrink from a full-throated commitment to protecting preborn lives,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, toldPolitico.
2. “This is pro-choice language, in keeping with Trump’s pro-choice position. The sleight of hand is that it seems to claim the 14th Amendment applies to the unborn. But if the GOP believes that’s true, then the federal government, not just the states, has a duty to protect life,” wrote Joe Carter, in a piece for The Gospel Coalition. “The platform does no such thing. It gives broad support for IVF (even when it causes the death of a child) and only lists opposition to late-term abortion.”
3. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who was a member of the platform committee, called the process “choreographed” in a statementand said it allowed for “no amendments to be discussed and voted upon.”   He said that delegates had to vote on the platform the same day they received it, without sufficient review time, and were only afforded a few minutes for discussion before the vote was taken.
4. “On abortion, many states are becoming a black hole for the most vulnerable. Donald Trump won the 2016 election on the GOP’s most pro-life platform in US history. It’s both bad politics and wrong morally to weaken the party’s commitment to the most vulnerable,” Aaron Baer, president of the Ohio-based Center for Christian Virtue, told CT.
5. “For all those consoling themselves that the GOP is still better than the alternative on abortion, keep in mind that being a little less pro-choice than the Democrats is not a pro-life position,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Denny Burk commented.  In an article for World, Burk wrotethat “pro-lifers understood the deal they were making in 2016 when they turned out to vote for the Republican candidate,” referencing Trump’s pledge to appoint justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.  “But now it looks as if Trump is altering the deal for his possible second term—a deal that has eviscerated the pro-life plank of the Republican Party platform,” Burk wrote.

As R.R. Reno of First Things concludes, “This is a confusing moment for pro-life politics. For decades, overturning Roe received most of the attention. As a result, pro-life politicians and advocates rarely had urgent debates in which prudence was weighed against principle. Now we must have such debates, and amid ominous developments, as ballot initiatives in deep-red states confirm that Americans regard abortion as essential. What should pro-life politicians do?

• Back the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion. This measure is agnostic about the legal status of abortion, ensuring only that taxpayers who object to it will not fund abortion through their tax dollars.
• Oppose efforts to import Canada’s evil regime of doctor-assisted suicide. Republican politicians should promise to appoint judges who will not invent a spurious “right to die.” The pro-life cause is about more than abortion.
• Decry the prosecution of anti-abortion protestors by the Biden administration.
• Speak of the sanctity of life and express the hope that every child will be protected in law and welcomed in life. “Even as we acknowledge the political realities of a society addicted to abortion, we must always identify the truth that we seek to defend.”

The sanctity of life cause is at a turning point. Dobbs was rightly decided. Our Constitution no longer accords privileges to the culture of death. And yet Dobbs exposed a terrible truth: “The culture of death has made deep inroads into our society. The danger is twofold. Our political leaders may capitulate, deeming the battle for life not worth fighting. And we, in our rage, may fail to support those who pick their battles, fighting only where they have hope of a meaningful victory.”

• Third is a seemingly obscure Supreme Court case handed down at the very end of the latest Supreme Court term:  Moyle v. United States.   David French argues that “Moyle illuminates a deep conflict within the anti-abortion movement . . . The court dismissed the case as ‘improvidently granted.’ In plain English, it means that it never should have taken the case in the first place . . . The question at issue in Moyle was simple: ‘Whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) pre-empts a provision of Idaho law that prohibits abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother.’ The act is a Reagan-era law that requires hospitals that participate in Medicare to provide stabilizing treatment for people with emergency medical conditions, regardless of their ability to pay.”

The conflict with Idaho’s law is obvious: “What if a pregnant woman suffers from an emergency medical condition that requires an abortion to stave off serious injury but the condition isn’t life-threatening? After all, people go to emergency rooms for serious but non-life-threatening conditions all the time. If a pregnant woman goes to an emergency room and she faces serious physical peril—but not an imminent mortal threat—should she be treated fundamentally differently because she is carrying a child?”

As Justice Barrett wrote in her opinion concurring with the court’s decision to dismiss the case, the federal government’s witnesses claimed that Idaho’s law “might prohibit abortions as treatment for conditions including severe heart failure, pre-eclampsia, preterm premature rupture of the membranes, sepsis and placental abruption, because a physician could not know, ‘with certainty,’ that an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life in those circumstances.”

French:  “That is extraordinary, but it is completely consistent with the philosophy of the so-called abortion abolitionist movement. Many abortion abolitionists refuse to acknowledge any exceptions permitting an abortion. In 2021, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention passed an abolitionist resolution that declared that Baptists “state unequivocally that abortion is murder, and we reject any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of our preborn neighbors.  This language goes far beyond even declaring that unborn children possess equal status with their mothers. It puts them in a superior position. Outside of the abortion context, we do not grant any person a right to inflict serious bodily harm (even unintentionally) on an innocent person. The abortion abolitionist ethos fundamentally contradicts the principle of “love them both”—both mother and child, that is—that has undergirded the best of the anti-abortion movement.”

He concludes that “the pro-life movement cannot be exclusively anti-abortion. It is not moral or legal equality to elevate the unborn child over the life and physical health of the mother.  Many of the most strident abortion abolitionists I know would open fire on another human being in an instant if they believed they were under serious threat. That same person would then tell a pregnant woman who is screaming in agony in the midst of a gravely serious medical emergency that she must suffer profound harm or she and the person who treats her could face murder charges.”

The Dobbs decision did not by any means settle the abortion issue in America.  It is an excruciatingly difficult issue.  French’s review of the Moyle case illustrates the complexity of the issue, and the need for compassion and empathy.  But the Republican Party platform also demonstrates that politics can seriously water down the sanctity of life cause significantly.  Politics has little authority when it comes to affirming the value of life, even life in the womb.

See Casey Hough “Serving Our Children Means Saying No to Youth Gender Medicine” in www.christianitytoday.com (9 July 2024); R. R. Reno, “The Republican Party Sidelines the Pro-Life Cause” in First Things (15 July 2024); Harvest Prude “Republican Party Backs Away from Pro-Life Stance in New Platform” www.christiantytoday.com (9 July 2024); and David French “The Supreme Court Puts the Pro-Life Movement to the Test” in the New York Times (30 June 2024).