Abortion is the “safe” evangelical social justice issue
There is a costliness to pursuing justice.
Number one, abortion may or may not ever personally affect you. Obviously its a possibility for any family. Its always on the table there, but if your family hasn’t gone though it or if you’re not a woman there’s only so close that this issue is going to get to you. You can speak about it abstractly. You can speak about it philosophically and never have encountered it in a personal way that affects your heart personally.
The other thing is its not even financially costly for most people. You can be staunchly pro-life in the sense of wanting to overturn Roe-v-Wade at best you donate money to a charity or cause you believe in. But seeing this change occur is not going to change your lifestyle in any significant way; certainly not in terms of material comfort. So that’s a lot easier to get behind than something like refusing to go to speaking engagements that don’t feature women or people of color, or talking about reparations and what that might look like in terms of a church or a nation and how that might cause us to sacrifice financially.
You can publicly posture about this really well. You can post on social media, you can write articles, you can preach sermons, and its really good optics to make you look righteous. But you don”t even necessarily have to really mean it. Because you can talk about all of this stuff and it doesn’t have to—it can, but it doesn’t have to—require much personal sacrifice
Lastly, and I think this is what’s most insidious, really about any justice issue, but particularly about this is you can sort of publicly posture but secretly support abortion. Because when it comes to your family or when it’s you, you can say “ok, this is the best decision for me or my loved one” you will never know the number specifically but its not zero.
I’m talking about people who will publicly posture like they’re so pro-life and staunchly for having babies in basically any situation but then when it actually hits your family and your situation and your network then suddenly you take another tac. So that bugs me about the whole thing.
[Individual decisions and morality vs systemic situations a decision that happens in a vacuum]