How Can We Negotiate With Death?

Al Mohler writes well here on the abortion issue:

Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, abortion on demand is now an ingrained part of American culture. Many Americans are willing to consider it a "right" even as they would never consider an abortion for themselves. Roe is now a precedent protected by a wall of other precedents in the law. If Roe were to be overturned tomorrow, we would be in for a battle on a state-by-state basis that might take decades -- and might not turn out as we hope.

I can understand the fatigue and the sense of frustration. On the other hand, we have witnessed a growing respect for life as ultrasound technologies have opened the womb to view. We have seen the Supreme Court allow that some abortion procedures can be ruled outside the law. We see pro-life convictions growing among the young. This is a moral conflict that might take a century or more to run its course.

I can understand the desire to reset the equation, to transcend the tired divisions. I can even understand the desire to move on, to go on to other issues of great and grave concern. I can sense excitement about a candidate who represents generational hope, and whose election could do so much to heal racial lines of division.

But I just cannot get past one crucial, irreducible, and central issue -- the moral status of those unborn lives. They are not mine to negotiate. If abortion were a matter of concern for anything less than this, I would gladly negotiate. But abortion is a matter of life and death, and how can we negotiate with death? What moral sense does it make to settle for death as "safe, legal, and rare?" How safe? How rare?

Our considerations of these questions will reveal what we really think of those millions of unborn lives. Do we consider the battle for their lives permanently lost?

Those fighting for the abolition of slavery pressed on against obstacles and set backs worse than these because, after all, these were human lives they were defending. What if they had listened to those who, after Dred Scott and the Missouri Compromise, said that the battle was "permanently" lost? What if they had been intimidated by critics accusing them of "single-issue" voting?

If every single fetus is an unborn child made in the image of God, there is no moral justification for settling for a vague hope of some reduction in the number of fetal homicides. If the abortion fight is "permanently lost," it will be lost first among those who claim to be defenders of life -- those who tell us that the argument is merely changing.