There is a recurring temptation within the pro-life movement to conclude, after decades of legal and cultural struggle, that the movement itself has failed. Frustration mounts, blame is assigned, and calls arise for an entirely new strategy—one unconcerned with political prudence and indifferent to consequences. This impulse is understandable. It is also, on close examination, short-sighted. The abortion debate cannot be properly understood, much less won, without first reckoning with the centuries-long history of ideas that made abortion culturally plausible in the first place. To grow impatient with the pro-life movement without understanding that history is to misdiagnose the problem entirely.
A Visual Lesson from Oxford
This argument begins, unexpectedly, in the quadrangle outside the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a building dating to the fourteenth century. Surrounding the entrance are small doorways, each inscribed with the name of an academic discipline: theology, philosophy, music, philosophy of religion, and what might loosely be called the study of politics, or “the body politic.” At first glance this seems a minor architectural detail. In fact, it conveys a worldview.
Each of these doorways represents a distinct field of study, yet all of them open onto the same courtyard and lead into the same library. Science, philosophy, politics, and theology were not, in the medieval and early Renaissance mind, walled off from one another. They were integrated branches of a single body of knowledge. Ethics and morals were not treated as private sentiment; they were considered real knowledge, on par with anything empirically verifiable. Theology, likewise, was not dismissed as opinion but pursued as a legitimate, rigorous discipline worthy of serious inquiry.
That unified vision of knowledge no longer describes the modern West. Since the Enlightenment, Western culture has increasingly narrowed the definition of “real knowledge” to what can be measured empirically—what can be tasted, touched, seen, heard, or felt. Everything else, including ethics, morality, and questions of ultimate meaning, has been quietly reclassified as personal opinion. Understanding how this shift occurred, and how long it has been underway, is essential context for anyone laboring in the pro-life movement today.
Ideas That Predate the 1960s by Centuries
It is tempting to imagine that the intellectual scaffolding supporting abortion, and more radical positions such as infanticide advocated by thinkers like Peter Singer and Michael Tooley, emerged suddenly in the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. This is a mistake. The worldview premises that make abortion plausible to millions of people today were not invented in the twentieth century. They are the product of a philosophical trajectory stretching back for centuries, and arguably millennia.
In the Old Testament era, right and wrong were understood as objective features of reality, not internal constructs. They existed independently of human recognition or consent. The Mosaic Law reflected the conviction that these moral realities were knowable, and that human beings had an obligation to conform to them. Outside the Hebrew tradition, the classical world reached a similar, if not identical, conclusion. Aristotelian philosophy held that virtues were real, knowable, and something to be cultivated through a deliberate pursuit of the good life. Greek and Roman thinkers disagreed among themselves about the content of morality, but not about whether morality was real.
The early Christian church inherited this confidence in objective moral knowledge while adding a distinctive theological claim: believers are justified by the finished work of Christ on the cross, and that justification is followed by sanctification—a Spirit-empowered transformation that conforms the believer’s life to Christ. Unlike the Aristotelian model, in which virtue is cultivated primarily through human will and discipline, the Christian account holds that human beings are bent toward evil from the outset and require divine regeneration to pursue genuine righteousness. Yet despite this theological distinctiveness, Christians shared with both their Hebrew predecessors and their Greco-Roman neighbors a basic conviction: moral truth is objective, real, and binding, whether or not any individual acknowledges it.
Even the Romans who ruled during the time of Christ, whose practices often diverged sharply from Christian ethics, did not dispute that a real distinction between right and wrong existed. They differed on content, not on the underlying category. This consensus persisted well into the medieval period. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught that human beings possess a soul oriented toward particular virtues, and that cultivating those virtues was both possible and obligatory.
The Subtle Shift and the Enlightenment Break
Toward the end of the medieval period, cracks began to appear in this unified edifice. Thinkers such as William of Ockham began emphasizing particulars over universals, a subtle philosophical move that, while not amounting to full relativism, planted seeds that would germinate later. It was the Enlightenment that broke the dam entirely. Thinkers such as Hobbes and, later, David Hume argued for a firm division between empirically verifiable facts and moral judgments, which they recast as mere passions or subjective preferences rather than objective realities.
This is precisely the split visualized by the doorways at the Bodleian: a unified field of knowledge fractured into “real” empirical knowledge on one side and “mere opinion,” including ethics and theology, on the other. Once morality was reclassified as subjective preference rather than objective truth, the door opened to the idea that morality is not discovered but constructed—negotiated through social contract or personal taste rather than apprehended as a feature of reality. Immanuel Kant complicated the picture further, suggesting that even if objective moral truth exists, human beings are trapped behind their own perceptions and cannot reliably access it. The cumulative effect of these developments was the fact-value split that dominates contemporary secular thought: science yields facts, and everything else, including morality, is relegated to the realm of unverifiable opinion.
From Nietzsche to the Present Desecration of Human Dignity
Friedrich Nietzsche understood better than most of his contemporaries what this shift ultimately implied. In his famous parable of the madman, Nietzsche depicts a figure confronting atheists who have, in their own minds, “killed God.” He presses them on whether they grasp the full implications of that act: in killing God, they have also killed objective morality and any rational foundation for moral knowledge. The atheists in the parable scoff, and Nietzsche concludes that he has arrived too early—that centuries would pass before people fully lived out the implications of a godless universe in which the autonomous self reigns supreme, unconstrained by any external claim upon it.
That later moment, many observers argue, has now arrived. Carl Trueman’s work on the modern self helps explain how the current cultural moment differs even from the more casual skepticism of the 1960s and 70s. What we now witness is not merely the marginalization of the idea that human beings bear the image of God and possess intrinsic dignity and purpose; it is something closer to an intentional desecration of that idea, pursued with something like religious fervor. Technology—never a neutral tool—has become the means by which this desecration is enacted. Medical technology allows individuals to physically reconstruct their bodies in defiance of their biology. Digital and legal technologies allow that reconstructed identity to be asserted, defended, and enforced against anyone who would question it. The underlying logic is consistent: if human beings possess intrinsic purposes and intrinsic dignity, then obligations follow from that fact, and the autonomous self is no longer free to pursue any self-vision it chooses. Removing the premise of intrinsic dignity removes the obligation along with it.
Lessons from Wilberforce and Lincoln
Given this centuries-long trajectory, it should be no surprise that ideas entrenched since the Enlightenment are not dislodged in a single generation, let alone by a single piece of legislation or a shift in rhetorical strategy. History offers instructive parallels. William Wilberforce spent nearly forty years pursuing the abolition of slavery in Britain. His initial push for full abolition failed, forcing a tactical shift toward abolishing the slave trade first—a victory achieved in 1807 that laid the groundwork for eventual total abolition. Wilberforce endured criticism from those who considered incremental legislative gains a betrayal of principle, yet his willingness to compromise tactically, without compromising his underlying convictions, proved decisive.
A similar pattern appears in the American abolitionist movement. Abraham Lincoln, committed in principle to ending slavery, drew criticism from more zealous abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, who famously burned a copy of the Constitution in protest of what he saw as its complicity with slavery. Yet it was Lincoln’s prudent, carefully calibrated approach—not Garrison’s uncompromising purism—that ultimately produced abolition. Frederick Douglass himself, eulogizing Lincoln, credited the president’s patient statesmanship, not the fiery immediacy of the abolitionist fringe, with making emancipation a reality.
Conclusion
The pro-life movement operates within a culture shaped by ideas centuries in the making, from the fact-value split of the Enlightenment to the more recent, deliberate rejection of intrinsic human dignity described by thinkers like Trueman. Recognizing this history does not counsel passivity or resignation. It counsels prudence: an understanding that entrenched worldview premises require sustained, patient, and strategically wise engagement rather than impatience directed at fellow pro-lifers who differ on tactics. Wilberforce and Lincoln did not achieve their reforms by abandoning principle for expedience, nor by charging ahead heedless of cultural realities. They achieved them by understanding their times. The same patient wisdom, applied to the ideas that make abortion plausible today, remains the pro-life movement’s surest path forward.