I have always been pro-life, in the sense that I have always believed that each human life is God’s precious creation, from the minute-old blastocyst to the last gasp of the elderly. Theologically, this is a no-brainer. As for politics, I have long been of the mind of Plato—people less than fifty probably don’t understand the world well enough to make political proposals, and, as I’m a ways off from that venerable age yet, I will remain wisely reserved on the subject.

That said, it seems to me both terribly problematic to legally endorse the murder of the most vulnerable persons in society, persons who will never be able to start a movement, create a body of literature, or do a march on Washington; and equally problematic to make abortion utterly illegal, simply because illegality will not actually stop abortions from happening.

I was talking recently to some Scandinavians, who have a famously pro-child culture. There is generous maternity leave, discounts for parents on public transit, tax breaks, general public helpfulness to families with children. And yet, in conversation, my Scandinavian friends told me it is nearly impossible to adopt children in their own country. In the rare instances children are available for adoption at all, it is through the foster system—when children have been removed from abusive or neglectful families, and even in those cases the state highly favors return to the family of origin, so few potential adoptive parents are willing to take the risk.

I said, “I’ll bet you have an extremely high abortion rate, don’t you?”

They said yes, they do.

And that’s the crux of it right there.

Pro-lifers are every bit as capable of pompous, self-righteous posturing as the pro-choice camp. I have heard entirely too many pro-life people assert the rights of the unborn as if it all that was involved was intellectual unclarity about the issue—just convince your opponents that life beings at conception and then this whole problem will clear up. I have heard nasty things said about promiscuous women. Whatever kind of arguments these are, they are not Christian.

The proper Christian response to prevalent abortion is to create a culture of adoption. You have no right to insist on preserving the life of the little one in the womb unless you are willing to open your home and your heart to that little one if the mother can’t.

This is a much more frightening prospect than platitudes about morality and scientific quibbles about heartbeats and implantation. This costs—it is costly grace extended to both the mother and the child. But abortion will never become an undesirable alternative until every pregnant woman knows that the life in her womb counts for more that her sins or the sins perpetrated against her, and that there are hundreds, thousands of loving families ready to nurture her child in the way she can’t.

Ultimately—and once again theologically—adoption is the model for God’s family, not natural, biological relations. For more on this, you can take a look at a piece I published in Christianity Today earlier this year.