Last week, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Planned Parenthood offered free abortions and vasectomies in an RV parked outside of the convention hall. According to CBS News, this abortion clinic on wheels served between 20 and 30 patients in just the first two days and also distributed abortion pills and emergency contraception. The point of the RV, according to a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman, was to fill “healthcare gaps” for people who had traveled to the convention from states that had restricted abortion since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.  

Attendees to the convention were also greeted by a 20-foot-tall inflatable intrauterine device named “Freeda Womb.” It was placed in the entrance hall of the convention center by the group Americans for Contraception, in order to “bring awareness to the threat to contraception and abortion access in the country following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.” 

In a cartoonish-yet-ghoulish display, the Democratic Party of 2024 has proclaimed an absolute fealty to abortion. While Republicans are guilty of gutting their party’s platform on issues of life and marriage this year, there’s no question which party is committed, with a religious zeal, to the most extreme, liberal positions on these issues. After all, the party’s presidential candidate is the most stridently pro-abortion politician ever to run on a major party ticket. 

It wasn’t always like this. Commenting on the DNC abortion RV, Bishop Robert Barron noted the “remarkable evolution” of leading Democrats on abortion in recent decades. According to Bishop Barron, “When I was a young man, Democrats as prominent as Sen. Edward Kennedy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and yes, Joe Biden were enthusiastic pro-life advocates.”   

Even those not old enough to remember when those men changed their views might remember Bill Clinton’s admonition, somewhere in the ’90s, that abortion ought to be “safe, legal, and rare.” However, when his wife ran for president in 2016, she supported state-funded abortion up to the moment of birth. Former New York governor Mario Cuomo reportedly claimed to have “wrestled mightily with his Catholic conscience” over abortion, but his son Andrew lit up skyscrapers in New York City to celebrate so-called “reproductive rights.” We’ve come a long way baby. 

And where are we, exactly? Last year, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed a bill into law to remove the longstanding requirement that doctors offer life-saving treatment to babies born alive after botched abortions. In other words, he legalized infanticide. Walz is now, of course, the Democratic candidate for vice president of the United States.    

According to Bishop Barron, this year’s Democratic National Convention represents the “appalling declension” of a party that once admitted that abortion was tragic or at least regrettable. No more. Abortion is to be celebrated, even given away like candy at a parade.  

This decline has been awful to watch, but the journey to that awful should be noted. In the first chapter of Romans, Paul described how human beings “suppress the truth” through unrighteousness. As a result, they become “futile in their thinking.” Their foolish hearts are darkened, which leads to more unrighteousness. The moral descent continues with humans practicing even more unspeakable things and, in the end, giving “approval to those who practice them.” Put differently, they not only commit evil, they celebrate it.  

This is the story of the Democratic Party on sexuality and abortion. Practicing abortion led to accepting it, not as a regrettable choice but as a celebration of absolute bodily autonomy. Once politicized, the idea that human beings are detached, self-determining individuals without natural duties or dependence on others corrupted sex, turning it into a zero-sum power struggle between men and women, and between women and children. Bloodshed was always inevitable in this way of thinking.  

However, human beings aren’t detached bundles of rights in an eternal power struggle with each other. We are interdependent, never more so than in the radically asymmetrical bond between a mother and her preborn child. Babies, in and out of the womb, remind us of this truth about who we are, but the only way to maintain absolute autonomy is to suppress that truth. In the end, the prevention and disposal of babies becomes a kind of political sacrament, celebrated to a cartoonish degree.  

Clearly, a corner has been turned on abortion in this nation. Of course, there is much good news to report of good work being done in so many places to protect and preserve innocent life. Praise God for that. But we should not so quickly turn away from the ghoulish display in Chicago last week. Not only is it a reminder of all that is at stake in this issue, but it also reveals what happens to people and to parties and to nations that suppress the truth in unrighteousness. 

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.