A Pro-Life Society is a Non-Liberal, Religious Society
Protests at the Supreme Court of the United States on the day Roe vs Wade was overturned.
"2022.06.24 Roe v Wade Overturned – SCOTUS, Washington, DC USA 175 143227" by Ted Eytan is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
By Georges Buscemi, President of Campagne Québec-Vie
Last year’s reversal of the Roe vs. Wade decision in the U.S. may have prompted some to believe that a tectonic shift was underway in favour of the protection of unborn life in the U.S. and around the world. However, this stunning pro-life victory, which abolishes any so-called “right” to abortion in the U.S. and grants states the right to limit—or liberalize—abortion as they see fit, as epochal as it may be, should motivate pro-lifers to deepen their view of the battle against abortion, if they wish to make any long-term progress. For, as I have argued elsewhere, the fight over abortion is symptomatic of a deeper cultural battle between two opposing worldviews: the first an a-religious “liberal” worldview, and the second a non-liberal, religious worldview. While the fall of Roe is good news for the pro-life side, the ultimate defeat of abortion will depend on each country’s success, on both an individual and societal level, at rejecting the “pro-choice” or liberal worldview and adopting the religious one.
My diagnosis seems to have been at least partially confirmed by a recent Pew Research Center study on Global Attitudes to Abortion and Religion. Published on June 20, this international survey of 24 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, first reveals a disturbing truth, that favourable attitudes towards legal abortion predominate in Europe and North America. In Canada, for example, over 75% of the population agrees that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, whereas 17% wishes it were illegal. In the UK, 84% of the population favours legal abortion and 14% opposes it, while in the U.S., 62% believe that abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, whereas 36% say the opposite. In certain European countries, the situation is far more dire: in Sweden, for example, an overwhelming 95% of the population thinks abortion should be legal in all or most cases, with a barely measurable remnant of 2 or 3 percent thinking otherwise.
But what I consider the most interesting part of this study is its demonstration that attitudes to abortion are very closely related to attitudes towards religion. This study shows that in country after country, with very few exceptions, religious adherence (or lack thereof) precisely predicts whether the country will be disposed or not to legalizing abortion. In Indonesia, for example, where 97% of the country’s 274 million people deem religion to be “very” important, fully 83% think that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Conversely, in the land of Ikea (Sweden) where 95% agree that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a corresponding 74% believe religion to be not at all or not too important to them. In other words, the more religious, the more pro-life and conversely, the more a-religious, the more “pro-choice” or favourable to legal abortion.
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