Why Can't Christians Just "Get Over" the Abortion Issue?

Why is abortion such a big deal? Why can't Christians just move on and deal with other important issues related to justice? 

Here is the brief version:

• It is a serious injustice (killing an innocent person)
• It is happening on a massive scale (862,327 a year. Over 60 million since 1973 in the US)
• It is done legally and therefore with the permission of the government which is supposed to protect its citizens.

The points below elaborate on this:

1. Abortion is the intentional killing of a human life. (all 46 human chromosomes are combined at the moment of fertilization so it is human life. The intention of abortion is the destruction of this human life).

2. There is no philosophical reason for distinguishing between a toddler and an unborn person when it comes to his or her dignity and right to life as a human being (i.e. size, level of development, degree of dependency, or location do not change a person’s value or inherent right to life).

3. Based on points 1 and 2, there is no philosophical or scientific reason to treat the unborn differently than a toddler when it comes to the right to life.

4. Abortion is widespread. There were 862,327 abortions in 2017 (per planned parenthood’s research wing).

5. The unborn are the most vulnerable in society because they cannot speak in defense of themselves. In addition, they are the most innocent people on the planet.

6. These people are being killed legally. As Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert George wrote, “For government to permit abortion . . . is for government itself to commit an injustice against its victims — denying a disfavored class, the unborn, protection it affords to all others. To be responsible, or partially responsible, for the injustice of the law in exposing unborn children to legally authorized lethal violence is to be complicit in grave injustice” (https://www.nationalreview.com/.../10/19/voting-for-life/)"

7. As Christians, we believe all these children are made in God’s image and that is the fundamental basis for their dignity and right to life.

Therefore, we must not give up on fighting to end abortion. 

We find a good exhortation from William Wilberforce, who fought to end the slave trade in England. He wrote, 

“Never, never will we desist till we . . . [extinguish] every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonor to this country.”[1] 

Let us have the same resolve. 

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[1] William Wilberforce, speaking for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, on April 18, 1791, in the House of Parliament, The Parliamentary History of England from The Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1817), 24:278.