Roe v. Wade: CT’s Response Over the Decades

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in the United States, Christianity Today has featured many articles arguing for the sanctity of human life and examining how Christians can respond. Here’s a selection of some of our key articles on this topic over the decades.

The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973. Christianity Today responded with this editorial in February 1973.

Norma McCorvey—known as “Roe” in Roe v. Wade—later came to faith in Christ and changed her views on abortion. This 1998 article details her conversion story.

“Ours is not the first abortion war,” Tim Stafford wrote in this 1989 CT cover story. In “The Abortion Wars: What Most Christians Don’t Know,” Stafford describes historical practices of abortion and infanticide and examines the Christian response.

Christian conviction about the sanctity of life is grounded in Scripture, yet the New Testament does not directly address abortion. In this 1993 article, Michael J. Gorman draws upon Jewish history and ancient texts to demonstrate that a “Jewish antiabortion consensus” was the norm in the first century and that “the earliest Christians shared the antiabortion position of their Jewish forebears.”

This 1999 article examines the prevailing sentiment that abortion is a necessary evil by debunking four myths about the purported need for legalized abortion.

That same year (1999), Frederica Matthewes-Green candidly addressed growing societal acceptance of legal abortion, asserting that while the “debate” may be over, “The pro-life cause is not.”

CT’s 2003 editorial “New Life for Pro-life” assessed changing trends in attitudes toward abortion and declining abortion rates. Whether or not the decline in abortion rates would continue, though, the editorial makes plain: “The pro-life movement is on the right side of history, regardless of cultural trends.”

In 2011, CT responded to what would be one of several undercover video scandals exposing abortion providers participating in unethical behavior and conversations. This article discusses the use of deception by pro-life advocates as well as the Christian response to the undercover video controversy, asserting that “bombshells must not blind us to the routine, everyday scandal of abortion.”

In 2018, Matt Reynolds addressed Roe v. Wade from a different angle. In “Abortion Is Wrong. That’s Not Why Roe v. Wade Is Wrong,” Reynolds asserts, “The wrongness of this decision has precisely nothing to do with the wrongness of abortion. Taking the life of an unborn child is a sin against God and man. Roe, by contrast, is an offense against America’s democratic order.”

In 2019, Andrea Palpant Dilley examined “the intersection of the pro-choice and #MeToo movements.” In “Who Owns a Woman’s Body? Not Who You Think,” Dilley argues that the notion of owning one’s body—a common line of argumentation in abortion debates—“doesn’t, in fact, enable the safety of women or their unborn children and arguably begets more violence against both, not less.”