The possibility that Roe v. Wade might be overturned is a rip tide in the culture war. There were enough indications from the Dobbs v. Jackson hearing late last year to the give pro-life side cause for hope and the pro-abortion side cause for despair.

The argument has shifted over the years from “Is it right to destroy the life of a baby in the womb that is irrefutably human?” to “Is it really a human in the womb?” It echos eerily the deception in the Garden of Eden when the serpent Satan asks, “Did God really say…?” This metamorphosis takes away the morality question and replaces it with one that focuses on semantics and value judgment. Hadley Arkes defines value judgment as “a term that came into play with Nietzsche and Max Weber, as people began to lose confidence in speaking of ‘moral truths.’” She says people “would speak rather of things that were important insofar as people ‘valued’ them.”

Children in the womb are only as valuable as they are wanted by their parents and by society (see the one-child policy devastation in China). If they are not deemed valuable, they are expendable, and any argument to justify those means will be used.

This shift though is hardly unforeseeable. As cultures moved away from faith in God to rewriting the Scripture to suit their own ideas, language changed to justify morally abhorrent things. Notice the language that pro-abortion advocates use when describing mother and child: The mother is a “victim.” The unborn, unwanted child is a “fetus,” i.e., merely a parasite to the poor oppressed mother. (Note: Some mothers are victims of crimes that have led to an unwanted pregnancy. They are not the only victims, though. The baby is also made to pay for the sins of the father should the mother choose to abort him or her.)

The language of dehumanization used on both mother and child is the slippery slope that leads to unspeakable atrocities. We see it over and over again in history. In Rwanda, the Hutus justified the genocide of the Tutsis by calling them cockroaches and snakes. In Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis called the Jews rats. It is much easier to talk yourself into killing something you don’t consider human.

Red states are taking their cue from Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and Texas’s heartbeat legislation (six weeks gestation) as the template for their own laws should the issue of abortion be given back to the states to decide.

Meanwhile, Democrats are passing legislation to the other extreme. They even rationalize abortion to the point of psychopathy. In Virginia, the state’s Senate Democrats voted against a bill that would protect a baby who survived an abortion. Leftists literally would have medical providers leave a living baby to die from lack of care. This is irrefutable baby murder. The living, breathing survivor’s humanity cannon be denied at that point.

More states than not, however, are passing laws to protect preborn children. This is a victory in the war against a silent genocide.