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Foreign It's Wednesday, December 17, 2025. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. As we think about the abortion question, there have been crucial dates that were big turning points. 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States legalized abortion in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision. Then Fast forward to 2020 22, when that same Supreme Court reversed the Roe decision, and we're very thankful for that in the Dobbs decision and thus returned the question of abortion to the states. There was the hope among pro lifers at the time that this would mean a net reduction in the number of abortions performed in the United States. But now it turns out that is not true. And we have pretty ample documentation of the fact that there are now more abortions, by some counts taken seriously by both sides in the debate than was true even before Dobbs. Now, how could that have happened? Well, for one thing, we need to recognize that the entire abortion landscape changed. Now what do I mean by that? The morality changed? No, of course it didn't. But what did change was technology and availability. The big change is telehealth, abortion and its mifepristone, the abortion pill, so called medical abortions as opposed to surgical abortions. Those did not exist when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. Neither existed in the availability that is now the case in 2022 when Roe was reversed in the Dobbs decision. The big game changer here is not just that the issue of abortion was returned to the state. So you now can have a map of the United States. You've got states in which you have not only absolutely available abortion basically at any point up to birth. And you also have taxpayer support for abortion in the very liberal states. You have conservative states, pro life states where abortion is practically unavailable, at least in terms of abortion clinics, et cetera. But you have that and you have the overlay of telehealth, which means that a woman seeking an abortion and yes, we're going to continue to talk in those terms because that's what we are talking about. It's not a pregnant person is a pregnant woman calling the telehealth authorities in order to arrange for what's usually a prescription or perhaps even the mail order delivery of the abortion pill regimen. And then you have the availability of the pill itself. It's availability throughout so much of society. And you have some legal challenges to this. You've got pro life states, you have attorneys general in those states suing against abortion pill providers in other states being able to mail in the abortion pills to their states. You've got a lot of things going on here. But in moral terms and Christian worldview terms, there are some huge issues we need to confront. Number one, what about abortion? Why is it that arguably there are now more abortions, there are more babies being destroyed in the womb than was true even before the Dobbs decision in 2022? Why? I think it is because we need to understand that the logic of abortion has taken a deep residence within American culture, within this civilization, I think, to a degree that pro lifers never adequately recognized the logic of the culture of death. It is now deep in American society. It's deeply embedded. So much so that some of the people who will even answer the question say they're pro life. When their own unmarried daughter gets pregnant, their impulse is to take her to an abortion clinic or to get her the abortion pills by telehealth. That just shows you how much ground we have lost. And you know, there are some people on the pro life side who would say you shouldn't talk this way because it weakens our case legislatively. But, you know, the truth is the truth, and the truth is that we are now in a situation in which the telehealth availability, the abortion pill availability, and you add to that what is undeniably a demand for abortion, it means that the number of abortions is actually higher than it was before the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Now, again, I said that these numbers are basically agreed upon by both sides in the debate. And that's an interesting thing here. And so you have pro lifers and pro abortionists who basically say, yep, this pretty much is the math, this is the way it turns out. I want to point to a statement made by a pro abortionist which I think really ought to demand our attention for a bit. It appears in a headline news story in the New York Times and the headline is this. Three years after Dobbs. The reality is people are getting abortions. That's the quotation in the headline of a statement from a very pro abortion source. The subhead in the story, the state divide over abortions has only deepened since the Supreme Court decision, but research shows the number of abortions has climbed. The article is basically telling us that the pro abortion side is arguing that the numbers are up because people are just going to get abortions. Women are just going to demand abortions and they're going to get them one way or another. It's a very interesting statement. One professor who's also a public health scientist at the University of California at San Francisco, said, quote, the U.S. is becoming a tale of two countries in terms of abortion access and abortion policy. So there's that abortion map. You've got pro abortion states, you've got pro life states, but when you look at the overlay of telehealth and the abortion pill, well, that's where the states get all mixed together. But then we have to go back to this statement from this professor of public health, public health scientists at the University of California, who went on to say, quote, all of this legislation will never take away from the fact that women will continue to need abortion care and continue to get abortion care. Now, you'll notice the euphemism here. You'll notice the language, the shifting here. One of the signs of the fact you've got a real problem is the presence of euphemism. No one will say on the pro abortion side or very rarely will say what's really taking place. In other words, what you have here is the redefinition of all this into women will need abortion care. Abortion care. Let's just remind ourselves, women, what abortion means and what care means. How in the world, what kind of worldview, what kind of understanding allows you to put together the two words, abortion care into one compound and continue to get abortion care. So let that sink in. Again, the fact is that women will continue to need abortion care and continue to get abortion care. Now, where does that come from? Now I think we know where the euphemism comes from. You call something what it's not in order to try to make it more acceptable than it is. You try to dress up what is the termination of life, the killing of unborn life. And you try to say, well, we're not going to talk about that as the murder of the unborn. We're not going to talk about that as the destruction of the unborn. We're not going to talk about that in surgical abortions as the dismemberment of the unborn. We're not going to talk about, even with the abortion pill, what is causing the womb to expel a human embryo or even a developing fetus. No, you don't talk that. Instead, you call it abortion care. And it's just a complete world turned upside down. But notice the moral imperative that is behind this statement. In other words, this is not just a descriptive statement. It's coming with moral force, and that is that women will demand abortion care and they will get abortion care. And I Don't think we can dismiss this simply by saying it's so obvious that this is an attempt to evade the moral issue. I think it's very important. It's indeed morally urgent. We recognize that this public health scientist, though I think she's trying to disguise the reality, is pointing to something we've just got to stare honestly in the face, and that is that demand for abortion may be higher now than it was before the reversal of Roe v. Wade. It's really hard to measure these things. The numbers of abortions much easier to measure. The demand is certainly there. And the moral logic of this person speaking clearly from the pro abortion side is, you know, women are going to demand it and someone's going to provide it. That's just the bottom line. There's a market for it, there's a demand for it. It's supply and demand. So long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. And that is the logic of the pro abortion movement. And that's why they think history's on their side. They think personal autonomy always expanding, personal choice always expanding. And in the case of abortion, always expanding. And so even with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, we can still expand abortions because now we have telehealth, we have the abortion pill. It's like a human pesticide. And you'll notice how this is packaged. But I just want us to take stock of the fact that it certainly appears to be true that over the course of years, millions upon millions of women in the United States have demanded abortions. I think many in the pro life side just fail to understand this is indeed, well, let's put it this way, it is at least true that there is the demand. Let's just admit that right up front, there is the demand. There is the demand on the part of many women that they want an abortion. There is in that sense, just of the economic equation, there is plenty of demand. The argument here is that where there is demand, there's also going to be supply. And of course this is politically and morally facilitated by the pro abortion movement. They've been working at this for years and there is much money to be made. But the bigger issue here is the morality of what is at stake. It is understanding that this is the deliberate targeting of unborn human life and terminating that life and explaining it as simply a matter of supply and demand. But I think for pro lifers, for Christians, we just need soberly, honestly to understand this is the problem. The problem is that you can eliminate legal abortion, you can work hard in the courts, and that's the right thing to do. You can work hard in the legislatures, and that's the right thing to do. You can contend for the law to be changed to recognize the dignity and sanctity of human life, and that's exactly the right thing to do. But the bigger problem is not in the abortion clinic. It's in the human heart. And this is something that Christians, given a biblical worldview, understand, even if no one else understands this. The real problem is in the human heart. And that's where we simply have to recognize the staggering truth of how many people really do want abortion, really do want the willful choice to extinguish the life in the womb, really do want this exit ramp. They really do demand this. And the demand, if anything, appears to be growing. I just think we need to reflect upon that. We need to understand that there's a lot more going on here than legislation, judicial action, political argument, and all the rest. All that is really important. We're the ones who recognize it really is important. But I think we just need to recognize there is a giant battle going on here. A legislative battle. Yes. A judicial battle. Yes. But the bigger battle is in the human heart. And that's just good for us to recognize. Our job isn't less than it was in 2022. It's not less than it was in 1973. It's an even bigger job. And this is where, as Christians, we understand we have to lean into not only arguments for the dignity and sanctity of human life, we have to lean into the gospel of life and preach it all the time, everywhere we can. But there are a couple of other developments along the same lines we just need to recognize, as we're getting ready to head towards the end of the year, one of them is that a very important ruling from a federal appeals court says that Congress, and that means you could expand that to. The federal government, does have the constitutional authority to deny funding to Planned Parenthood. That becomes a very important issue because the tax and domestic policy bill that President Trump signed into law back in July, it's been called many things. Let's just think of it as the Big Bill, okay? That Big Bill isolated Planned Parenthood, and it did so by linking the fact that an exclusion of federal funding would go to any service that provides abortion. And so that basically just cut out Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood went to the federal courts and said, this is discrimination, unlawful discrimination. And now you have a federal appeals court that says, no, Congress had this authority. I have heard some people mischaracterize this as if it's an executive order from the Trump administration. Well, there was such an order, but the authority right now is full legislative authority, a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by the president of the United States. And if the Congress and the president do not have the right to legislate in this manner, then you really don't have Congress and the executive branch in control of federal spending at all. And I appreciate the fact that a federal appeals court recognized that. Don't think this is going to be end of the matter. I think you can look at an automatic appeal by Planned Parenthood to the Supreme Court. I don't think that their future at the Supreme Court is all that optimistic. I think they probably know that. But this is the way the world works. They will nonetheless make the attempt. They'll raise a lot of money in making the attempt. They'll raise a lot of noise in making the attempt. And then they'll raise more money when I think, as is likely, they will fail. That's the way this works when it comes to the pro abortion movement. They seem to win by winning or losing. And let's admit it, that's really frustrating. But I want to get to one other related issue that's important before we get to the end of the year. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, is at the center of this story. Axios reported the headline Trump advisers Strafe Hawley that Senator Hawley over new anti abortion group. Axios reports that Senator Hawley and his wife Erin Hawley, both of them constitutional lawyers, quote, are launching a dark money group called the Love Life Initiative. It is a new pro life initiative. Here's what Access reports. Quote, President Trump's advisers are furious with Senator Josh Hawley for starting an anti abortion group to spur new action on the issue, which the White House views as a loser for Republicans in next year's midterms. One Trump adviser quoted in the article says, quote, clearly Senator Hawley and his political team learned Nothing from the 2022 elections when SCOTUS Supreme Court abortion ruling overturning Roe v. Wade resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms. And then the Access report says a close Trump advisor told Axios, okay, I just want to deal with the bottom line issue here real fast. I don't think there is any future for the pro life movement in the American government, in the American judiciary, in American culture going forward if we do not have the organization of this kind of group for this kind of purpose. And if we don't say right up front what we're doing and then do it. And I know there's a political calculation here, and I will also note that, at least at this point, the people responding this, we're told from within the administration, they're largely unnamed. And I just want to remind the Trump administration again that the pro life movement is a crucial part of what got him elected. And there are many people who frankly voted almost entirely on the pro life issue simply because of the urgency of defending unborn human life. And I don't doubt for a moment that in some situations this is an electoral loser. But I will say this. If the pro life movement of the pro life cause is put on the back burner in such a way that it becomes a political impediment for the Republican Party and the Republican Party begins to turn its back on the pro life movement, I just would hope that the Republican Party would count the cost of doing that. Because if you look at Republican victories, how many of those are due to the fact that people are absolutely committed to this candidate and this platform precisely because they know it is a way to defend life rather than to extend abortion? If that calculus goes away, it will amount to a far larger injury to the Republican Party than standing by the pro life cause. But I'm gonna argue that pales in significance to the moral injury to the Republican Party. I think that if the Republican Party turns its back on the pro life cause, even if it says it's just doing so for political reasons temporarily, I think it will lead to the permanent injury of the Republican Party. You look at the situation in Great Britain and you have a Conservative Party and you have also a Liberal party, the Labor Party, a party of the left. There is no pro life party, really, in Great Britain. And that means that true conservatives of Christian conviction have no real reason to turn out much at all. There's just not that much difference. Of course, economic matters are important, yes. National defense issues are important, yes. But let's face it, the Republican coalition is and has been what it is since 1980, because there are moral issues of surpassing importance to Republican voters. You take those moral issues away. I don't think there's much of a future for the Republican Party. But finally, I want to look at something that's very much in the headlines. But what I'm going to talk about is really not in the headlines. It has been a really violent few days. You take the mass murder, anti Semitic violence there on Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia. You look at the mass shooting at Brown University. And then you come to the murder of movie director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle in their homes, apparently by the hand of their own son. It's really a horrible, horrible story. And it has caught the national consciousness, the national attention, simply because it's celebrity. Yes, Americans are always drawn to news from celebrities, but in this case, it's just the sheer violence of it. The horrible tragedy of the fact that a son apparently has killed his mother and his father. We're told that in the background there's homelessness and repeated treatments for drug addictions and other things. It's just a horrible, horrible, horrible thing. And the nation has been drawn to it simply because it's the kind of event that immediately draws attention. It's drawn an awful lot of comments, some helpful, some very not, but it's nonetheless an issue that has focused attention on a murderous fact. And it just raises huge, huge questions. But I want to go back to something else. I want to talk about Rob Reiner and the show all in the Family in which he was one of the stars. And I want to talk about the meaning of all of this. Rob Reiner was the son of Carl Reiner. Carl Reiner is one of the inventors of modern television as we know it. You go back to many of the sitcoms in the 50s and the 60s, you will see Carl Reiner had a major role. He was a stand up comedian, long tradition of Jewish comedy. He translated that into the developing model of sitcoms. And again, you'll see his name just all over the place. And sometimes he made his own appearances, sometimes he made guest appearances on his own programs. He didn't see his son Rob really as cut out to be an actor, but someone else did. Another major figure in the development of television, that was producer Norman Lear. Norman Lear was out to revolutionize American society the through what Americans watched and to put it simply, laughed at. And it was Norman Lear, very much a man of the left, as Rob Reiner was very much a man of the left, very committed to democratic causes, very committed to LGBTQ causes, very committed to the political left, very opposed to the political right, as I said, even to specifically evangelical involvement in politics and all the rest. Nonetheless, Norman Lear saw him as, even as a very young man, as a potential actor. And Norman Lear had a plan. That plan was to put before Americans a sitcom that would help to bring about cultural and moral social change in a more liberal direction. That's a lot of what Norman Lear was doing, and it was pretty transparent. But in the case of this one program where Rob Reiner was one of the stars, it sort of backfired on Norman Lear. The program was all in the family, and it was grounded in New York City, a working class white family. You had the father, Archie Bunker, played by Carol o'. Connor. You had the mother, Edith, played by Jean Stapleton. And you had the daughter, played by Sally Strothers. You had the son in law, Michael Stivic, played by none other than Rob Reiner. Rob Reiner was a hippie. He was a liberal. He was on moral issues, on political issues. He was representative of the hippies of the young people of the 60s and the 70s, with campus protests and all the rest. He and Archie and Edith's daughter Sally got married and they lived within the Bunker household. And it was constant conflict between Archie, the conservative father, and Michael, the liberal son in law. And Norman Lear, very liberal himself, was certain that what would happen is that the son in law, Michael the liberal, would win all the arguments and Archie Bunker the conservative, would be kind of a symbol of conservative arguments failing and going into decline. Now, as I said, it didn't really work well. Why didn't it work? It didn't work, first of all, because even when Archie Bunker was making outlandish arguments that no conservative would embrace in totality, he was often reflecting the basic moral consensus of the United States of America. And you might have had really liberal activists who wanted to push America on abortion, on all kinds of issues further to the left. And even when you had very legitimate moral causes being fought out, like the fight for civil rights. The fact is that there was an effort to demonize conservative America by demonizing Archie Bunker. But Carroll o', Connor, with his artistic ability, who, by the way, himself, as an actor, he was a man of the left, but he played Archie Bunker with such authenticity that Americans couldn't hate Archie Bunker. They just couldn't hate him. He humanized Archie Bunker. Even when Americans on the left didn't like his arguments, you couldn't help loving Archie. But there was another side of it, and the other side of it was Michael Stivic, the character played by Rob Reiner. He was the hippie. He made obnoxious arguments to conservative Americans. He really represented the liberal argument in almost every way imaginable. But even as Archie Bunker humanized the conservative guy, Rob Reiner as Michael Stivic, whether intentionally or accidentally, kind of humanized the liberal son in law in such a way that Americans watching that saw real issues debated. And it wasn't so much that they sided with Archie or with Michael just out of affection. They would take one side or the other in the argument. But here you did have the context of a household, indeed the context of a family, and there was mutual love within the family, even as there were hot arguments and even as there were stereotypes being played out. The fact is that the show accidentally became something of a release valve for Americans. And I bring this up today because of course, it is just an incredible tragedy when it appears that a son has killed his parents, regardless of who they are. It's just a horrifying thing. And in the case of parents who are so well known, you know, it just makes the. The story more infamous in terms of national attention. But I want to turn to just the power of entertainment and think about it and recognize that there are times in which if you can actually be drawn into a narrative and you can be drawn into characters, you find that you may just as avidly as ever disagree with the arguments. You may reject everything this person says. But the humanization of the argument is a good and healthy thing for all of us. As I said, it was pretty commonly observed at the time that Norman Lear's plan just sort of backfired with all in the Family. Just a few years ago, I had a thinking in public conversation with Benjamin Roelski, who wrote a book entitled the Rise and Fall, the Religious Left, Politics, Television and Popular culture in the 1970s and beyond. It was published by Columbia University Press. It had to do with telling the story about even the development of all in the Family and its impact. If you find it interesting, you may find that conversation interesting as well. You'll find a link to it with this program. As always, thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.