Nothing causes more discomfort for more Americans than a topic of abortion. If you want to see faces tighten and tensions rise, mention something about the unborn, sit back, and watch the irritation and anxiety cover the conversation like a blanket.

There’s a reason for this: Abortion is the confluence of pain and desire, personhood and deeply personal decisions. A new life and an old self.

People resent being forced to consider things that disturb them. It’s much more stressful to think through a troubling issue and come to a decision about it — one that can divide friends and families — than to mumble a superficially soothing cliché and talk about something else. Taking a side can be costly. Especially when it’s a matter of life and death.

In a May 2015 Gallup Poll, 50 percent of Americans surveyed identified as “pro-choice,” and 44 percent called themselves “pro-life.” This is misleading, because to be pro-choice is to be pro-abortion.

The trope, “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,” is internally inconsistent to begin with: If abortion is not something we will acknowledge as wrong, why should it be rare? The illogic of this position has finally jolted advocates of elective abortion to come clean. That’s why you’re seeing myriad posters and protest signs saying, “Abortion on demand and without apology.”

More significantly, if abortion is legal, even if only in, say, the first six months of pregnancy — indeed, especially then — it will never be rare. Human nature being what it is, it is natural for people to look for the readiest path of escape when confronted by things they intensely dislike. This is a gender-neutral proposition: Look at the number of male business executives who try to mask their illegal activities and find legal loopholes to justify their moral misbehavior. The men who cheat on their wives, habitually look at pornography, and cheat without a thought on their taxes prove the point.

Most of all, to say one is pro-choice is to acknowledge that many women will take the lives of their unborn children. It is to admit that the choice which about 3,000 women a day will make is one of death over life — and that this is acceptable. It is to accede to the reality that defending unborn life means telling women in crisis that they may not do something fundamental to the culture in which they have been enmeshed, in which abortion is now, in many quarters, not only accepted but celebrated.

The Resistance

This is where deep resistance enters: Saying to people that a choice to which they have become socially accustomed — and which is heralded routinely as a “right” — is wrong and should be illegal threatens the inner sanctum of human selfishness — the heart of self-supremacy we inherited from our first parents. It is to say we cannot be our own gods. Nothing is more enraging and scary to the unregenerate inner being than that.

When an unwanted pregnancy occurs, many women turn to abortion to prevent something massively inconvenient. In some cases, more than inconvenient — just plain hard. But if the little one in the womb is in fact a person, her life is worth hardship (and great joy for adoptive parents, too).

Yet inconvenience and the fear of hardship are not the only reasons for the decision to abort. Often the decision is made because women are shown distorted ultrasounds provided by abortionists.

Or because they are lulled into believing the second beating heart within them belongs to an unfeeling collection of blood and tissue.

Or because they consciously elevate their desires over their unborn children’s needs.

Or because their boyfriends, and in some cases husbands, pressure them into having abortions with promises of enduring love, romance and time together unencumbered by an irksome bundle in a car seat. Or even with a more blunt-edged, brutal threat.

More to Be Done

Constricting access to abortion will require the vast pro-life community to do even more than it does. Pregnancy care centers, of which there are now more than 2,000 nationwide, will need more support from churches and Christian charities than ever before. We will need to open our homes to women in crisis much more readily and in far greater numbers than we have in the past. Our allegiance to the adoption movement will be tested profoundly as more children than ever will need loving homes.

We will also need to prepare for an onslaught of invective and hate with which many mild-tempered Christians are wholly unfamiliar. If the Supreme Court corrects Roe v. Wade and other onerous abortion rulings, the howls of abortion “rights” proponents will be more shrill than anything we have heard in North America since the Civil War. And war it will be: the culture of death will not go gladly into the depths from which it came.

We will be portrayed in the major mainstream media in ways none of us recognize. Although we have medical science, natural law, general revelation and the U.S. Constitution on our side, we will have to appeal to the consciences of our fellow citizens with kindness and compassion. When we are maligned — and believe me, we will be and with a ferocity and longevity that will shock and dispirit many — we must take it with the calm inner confidence of those who know they are on the side of the angels. And, more significantly, the side of the angels’ Lord.

To be pro-life will mean, in coming years, pro-self-sacrifice. Pro-generosity. Pro-willing to suffer. Pro-more willing to be like Jesus.

Are you ready?