This week, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary considered the impacts and implications that would follow the conclusion of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court hearing over abortion.
Pro-abortion activists are on edge after reports that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court justices may rule in favor of pro-lifers, as Dr. Albert Mohler observed in the opening segment of his December 7 episode of "The Briefing" podcast.
"And not only that, they're in full frontal attack upon some of the arguments that were made by the defenders of the Mississippi abortion restriction law in the Supreme Court just last Wednesday," Mohler said.
On the other hand, Mohler pointed out that the subject of adoption was brought up during Wednesday's oral arguments by the Supreme Court's newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett. The majority of the Supreme Court expressed worry about imposing parenthood on some women who had gotten pregnant in the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion in 1973.
According to Mohler's assessment, Justice Barrett brought up the adoption question because of a major legal breakthrough that took transpired between 1973 and 2021: safe harbor laws that are reportedly now in existence in every state and jurisdiction in the nation.
This implies that mothers who give birth to children have a safe haven in which to commit their children to the care of an adoption agency without fear of being questioned about their personal responsibility or anything else that could be involved in helping the child find a home. There had been far too many heartbreaking incidents of newborns dying because their mothers had abandoned them. Consequently, safe harbor rules were enacted to stop this from happening again.
Justice Barrett just raised the question, asking, "Why don't the safe-haven laws take care of that problem?" The alleged issue is that a pregnant lady was forced to take on the obligations of parenting.
Mohler noted that this kind of argument demonstrates how people who support abortion don't even want to talk about adoption as an option to abortion.
"And here you need to note that this is ideological," he said. "It is because of the monomaniacal focus on abortion rights and the fact that those who have been arguing for decades now for abortion rights understand that the biggest problem with adoption is that adoption makes very clear that we are talking about a baby, a baby who, after all, is much desired."
According to Adoption Network, there are about 140,000 children adopted by American families each year. Adoption is also a big part of the lives of 6 in 10 Americans. This means that either they, a family member or a close friend were adopted.
"Now, we're going to be tracking these arguments, continuing to watch these arguments unfold in days, weeks, and months ahead," Mohler continued. "But before leaving today's discussion of adoption, we just need to point out that as Christians, there is full biblical support for adoption, not only as something that is allowable, but something that is a moral good. And not just a moral good, but something that is so good, so morally right that it becomes a picture of the gospel itself."
