When abortion advocates dehumanize the baby in the womb, they dehumanize themselves too. Ours is an age when so much of our culture encourages us to treat others made in God’s image as less than human. This is true, from the comparatively trivial trashing of others that is the favored idiom of those who seem to live online, to those at the DNC in Chicago this week, exulting in the slaughter of innocents.

A Planned Parenthood mobile clinic has been offering free abortions just a few blocks from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which concludes today. The DNC is not officially involved, but that is a minor detail, given that abortion has the status of a creedal non-negotiable in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. The clinic is simply actualizing the central plank of the Democrats’ election campaign. Its proximity to the convention is entirely appropriate—as is the presence of an eighteen-foot-tall inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb,” erected by the group Americans for Contraception. It is a stark reminder, along with the performances of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention last month, of how unserious today’s American politics has become. Where, one might ask, have all the grown-ups gone?

But there is a deeper issue with the grandstanding of abortion that goes well beyond the problem of showcasing moronic entertainers at a political convention. The move from abortion being sold to the public as “safe, legal, and rare” to being celebrated as a necessary social good is revealing. In part it is a reaction to the overturning of Roe. But it is more than just a reaction; the celebration of abortion as something to be proud of started long before 2022. Something deeper must have taken place within our culture. And this brings me once again to the inadequacy of characterizing our modern world as “disenchanted.”

The glee with which abortion is advocated and the anger that any restrictions upon it provoke indicate that we need a different category to capture our current cultural ethos. In a disenchanted world, one could imagine abortion being seen as a necessary evil. The demands of the workplace, the economy, and society at large might make it so. In a world where rape and incest exist, sometimes the options for addressing such evil might themselves involve a degree of evil. I disagree with that logic, but it seems consistent with the regretful moral resignation that disenchantment might involve.

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