This image hangs in my kitchen, a gift given to me by my dear sister. It is a picture of the childless Eve, wrapped in the snare of the serpent, and her counterpart, Mary, full of promise and hope for the gaping wound in humanity. Most prominent to me is the connection they share; an ancient sisterhood binding them together. Both capable of bringing forth life while wrestling with the consequence of their opposing choices. A fitting portrayal of the times in which we live.

The buzz about the recent legislation in New York is hard to ignore. Accolades of support. Enraged outbursts of disgust. On and on the endless debate goes, rehashing the same points I’ve heard for 25 years.

While the issue is of critical importance, the actual mechanics of the heated debate have become tiring. Name calling, fruitless fighting, the same old arguments and loopholes. The same disappointing human behavior from both sides.

While I believe human life is human life, my own opinion on the matter is of little importance to this post. Because as much as my pro-life friends hate to admit it, they are losing. Badly.

On the surface, it makes little sense. Pro-life voices rage loudly. They rally, they lobby, and they start impactful organizations to provide alternatives. They propagate social media with the most gut-wrenching videos and testimonies. More and more people speak up. And yet, here we are. The past 50+ years has been nothing but a slippery slope, leading only to more corruption and landing us today smack in the middle of heinous and insidious practices.

But to the astute observer, this is no mystery. As much as we’d like to blame this on spiritual evil attacking our nation, this is not merely the fault evil. No sinister devil with a pitchfork is standing on the front steps of our nation’s capitol, laughing and fighting back. No. This is our own fault. This is us drunk and dozing in the garden while our King sweats blood for us.

Scroll a few swipes past the latest post in any social feed and you’ll find a picture of a flat-bellied woman, thin and tan and “rocking life,” 20lbs down from her pre-pregnancy weight. No wrinkles. No scars. You’ll find an ad for the best vacation spots, the best weekend getaways, the latest fad for making your dresser drawers look more like a high-end luxury store than a place for your worn out socks. There will be some friend who has started a business selling the greatest, most life-changing thing known to man; another who traded in over the weekend for the new model. Someone will be complaining about the “snow day,” as if being at home for a single day with a child is akin to life in prison. It’s all just life as usual. This is the world we live in everyday. Nothing new to see here.

Worse yet, step into a typical American church. Families are separated, sometimes at the door; the children happily dismissed to go off and learn in a place that is less of a nuisance. Listen to the conversations. Couples casually commiserate about how awful it is to never get a date night anymore. And one Dad gently pokes fun at another who finally caved and bought a minivan. Even pastors make jokes from the pulpit about the real drag kids can be. Granted, most of this is in jest. We see it as harmless humor and ignore the undercurrent it is feeding.

For me, perhaps most noticeable of late, is the onslaught of articles entitled something like “Our last baby,” a post which grapples with the sadness and excitement of baby-less life. These writings are the heartbeat of two-faced emotions modern mothers bear–an emptiness at the end of a season. Every post is like the last. A decision is made final as a scalpel cuts away the promise of new life. These women mourn and move on. No big deal. It has to end sometime, right? And oh how the message is so crafty; a cunning beast, isn’t it? Luring a woman into the promise of freedom, only to leave her haunted by the looming shadow of a life that will never be.

Isn’t it so blatantly obvious? In the nobility of our pro-life message, we conveniently overlook our chronic anti-life behavior. While we rage on about the right to life and atrocities committed by women and their doctors, we are happy to sit back and complain about “just getting through the day” with our own kids. Happy to ask the pregnant mom of 3 if this baby was planned; joke with the expecting dad if he knows how to “fix that?” As though pregnancy is a problem. As though a baby is an accident. As though a family is a curse.

It’s true that for some, new life is dangerous or even impossible. But really, most of these conversations are rooted in a value system that views more than a child or two as inconvenient. Expensive, exhausting, limiting. We shamelessly shy away from the truth that growing families require parents to welcome things like maturity, responsibility, determination, and sacrifice.

And so the pro-lifers sit with the rest of the world, fawning over the Super Bowl commercials of disabled children who demonstrate these very traits. We offer a hearty nod of approval to those in the Armed Forces who embody them daily. And then we celebrate the status of the luxury SUV, the dream job, the perfectly decorated house, and the flat abs that comes from an empty womb. From a life free of the growing up, knowing up, and showing up that small humans require. I am guilty of it myself. And thus the losing battle.

Friends, as much as we like to think of ourselves as champions of the pro-life movement, we are culturally programed to distain it. The change will not come in fighting for the rights of the unborn; it will come in elevating the status of new life, period. It will come when a baby–no matter it’s origin or birth order–is no longer seen as a burden, but promise. When women are respected for the scars they bare, not the ones they avoided, sweated off, or removed. Change will come when men embrace their identity as caretakers of new creation and rise to the challenge of cultivating it.

After all, renewal for the sub-human depravity epitomized by situations like New York was always promised to come through a baby. And the outward-spreading, ripple effect of that renewal was promised to come through a family.

As a member of that family I have a choice. I can believe the crafty serpent and choose his definition of freedom. Or I can side with the promised seed of the woman and step into a value system which elevates new life to an extent the world never will. This is a deeply counter-cultural move. Embracing the later worldview will result in deformity; the world won’t recognize me. They’ll only see an image of the One who came before me. The One who exchanged His own life for the very one I’m living today.

“…And the world did not know Him…But to those who did believe, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” John 1:10, 12