Maybe, though, that’s led you to wonder something. Since overturning Roe v. Wade — the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion — would merely free state legislatures to make their own laws, what are the abortion-rights people afraid of? After all, they’ve got the vast bulk of people firmly on their side, right? Their opponents are just a fringe minority, right? Since elected officials want to be popular and get re-elected, any legislative battles should be slam-dunk victories for the abortion-rights forces, right? Indeed, a world without Roe could be a great opportunity for them: It’s their big chance to prove (contrary to their opponents’ complaint) that they’re not dependent on unelected judges, but that they can win fair and square through the democratic process.

So again: Why are they worried?

The most obvious reason is that, for all their bluster, they know they haven’t got the people on their side — certainly not firmly. Abortion-rights supporters are far from a rock-solid majority, and pro-lifers are far from a fringe minority.

Polls show lots of legal restraints on abortion are already popular, such as laws mandating parental notice or consent, waiting periods and counseling on alternatives to abortion. Americans are strongly opposed to using taxes for the procedure, and even support outright bans on later-term abortions. That’s a long way from the position of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other groups of that sort: Abortion on demand for all nine months, for any reason, with no delays or hindrances, at taxpayer expense.

More important, though, support is shaky even for the notion that, after all is said and done, women (as distinct from teens) have the ultimate “right to choose” abortion. If pollsters ask the question in its most generic form, majorities still say they’re “pro-choice.” But when they get specific and take away a few hard cases that account for a tiny fraction of abortions (those involving rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother), support for legalized abortion plummets dramatically, while larger numbers say abortion is morally wrong.

And young people — supposedly the most “pro-choice” segment of the public (because they’re the most sexually active) — are deserting the cause.

In recent years, UCLA’s annual survey of incoming freshman nationwide saw support for legal abortion drop from 65 percent in 1990 to barely over 50 percent (as I noted in one of my first columns), before slightly rebounding to 55 percent in the latest survey. Meanwhile, pro-life sentiment is rising. As Heather Koerner noted in a previous Boundless articlethey’re more pro-life than their parents and grandparents; fully a third of those ages 18-29 favor a total abortion ban. If this is supposed to be the most pro-abortion segment in the country, the NOW crowd have reason to be nervous about their long-term prospects. They can claim that young folk simply aren’t “educated” on the issue, and will surely come around once they “understand.” But pro-life youth, as Koerner reports, cite precisely the experience of abortion as the reason so many of them oppose it. “People say, ‘I love my friend, I want what’s best for them.’ But we’ve learned that abortion is not the best for them. It has negative effects on their body and their psyche,” says Michael Sheehan of American Collegians for Life. “It affects us, and it affects our friends,” agrees Jamie Polychornis, who’s interned for Rock for Life. “Most people probably know someone who’s been through an abortion and there’s nothing good about it.” (There’s a lot of research testifying to the trauma.)

All this doesn’t mean that a pro-life culture is inevitably going to triumph in this country. (Christians, especially, shouldn’t indulge the romantic notion that Americans, in the end, will always choose the path of virtue.) But it does mean that the abortion issue remains anything but settled in Americans’ minds. It’s still very much up in the air.

And that, I think, is what some people find most scary (and most galling) about the prospect that Roe v. Wade could be overturned. It’s not just the fear they might lose some political battles. It’s that they badly want to believe the Supreme Court settled the abortion issue once and for all — not just legally, but morally. The reversal of Roe would be a major blow not just to their politics, but to their conscience.

That may not make much sense on its face, since a court ruling in and of itself can’t make anything right or wrong. But it makes perfect sense if you understand the dynamics of abortion — and the spiritual warfare that’s at the heart of the issue.

We can’t avoid the fact that God has written His law on our hearts: We all know deep down that some things are right and others are wrong, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise. And abortion is no small sin (if there were such a thing): It’s as wrong as anything can possibly be. We’re talking, after all, about a woman choosing to do lethal violence to her own child, when her whole God-given nature is to cherish and protect that child with her very life. Worse yet, in many cases, the child’s father — who should cherish and protect both her and the child with his very life — has pressured her to kill that child, whether through bullying or manipulation, neglect or abandonment. Sometimes even her own parents join in on the pressure, telling her it’s “for the best,” while somewhere inside her, her soul screams in protest. The violence may encompass every precious relationship God made her to have — with Him, her child, her man, her family.

How does someone live with this? Typically by living in denial — trying to bury the memory, to forget it ever happened. But denial can also include trying to justify the act. One way is to dehumanize the baby as a mere “potential life” or “blob of protoplasm;” the killing itself (and as a matter of biological fact, it is a killing) is shrouded in evasive technical language like “termination of pregnancy.” Indeed, no one talks like that unless they’re trying to justify something. (You’ll never hear a woman who suffers a miscarriage say “I lost my potential life,” or even “I lost my fetus,” but only “I lost my baby.” It would never occur to her to say anything else.)

There’s another common way to justify abortion, though — and it’s a way practiced not just by the people directly involved in the act, but by the larger society of people who tolerate it.

That way is to appeal to a deity other than the God Whose law is written on our hearts: namely, the American civil religion. This religion sometimes invokes a sort of generic god in its rhetoric (it professes to thank him for various blessings), but its real god is personal autonomy. It worships the freedom for each of us to make every decision for ourselves, and beyond that, to actually define truth and falsehood, right and wrong, for ourselves.

Which brings us back to the Supreme Court, which in many areas (especially abortion) is the chief oracle of the American civil religion. Roe itself was officially based on a broad “right to privacy” which the Constitution never mentions, but which the Court claimed to discern in “emanations” and “penumbras” of the document. (Honest, they talked like that.) In a later abortion case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), Justice Anthony Kennedy declared for the majority: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

If we want to speak plainly, we’d have to say the “right to privacy” means each woman has a license to kill. Yet the Court’s saying even more than that: It’s saying she has a license to define whether abortion is killing at all. Her choice must not be assessed or assailed by any objective standards of religion, ethics, science or law, because the only standard the Court recognizes is the standard of her own will — her “right to define” whatever she wants, including whether a life is at stake.

No one could take this thinking seriously if it were applied more broadly; it would undermine every law and every social rule there ever was. Yet that just testifies to the sheer willfulness of people who want to justify abortion. Ultimately, they don’t care whether they make sense; they just want to get their way. Roe is their cover story: Issued by the august Supreme Court and wrapped in the American civil religion and the semblance of the Constitution (via its “emanations”), it furnishes an impressive façade to hide their most shameful acts.

Of course the façade doesn’t hold up under scrutiny; the constitution isn’t the real Constitution, and the god of civil religion isn’t the God of the Bible. But that’s the whole point of the “right to privacy:” Scrutiny is forbidden.

And scrutiny is what they fear most. If Roe is overturned, they fear not only that laws will change, but more fundamentally, that social standards will change. They fear the loss not only of the legal Roe but of the cultural Roe — the social standard by which they demand all Americans look away from their worst acts and defer to their “right” to redefine right and wrong.

Above all, they fear the judgment less of man’s law than of God’s law. In seeking to flee the judgment of other people, they’re really seeking to flee the judgment of their own conscience, covered by the Law of God, whose bold letters no one can successfully erase.

With or without Roe, that’s one judgment that’s bound to catch up to them. And when it does, we can only pray that they fall to their knees in repentance and embrace the mercy of Christ.