But the culture has shifted.
I remember as a kid where every dang show on TV had a heroic woman killing her child.
Now you have most of the characters keeping them. You have openly pro life messages on secular shows.
I suspect it is because of two things.
1. Woman do not have the same amount of shame for having a child out of wedlock. For that matter, being married is outside the experience of a great many people today, it is becoming a luxury good.
2. People can see that killing a child is really killing a child. The baby isn’t a blob of tissue, it is baby. With the rise of miscarriage support groups and such, many are starting to think of a child as a child, not a parasite.
We have lost marriage, but we might just win on abortion.
We haven’t lost marriage. If anything, winning on abortion is likely to result in a win on marriage. Imho.
I think marriage will come around. It’s too stabilizing for individuals for it to be destroyed. We’ve simply forgotten all the bad reasons that caused marriage to become normal. Mostly it is women who’ve been convinced that committed marriage is a bad thing.
When was that?
“We have lost marriage, but we might just win on abortion..”
I think we end up winning on both in the long run. As long as the state continues to expand its views of secular marriage to include homosexuality, polygamy and miscellaneous barnyard animals, it cheapens the idea of secular marriage. Religious marriage on the other hand doesn’t suffer from that and as your post noted, it’s becoming a luxury good. I foresee a future where people aspire to religious marriage but skip the license.