Scott Adams is best known for creating “Dilbert” – the white-collar comic strip that satirizes office life and all its fun and foibles. As its artist and comedian-in-chief, the now controversial artist put lots of words in his character’s mouths.

“When you don’t know what to do, walk fast and look worried,” once quipped the short-sleeve shirt-wearing protagonist in the popular series.

That adage comes to mind when reading the famed cartoonist’s own words yesterday. In a post on X decrying current pro-life efforts, Adams qualified the campaign to protect the innocent as a “Noble cause, but strategically stupid at a world-ending scale.”

Worried that pro-life initiatives are hurting rather than helping, he said “the smart play” would be to let pro-abortion people “kill their own unborn children at any rate they like and take the issue off the table …”

Scott Adams has made a living with his fictional comic characters exposing the absurd by saying the absurd, so there’s a very good chance he’s employing a similar tactic in this instance. But at the heart of his comments is a frustration that many otherwise conservative people have similarly expressed:

Abortion, they say, is a losing issue that’s holding back the success of otherwise successful policies and people. It’s time to move on.

They would be wrong.

In fact, not only should we not back away, but we must reimagine and reenergize the entire half-century effort to save innocent preborn life.

It’s additionally important because abortion is a bellwether on culture in many more ways than most people think or fully appreciate.

No culture that embraces and legalizes abortion will ever be healthy or fully thrive. Societies that disrespect and disregard preborn life inevitably express contempt for other people at other ages and stages. When those individuals don’t meet the standards the elites arbitrarily set, their lives become expendable.

Nearly twenty years ago, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto floated a theory similar to Scott Adams’ suggestion. It became known as the “Roe Effect,” and held that abortion-minded people would decrease over time because they’d be the ones less likely to actually carry babies to term. Taranto wrote:

It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values. This would see to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party–that is, Republican–than they otherwise would have.

He concluded:

The best solution for both parties would likely be a return to the status quo ante Roe–that is, for Congress and the president largely to ignore abortion, and leave its regulation to the state legislatures. This would allow politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, to tailor their views to match those of their constituents and their own consciences, and it would remove abortion as a polarizing issue from national elections. Thus, one might say that both Roe and the Roe effect contain the seeds of their own demise.

 Now that Roe has been reversed and the issue has been returned to the states, it remains to be seen how this will all unfold in the long-term. In the short-term, though, abortion remains a nationally polarizing issue.

Of course it is.

Nothing should grab hold of our attention, passions, and convictions more than matters of life and death.

Protecting innocent preborn life shouldn’t be polarizing, but when a culture of death grabs hold and darkens hearts and minds, the chasm between light and dark widens and deepens.

Abortion is a non-partisan issue to those of us who champion the defense of the pre-born. We recognize that life and politics don’t occur in a vacuum, but we cannot allow parties and elections to throw shade or silence our efforts to tend to the desperate cries of the innocent.

“Change is good,” once quipped Dilbert. “You go first.” The change brought about by the fall of Roe and its return to the states is a good first step in our quest to protect and give voice to the voiceless.

 

Image from Shutterstock.