For almost a decade I worked in homeless shelters. Over those years thousands of people came through our doors, and very few of them arrived because of one bad choice. They came because life had narrowed down until every option in front of them was a bad one. I learned there that desperation is rarely the root of anything. It is the fruit.
I have been thinking about that lately, because of a message many Christians have heard from the pulpit in recent years: that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for abortion, and so a vote against Christianity. I understand where that conviction comes from. I also think it is too simple, and I want to explain why.
Two Different Claims
It helps to separate two ideas that often get blended together. One is the question of whether abortion should be legal. The other is the question of what a vote for a particular candidate or party has to mean.
Some on the left do vote with abortion rights as their first concern. That is true, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it is not the only reason a Christian might vote that way, and it does not have to be what that vote means. A believer can hold that every unborn life is precious and still conclude that a candidate's policies on poverty, health care, and family support will do more to protect those lives than a candidate who says the right words about abortion and little about the conditions that lead to it.
That is the claim I want to make. Not that abortion is a small matter, but that the way we fight it matters.
Why Women Choose Abortion
In an earlier post, Is The Solution to Abortion More Economical Than Legal, I looked at who is having abortions, and I need to correct something I wrote there. I said that 71% of women who had an abortion in 2023 earned less than $30,000 a year. When I went back to check, I could not find a source for those numbers. The total I gave, about 1,037,000 abortions in 2023, does match the Guttmacher Institute's estimate. But the most recent national breakdown by income comes from Guttmacher's 2014 survey of abortion patients: 49% lived below the federal poverty level, and another 26% were low income, living just above it. That is three in four. The point still holds, but you deserve the right numbers. I also understated the historical peak. Abortions topped 1.6 million a year around 1990, not 1.5 million.
The reasons women give point in the same direction. In a 2004 Guttmacher survey (Finer et al., Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2005), roughly three in four women said they could not afford a baby at the time, and about the same share said a child would interfere with their education, their work, or their ability to care for children they already had.
I want to be honest about the limits of these numbers. Women could give more than one reason, and when asked for the single most important one, the answers spread out: about a quarter said they were not ready for a child, and about a quarter named money. The reasons survey is also twenty years old, and it comes from an organization many pro-life readers distrust. Still, the picture it paints matches what I saw in the shelter. Most women are not choosing abortion casually. Many feel they have no other option.
If that is true, then a law alone cannot reach the heart of the problem. It can change what is permitted. It cannot change what a woman believes is possible.
The Famine in Samaria
I have written before about a hard story in 2 Kings 6, one I first heard as a teenager. Samaria is under siege, and the famine is so severe that a donkey's head sells for a fortune. As the king walks along the city wall, a woman cries out to him. She and another mother had agreed to eat their sons, one each day. They ate hers. Now the other woman has hidden her child.
The king tears his robes, and the people see he has been wearing sackcloth underneath all along. He is grieving, and then he is angry, and he blames the prophet Elisha.
What strikes me is what the passage does not do. No one proposes a law against what these women did. No one needs to. Everyone already knows it is monstrous. Scripture presents it as the fruit of the siege, the kind of horror that famine produces (the same picture appears in Deuteronomy 28 and Lamentations 4). The story only resolves in chapter 7, when God breaks the siege and the city has bread again.
I don't want to stretch this text. It is not a policy manual, and the deliverance in Samaria came from God, not from a government program. But I do think it teaches something about how Scripture sees desperation. The evil was real. The suffering beneath it was real too. And the end of the horror came when the hunger ended.
That is how I see abortion. It is a grief. And much of it grows out of a famine of resources, support, and hope.
The Obvious Objection
Many of my pro-life brothers and sisters would answer: why not both? Why not work to ease the suffering and also protect the unborn in law? Law teaches, they would say, and a society shows what it values by what it forbids. They would also point out that some conservatives support pregnancy resource centers, expanded child tax credits, and adoption reform, and that the evidence on which policies actually lower abortion rates is mixed and still debated.
Those are fair points, and I take them seriously. I am not asking anyone to stop caring about the law. I am asking us to stop treating one way of voting as the only faithful one. A Christian who weighs the causes of abortion and votes accordingly is not voting against Christ. They may be trying, imperfectly like all of us, to attack the cause.
Where That Leaves Us
I don't write this to tell anyone how to vote. I write it because I have watched good people in the pews carry guilt they were never meant to carry, and I have watched others look down on fellow believers whose consciences landed somewhere different.
The question underneath all of this is not which party gets our loyalty. It is whether we care as much about the woman standing on the wall as we do about winning the argument. The king in Samaria tore his robes. The better question for us is what we will do about the famine.
