We can’t separate the abortion issue from the immigration issue. Anyone who says abortion should be excluded from the current political debate has already misunderstood the nature of the problem.
Mass immigration, cultural decay, family breakdown, excessive taxation and the steady expansion of state power aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of a much deeper crisis. Treating one symptom as though it’s the cause is like putting a Band-Aid over cancer. It might hide the problem for a while, but it doesn’t stop the disease from spreading.
That’s why isolating any one issue as the “real” problem is a mistake. Every one of these issues matters, and every one of them needs to be confronted. But none of them makes complete sense when separated from the deeper cause behind them.
At its heart, the West’s crisis is theological before it is political. Politics flows downstream from theology. When our understanding of God, man, morality and authority changes, our politics eventually changes with it. What we’re seeing across the West is the displacement of Christianity as the moral foundation of public life and the gradual elevation of the state into the position of ultimate moral authority.
Put simply, once there is no law above government, rights are no longer grounded in the inherent dignity of the human person. They become permissions; things the state can define, grant and ultimately take away.
That’s why abortion isn’t some secondary political issue. It goes right to the heart of this transformation. Once a society accepts that the state has the authority to determine who may live and who may die, it has abandoned the Christian principle that underpins every other right: the right to life.
And once the right to life becomes something the state can decide, why should we assume other rights are permanently secure? Property, speech, conscience, family and citizenship can all become conditional if they exist only because the state allows them to.
Without a moral order above the state — one that the state itself is accountable to — government becomes the final authority over what our rights are and who is entitled to them.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that the same state claiming authority over unborn life increasingly asserts authority over borders, taxation, education, national identity and culture.
If the state can decide who may live and who may die, then the underlying principle also allows it to decide who may enter the country, what may be owned and by whom, what a family is, and even what a nation is permitted to be.
These aren’t completely separate battles. They’re different expressions of the same underlying question: Who is sovereign?
That’s why focusing on a single symptom will never be enough. Abortion, immigration, family breakdown and the erosion of freedom all need to be resisted in their own right. But if we never address the root cause, the system producing these problems will remain in place — and new symptoms will keep appearing.
The West didn’t begin to decline because of one bad policy or one political mistake. Its deeper decline began when it stopped recognising any authority higher than the state.
Until that foundational error is confronted, we’ll keep fighting the symptoms while the system producing them remains untouched.