Have babies and don’t kill them. That’s a decent summary of the direct commands we have from God before the law is handed down in Exodus. The first and most repeated is the most familiar: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. (Genesis 1:28) Adam and Eve’s primary work was to fill the earth with images of God. They were of course to be faithful, worshipful, affectionate reflections of God and his glory, but then they were to love each other in a way that multiplied that image a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold. Be fruitful. Have babies. It’s one of the great choruses of Genesis, repeated to Noah and Jacob (Genesis 9:7; 35:11), and then later to the people of Israel (Jeremiah 23:3). A second command is like it, however, and comes with it because of sin. When God repeats the command to Noah, encouraging his family to multiply, he adds a severe warning he hadn’t given to Adam and Eve: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it. (Genesis 9:6–7) Have babies and don’t kill them — these are twin commands for guarding and nurturing the sanctity of human life. And in the United States, we wickedly defy both. Has Life Won Since Dobbs? We can’t even obey the first (and more delightful) command: Go and have babies. The fertility rate in the United States fell this year to the lowest level ever recorded. In 2007, just twenty years ago, we gave birth to more than four million babies. Last year, we had 700,000 fewer. In America, children are not a heritage, a reward, an arrow in the hand of a warrior (Psalm 127:3–4). No, too often, they’re treated like bulky, messy, expensive luggage. I wish plummeting fertility were the worst news. Tragically, we also break that second great command — not to shed the blood of man and destroy the image of God. Every year, we kill a million babies in this country. This silent, hidden population is larger than Washington, DC — and we kill that many boys and girls every year. Didn’t we overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, and praise God we did! And yet the abortion scene has actually gotten worse since the Dobbs decision. As I write, thirteen states have near-total bans on abortion: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Hallelujah! And yet I live in one of the 37 states where anyone can legally get an abortion for basically any reason within a given period. Six states limit that “freedom” at 6–12 weeks. Four more set limits between 15–22 weeks. Eighteen have limits at or near viability (24–28 weeks). And nine states plus DC — a total population of 45.5 million — have no gestational limits at all. That means a child can be legally killed anytime up to and including the moment of birth. Stop and make yourself think about that. Have babies and don’t kill them. We’re still a country who avoids babies and kills millions. Minefield for the Unborn Since the Dobbs decision, pro-life bills have gone just three for seventeen on state ballot votes. The legal losses have been more and greater than the wins. The biggest current fight is being waged over abortion pills. Just this May, the Supreme Court ruled to allow distributors to send the pill into states with abortion bans. A state like Louisiana, where abortion is almost completely banned, still expects to see one thousand babies killed each month. The United States, even in 2026, is still one of the most dangerous places on earth for an unborn person. Clarke Forsythe, in his excellent book Abuse of Discretion, writes, The United States is an outlier when it comes to the scope of the abortion “right.” The United States is one of approximately ten nations (of 195) that allow abortion after fourteen weeks of gestation. . . . When it comes to allowing abortion for any reason after viability, however, the United States is joined only by Canada, North Korea, and China. (126) The US is one of only four countries in the world — only four — that refuses to protect the unborn even after viability. And what defines viability? “Having reached such a stage of development as to be capable of living, under normal conditions, outside the uterus.” The US and Canada are half of the nations worldwide that will not defend a baby even when that baby could already survive outside the womb. The other two are North Korea and China. For nearly fifty years now, the United States has made the womb a minefield, and millions of our sons and daughters have become the innocent casualties of our lust for sex, for freedom, for power, for self. In a World That Kills Children Abortion is a horror so evil and so persistent that even Christians can grow numb to the nightmare. We at Desiring God feel the need to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves in our day, and so we developed a series of articles to expose the ongoing monstrosity and awaken concerted prayer and action for the unborn. We are killing our children by the hundreds of thousands, and God has been telling us, since before the first abortion, that the killing must stop. We’ll spend most of our time looking at infanticide in the Bible. Abortion was not new with Roe v. Wade. The world under sin has been killing children for thousands and thousands of years. Where does abortion rear its evil, ugly head, and what does God say about it when those murders happen? We’ll force ourselves to watch Pharaoh throw baby boys in the Nile — and then see that our nation is more like Pharaoh than we think. We’ll examine child sacrifice to false gods and the demonic nature of the abortion industry. We’ll remember when King Herod’s jealousy and rage executed the little children in Bethlehem. With a couple of other stops on this tour of horror, we’ll land again on the battlegrounds now and learn what it might mean to fight for the unborn in our day. Greater Danger Than Abortion In the Christian fight for life, we really are fighting for something higher and greater than human life on earth. We battle for these babies, yes, but we’re not content to end abortion or sex trafficking or racism. John Piper and Tony Reinke recorded a special episode of Ask Pastor John the week the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The conversation celebrated the decision as right and good, but it also included some real caution about what it might actually mean for the unborn in America. The caution was warranted. Near the end, Pastor John set the highest priority in our pro-life cause: Far greater than the danger of abortion is the danger of hell. Rescuing people for eternal life is more crucial and more loving than rescuing babies from abortion. In other words, we care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering. . . . We are Christians before we are pro-life. We are Christ-exalting before we are life-exalting. We want to save souls, the souls of mothers and fathers, as much as we want to save the bodies of the babies. The aim for us is not just the end of abortion, but the eternal joy of forgiven sinners. Amen. Even as we focus on the terrors of child-killing, our greatest prayer is that souls would be saved and transformed by Jesus. A land experiencing revival is an undeniably safer land for the unborn. That pursuit of eternal joy doesn’t limit the real progress we can make on the ground today, with God’s almighty help, but it does guide and energize the long battle ahead. So, let’s take up arms against evil and pray that God does more than we can ask or imagine to save the unborn from both death and hell.