Explaining Abortion to an 8-Year-Old.

My daughter, Savannah, turned eight-years-old this past Saturday. We went to the beach for a Dad/Daughter getaway in Wilmington, North Carolina. The plan was simple: beach day, dinner together, and then I (Josh) would speak at the local March for Life in the morning before we drove home to Charlotte.

I was there to raise awareness about the unborn lives lost and perpetually frozen through the IVF process. Our organization, Them Before Us, is one of the leading voices on this topic, and events like this are a regular part of what we do. We travel to churches, rallies, and legislatures to make the case that every child’s life matters, including the ones created in a lab or suspended indefinitely in a freezer.

We’ve always been upfront with Savannah about hard topics. She’s a sharp kid, reads her Bible on her own, and asks lots of good questions. But sitting across from her that morning at breakfast, it hit me that while we’d been open about a lot of things, I had never REALLY explained abortion to her. Not in plain terms. She was about to sit in an audience full of people talking about it, and I didn’t want her sitting there wondering what certain words meant or being caught off guard by what could be some pretty sad topics. So I prepped her.

I started simple. “You’re going to hear people talk today about something called abortion. I want you to understand what they’re talking about before we get there.”

I asked if she knew where she was before she was born. “Yeah,” she said. “In Mom’s belly.” I told her that was right, and that we got to see her on the ultrasound machine, and what we saw on that screen looked just like her when she came out.

Then I said it plainly. “There are some people who believe that moms and dads should have the right to kill babies while they’re still in their mom’s belly. That’s called abortion.”

She looked at me stone cold. “Are you serious, Dad?”

Yeah. I’m serious. They think it should be up to a mom and dad whether or not the baby gets to be born.

“But why would they do that?”

I explained that some people don’t believe it’s a real baby yet. And before I could say another word, she started building her case.

“I’ve seen them kick. When Lincoln and Gideon and Rowan were in Mom’s belly, I saw them kick.” She paused. “And also, didn’t John the Baptist kick when he heard about Jesus?”

I told her that was exactly right. Then I asked if she could think of any other place in the Bible that would tell you it’s a real baby.

She didn’t even hesitate. “I have one hanging on my wall. The one about how God knew me and knit me together in my mom’s belly.”

Psalm 139. Framed above her bed.

I told her she was absolutely right. She sat with it for a second. Then she said, “I can’t believe that.”

Me neither.

Then she said something that shifted the whole conversation. “Jesus would not be happy with that.”

I wanted to see where she’d go, so I pushed a little. “But Jesus is normally so nice.”

“Yes,” she said, “but he loves children.”

I asked if she remembered what Jesus said about someone who causes children to stumble. She thought about it and said, “They drown?”

Close enough. I pulled up a picture of an ancient millstone on my phone and showed it to her. I told her Jesus actually said it would be better for you if you tied one of these around your neck and jumped in the ocean than what He’s going to do to you.

She stared at the picture. You could see her trying to reconcile two versions of the same person. The gentle Jesus from her picture book Bible, the one holding lambs and blessing children, and this one. The one making threats with a millstone.

I told her both are real. He is incredibly kind. But when it comes to kids, touch them and He’ll drown you in the ocean. Is that mean? No. True love protects. Kindness for those babies means protecting them.

She sat there processing for a second, then said, “Well, who is going to protect them? We need to tell people about this.” She thought about it a little more. “Like the president.”

I told her that I actually do get to tell people about this. That’s my job (Not exactly the president yet). But I get to go to churches, families, and politicians and explain to them that it is always wrong to hurt children. That’s exactly what we were doing today in Wilmington.

That’s when her eyes got wide. “Wait. You get to do this for a job?”

She sat up a little straighter. “Good. We totally need to stop that. It is so evil.” Then she added, with the confidence only an eight-year-old can carry,
“Babies are so cute. Literally none of them should die.”

And that was it. That was the whole conversation. No footnotes. No qualifications. No carefully worded position paper. Just an eight-year-old girl on her birthday, looking at her dad like he just told her something that made no sense, and arriving at the clearest moral conclusion in the room.

Out of the mouth of babes.

It was an important reminder for me that kids haven’t been saddled with our cultural baggage. They don’t know the polite language. They haven’t learned which words to use to make hard things sound softer. They just see things for what they are. And God has revealed his truth all around us, written it into creation, pressed it into the conscience of every person on the planet. Children just call it like they see it. The rest of us have been trained not to.

I’ve spent years in this work. I’ve sat across from legislators. I’ve debated policy experts. I’ve read the studies, cited the data, written the briefs. And I’ve watched how we talk about abortion in this country, even those of us who oppose it. We’ve developed an entire vocabulary designed to soften the edges. We speak in abstractions. We talk about “reproductive rights” and “bodily autonomy” and “difficult decisions,” and we layer on so much language that the actual thing we’re talking about gets buried underneath it.

Even in pro-life circles, we’ve learned to speak politely. We frame things carefully. We choose our words to avoid making anyone uncomfortable.

But when you sit across from a child and try to explain abortion, you can’t hide behind vocabulary. You have to say what it actually is.

A real baby. In a mom’s belly. And some people think it’s okay to kill that baby.

That’s what it sounds like when you strip it all away. And it is sobering.

I think every parent should have to do it. Sit down with your eight-year-old and explain, in terms they can understand, exactly what abortion is. Not because it’s easy, but because the difficulty is the point. If you can’t explain your position to a child without it sounding monstrous, maybe the problem isn’t the vocabulary. Maybe the problem is the position.

We have a habit in this culture of complicating what we don’t want to be responsible for. We add nuance until the obligation feels optional. But a baby in the womb is a baby. A full and real and living baby. And that means you have to act like it.

Nobody said the decision was easy. But simple and easy are not the same thing. Sometimes the simplest decisions are the hardest ones to live with. You look at the facts, you see what’s true, and the path forward is clear even though it’s steep. That’s the kind of decision this is. It always has been.

Moms and dads must protect their children. Born and unborn. Full stop.

Remember: Babies are so cute. Literally none of them should die.

My daughter understood that over scrambled eggs on her eighth birthday. And the fact that an eight-year-old can see it that clearly should make the rest of us wonder what we’ve been so busy complicating.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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