Abortion makes sense to people who think that our existence is primarily about our rights – that we are human beings who stand on our own two feet, that we are autonomous human beings, that we are answerable to no one, that we are our own independent moral agents, and that we have the right to decide who will live and who will die.

The following is an edited transcript of a message preached by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. for “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” on January 18, 2009. Today’s installment is the second in the six-part series.

Most Americans would probably be surprised to know that Sen. Edward Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and former Vice President Al Gore all were once solidly anti-abortion.  That seems almost incomprehensible now, but the record is clear — and the pattern is chilling.

Election cycles serve to confuse as well as to reveal.  Reading voting patterns is not quite like reading a CAT-scan, but something does appear to be happening among some parts of the electorate that had been solidly pro-life in voting patterns.

The shadow of abortion looms large over the American conscience.  Over thirty years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion controversy has not gone away.  If the U.S. Supreme Court majority really thought that their decision to create a new “right” to abortion would resolve the issue, history has rejected that assumption.  The nation is even more divided on this question in 2008 than it was in 1973.