Our 13-year-old son doesn’t have a phone, but he does have a new used CD player. And two weeks ago, we added a landline to our home for the first time in 20 years. Which is to say, our embrace of technology is running in the wrong direction. Then I topped it off by doing this past Friday something I hadn’t done since last century. I went to an actual store and bought an actual album on the actual day it came out. That would be Switchfoot’s Forever Now! Compact discs have done away with jewel cases, apparently, but the rest of the experience was gloriously 1990’s. And then there are the songs.

I made an uncredited reference to Forever Now’s first single in my last article, but it’s track 11–“Two Twins”—that contains a metaphor so simple and profound that it hardly seems possible I could go 50 years without having heard it before. Or thought of it myself. For those of you who didn’t buy the record at Barnes and Noble last week, or listen via more traditional means—like Spotify—the song is “a tale of two twins in their mother’s womb, talking back-and-forth inside that room, wondering if there’s life after birth.” Here is an excerpt:

One twin says to the other twin
“Do you think you and I will ever meet again?...”

And the twin said, “No brother
There ain’t no other
Life outside this womb
When you and I get born
And they cut the cord
That’s the end of me and you”
“Ain’t nobody never ever come back from
Thе other side of birth”
He said “No brothеr
There’s no such thing as earth”

One twin says to the sceptic other
“But brother, but brother, but brother, but brother
Don’t you think there might be such a thing as mom?
When I am quiet I can almost hear her
And all around me I can feel her nearer
As if we’ve been together all along”

Lyrically, this is the most brilliant song I’ve encountered in many a long year. Without mentioning abortion, it testifies to the humanity of children in the womb. And without getting religious, it reveals how naive it is to simply assume that nothing could await us beyond the grave. On the first front, perhaps you’d point out that twins in the womb don’t actually speak to each other. To which I would respond: Fair enough, smarty pants, but they certainly do communicate. Back in 2007, National Geographic released a documentary about multiples in the womb. It reveals that “as identical twins grow bigger, they're almost always in contact, touching hands, faces, feet and gradually becoming more aware of themselves and each other." Scientists, in fact, have witnessed twins playing games together in the womb that are carried over and repeated outside the womb. So even if you’re going to make the nonsensical assertion that rights of personhood should be withheld from human beings who don’t have the ability to form relationships, this is precisely what twins in the womb do.

Now onto the metaphor. Though the first person of the trinity is most often conveyed as God the Father, the Lord presents himself as a comforting mother in Isaiah 66. Starting in verse 12, “For thus says the LORD: ‘Behold, I will extend peace to [Jerusalem] like a river… and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip, and bounced upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.’” Whether or not Switchfoot’s indefatigable Foreman brothers had this passage in view when penning “Two Twins,” the analogy is the same. Just as skeptics in the world deny the existence of God, this skeptic in the womb denies the existence of mom. But if you quiet your soul and listen for that still small voice, you just might find that it’s there.

Though no one can pretend to know precisely what awaits us after death, neither can we pretend that our soul’s survival is an impossibility. It may even be the more plausible outcome of the two. Is it really that farfetched to think that the life to come may dwarf this one in much the same way that this life dwarfs our time in the womb? The believing twin told his brother that he could “see the shadows on the wall,” which is reminiscent of something the Apostle Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians. “Now we see through a glass, darkly;” he wrote, “but then face to face.” We are living in the Shadowlands—as C.S. Lewis put it in The Last Battle. “You need not mourn over Narnia,” Professor Diggory told Lucy. “All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia [which is] as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” The womb is a place of perpetual shadows, but for the unbelieving twin who had yet to experience anything else, it was all he could imagine. That may seem silly to us, but what is obvious from the outside is not necessarily obvious from within.

The believing twin was convinced their life together would continue on after birth. The unbelieving twin called such thinking lies and fairytales. “When you and I get born,” he warned, “and they cut the cord, that’s the end of me and you.” There’s no such thing as earth. We all know, of course, which twin turned out to be right, though modern technology has sadly introduced a third scenario in which some twins are allowed to survive while the vast majority are not. They are wiped away by what is clinically known as fetal reduction procedures—an integral part of most IVF procedures. This comes from an article I wrote back in 2012: 

(What is) the problem with IVF? Generally speaking, more children are being conceived than can realistically be born. What happens to all the extras? ART (assisted reproductive technologies) technicians, Mark I. Evans and David W. Britt, report that 75% of their patients "have combined CVS (chorionic villus sampling) and fetal reduction procedures" to solve this problem. Chorionic villus sampling is a form of prenatal testing. Multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) is the process of aborting the "extra" babies that were conceived through IVF.

In practice, this means that almost all of the human beings that are created through in-vitro fertilization are destroyed before they’re born. For them, there is no such thing as earth. Or mom. They are sacrificed instead so that wealthy older women can get at least a chance of becoming a mom to one of the lucky siblings who manage to survive. And, of course, IVF birthed a brand new and incredibly lucrative industry. All it requires is money and moral compromise. If you’ve been following Abort73 since the early days, you may remember a shirt we used to have that read Birth Before Death. It was a declaration that death should not precede birth, and though it was designed with abortion in view, it is no less true when it comes to fetal reduction procedures. My research in 2024 indicated that “for every one child born through IVF, something like 12 ‘siblings’ [are] lost to the process.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine reports that 100,158 babies were born through IVF in 2024—which means that an additional 1.2 million were never born. They died in the attempt. 

The Neverborn, as we might call them, is also the name of a novel I read last week by B.B. Brighton. It imagines a dystopian future wherein every American is microchipped at birth and every OB-Gyn is required by law to perform abortions. Sadly, neither premise seems all that far-fetched. The wrinkle, here, is that one particular “abortionist” has decided to specialize in late-term procedures for the express purpose of secretly delivering babies alive and placing them with families willing to raise them off the grid. Because these children are not chipped, they are known as Neverborns. Leading a normal life is not an option for them since everything from education to health care and employment to commerce is contingent upon the possession of said chip. Anyone discovered without a chip is sent off to a foreign war while their families are imprisoned or worse. 

The action in this story, which is the first in a three-part series, focuses on a teenage Neverborn named Kekoa who goes on the run after discovering his lineage—and the threat he poses to his adopted family. But before he even gets off his home island of Kauai, he is targeted by a pair of murderous scoundrels who promise to help him start a new life. Neverborns, it turns out, are the perfect scapegoats for all manner of crime and villainy. In the end, Kekoa’s only means of escape is to find the birth mother who doesn’t know he’s alive and convince her to provide him the credentials he needs to clear his name. Having some inside insights from the author herself, I know that one of her objectives is to humanize the victims of abortion by introducing us to a trio of those who ”shouldn't be here”—human beings who would have lost everything if their lives had forcibly ended in the womb (or the Petri dish). The embryo who is discarded mere days after conception loses no less of his or her life than the fetus who’s aborted on the cusp of birth. This is one of the points drawn out so beautifully in the Sheldon Vanauken essay I referenced last week. When we meet as adults people who were supposed to be aborted in the womb, it becomes impossible to deny what would have been lost had the prince of darkness had his way. 

Trying to predict the future of abortion, or the future of reproductive technologies, is both difficult and depressing. That’s because even the victories are inherently precarious. When other marginalized people groups make legal gains, the beneficiaries can be seen and heard. But the children who are threatened by abortion cannot make public appearances. Nor can a great orator or activist arise from their midst. You can get to know your black neighbors (or your white neighbors, as the case may be). You can get to know your Jewish neighbors or your Palestinian neighbors, but you cannot get to know your unborn neighbors. At least not directly. And so they remain a mere abstraction whose death and destruction barely merits notice. There are people the world over who came close to being aborted as an embryo or fetus, and even people who literally survived an abortion, but their very act of survival removed them from the marginalized class. They are no longer an “unwanted” unborn child. That means the only hope for those who so remain is for people from outside the group to stand in on their behalf. People like you and me, who have already survived the womb and must now make the case for those who haven’t.

It’s hard to imagine that there could be anything like a “final” victory this side of eternity, but perhaps this is a case where there is benefit in losing sight of the forest for the trees. Like the proverbial girl throwing starfish back into the sea, we might wonder what difference it makes to save a single child from abortion? Well, it makes a pretty big difference for that one! Until recently, I'd gotten out of the habit of wearing Abort73 T-shirts. What does it matter, I thought? The success of this ministry ultimately depends upon thousands of other people wearing Abort73 shirts. But what if I’m looking at it wrong? What if mine is the Abort73 shirt that saves a life? What if mine is the shirt that prompts a five- or six-figure donation? I can’t control what anyone else does; I can only control what I do. It may be true that we men and women of faith lack the empirical evidence necessary to topple the shortsighted cynicism of our brethren, but it’s the believing twin I hope to emulate—the one who never gave up on the idea that there just might be such a thing as mom.