The child Gloria Steinem left out of the story

They say diamonds are forever, but so are humans. We do not stop existing at the death of our bodies. And that is why the death of Gloria Steinem should cause us to think seriously about more than her political legacy as a leftist activist.

Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She will be remembered as one of the most influential feminists of the last century, a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and a leader in the movement that made abortion a defining element of modern feminism.

Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.

But there is another person whose life must be remembered when we remember Steinem: the unborn child she aborted.

Steinem became pregnant at 22. She had broken off an engagement and was preparing to leave for India. Abortion was illegal in Britain except in limited circumstances, but a physician, John Sharpe, helped her obtain one.

Decades later, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Sharpe. She remembered his words to her: “You must promise me two things.” One was that she not reveal his name. The other was: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”

Those words summarize an entire moral revolution.

But what about the other life? What did that child want to do with his or her life?

That child never went to India. Never went to school. Never chose a career. Never fell in love. Never held a child. Never traveled, wrote a book, changed political parties, found religion, rejected religion, made mistakes, sought forgiveness, or grew old.

The philosophy supposedly centered on “choice” began by taking every choice away from someone else. There is no higher level of selfishness than to end another person’s life so that person does not get in the way of your own plans.

What does this tell us about the human heart?

Steinem once said, “I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a little bit of social conditioning.” She considered freedom from conventional social expectations liberating. That theme ran through her life: question inherited rules, throw off imposed roles, and determine your own destiny. In its most radical form, modern feminism treats human rules as mere social constructs and “being yourself” as acting on your desires without discipline or correction.

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There is something attractive about that message. Human beings should question unjust traditions. But there is a darker possibility. What if the moral law we are overthrowing is not merely “social conditioning”? What if some acts really are wrong regardless of what society says? Steinem’s questioning was not merely philosophical curiosity. It echoed the sin of Genesis 3: the desire to become one’s own god, even to claim power over the life of another human being.

The most frightening capacity of the human mind is not ignorance. It is self-justification. We can take something terrible and give it a noble name.

Steinem did not merely defend her abortion reluctantly. She later described it as taking “responsibility for my own life.” She said she tried to make herself feel guilty by imagining how old her child would have been. It is as if Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had stopped midway through “Crime and Punishment,” still convinced that murder could elevate him above ordinary morality.

That is chilling precisely because the child disappears from the moral calculation.

Her life. Her responsibility. Her choice. Her future.

But another human being had a life too.

What does this say about the movement that followed her?

Steinem did not keep this reasoning private. She helped make it a political philosophy.

Millions of Americans were taught to describe abortion in the language of liberation, autonomy, and reproductive freedom. The unborn child became almost linguistically invisible. We learned to talk endlessly about the woman’s future while refusing to talk about the future being deliberately ended.

That is how moral revolutions work. They do not normally begin by convincing people to celebrate evil as evil. They rename it as something good.

Murder becomes “choice.”

The destruction of a human life becomes “health care.”

And denying another human being her entire future becomes “doing what you want with your life.”

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The lesson of Steinem’s life is therefore larger than Steinem. She became influential because millions of people found that reasoning persuasive. A culture embraced the astonishing proposition that equality could be advanced by denying the most defenseless human beings even the equality of being allowed to live.

And now comes the question death forces upon us.

Christians believe Gloria Steinem still exists. We also believe her child still exists. Death does not make our actions disappear. It removes our ability to distract ourselves from them.

Imagine the question that child could ask: Mom, why did you kill me? Why was your future worth more than mine? Why did you get to “do what you want to do with your life” while deciding that I would never get to do anything with mine?

And widen the circle. What of the millions whose deaths were justified by the political movement Steinem helped lead? What happens when slogans about “reproductive freedom” meet the human beings whose lives those slogans helped extinguish?

Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.

And it makes repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God infinitely more urgent.

The great question is not whether history praises us after we die. It is whether the God who gave life agrees with what we did with it. Steinem now stands before His judgment seat.