OPINION:
A new survey from the Pew Research Center to rate the morality of nine different behaviors and actions, from consuming alcohol to having an extramarital affair, found more U.S. adults find it unacceptable to watch pornography than abort a baby.
That’s quite a culture shift — and shock.
It’s one thing to call out pornography for its potential to destroy marriages and relationships; damage cultural norms of beauty and decency; harm and exploit children, particularly young girls who are demeaned and objectified by a porn-obsessed world. It’s one thing to decry the spirit-killing and soul-sucking nature of porn. It’s one thing to recognize and deplore the dark, seedy underworld of porn that advances sexual trafficking and rape and crimes against humanity.
It’s another thing to see porn as more harmful — more morally reprehensible — than the killing of a human life.
Yet that’s how U.S. adults in America view it. And that’s how U.S. adults view it because — and this is the real culture shift and shock — they don’t see abortion as the killing of a human life.
Here’s the Pew data: In America, 90% of U.S. adults say it’s morally unacceptable for married people to have an affair; 52% say it’s morally unacceptable to view pornography; 47%, to have an abortion; 29% to gamble; and 23% to use marijuana.
That means more consider adultery and porn morally more wrong than aborting a baby.
As egregious as that seems, it makes sense when Americans are surveyed on their thoughts of abortion.
In June of 2005, roughly 24% of Americans told Gallup in a poll they believed abortion should be legal under any circumstances, versus 20%who said abortion should be illegal, no matter the circumstance — no matter if the pregnancy was due to rape, for example. Fast-forward to May of 2025, and 30% said abortion should be legal under any circumstances; versus 13% who said illegal in all circumstances.
Religion plays into views on abortion quite a bit.
“About three-quarters of white evangelical Protestants, or 73 percent, think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases,” the Pew Research Center found in a “Public Opinion on Abortion” survey published in June 2025. “By contrast, 86 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 71 percent of black Protestants, 64 percent of white non evangelical Protestants and 59 percent of Catholics.”
As the nation moves more secular, so, too, the nation’s growing acceptance of abortion.
That makes abortion a symptom of the level of faith, biblical values and godliness of the citizens of society. And it matters. Faith matters. Morality matters. As citizens go — so society goes.
Look at this, from The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law — a 2021 published piece entitled, “The Insidious Origins of the ‘Moral’ Argument Against Abortion Rights,” and it’s clear society is moving so far down the path toward secularism that even calling abortion a moral consideration is becoming a matter for debate and outrage.
“One of the most common arguments levied against a woman’s right to choose is the idea that abortion is ‘murder,’ and the killing of an innocent fetus is the most heinous sin a woman can partake it,” the essay states. “This view is supposedly grounded in a deep reverence for human life. However, the origin of this belief is less humanistic than its current proponents would like to believe. The crusader against women’s bodily autonomy was invented, perpetuated and executed by male doctors in the mid-nineteenth century in a bid for financial gain and the domination of a market over which, at the time, they had no control.”
So the pro-life movement is rooted in greed for money?
The farther away from God the nation moves, the more separated from common decencies, common sense and commonly held values and morals Americans become — and the greater the chance grows for wickedness and evil to spread and become the new norm.
The moral ratings from Pew are indicators of where this country now stands, and how far we’ve strayed from founding days, when God was written into the culture, the Bible, into the legal and governing structures, and human life was regarded with the utmost respect. We’ve turned a corner on reverencing God’s creations to denying Him as the creator, and now, to denying even what He creates.
Porn may be immoral.
But saying it’s morally better than abortion is a sick view, symptomatic of a very sick society. The only cure is to return to God.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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