A recent Instagram post from Planned Parenthood declared “Abortion is gender-affirming care,” accompanied by the claim that “reproductive freedom means every person gets to decide what’s right for their own body. No exceptions.” While many focused on the slogan’s shock value, they missed its significance.
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Planned Parenthood wasn’t creating a new philosophy. It was finally saying aloud what has long united two movements that are usually discussed separately.
For years, Planned Parenthood’s own literature has defended both abortion and “gender-affirming care” under the banner of “bodily autonomy.” Both are described as life-saving, life-affirming, and essential expressions of personal freedom. Once that premise is accepted, the slogan makes perfect sense. Ending a pregnancy and interrupting healthy human development become parallel acts of self-definition. To some, it may appear the statement is a terribly effective marketing decision. But it was not just tasteless food for the hungry social media algorithms that prey on controversy. Instead, Planned Parenthood and, by association, its allies, are finally acknowledging both practices share the same anthropology.
That anthropology views the material, and therefore humanity itself, not as divinely formed but as raw material ripe for alteration or destruction according to the will of an individual. The natural development of the body no longer reveals who we are and the physical bears no relation to the mental or the metaphysical.
Flip Planned Parenthood’s new slogan, however, and the implication becomes just as clear for those of us who hold a biblical view of the human person: gender-affirming care is indeed abortion’s ideological twin.
Both rest on the lie that our deepest identity is found in subjective feelings rather than in the objective reality God has woven into creation. Abortion holds that unborn children are disposable tissue whose inconvenient existence may be ended if it conflicts with a desired life plan. “Gender-affirming care” treats the post-birth human body as disposable tissue whose inconvenient development may be chemically or surgically destroyed if it conflicts with a newly desired life identity. Though the outcomes differ, the overarching principle remains: the created body must yield to the will of the self.
Every society is no doubt shaped by its answer to one foundational question: What does it mean to be human? If the biological body is only incidental in the formation of our personhood, then it has no authority over how we ought to live. It can be altered, suppressed, or discarded the moment it no longer serves personal desire. But if the human body is part of God’s deliberate design, then it is not a barrier to our personal identity. It is instead one of the ways, if not the first way, God discloses who we are. That conflict between the inner self and the created body is not a modern discovery. Christians have encountered it before.
The early Church confronted Gnosticism, a worldview that diminished the significance of the physical world by elevating an inner, hidden self above bodily reality. Christianity rejected that notion because Scripture presents the body as intentionally created by God and therefore inseparable from the person. Though our bodies now carry marks from the fall of man, we are not souls trapped inside meaningless flesh. God’s original design remains good and true: “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Unfortunately for Planned Parenthood, Scripture is rather clear. The body is not a commodity to be reshaped and recycled according to every passion. It possesses objective meaning because it is given by a creator. But as we have, as a society, continually affirmed such delusions, we encourage a confusion that severs the mind from the body, identity from creation, and as we now witness, truth from reality itself.
This same anthropology even surfaces in our language. Society’s cultural assertion of “deadnaming” assumes that the person born with a given name has, in some meaningful sense, died and been replaced by another identity. The given name, like the given body, is treated as something that must die so that another identity can live. Just as the body is treated as something to be overcome, a given name becomes something to be buried.
As Christians, Planned Parenthood’s statement should not merely incite our outrage; it should provoke sobriety. If the same organizations promote both causes, defend both by appealing to absolute bodily autonomy, and if both require society to affirm self-definition over created order, then Christians should recognize them as expressions of the same underlying worldview rather than isolated moral controversies.
Ironically, Planned Parenthood may have clarified this ideological connection for believers better than many ever have. In their misguided attempt to expand one coalition, they have openly exposed the common foundation beneath both causes. That admission should not be wasted on us. To quote Napoleon, “When the enemy is making a false movement, we must take good care not to interrupt him.”
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(Excerpt from The Christian Post. Photo Credit: transgender by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash)
