With Roe vs. Wade having been recently overturned and abortion laws now returned to the states, the time has never been more urgent for pro-life individuals to be prepared at the local level to strike against abortion. Scott Klusendorf's book The Case for Life is more of a how-to manual for how to make the pro-life argument, but Tearing Us Apart is the book that will make you want to be prepared, once you learn all of the ways that abortion brings harm to so many different areas of life.
Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis take it one topic at a time — abortion harms women by undermining the sacred and moral relationship (p.41) between mother and child, and by damaging a woman's emotional and psychological health (p.87); abortion harms medicine by turning a profession that exists for healing into a tool of destruction (the Hippocratic Oath forbids abortion — p.122); abortion harms the political process as it has become the "blessed sacrament" of the Democratic Party (p.188,198), which now leaves no room for any dissent on the issue (p.180); abortion harms the media, as reporters have devised various deceptive euphemisms ("fetal cardiac activity" or "embryonic pulsing" instead of "heartbeat," p.210) to obscure basic facts.
This is just a small sample of how abortion tears us apart, but worst of all, abortion harms unborn children, the most helpless members of the human community, who are denied their personhood so their killing may be justified. "Just as past societies once classified some human beings as non-persons based on race or religion, so today we classify a segment of humanity as non-persons based on age, size, location, or stage of development. The law should refuse to endorse such arbitrary standards of personhood and, in so doing, protect us all." (p.46).
The book is not just a rant, either, as the conclusion provides several practical suggestions for what we should do in response. "We can't neglect the responsibility that each of us has on an individual level to build a culture of life . . . None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." (p.238).
This book does not present itself as coming from a Christian perspective, so you won’t find Scriptural support or theological arguments. For that reason it should be stated that anyone suffering from the shame of abortion can find refuge in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who offers forgiveness and salvation to any who would turn from their sin and place faith in him. There is no sin so serious that it can’t be covered by Jesus’ blood.