Barack Obama recently said that pro-lifers want to return to the 1950s.

He makes this claim as if everything now is better than it was in the ’50s and it’s clear that no one should want that.

There are two problems with this argument. First, he employs the logical fallacy of guilt by association. He wants to make you think that just because they want to return to pro-life laws, that mean misogynist conservatives also want to return to a time with polio, without microwave ovens or iPhones, and when women were barefoot and pregnant.  That’s not necessarily true. We can save those millions of human lives and still keep our microwave ovens and iPhones. Making abortion illegal doesn’t mean we have to lose the good things of modernity.

Second, Obama makes the progress fallacy, implying that everything is better now than in the 1950s. That is clearly not the case. We have a lot more government regulation now than in the 1950s and that ain’t good. We have more divorce now, more drug use, and violent crime. We have AIDS and skyrocketing mental disorders. With all these problems, some aspects of the ’50s don’t sound too bad after all, huh?

Take feminism itself, for instance, the movement supposedly with the most to gain from abortion. There were some very important aspects to the women’s liberation movement that started in America in 1820 including universal suffrage and legal equality. But what has this movement devolved into when women’s liberation looks like a young woman completely disrespecting and objectifying herself in front of a national audience? Miley Cyrus as a representative of feminism? Susan B. Anthony is not impressed.

Not everything improves with time and not all change is good. If you were to tell Jews in Nazi Germany, oh, the British want us to return to the ’00s, I bet it wouldn’t sound too bad to them. At least they weren’t the subject of a mass genocide back then.

The same is true right now. An entire population is being targeted in a classist, racist, sexist genocide and if you ask those on the wrong side of the killing if they wish it weren’t happening, I’m pretty sure they would say yes. Unfortunately, they can’t speak. They can’t do a lot of things–including defend themselves. They are the most helpless–the most vulnerable in our society–the unborn.

Turn back the clock? As CS Lewis said, well if the clock is wrong, the best thing to do IS turn back the clock. Unfortunately we live in a time in which several collective clocks are about as wrong as they can be.