U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently insisted that widespread access to abortion doesn’t just make women “more free,” it also gives men more “freedom” as well.

His statement showcases the common idea that human happiness and fulfillment depend on sexual freedom. And what better guarantees that “freedom” than abortion, the ability to erase one of the main “barriers” to unrestricted sex, namely, the unplanned birth of a new human life?

But sexual immorality isn’t freedom, it’s slavery.

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Jesus warns that “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). And, while we know that any kind of sin is enough to damn us (if we do not stand covered by Jesus’s finished work on the cross), sexual sin is more perversely corrupting. That’s why Paul emphasizes that “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18).

Now, we live at a time when the temptation to put on those chains voluntarily is overwhelming.

Everywhere, whether on TV, billboards, and especially on social media, we are bombarded not only with temptations but also with the message that it is good to give in.

But sex outside of the context for which God intended it — a man and a woman united in monogamous marriage — consistently leads to misery. If complete sexual freedom is the key to joy, then why is it that Gen Z, which lives in perhaps the most libertine era in human history, also reports such high rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety?

Shouldn’t the ability to partner with whomever you wish — free of social opprobrium and with the ability to kill any preborn children so they don’t “get in the way” of your life — bring unprecedented joy and cure loneliness and depression?

Certainly, other factors also play a role in this mental health crisis. But a large part of the problem lies with the destruction wrought by sexual debauchery.

Solomon instructs that “Bread gained by deceit is sweet to a man, but afterward his mouth will be full of gravel” (Proverbs 20:17). Similarly, pleasure gained by sin might feel “sweet” for a moment, but its sweetness quickly turns to ash.

Men and women are both learning the emptiness of sexual libertinism. They were told that this unrestrained liberty is the way to achieve lasting joy. They seem to gain it for a moment, they feel happy for a time — but then they find out the hollowness of what the culture promised them.

They find out that these worldly relationships don’t really satisfy them, that they gave up the beauty of a lifelong, self-sacrificial commitment to another human being. They find themselves listless and unhappy, and they can’t explain why.

Abortion empowers this empty lifestyle: Before the widespread advent of abortion, the risk of having an unplanned pregnancy was a powerful deterrent on immoral behavior.

Yes, it’s true that abortion is an evil as old as ancient Egypt, but at no time has it been so widely available and aggressively promoted as it is in the 21st-century West.

It’s an added irony that the left, which claims to be feminist, is so pro-abortion.

Buttigieg is right, in a way. Abortion has made men more “free” — but not in a good way. Men may be more free to pursue happiness but they are also more free from responsibility. They’re more free to sleep around, have affairs, and then eliminate the consequences of their behavior by killing any unplanned babies, sacrificing them on the altar of their selfish, immoral pleasures.

Men and women both would find it much better to ignore Buttigieg’s philosophy and accept, as the 17th-century Puritan Thomas Watson wrote, that “To serve God, to Love God, to enjoy God, is the sweetest freedom in the world.”

Originally published at the Standing for Freedom Center.