A rising pop star unapologetically joked about a fan killing her preborn baby last week — the sobering result of the decades-long devaluation of life in the West.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant here but at least my baby got to hear ‘Midnight Sun’ before I aborted it,” a fan of songstress Zara Larsson commented under a TikTok video of Larsson performing the song.

“I killed the performance and then you killed it after the performance purrrrrr,” Larsson replied, using a slang term meant to indicate strong approval or celebration. The singer remained unapologetic — even gleeful — in the face of pro-life censure.

“Like, sorry, that’s funny,” Larsson said of her (mediocre) wordplay in a video responding Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins, who called the singer’s comments “sick.”

“Like, I don’t know what to say. That’s funny,” Larsson repeated. The singer encouraged her followers to further trivialize abortion. “Let’s make more jokes,” she said. “Like, abortion is healthcare.”

Hawkins’ responded to Larsson’s video on X, writing: “This is the culture of death the pro-abortion movement has created. We must end it.”

Hawkins’ response refers to the systematic devaluation of life in American culture, evidenced by the legalization, normalization and celebration of killing preborn babies.

Larsson’s reprehensible comments illustrate a grim new iteration of the culture of death — the trivialization of murder.

Larsson and her fan reduced the death of a preborn child to a pithy exchange on social media. Even more disturbing, the duo joked about the baby’s death after humanizing him or her. The child’s mother admitted he or she could hear music. Larsson freely used the word “kill” to describe the child’s death.

You don’t kill “a clump of cells.” You kill a living being. But, in a culture of death, life ceases to matter.

I’m reminded of a line from C.S. Lewis’ eminently relevant The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape, a demon, describes humor as “an invaluable means of destroying shame.”

People continue toward damnation, Screwtape contends, when they discover “almost anything [they] want to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of [their] fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke.”

Larsson’s utter detachment from the gravity of murder illustrates how much influence the culture of death wields over hearts and minds.

It is vital, then, for pro-lifers to not only pursue legal protections for preborn children, but also to remind those who have forgotten that human life is intrinsically valuable.

Only when Americans reclaim the cultural value of life will abortion become unthinkable — and jokes like Larsson’s utterly unacceptable.

Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.