“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” – Hubert Humphrey
In light of recent developments in New York State last week when the governor of that state signed into law the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), I have decided to weigh in on the ongoing abortion debate and dedicate my next two blogs to responding to this moral issue of our time. This act now signed into New York state law allows for abortion to occur up to 24 weeks of pregnancy which essentially sanctions elective abortion up to the moment of birth if the life of the woman is at risk.
Now, I do not necessarily offer any new thoughts that haven’t yet been bandied about since Roe v Wade, but perhaps I do offer a fresh perspective for Christians to consider in their fight against this moral evil that has overtaken our country.
In this first installment, it is my hope to shed light from the Scripture on why this evil exists; and why it will continue to exist in our world. And in my next blog I will seek to lend some helpful biblical insight into what we as the people of God can do about it.
There is a misquote that was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi who supposedly said, that the “greatness of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest member.” While the truth of this statement seems obvious, the creation of it should be better attributed to former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey who spoke the above tag-line quote at the beginning of my remarks at the dedication of the Hubert Humphrey Building on November 1, 1977 in Washington, D.C.
What he said that day was true, “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life….” And if last week’s signing of the Reproductive Health Act is any indication, it seems that we have failed that moral test as a nation.
What could have led us to make such a decision as the legalization of state-sanction killing? Now, while abortion existed long before the Roe v. Wade decision, how have we now come to not only legalize it but to defend it in terms of “women’s rights”? What other group or sexual orientation, gender or race has ever being given by the state the “right” to end a human life indiscriminately?
If we could manage to strip away all the political correctness, the rhetoric, the slogans, and protest signs what would we discover?
What is an abortion? Is it simply the ending of an unwanted pregnancy; is it simply the evacuation of fetal tissue from the uterus? Is it really only clinical in nature; or is it a deeply immoral activity that goes well beyond what is humane and conscionable?
I think we all know what it is, don’t we? Even those who are the most ardent advocates of a woman’s right to choose, know what an abortion accomplishes. They may not want to admit the truth; they may not want to know the details but deep down where God has formed and touches the human conscience, they know. And if they don’t, it is only because they have seared their conscience beyond all sensitivity. Perhaps unformed; perhaps deformed; we all know what it is that occupies the womb, and we all know what is being done when an abortion doctor accomplishes the procedure.
Yet how is it, if we know what it is, that any rational thinking human being can, not only perform such acts, but go to hell and back, to defend them?
Jonathan Swift, the 17th Century Author of the famed, Gulliver’s Travels Adventure wrote this short quip about the nature of humanity. He said,
“You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”
I think that’s true of anyone who has ever made the decision to have an abortion; the act is simply the end result of a place they have reasoned themselves into. And as traumatic as making that decision might be, their conscience is perhaps eased to some degree given that they are surrounded by a culture applauding and supporting it.
But it does beg the question in my mind, what some of the most common reasons women give for why they would seek this option above any other alternative?
The Most Common Reasons Women give for having an abortion
The statistics are staggering, according to Planned Parenthood, 1 in 4 women will have an abortion before they’re 45 years old[1] And “a new analysis published by the National Right to Life Committee indicated there have been an estimated 60,069,971 abortions since the Supreme Court handed down its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision allowing virtually unlimited abortions.”[2]
Over sixty-million lives ended means that over 60 million women or more, have reasoned themselves into making the same decision. If a woman’s right to choose is somehow sacred in today’s corrupt culture, then shouldn’t the reason for making such a choice rise to the same level of importance where the reason justifies the action? In other words, if you’re going to undergo such procedure that results in the death of your baby, you’d better have a good reason to do so. You had better have exhausted every other alternative. One would think. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Here’s one listing for the most common reason(s) for why women choose abortion:
“According to research collected from 2008 through 2010, the most frequently cited answers women provide as reasons for abortion (and the percentage of women who provided them) are the following. Note that women were able to give multiple reasons in this survey”[3]:
- Not financially prepared: 40 percent
- Bad timing, not ready, or unplanned: 36 percent
- Partner-related reasons (including the relationship is bad or new, she doesn’t want to be a single mother, her partner is not supportive, does not want the baby, is abusive, or is the wrong guy): 31 percent
- Need to focus on her other children: 29 percent
- Not emotionally or mentally prepared: 19 percent
- Interferes with educational or vocational plans: 20 percent
- Health-related reasons (includes concern for her own health, the health of the fetus, use of prescription or non-prescription drugs, alcohol, or tobacco): 12 percent
- Want a better life for a baby than she could provide: 12 percent
- Not independent or mature enough for a baby: 7 percent
- Influences from family or friends: 5 percent
- Doesn’t want a baby or to place the baby up for adoption: 4 percent
What you may notice about such reasons is that almost every reason given is one that is focused upon needs or issues of the mother, not the unborn child that she carries. And the few that do, still do not rise to level of importance as to justify the action taken. Some makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. How do you reason that if you want a better life for your child then you can provide, that the answer to that dilemma is to end its life altogether? Isn’t quality of life predicated first on being allowed to live?
I must say, the kind of mental and ethical gymnastics a person has to perform in order to silence their own conscience on this issue is truly staggering.
Instead of responding emotionally as I would like to do, I must choose to bow at this point to the reasoning of those perhaps greater than I. To Ms. Alveda King the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King who said most poignantly that:
“Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.”
But is that it? Is selfishness the only reason America stands knee-deep in blood; in the blood of children? Although I agree with Ms. King, I would add to the issue the following overlooked reasons for why abortion exists. And not only exists but is celebrated in dramatic fashion as was evidenced in the City of New York last week when Governor Cuomo ordered the top of the World Trade Center to be lit in pink in celebration of the Reproductive Health Act being signed into law.
How can a culture celebrate such a gruesome act as abortion? Have we all lost our ever-loving minds? Well, as we’ve said previously, to do so, one must reason themselves into it. To do so one must first:
Euphemize the reality of abortion in order to keep the conscience at bay!
It is at this point I pause to highlight in broad strokes what seems to have been forgotten and remains hidden in the shadows to those who would advocate for the right of a woman to abort her unborn baby. And that reality is that the for the success of the pro-choice movement to have ever gained ground in the first place, it had to refashion the reality of abortion in terms of “women’s rights”. This they have done successfully through the use of clever euphemistic argument. Through euphemism, they took the spotlight, as it were, off of the rights of unborn to live, and placed it upon the supposed “rights of women”.
Euphemism was the tool they used to change the minds of America. In fact, everything about their continuing argument for the continuation of abortion on
And look how they have euphemized what occupies a pregnant womb! They refuse to identify the unborn as a “baby”, instead they apply clinical, and less human terms to it, using references such as “fetus” or “fetal tissue”. They do this so that when an abortion is performed, they do not awaken their conscience to what is actually happening. Thus…
…in the relative comfort of euphemism, people suppress the conscience, re-train the mind, and dehumanize the unwanted.
And we know from history that whenever and wherever genocide has occurred, the process of dehumization has happened previous to it. In fact genocide cannot happen without it, for if you ask the question, how can rational, reasonable human beings be made to appeal to the baser part of their natures? To willingly, ceremoniously commit unspeakable acts of brutality without the slightest twinge of pity for their fellow man? Again, the answer is dehumanization.
We saw this happen in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s in Nazi Germany when Hitler convinced an entire nation of cultured people to become complicit in extinguishing those whom they considered undesirable and unwanted.
In his book, When a Nation Forgets God, Erwin Lutzer wrote this startling fact from history,
“Hitler believed that the Jews were subhuman—parasites that needed to be exterminated. In a 1923 speech in Munich, he said, ‘The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being an image of God, the Eternal. The Jews are the image of the devil. Jewry means the racial tuberculosis of the nations’. And, because they were deemed to be in the same category as animals, Hitler made sure they could be killed without reprisals. He would change the law to ensure that extinguishing this race was not a crime.”[4]
The parallels between what led to the Holocaust in the 1940’s and the genocide of the womb that continues with the passing of RHA in New York cannot be understated. In 1973, “the United States Supreme Court changed the law to exclude a whole class of people from constitutional protection. Under the court’s ruling and its progeny, the courts have held that as long as a baby was in the womb it was not human and thus could be killed.”[5]
How do you reason yourself into the rightness of what is by its very nature, state-sanctioned murder? Easy, euphemize the debate; dehumanize womb; focus more of your attention upon the mother’s right to choose and less on the baby’s right to live; and soon you’ll begin to look on the unborn as one student at a leading university referred to it, as…”a parasite”. That’s extreme euphemism in living color…the color pink.
The second way to reason yourself into the Pro-Choice position is to…
Remove the Creator from the equation for this will free you to create your own truth!
In the 19th century, the atheist German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Parable of the Madman in which he spelled the doom of Christianity in Western thought.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
“By this he meant that the Christian world view was no longer the dominant influence on the thought of Western culture. Nietzsche reasoned that mankind had once created God through wishful thinking, but the nineteenth century man intellectually matured to the point where he rejected God’s existence. Intellectuals throughout the world were embracing atheism as their world view, and the ideas of these intellectuals were beginning to influence the common people throughout Western civilization. According to Nietzsche, scientific and technological advances had made belief in God untenable.”[6]
Nietzsche’s philosophy gained wide acceptance among the academic elites which eventually filtered into western thought. So much so that it’s been said that when God died in the 19th century, man died in the 20th. For the 20th century has gone down in history as the bloodiest, with humanity slaughtering more people than all of the previous nineteen centuries put together.
This too, Nietzsche predicted for with God dead, man becomes an untamed beast. If God does not exist, then one is free to make up one’s own truth, one’s own morality and one’s own rules independent of Divine authority. And when that happens…people tend to die. The Pro-choice position is a reflection of that reality.
So if you want to reason yourself into the pro-choice position; one of the first things you must do is…rid yourself of absolute truth in favor of a false, relative, culturally popularized, perverted version of the truth. In order to kill a baby in the womb…one must first kill God in his life.
Which is why it is almost impossible to have a civil discussion with those who are Pro-choice. For the moment you appeal to divine absolute truth, the foundations upon which the Pro-Choice position is built, begin to crumble. Which is also why the debate becomes so emotionally heated, for as Milo Yiannopoulos remarks, “Abortion is wrong. I think everyone knows that, which is why abortion activists are so angry all the time. It’s a bit like when you catch someone out in a lie, and they get really mad at you really quickly, and you can’t work out why until later. It’s guilt.”
The last reason why people are able to reason their way into the Pro-Choice position is that…
They are ignorant the fact that there is Satanic activity behind the act!
It occurred to me that in searching for a reason for how a person can reason themselves into the Pro-Choice position that there is one consideration of which most people are unaware…The influence of the god of this world.
Satan has always been at war with innocence. Jesus, in his description of Satan, says of him,
“…He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.” John 8:44
Think of it, Satan uses lies to deceive; and that satanically-devised deception can be lethal. Look throughout history to the great deceivers of the world, men like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein their deception ended in the deaths of millions. Or even the ecclesiastical frauds like Jim Jones, David Koresh and the like; they deceived the people that followed them, and that deception led to their follower’s ignominious end. This is the way of things. Death most often follows deception.
This is what we have done in abortion. Having sucked down the lie that the one who grows in the womb unseen isn’t human, we’re no longer bothered by the fact that the lie we’ve come to believe enables a child to die.
Satan knows this better than anyone.
As such, evil has always been aimed at destroying innocence and children are the personification of that innocence. This is the reason behind Satan’s slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem by Herod; why he incited the Israelites to sacrifice their children to the false god, Moloch; why out of the 11 million people killed in Nazi death camps, over a third were children. And with the ever-growing number of aborted babies continuing to mount we find again, Satan is awash in the blood of children.
Perhaps the
worst part of reasoning ourselves into celebrating abortion, beyond the tragic
slaughter of an entire generation of innocents is that in the process of doing so,
we have slaughtered our own collective innocence, as well.
[1] https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/considering-abortion
[2] https://www.lifenews.com/2018/01/18/60069971-abortions-in-america-since-roe-v-wade-in-1973/
[3] https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-for-abortion-906589
[4][4] When a Nation Forgets God, by Erwin Lutzer Chapter 3
[5] Ibid
[6] Approaching the 21st Century: The Death of God, Truth, Morality, and Man by Dr. Phil Fernandes