The genocide continues

Supporters of Planned Parenthood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve written quite a bit on this blog about whether abortion’s right or wrong. That’s not what this is about. Most pro-choice campaigners would be happy to unite behind a banner saying, ‘Let’s make abortion legal, safe and rare.’

Let’s look at rare for just a moment. Planned Parenthood released their annual report last week, proudly announcing that in 2011-12 its affiliated clinics carried out 333,964 abortions. On average, wait for it, that’s one unborn child killed every 94 seconds.

In two words: not rare.

Please pray.

Abortion

Image via Wikipedia

39 years ago, 22 January 1973, a controversial court decision in the US changed the way abortion was viewed and addressed. The decision was called Roe v. Wade, and it basically set a precedent meaning that anyone can have an abortion right up to the date of birth, providing that killing the child in the womb would prevent any health issues in the mother. But ‘health’ in this case means any level of health; physical, mental, emotional, financial, anything you want. Obviously having a baby costs money, so the pro-choice advocates placed the choice firmly in the hands of the mother.

In response to Roe v Wade, every 22 January since people have remembered that decision, and have remembered the millions and millions and millions of children who have been killed since (1/3 of all unborn children in the US are killed). Internet articles have appeared all over the place again this year, so I wanted to mention a couple of them.

The Resurgence published a list of 15 things to consider about abortion before drawing a conclusion on it; here are a few:

• Existing fetal homicide laws make a man guilty of manslaughter if he kills the baby in a mother’s womb (except in the case of abortion).
• Living on its own is not the criterion of human personhood, as we know from the use of respirators and dialysis.
• Infants in the womb are human beings scientifically by virtue of their genetic make up.
• Justice dictates that when either of two people must be inconvenienced or hurt to alleviate their united predicament, the one who bore the greater responsibility for the predicament should bear more of the inconvenience or hurt to alleviate it.
• Jesus Christ can forgive all sins and will give all who trust in him the help they need to do everything that life requires.

Also, three sermons preached by John Piper have been made into a short 27-page booklet entitled Exposing the Dark Work of Abortion. Download it for free over here.

This is abortion

I would like to share a video today, and I would like you to watch it. I’m giving you fair warning that after about a minute or so the content changes from text to some extremely graphic images, which you may not like.

You’re not meant to like them.

I know that people disagree with me on this, but abortion is murder. If you disagree that abortion is murder I challenge you to watch this video the whole way through.

One unborn child is killed every 23 seconds. This video is less than four minutes long, and in that time eight children will have been murdered.

The good news is that God has the phenomenal power to forgive.

The pro-choice argument

Denny Burk wrote about a conversation he had with a pro-choice lady – here’s the climax:

I pressed still further, “What if the baby has been delivered completely, is still connected to the mother by the umbilical cord, and remains outside the womb for an hour while still connected? Should a woman have a right to kill the baby then?”

She replied, “Yes. If it’s still connected to the mother, it’s still a part of her body, and she has a right to abort it.”

I was astonished and informed her, “That’s infanticide, and that’s illegal.”

It was at that point that I realized that this conversation wasn’t about logic. It wasn’t about what was reasonable or right. This was just blind passion, and this woman had no ears to hear the cold inhumanity of her own position.

Have a read of the whole thing to see the rest of the conversation and his (correct) conclusion.

Giving birth to a disabled child is inconsiderate

Challies commented on his friend’s experience with abortion and children with special needs:

Is my son an accident? A faltering of the progressive cycle of evolution? A drain on society and its money? A thing not as valuable as a fully-functioning “normal” person?

He makes good observations about society and how the attitude has changed from ‘do you really want to give a disabled child life?’ to ‘how could you do this to your family?’ to ‘how could you do this to society?’ Conclusion: all ‘imperfect’ kids should be killed.

I’d encourage you to read the whole post here.

Misconception: one couple's journey from embryo mix-up to miracle baby by Paul and Shannon Morell with Angela Hunt (audio)

Misconception is an account of a nine-month journey faced by Paul and Shannon Morell. They successfully gave birth to twins using IVF, and hoped to give birth again until they discovered that their thawed embryos had been implanted into another woman. The struggles faced included the fear that the other woman would abort the baby, and dealing with national press coverage.

I was really looking forward to this book – I thought it would give a unique view into something I know very little about, but I’m afraid I didn’t really get it. The account is one-sided (as it has to be), but the authors’ inability to understand any other points of view about this extreme ethical dilemma was frustrating. For example, at one point Shannon is clearly offended that anyone would question her right to bring up this child who had been in another woman’s womb for the last nine months – I’m not saying anyone should, only that she sees this complex situation as quite black and white.

At times I found myself becoming frustrated with the logic presented. At one point, for example, Paul and Shannon were deciding whether or not to go public with the news story. Neither wanted the public to know, but based on their thoughts that the story was likely to get out anyway, they decided to go on national television.

The writing style is good, and the story is a compelling one, but my struggle here is what audience this book would appeal to. If you are considering IVF then this book may help, but there are better ones out there. If you have had an embryo mix-up, this book may well help. But if you’re just looking for a good read, I’d look somewhere else if I were you.

I got this audiobook for free from christianaudio.com as part of their audiobook reviewers’ programme. I’m not required to give a positive review.

God creating people for hell vs. abortion

I had a bit of a thought last night. A question often asked by atheists is ‘why would a good God create people, knowing they’re going to hell?’ People have been asking this question for millennia so I don’t think I’m suddenly giving the magical answer here, but I do think I can present a reason why the answer may not be understood.

Tim Tebow and his Mum did an advert in the Superbowl this year which could be misunderstood to say, ‘don’t abort your kid, because he could be famous one day’…but imagine that a couple got pregnant and the doctor told the new parents that their child would, without any doubt, end up going to prison. The couple may decide that the best course of action would be to abort the child or not…but if the baby was not aborted and then ended up in prison, you could ask him/her whether they would have preferred to have been aborted.

Here’s where the key thought lies. The Christian view would say that the parents should not abort their child. He/she is given the grace to enjoy at least a temporary time of fun and joy before being sent to prison. But the person in prison may not think that way – they may wish that they had never been born.

Bottom line? God is good. He knows what the most loving course of action is, so gives us all a time on this earth, despite the fact that none of us deserve it. He has also given us all the way to be delivered from hell, through the substitution of his own Son, Jesus Christ. Of course, some of us will not accept that gift, and God has always known that. But the action he has chosen, as a loving father, is to not abort the kids he knows will end up in hell.

The pro-life Superbowl ad

So Tim Tebow, a very famous college football quarterback and a white-hot born again Christian, is doing a 30 second advert about the importance of family and life during the world-famous Superbowl advertisement break.

A pro-choice journalist at the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins, wrote this article about it. I’d read it if I were you – here’s a snippet:

I’m pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I’ve heard in the past week, I’ll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the “National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time.” For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn’t be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t.

I particularly like the way that she says:

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren’t embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too — and they should step up to that.

Now how many non-Christians are heard saying that? Not too many! Make the most of it!

Like an electric current

The following post is taken from here.

“Mugged by Ultrasound: Why So Many Abortion Workers Have Turned Pro-Life”,by David Daleiden and Jon Shields, is a gut-wrenching, disturbing, graphic account of the emotional trauma abortion wrecks on those who perform them. For example, in 2008, Dr. Lisa Harris explained what happened while she, 18-weeks pregnant at the time, performed an abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. She felt her own baby kick at the same time she ripped off a fetal leg with her forceps. This prompted a visceral response.

Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.

Tragically, Dr. Harris is still in the abortion business.

Paul Jarret is not. He quit after 23 abortions. “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall, reflecting on aborting a 14-week-old fetus. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.” Judith Fetrow and Kathy Spark, both former abortion workers, converted to the pro-life cause after seeing the disposal of fetal remains as medical waste. Daleiden and Shields explain:

Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.

Many abortion providers have been converted by ultrasound technology. The most famous example is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. By his own reckoning Nathanson performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. But over time he began to fear he was involved in a great evil. Ultrasound images pushed him over the edge. “When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment.”

Sadly, countless abortion workers keep on perpetuating the great evil, even if it means suppressing the truth they literally feel in their bones.

Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights.  Ultrasound and D&E [dilation and evacuation] bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”

Read the whole thing and pray for abortion workers.

Abortion leader watches ultrasound of abortion and resigns

http://ow.ly/z0os – I’m just sayin’