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 is involuntary euthanasia (i.e. wrong)

Abortion Memorial (Photo credit: DrGBB)

I don’t think it’ll take anyone by surprise when I say that I dislike abortion. Killing unborn children is something which, I think, should be avoided at all costs. Yes, exceptions, blah blah blah, but for 99.9%+ of cases, it’s wrong.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Take Peter Kreeft for example, who takes an opening statement (‘we know what an apple is’) and draws it to its logical conclusion (‘abortion is wrong’). Here’s the climax paragraph:

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to [deny that murder is morally wrong], for they have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to do? [...] I think most people refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.

So there you go. According to this well-constructed argument, pro-choicers willingly stop their brains from working for the sake of abortion. If that offends you (or if you’re just interested in seeing the argument in full), you can read the whole thing here.

HT: Justin Taylor

Will you open the casket?

Emmett Till’s Mother (Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Images)

Last Friday a story ran in many newspapers about the fact that the Chinese government had aborted a child because the expectant mother couldn’t afford the £4,000 tax on second children. My immediate response was: if a foetus isn’t a human being then what’s the fuss about?

Well, the same day Justin Taylor blogged a quote from a book which pretty much highlighted what needs to happen to show a world that what it’s doing is simply wrong:

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14 year-old black youth, traveled from Chicago to visit his cousin in the town of Money, Mississippi. Upon arrival, he bragged about his white girlfriends back in Chicago. This was surprising to his cousin and the cousin’s friends because blacks in Mississippi during the 50s didn’t make eye contact with whites, let alone date them! Both actions were considered disrespectful. Later that day, Emmett, his cousin, and a small group of black males entered Bryant’s Store where, egged-on by the other males, fourteen-year-old Emmett flirted with a twenty-one-year-old white, married woman behind the counter. After purchasing candy, he either whistled at her or said something mildly flirtatious. (Reports vary.) The cousin and the others warned him he was in for trouble.

A few days later, at 2:00 A.M., Emmett was taken at gunpoint from his uncle’s home by the clerk’s husband and another man. After savagely beating him, they killed him with a single bullet to the head. Emmett’s bloated corpse was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. A cotton gin fan had been shoved over his head and tied with barbed wire. His face was partially crushed and beaten almost beyond recognition. The local Sheriff placed Emmett’s body in a sealed coffin and shipped it back to his mother in Chicago.

When Mamie Till got the body, she made a stunning announcement: There would be an open-casket funeral for her son Emmett. People protested and reminded her how much this would upset everyone. Mamie agreed, but countered, “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.”

The photo of Emmett’s mangled body in that open casket was published in Jet magazine and it helped launch the Civil Rights Movement in America. Three months later in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus when ordered to do so. She said the image of Emmett Till gave her the courage to stand her ground.

It’s time for pro-life Christians to open the casket on abortion.

We should do it lovingly but truthfully. We should do it in our churches during the primary worship services, comforting those who grieve with the gospel of forgiveness. We should do it in our Christian high schools and colleges, combining visuals with a persuasive defense of the pro-life view that’s translatable to non-Christians.

But open the casket we must.

Until we do, Americans [or anyone for that matter] will continue tolerating an injustice they never have to look at.

Pro-abortion protesters protest in protest against protesting…what?

Protest sign: "Scientology Forces Abortions" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read a little article the other day. In summary, a bunch of pro-abortion supporters have planned a protest to protest against a protest in protest against abortions.

Maybe read it a couple of times.

Anyway, this made me think.

Firstly, it doesn’t need me to make up a silly sentence to show that the protest seems a bit daft – they’re literally protesting against a protest. That’s like unions striking in protest against the unions who are striking. Pro-life campaigners protest because they disagree that abortions should happen so easily, whereas these guys seem to be protesting because they disagree with the pro-lifers’ opinion…if that’s a sensible course of action we might as well all spend every day protesting!

Secondly, what they’re protesting against seems silly. At the top of the article there’s a picture, and the caption quotes someone they clearly disagree with; MP Nadine Dorris has proposed that 13-16 year-olds should be taught the:

benefits of abstinence from sexual activity.

Now, please feel free to accuse me of being a prood, but what’s wrong with that? At the age of 13-16 sex is illegal, so teaching the benefits of not breaking the law would seem to me to be a sensible idea! It’s like teaching under-18s that not drinking alcohol has benefits. Yes, drinking alcohol can be an enjoyable activity, as can sex, and neither MP Dorris nor me is suggesting that alcohol or sex should be banned from society, but that doesn’t seem to be that controversial to me.

Well, anyway, if you fancy protesting against a protest, or against teaching people that keeping the law can be a good idea, then be my guest.

I won’t be joining you.

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.