8-17-15<\/p>\n
Well\u2026 actually, that\u2019s a lie. If it really were simple, in America and many places in the world, there would not be hot debates, policy fallouts, family feuds, \u201clitmus tests,\u201d stockpiles of weaponized arguments, court cases, broken churches, broken families. Or, often, broken women, erstwhile moms, bitter regrets. And, not recalled enough: tens of millions of dead babies.<\/p>\n
But I hope any pro-abortion, \u201cpro-choice,\u201d readers will stick with me here. I acknowledge the \u201cissue\u201d is not simple\u2026 and my thoughts here, which have evolved through my life and I feel have arrived where they should be, might yet be a snapshot in time, evolving still. I think theology is clear, but public policy is difficult. Family management, counseling friends, is challenging.<\/p>\n
And my theological point of view \u2013 where colleagues might part company \u2013 is that I believe the Bible is clear, although without the preponderance of specific references, on the proper spiritual and ethical attitude toward abortion. But I do not think that it is the Unpardonable Sin. It should not be encouraged in or out of the family of God\u2026 but mothers who made the euphemistic \u201cchoices\u201d to \u201cterminate\u201d should be welcomed, not shunned, by Christians.<\/p>\n
Friends know that I once was quite comfortable with the practice (not alone among other issues I have abandoned). Even before Roe vs Wade it was legal in Washington DC, where I went to college, and there was a culture that was very mechanistic \u2013 arguments about affordability, family \u201cplanning,\u201d the soulless nature of blobs.<\/p>\n
In truth, two attitudes fueled that culture, in those days: Washington, with its large black population, was a focus of abortion advocates like Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, frankly targeted her work, hoping to minimize or eventually eliminate the black population in society. Ugly, but true. And in the 1960s and \u201870s there was the attitude, if not explicit argument, that abortion simply was after-the-fact contraception.<\/p>\n
My views changed through the years, the closer I drew to Jesus; but, also, the more I thought about the \u201cissue,\u201d the implications, the repercussions, the legacies. Abortion says<\/span> something about the women, and men, involved. It says<\/span> something about the society that permits \u2013 or encourages \u2013 it. It says<\/span> something about dead babies. Not aborted fetuses: shut up. Dead babies.<\/p>\n The \u201cissue,\u201d once thought settled after Roe vs Wade, is more contentious than ever in America. Less settled. Science has made astonishing advances, both in maintaining viability of the pre-born, and in determining what, frankly, is a human \u2013 what is life, who is living \u2013 after conception. Traditionalists often are labeled \u201canti-science\u201d about issues like evolution and global warming, but science is on the side, today, of the anti-abortionists. Or pro-life advocates.<\/p>\n The \u201cissue\u201d has invaded politics. Candidates might disagree on war and peace, the economy, government snooping, the threat of Iran, anything and everything\u2026 but (to employ the extreme labels) killing babies or a woman\u2019s \u201cright to choose\u201d are defining issues of the age.<\/p>\n The \u201cissue\u201d is such today that almost every day its implications rise before us. At least for me. The news stories, of course, that disclose videos of Planned Parenthood leaders discussing the sale and efficient harvesting of babies and their organs. (Opponents fulminate against the hidden cameras, or the relatively small profits, shamelessly ignoring the horror of it all.) This week is the anniversary of my granddaughter Sarah\u2019s birth. She lived nine days, a fragile preemie, and I look at the photo of my daughter Heather holding the tiny baby; I still cry to see the hope in Heather\u2019s smile \u2013 and then I look at tiny Sarah and cannot help, today, picturing \u201cscientists\u201d and abortionists who would have swept in and carved her up at so many cents per pound. I watch an afternoon of Smithsonian documentaries about primitive societies and realize, peripherally, how many practiced infant sacrifice. Primitive. societies. <\/p>\n I believe abortion is current-day infant sacrifice. We appease the gods of convenience, guilty conscience, and callous morals. <\/p>\n History has a term for these primitive, and contemporary, practices writ large: infanticide. China long has practiced selective \u2013 and mandatory \u2013 abortions and infanticide in order to manage its economy. And the world shrugs.<\/p>\n Again, not an issue easily discussed or dispatched. Does it come down, after all, to women grasping for a legal sanction to resist biological, as well as moral, imperatives? Five Supreme Court justices aside, there still are differences between the sexes, and always will be. We have a generation of women \u2013 I know<\/span> not all, despite the implications and claims of surveys, or, rather, poll-takers \u2013 who refuse to be women, at least in the most defining, distinctive, and glorious, way possible: motherhood. <\/p>\n Theodore Roosevelt once said (a propos<\/span> expanding women\u2019s right to vote), \u201cEquality of rights does not mean equality of functions.\u201d He did not mean cooking and cleaning; he meant to resist the revolutionary and degenerate aims of his contemporary, Margaret Sanger.<\/p>\n Of course there are the assertions, whether sincere or convenient, of those who argue that many children born to disadvantaged families are abused; that one \u201cmistake\u201d of passion should not be \u201cpunished by a baby,\u201d as President Obama rationalized; that our planet cannot support more people. With these arguments the \u201cissue\u201d finds itself shifted alongside those of barbarians, Nazis, and ethnic cleaners.<\/p>\n To me, certain responses are increasingly hard to resist:<\/p>\n If death is determined by when a heart stops beating, why is life not measured when a hearts begins beating?<\/p>\n If fetuses are not human, why are their little body parts considered human?<\/p>\n We are told that people have rights to health care, to food, to schools, to hospital care; why not a right to life?<\/p>\n If a single cell were discovered on a distant planet, the world would celebrate life existing elsewhere in the universe. If it were found in a woman’s womb, why is it not considered life?<\/p>\n Women abort \u2013 let us say, kill their children \u2013 when babies are inconvenient. Under Hitler, Jews were deemed inconvenient; their mistreatment was legal; their slaughter not punished. Are pre-born babies guiltier, more deserving of execution, than Jews?<\/p>\n If these unborn babies can be dismissed as tissue masses and \u201cblobs,\u201d why do we not discuss \u201cblob control,\u201d so nice and antiseptic, instead of \u201cbirth control\u201d?<\/p>\n This is not a man\/woman perspective. I know as well as any man can, how life-altering an \u201cunwanted\u201d pregnancy can be. Well, there are millions of women who cry for babies, their own and others, who are more militant than I. There are uncountable women who were spared being aborted, sometimes at the last minutes, who thrive today \u2013 happy, healthy, and grateful for life. There are women who decided to give their babies up for adoption \u2013 maybe the second most wrenching decisions they could make \u2013 and those children live amongst us.<\/p>\n Our society is not sensitive to fathers of \u201cunwanted\u201d babies who are bound to support their child until majority; but have no say if their girlfriends kill the baby. I have met women who were consumed with grief for being misled, for killing their babies, and have lived with their \u201cchoices,\u201d to use the hallowed word. One I know, have interviewed, is Norma McCorvey \u2013 the \u201cJane Roe\u201d of Roe vs. Wade \u2013 remorseful and a pro-life advocate today.<\/p>\n But still, not an easy issue. This is my determination, and a plea to my allies \u2013 celebrate life, all life; welcome sinners (as we all are<\/span>) who repent; wrap them, as we wrap ourselves, in Jesus\u2019s love; and exercise forgiveness. As God offers forgiveness to us.<\/p>\n To those who still wrestle with the morals and ethics of the abortion issue, I close. Like it or not, there is a Heaven and a Hell. And as we understand God\u2019s mystery, in Heaven we will all have \u201cperfected\u201d bodies. More than that we really don\u2019t know. But consistent with what the Bible teaches, one\u2019s aborted babies will be there, too. <\/p>\n Can you imagine looking into the eyes of these? \u201cWhy, Mommy? Why, Daddy?\u201d<\/p>\n You might think you would answer, \u201cI was afraid I would fail you. I was afraid you would stumble through life\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n And what if the answer is, \u201cBut what if you had not failed but succeeded? And what if I had not stumbled, but blossomed and flown and danced\u2026 and lived?\u201d<\/p>\n + + +<\/p>\n