Don't forget the Gosnell case

Kermit Gosnell was not an aberration. He is the product of the culture of death that abortion and its supporters have created.

Watch part one of the powerful and important documentary 3801 Lancaster:

The following is a trailer for part two:
3801 Part II: Trailer #1 from 3801Lancaster on Vimeo.

Consider supporting this important effort to document the Gosnell case. We must not forget.

Are the unborn my neighbor?

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for Rachel Held Evans. Almost. What keeps me from crossing that line are her own words. She continues to confound me with her strange approach to reason. In a recent article she displays her confusion over the nature of personhood. Doug Wilson offers help:

Rachel Held Evans recently wrote a number of things about our public debates about contraception, and it is not my purpose to get into all that, not even to defend the admirable epithet Uncle Sugar. But she did say something near the end of her piece that I wanted to comment on because I think it is an example of how easy it is to take our increased scientific knowledge about human reproduction and apply it in precisely the wrong direction. She said this:

“The fact that a woman’s body naturally rejects hundreds of fertilized eggs in her lifetime raises some questions in my mind about where we draw the line regarding the personhood of a zygote. Do we count all those ‘natural abortions’ as deaths? Did those zygotes have souls? Will I meet them in heaven? Honestly, the more I learn about the reproductive system, the harder it becomes for me to adamantly insist that I know for sure the exact moment when life begins. And it’s even harder for me to insist that everyone else agree.”

But I don’t think this is the right conclusion to draw from our increased knowledge of the human reproductive system. It delights me that God brings all the great questions of life and death down to the razor thin issues. It delights me that there are human beings created in the image of the most high God who could fit on the head of a pin and not fall off. From the vantage point of the Almighty, the rest of us are not that much bigger. So every fertilized human egg will live forever, and every unfertilized egg won’t.

Put another way, a poet, one of your own, has said, “a person’s a person no matter how small.” The size of these tiny people only affects the clarity of the situation if we define the humanity of others on the basis of our limited eyesight. But why is the question of a soul connected to size, as though the naked eye were in charge of these things? Once the DNA strand is established, we can say any number of things about this person that we cannot say at all before that point, whether we are talking about about sperm or eggs. We can now say, for example, “it’s a girl,” or “blue eyes,” or “black skin.”

So yes, we count natural abortions as deaths. Yes, zygotes have souls. Yes, we will meet them in Heaven, provided we get there.

We live in a fallen world, and consequently there are natural abortions as a result. We also live in a world where children in the third trimester die. We live in a world where newborn children die. We all die because we are sons of Adam. Nature is not the standard because nature suffers under this bondage to decay, and will continue to do so until the sons of God are manifested to the world.

Read Wilson's entire post HERE.

Justice and the Unborn

From an article in Christianity Today by Daniel Darling and Andrew Walker:

As evangelicals who came of age during the culture wars, we’re part of a generation ready to move past the pitched left-right debates. The critiques of Christian political activism have held some merit: A hyper-focus on elections, voter guides, and strategy has often buried the gospel story. Sometimes following Christ has strangely looked like following an elephant or a donkey. . . .

We’ve heard well-meaning, but cautious lovers of the gospel say that the cause of the unborn is too political, that it casts a harmful pall over the church, damaging gospel witness. To be sure, politics has not always brought out the best of God’s people. A renewed embrace of the grace-truth tension is needed. And yet, can we really claim to be social justice warriors if we ignore the millions of unborn children silenced and snuffed out in America at the altar of convenience? Can we overlook the corporatist worldview of Planned Parenthood that has industrialized abortion? No, we cannot. . . .

In fact, the denial of human life is arguably what triggers all other forms of activism. If we don’t get our witness right on life, how can our witness on any other issue seem anything other than pyrrhic? A Christian approach to social engagement cannot be calculated through the grid of popular appeal or mass approval. . . .

Being pro-life is about justice. And justice is blind—blind to color, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status. Justice is standing up for what is true, good, and beautiful; and on the issue of life, we insist that every child is a uniquely good and beautiful creation of God, and therefore deserving of life.

Read the entire article HERE.

Making a pro-life argument

An Old Testament Scholar Weighs in on Abortion

Meredith Kline, one of the great Old Testament scholars of the 20th century, wrote a fascinating study examining Exodus 21:22-25:
"When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

Kline points out that both sides of the abortion divide have used this text to support their position. Kline, rather masterfully, dismantles the pro-abortion appropriation of the text. Over at Underdog Theology there is a helpful piece unpacking Kline's argument.

Kline sums up with the following stern pronouncement concerning the morality of a culture that legalizes such an abominable practice.

"As we observed at the outset, induced abortion was so abhorrent to the Israelite mind that it was not necessary to have a specific prohibition dealing with it in the Mosaic law. The Middle Assyrian laws attest to an abhorrence that was felt for this crime even in the midst of the heathendom around Israel, lacking though it did the illumination of special revelation. For in those laws a woman guilty of abortion was condemned to be impaled on stakes. Even if she managed to lose her own life in producing the abortion, she was still to be impaled and hung up in shame as an expression of the community's repudiation of such an abomination. It is hard to imagine a more damning commentary on what is taking place in enlightened America today than that provided by this legal witness out of the conscience of benighted ancient paganism!"

I am a single issue voter

To be a single-issue voter is often sneered at as being too simplistic or overly confined to an ideology. However, I would suggest that all of us are single-issue voters. Each of us have a line, that if crossed by a politician renders them unworthy of our vote. For some that may be tax policy. For others that issue is welfare spending. While those are vitally important issues and are connected to the health and prosperity of our nation, abortion is, for me, that issue that separates the candidates above all else. I simply cannot cast a vote for anyone who believes that abortion is a good worth defending by the power of the state.

I am often confounded by those voters who are interested in "justice" but enthusiastically cast votes in favor of those who advance the greatest injustice of our time - the taking of life in the womb. The unborn are the weakest and most vulnerable among us. How can we tolerate legislation that allows them to be killed and cast aside like so much waste? Abortion is a breathtaking evil and any man or woman who desires to protect it as a right is unworthy of my vote.

Over at the Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter has written a helpful post on this very theme.

Killing Children

It is a small leap from killing children in the womb to killing, say, two-year-olds (an idea already proffered by Princeton's Peter Singer). Belgium is now considering a law that would allow children to be euthanized. This ought to outrage but not surprise. A culture that approves the killing of the unborn has lost all moral sanity.

The U.S. is not Belgium. But what is keeping us from going down the same road? We elect lawmakers for whom abortion is a sacred right to be celebrated. We elected and re-elected a President who, while in the Senate, voted three times against The Born Alive Infant Protection Act which would guard the lives of those babies fortunate enough to survive an abortion.

Once we agree to kill our most vulnerable; indeed to even pronounce God's blessing on those who do the killing, then what boundaries remain?

Pro-Life Ethics

Thanks to Justin Taylor for posting these excellent lectures on Pro-Life ethics from Scott Klusendorf:

There are issues and then there are ISSUES

Great analysis by Denny Burk on the idea of "Post-Partisan" Evangelicals:

My concern with the post-partisanship of Jonathan Merritt is the message that it sends to ordinary evangelicals. When the ordinary evangelical steps into the voting booth this November, he will in fact have a choice to make. And that choice will involve prioritizing some issues over others. But I think Merritt disagrees. In his new book A Faith of Our Own, he writes:

Evangelicals…often reduce the immense witness of the Scriptures to only a few culture-war issues—namely, abortion and gay marriage. Both are important issues deserving serious thought. The Scriptures speak often about life and sexuality. But they also regularly address poverty, equality, justice, peace, and care of God’s good creation.

If Christians act as if the culture-war issues are the only issues or make them so paramount that they dwarf all others, we distill the limitless bounty of the Scriptures into a tiny cup of condensed political juice (p. 89).

How is a reader to apply this reasoning when it comes to voting? Merritt seems to be saying that evangelicals need not prioritize ending the regime of Roe v. Wade in their exercise of the franchise. If that is the message he’s trying to send, I think he is dead wrong.

When it comes to voting (which is the extent of political activism for most evangelicals), if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. Merritt’s “post-partisan” approach causes the pro-life issue to get lost in the din of competing interests.

Christians should cast a wary eye toward anyone who suggests that abortion-on-demand is just one among many social ills. In America, it is the single greatest human rights crisis of our time, and to overlook the fact that it is legal in all fifty states to kill a person at any time from 0-9 months gestation is unconscionable.

Abortion definitely deserves more than “serious thought” in the voting booth. It deserves priority.

Read Denny's entire post HERE.

Is it time for civil disobedience?

"We have come to the point—I say this very soberly—when if there isn’t a dramatic change in circumstances, we as Christians may well be called upon to stand in civil disobedience against the actions of our own government. That would break my heart as a former Marine Captain loving my country, but I love my God more… I’ve made up my mind—sober as that decision would have to be—that I will stand for the Lord regardless of what my state tells me."

Komen, Planned Parenthood, and the god of Money

Dr. Russell Moore has written an important article on the recent decision by the Susan Komen Foundation for the Cure to restore its funding to Planned Parenthood. Dr. Moore sees the worship of money at the core of this sad decision and urges the church not to try to compete in this pagan arena.

He writes:

We don’t need a Christian foundation to compete with the merchants of death. We don’t need one more coalition with enough signatures to counter the threatened boycotts of the abortion rights peddlers. And we sure don’t need to sell bumper stickers with a line drawn through a pink ribbon.

What we need, first of all, are churches who recognize that this isn’t all that surprising. Mammon is a jealous god, and he’s armed to the teeth. We need to create the kind of counter-culture that constantly shines the light of Christ wherever these false gods exist in our own affections. And then we need to demonstrate what it means to believe that a person’s life consists in more than the abundance of his possessions.

Let’s stop highlighting how God “blesses” the millionaire who tithes. Let’s stop trumpeting the celebrity football players and beauty queens as evidence of God’s blessing. Let’s show that God has blessed us in a Christ who never had a successful career or a balanced bank account, but who was blessed by God with life, and with children that no one can number, from every tribe, tongue, nation, and language.

Planned Parenthood has won this one. They spent a lot of money, and they’ll make a lot of money. And they’ll do so off the shredded corpses of children and the raped consciences of women. If Jesus’ kingdom were of this world, we’d be fundraising to keep up with them.

But what we have is greater than that. We have a word that tells a pregnant young woman that we believe her Down Syndrome baby is a gift, not a health care burden. And we can offer the kind of gospel that cleanses the conscience and offers what outlasts money and power: life and that to the uttermost.

Let’s work to legally protect women and children. And let’s grieve that old Mammon has won the day, again. But let’s not grieve like the pagans who have no hope. When it comes to the struggle for life, the color of victory isn’t pink like a ribbon. It’s red like a cross.

Read the whole article HERE.

HT: Justin Taylor

Russell Moore on Sanctity of Life Sunday

Listen to the audio HERE.

Pro-Life Resources

The Case for Life by Scott Klusendorf

Abortion: A Rational Look at an Emotional Issue by R.C. Sproul

Abortion: Open Your Mouth for the Dumb by Peter Barnes

Healing After Abortion by David Powlison

Resources from Randy Alcorn

Resources from Desiring God

180 Movie

A dread anniversary

It was 39 years ago today that the Supreme Court of the United States passed the inconceivably bad and immoral decision in the case of Roe V. Wade. Since that day over 50 million babies have been ruthlessly slaughtered in the wombs of their mothers. Abortion is undiluted evil. It is not a pragmatic necessity. President Obama's recent remarks celebrating the passage of Roe put on vivid display the moral blindness one must adopt in order to approve of such wickedness. Last year at least 500,000 African American babies were killed in the womb. Where are the social justice advocates? Where are the prominent evangelical pastors who are so gifted at contextualization and reaching hip urbanites? They preach and write about justice. But is there a graver injustice than the slaughter of our most vulnerable? What about the pastors, like myself, who lead large churches but are often afraid to mention abortion because of the wrath they will face from some of their congregants? Shame on us, truly.

Endangered

Free eBook from John Piper

Desiring God is providing a free eBook by John Piper concerning abortion. Read it HERE.

Seeing, they do not see...

In a recent Hardball, Chris Matthews and his panel demonstrate a stunning lack of moral seriousness in a conversation about abortion. Of course, avoiding moral seriousness is necessary if one is to hold a "pro-choice" point of view. The entire abortion debate rests on the issue of personhood. But it is this issue that Matthews and his ilk, for obvious reasons, seek to avoid.

Denny Burk links to the Hardball episode and offers these comments:

I have often observed that debates about abortion among political pundits tend to miss the point. There is no serious moral contemplation of the issue, but only crass calculations of how a particular point of view might help or hurt some politician.

That is why I was struck by this conversation on Chris Matthews’ program “Hardball” (see above). Matthews and his guests seem to have discovered for the first time that pro-lifers actually believe life to begin at conception. They are astonished and appalled by this revelation, and it is almost as if they have never even heard of this point of view before several GOP candidates signed the Personhood USA pledge. As a result, the panel lampoons the view as if it represented some extreme, unheard of ideology. They don’t seem to realize that the pro-life position consists precisely in the view that individual human life begins at conception. How could they not know this?

The entire pro-life debate hinges upon the status of the life that is taken in an abortion. If it’s just a blob of cells, then abortion on demand would be no problem. If it’s a person (as pro-lifers have been arguing all along), then that unborn person should be protected in law. I am happy to welcome Matthews to the national conversation now that he has discovered what it is really about.

I give you fair warning that what you are about to see is completely morally unserious. Matthews argues that the politics of abortion should be totally disconnected from “metaphysical” questions about personhood. The panel even suggests that the reality of miscarriages somehow constitute prima facie evidence against the personhood of the unborn. The arguments here are really weak, but they are precisely the kinds of opinions that proliferate among unthoughtful pro-choice advocates.

Some euphemisms speak a thousand words...

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine explores a little talked about trend in the abortion industry - baby reduction. It is the practice of aborting one or more babies of a multiple pregnancy. It is difficult to find words to describe such wickedness. This dastardly practice is wrapped up in the most banal language of consumerism. It is truly chilling. I am reminded of Robert J. Lifton's disturbing book The Nazi Doctors.

Al Mohler comments:

As Ruth Padawer reports, obstetricians were at first reluctant to reduce twins to a single pregnancy on moral grounds, and many doctors who perform reductions refuse to reduce below twins. But the practice is growing, reflecting a shift in medical practice. She profiles Dr. Mark Evans, who at first refused to reduce twins on moral grounds. In 1988 he co-authored ethical guidelines for reducing pregnancies that declared reductions below twins to be unethical. Evans wrote that doctors should not allow themselves to become “technicians to our patients’ desires.”

And yet, in 2004 Dr. Evans reversed his position on the issue. Padawer explains his rationale:

For one thing, as more women in their 40s and 50s became pregnant (often thanks to donor eggs), they pushed for two-to-one reductions for social reasons. Evans understood why these women didn’t want to be in their 60s worrying about two tempestuous teenagers or two college-tuition bills. He noted that many of the women were in second marriages, and while they wanted to create a child with their new spouse, they did not want two, especially if they had children from a previous marriage. Others had deferred child rearing for careers or education, or were single women tired of waiting for the right partner. Whatever the particulars, these patients concluded that they lacked the resources to deal with the chaos, stereophonic screaming and exhaustion of raising twins.

Note carefully that the justification offered for killing an unborn baby is clearly identified as “social reasons.” The medical rationale he cited cannot be taken seriously, even as he cites “recent studies” that “revealed that the risks of twin pregnancies were greater than previously thought.” As this article makes abundantly clear, the main risk of a twin pregnancy these days is the risk that one of the twins will be intentionally aborted.

“Ethics,” Dr. Evans told Padawer, “evolve with technology.” That is a foundation for murderous medical ethics. The Culture of Death has worked its way into the logic of modern medical ethics to the extent that these obstetricians justify killing healthy babies just because the parents do not want the burden of twins.

Read the entire article HERE.

Abortion Debated

Take time to watch the following debate held at Westmont College between Scott Klusendorf of Life Training Institute and Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU).

Abortion Debate at Westmont College from Randy Alcorn on Vimeo.

HT: Justin Taylor

Prenatal Development