Why is today’s video of particular note? Because today, the person shown on screen is one of the most notorious abortionists in the country—LeRoy Carhart. He is one of only four who will perform an abortion beyond the second trimester, and as revealed in the video, he is as willing to abort a perfectly healthy baby as he is to abort one with disabilities. Dr. Carhart was already in the news this year for abandoning one of his patients to die, after complications arose from her late-term abortion. That investigation is ongoing. In light of all this, you’d assume LeRoy Carhart would be among the most guarded and suspicious men in the entire abortion industry, and yet he is as cavalier in his crude, audacity as all the others—maybe more so. Included in his pre-abortion counseling is the following:

When questioned about what happens during the three days between the time the baby is killed by injection and the time it is delivered, he compares the dead baby to meat simmering in a crock pot—softening up, but not rotting.

When asked why there are only four doctors in the nation who perform abortions past 26 weeks, he laughs and says, “because nobody else will do it!”

When asked what he uses to dismember the baby if it must be removed in pieces, he jokes that he uses “a pickaxe (and) a drill bit.” He then states that he uses “instruments that have been developed (for such things).” You’ll find many of those instruments in our TOOLS OF MASS DESTRUCTION  graphic.

After advising his patient that nothing should go into her vagina until three weeks after the abortion, he smiles and adds: “As I tell everybody, that includes fingers, friends, and fruit, OK?”

In a more serious tone, he instructs his patient that if a complication arises during the three-days between injection and delivery, she must call him, not 911.

When questioned about what might happen after the abortion, Dr. Carhart says that having an abortion gives you the freedom to be “a better person” in the future. He follows up by saying, “Postpartum depression is really very common, but abortion depression, I can honestly tell you that I haven’t seen one person that way.” He says he’s never had anyone leave the abortion clinic “feeling worse than (when) they came.” The women who have shared their stories with Abort73  would beg to differ. 

Dr. Carhart mentions that one of his patients tried to kill herself after the abortion, but he insists that she didn’t try to commit suicide because of the abortion but because she regretted not having aborted her one-year-old child.

Each Live Action video would be astounding enough as a standalone piece, but taken collectively, the number of lies and concessions they’ve been able to capture on camera is almost unfathomable. And even though LeRoy Carhart doesn’t get into what he would do should one of his aborted babies be born alive (as many other subjects have), his testimony is no less damning to those who are trying so desperately to differentiate abortion from infanticide. At one point in the video, Dr. Carhart speculates that he would have more chance of survival after getting hit by a 100-mile-an-hour train than a baby would have of surviving one of his abortions. At another point, he affirms that the babies he aborts could survive outside the womb if they were delivered without injection. In other words, Dr. Carhart kills babies, healthy or otherwise, who are old enough to be born and survive. Whether you call that abortion or infanticide, there is no moral distinction.

If any other high-profile industry was being exposed like this, over and over and on so many different levels, what a story it would be. But as was true with Kermit Gosnell, most media outlets want nothing to do with Live Action’s videos—and so Lila Rose, perhaps the most courageous investigative journalist in the country, is relegated almost exclusively to Fox News—while her overwhelming body of work continues to pile up. Thank God for the internet! So if you’re not already familiar with Live Action, it’s time to get to know their work and start showing your friends what the networks aren’t. Specifically, Live Action has shown Planned Parenthood’s willingness to target minorities, to cover up statutory rape  and sex trafficking, to perform sex-selection abortions, to lie about the medical services they provide  and mislead women about prenatal development. As I said, were even one of these practices to be documented in another context, all hell would break loose. But the abortion industry gets a free pass. It’s time to change that. You can help!

It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts.

Nature is relentless and will have full revenge for any such violation of her laws.

In the West, indeed, people have transgressed all bounds. They indulge in sexual pleasures, and devise measures in order to evade the responsibilities of parenthood.

If it is contended that birth-control is necessary for the nation because of over-population, I dispute the proposition.

Reading that last remark, you might conclude that Gandhi did not see unchecked population growth as a legitimate threat to humanity. That would be incorrect. Gandhi was concerned about population growth, but he regarded birth control and abortion as “solutions” that were infinitely worse than the problem. The human population must be regulated, he argued, in accord with natural law. In his own words:

There can be no two opinions about the necessity of birth-control. But the only method handed down from ages past is self-control… It is an infallible sovereign remedy doing good to those who practice it. And medical men will earn the gratitude of mankind, if instead of devising artificial means of birth-control they will find out the means of self-control.

Increase in population is not and ought not to be regarded as a calamity to be avoided. Its regulation or restriction by artificial methods is a calamity of the first grade whether we know it or not.

Birth-control by contraceptives no doubt regulates to a certain extent the number of new-comers and enables persons of moderate means to keep the wolf from the door. But the moral harm it does to the individual and society is incalculable.

Birth-control according to methods suggested today and recommended in the West is suicidal. When I say ‘suicidal’, I do not mean resulting in the extinction of the race; I mean suicidal in a higher sense of the term, that is to say, these methods make man lower than the brute; they are immoral.

In one sense, the moral demise Gandhi had in view was specifically connected to the sex ethic. Artificial birth control, he predicted, would be devastating to the institution of marriage and would eventually lead to the widespread, normalization of homosexuality. He prophetically argued:

I urge the advocates of artificial methods to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love.

If mutual consent makes a sexual act moral whether within marriage or without, and by parity of reasoning, even between members of the same sex, the whole basis of sexual morality is gone and nothing but ‘misery and defeat’ awaits the youth of the country… Divorce of the sexual act from its natural consequence must lead to hideous promiscuity and condonation, if not endorsement, of unnatural vice.

The reader should know that even persons of note have been known to approve of what is commonly known as sexual perversion. He may be shocked at the statement. But if it somehow or other gains the stamp of respectability, it will be the rage among boys and girls to satisfy their urge among members of their own sex.

In Gandhi’s mind, these were the threats artificial birth-control posed to the cultural understanding of sex, but his concerns actually went much deeper—and had nothing to do with religious dogma. Rather, his condemnation of the practice was built on the conviction that it promotes the utter abandonment of self-restraint. Why is that such a big deal?  Because Gandhi took a holistic view of life. The man who cannot control his “animal passions” in one context will be unable to control those passions in any context. To enable cowardice and self-absorption in one realm is to enable them in all realms. He writes:

The use of contraceptives bids fair to kill the desire for self-restraint.

He who attempts to control only one organ, and allows all the others free play, is bound to find his effort futile.

Spread of contraceptive knowledge and practice can only aid the growth of self-indulgence and abuse and its inevitable concomitants, misery and disease.

If we begin to believe that indulgence in animal passion is necessary, harmless and sinless, we shall want to give reins to it and shall be powerless to resist it.

It is a sin to bring forth unwanted children, but I think it is a greater sin to avoid the consequences of one’s own action. It simply unmans man.

When Gandhi asserted that the use of contraceptives “unmans man,” he said this not as a male chauvinist but as one who was deeply concerned about the sexual objectification of women. It is women, Gandhi believed, who bear most of the misery meted out by the widespread use of artificial birth control. And it is on this point that his philosophy deserves the most consideration. Almost everything Gandhi says in this book would be scoffed at by the enlightened, secular mind—which is a bit ironic. Gandhi is revered in the abstract, but we have culturally rejected almost everything he stood for. This may be nowhere more evident than in the context of contraceptives. The world has embraced artificial birth control on the assertion that it is good for women. Gandhi took exactly the opposite position—arguing that contraceptives do not liberate women but enslave them. Here’s why:

In my opinion it is an insult to the fair sex to put up her case in support of birth-control by artificial methods. As it is, man has sufficiently degraded her for his lust, and artificial methods, no matter how well-meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her.

Man must understand that woman is his companion and helpmate in life and not a means of satisfying his carnal desire. There must be a clear perception that the purpose of human creation was wholly different from that of the satisfaction of animal wants.

My argument is only addressed to those who regard marriage as a sacrament and woman not as an instrument of animal pleasure but as mother of man and trustee of the virtue of her progeny.

Contraceptives are an insult to womanhood. The difference between a prostitute and a woman using contraceptives is only this that the former sells her body to several men, the latter sells it to one man.

When Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, travelled to India in 1936 to try and sell Gandhi on the merits of birth control, this was his response to her:

When [people] want to satisfy animal passion without having to suffer the consequences of their act it is not love, it is lust… Love becomes lust the moment you make it a means for the satisfaction of animal needs. It is just the same with food. If food is taken only for pleasure, it is lust. You do not take chocolates for the sake of hunger. You take them for pleasure and then ask the doctor for an antidote. Perhaps you will tell the doctor that whisky befogs your brain and he gives you an antidote. Would it not be better not to take chocolates or whisky? [You do not accept the analogy] because you think this sex expression without desire for children is a need of the soul, a contention I do not endorse… Why must people be slaves of this passion when they are not of others?

When it came to sex education, Gandhi was no less counter cultural. This is the kind of sex-ed he supported:

The sex education that I stand for, must have for its object the conquest and sublimation of the sex passion. Such education should automatically serve to bring home to children, the essential distinction between man and brute, to make them realize that it is man’s special privilege and pride to be gifted with the faculties of head and heart both. (37)

My quarrel with the advocates of contraceptives lies in their taking it for granted that ordinary mortals cannot exercise self-control.

We need, not lessons in the use of contraceptives and helps to our being able to satisfy our animal appetite, but continuous lessons to restrain that appetite.

It is no argument against the possibility or desirability of abstinence to say that it is difficult for the vast majority of mankind.

If the possibility and desirability of abstinence be admitted, we must find out and devise the means of attaining it… life must be remodeled, if we are to live under restraint and discipline. We may not, as the vulgar saying goes, eat the cake and have it too.

The use of contraceptives is infinitely more tempting than the whisky bottle. But it is no more lawful than the sparkling liquid for its fatal temptation. Nor can opposition to the use of either be given up in despair because their use seems to be growing. If the opponents have faith in their mission, it has to be pursued. A voice in the wilderness has a potency which voices uttered in the midst of ‘the madding crowd’ lack.

It is the philanthropic motive that no doubt impels many birth-control reformers to a whirlwind campaign in favor of the use of contraceptives. I invite them to contemplate the ruinous consequences of their misplaced philanthropy. Those whom they want to reach will never use them in any appreciable numbers. Those who ought not to use them will, without doubt, use them to the undoing of themselves and their partners.

At this point, Christians in the West might be tempted to celebrate Gandhi’s opposition to abortion, homosexuality, gluttony, and drunkenness, along with his staunch opposition to Planned Parenthood and its amoral approach to sexual education. But before we do that, we must first reckon with those of his beliefs which cut across our grain—namely his teachings on marriage. You may have already noticed the tension. If you advocate for the moderation of family size and you are universally opposed to all forms of artificial birth control, it doesn’t leave you with a lot of options. As such, Gandhi advocated abstinence for those who are unmarried, and in most circumstances, he advocated abstinence for those who are married. In his words:

Man has no right to touch his wife so long as she does not wish to have a child, and the woman should have the will-power to resist, even her own husband.

I hold that the right education in this country is to teach woman the art of saying no even to her husband, to teach her that it is no part of her duty to become a mere tool or a doll in her husband’s hands.

If a [husband] may indulge in animal passion for the (mere) sake of it, what is he to do whilst he is, say, away from his home for any length of time, or when he is engaged as a soldier in a protracted war, or when he is widowed, or when his wife is too ill to permit him the indulgence without injury to her health notwithstanding the use of artificial methods?

Reading Gandhi’s thoughts on marriage, including his belief that husbands and wives should not sleep in the same bed, it becomes apparent that Gandhi believed that marriage, as its practiced in the mainstream, is just as devastating to women as artificial birth control. And he may be on to something. His solution was not to do away with marriage, but for husbands to start honoring their wives as partners instead of sex objects.  It also becomes apparent that Gandhi’s position does not come from a place of asceticism, but from the honest conviction that marriage as it’s generally practiced sexually brutalizes women. So before we trot out Paul’s admonitions in I Corinthians 7:5 and 9, we would do well to consider Gandhi’s critique. Is marriage the antidote for sexual desire or is it Spirit-filled self-control? If we’re honest, we must concede that the pictures we see of marriage in Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, are fairly horrendous. God-fearing men haven’t always treated their wives in God-honoring ways. How many Christian wives would prefer to be treated as Gandhi treated his wife than as their own Christian husband treats them? How much suffering and abuse has been piled on top of Ephesians 5:22?! I’ll close with one last excerpt:

We vainly expect to be free from outward manifestations of lust, while harboring it in our minds, with the result that physically and mentally we become utter wrecks, and our lives… become a living lie or hypocrisy personified.

We may criticize Gandhi for seeming to take an overly austere view of life, but there is no question that most Christians in the West are far more cavalier with our fleshly appetites than Gandhi ever was. His relentless pursuit of holiness should challenge us all—and give us pause to reexamine our own understanding of sex and marriage. Do we love our spouse because we have unconditionally pledged ourselves to their well-being, or because we simply use their body to satisfy our own desires?

Compared to Planned Parenthood, Kermit Gosnell is a two-bit player in the world of abortion. The clinic he ran in Philadelphia was paltry by comparison. But now that Gosnell’s abortion practice has made national headlines (violating the cardinal rule of abortion-business protocol), Planned Parenthood faces a dilemma. Do they condemn him as a public villain? Or do they stand with the man who shares their basic ideology? For more than two years, Planned Parenthood went with a third option: say nothing, and hope the seedy details of Gosnell’s arrest fly under the radar.

Their strategy worked marvelously until this past week, when the national media’s relative silence on the Gosnell trial became a story in itself. Suddenly, major news outlets were hustling to prove the criticism of their coverage  was unfounded, and Kermit Gosnell became a front page story. Though you still won’t find any mention of “Gosnell” on the Planned Parenthood website, they finally released a public condemnation of Gosnell on Friday via their Twitter Account. It reads:

‪#Gosnell‬ case is appalling. He ran a criminal enterprise, not a health facility, & should be punished to full extent ‪http://bit.ly/ZRyssI  ‬

The bit.ly URL included in the tweet links to an Oped by Dayle Steinberg, the president and CEO for Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania. It was written on the heels of Gosnell’s arrest in 2011 and argues that the “alleged practices” of Kermit Gosnell is proof that we need to further deregulate abortion in America. Yes, you read that correctly. She is arguing that we move in exactly the opposite direction of what common sense would dictate. In her own words:

The news of the alleged practices at Gosnell’s clinic prompted calls for stronger regulations of abortion services. The fact is abortion is already a highly restricted procedure, especially in Pennsylvania…  No new regulations can stop a physician who has decided to disregard the law. Restrictions that would further hinder access to safe abortion is not the answer, and will only increase the number of poor women who are forced by circumstances to turn to unsafe options for care.

If you think you’ve heard that argument before, you have—though in a completely different context. It’s the same argument made by those who oppose placing further restrictions on access to guns. Since criminals don’t get their guns through legal channels, they argue, further regulating those channels is not going to solve the problem of gun violence. The reason Steinberg’s argument doesn’t work in this context is because Gosnell was not a criminal operating outside the law. He was a licensed physician who performed abortions in a licensed abortion clinic. If abortion clinics didn’t enjoy such a wide swath of political protection, Gosnell wouldn’t have been able to maintain his license while going 17 years without a health inspection. The following comes from the District Attorney’s grand-jury report:

After 1993… the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.

If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that though Gosnell was a licensed physician, he was not a board-certified obstetrician or gynecologist. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was employing unlicensed and unqualified personnel to carry out abortions. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was falsifying the ages of the babies being aborted. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was storing fetal body parts all over his facility.

Seth Williams, the DA who oversaw the 2010 raid on Gosnell’s clinic states, “My grasp of the English language doesn’t really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was—rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, blood-stained.” This is the context in which Planned Parenthood argues that the abortion industry is being unfairly targeted and unfairly regulated. And herein lies the problem. Despite their tweet of condemnation, Planned Parenthood fights for the right to do virtually everything Gosnell is accused of.

Their recent opposition to Florida’s born-alive bill  indicates their belief that abortionists should be allowed to “finish the job,” if the baby should be accidentally born alive. And though they finally reneged on their opposition  to the bill amidst a public outcry, they couched their reversal under the claim that babies are never born alive anyway. The argument made by Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, and affirmed by the entire organization through last week’s tweet, indicates that Planned Parenthood believes abortionists should be allowed to work independently of government intervention. While claiming  to “condemn any physician or health-care provider who [does] not follow the law,” they do everything they can to remove any law that might actually regulate abortion in a meaningful way. And isn’t it telling that Planned Parenthood doesn’t condemn Kermit Gosnell for murdering a baby? They condemn him for breaking the law. If the law protected infanticide, it’s doubtful that Planned Parenthood would even raise a fuss.

Kermit Gosnell was greedy for gain. By all accounts, so is Planned Parenthood—as evidenced by the revelation of former insider, Abby Johnson, and more recently, by the suspension of Planned Parenthood’s abortion operations  in Delaware. Dayle Steinberg claims that “Planned Parenthood maintains strict policies and procedures to ensure the highest standard of health care”—and yet they have been plenty guilty of cutting corners in the service of their bottom line. Abort73’s latest video  argues that Planned Parenthood is right in failing to make a clear, moral distinction between abortion and infanticide, and this is the point I’d like to end on.

Stephen Massof, an unlicensed medical school graduate who assisted Gosnell, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder charges in the deaths of two babies who were born alive at Gosnell’s clinic. He described their deaths  as “literally a beheading.” When things were busy, he said, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” The state is seeking the death penalty for Gosnell on the assertion  that, “A doctor who cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies, who would survive with proper medical attention, is committing murder under the law.”

With those images in mind, take a few minutes to read through Abort73’s Abortion Procedures page—and as you read through these medical descriptions, ask yourself whether there is any moral difference between violently destroying a baby before birth and violently destroying a baby after birth. Though Kermit Gosnell doesn’t have any of Planned Parenthood’s polish, he seems to share all of their principles, and that’s what has them shaking in their boots! 

Katie Stockton was sentenced to fifty years in prison on Friday for leaving her newborn, baby daughter to freeze to death on a rural highway north of Rockford. The USA Today story reports:

Stockton hid her pregnancy and gave birth to the baby in secret on Dec. 17, 2004. Afterward, she stuffed the baby and soiled clothing into an orange shopping bag and placed it along a dead-end road near her parents’ Rockton home. She was questioned in the baby’s death at the time, but denied she was the mother and refused to provide a DNA sample.

Years later, detectives got the DNA sample they needed from a discarded cigarette. Stockton finally confessed to the crime in February, in pursuit of a reduced sentence. Though she got less than the 60 years she was eligible for, Judge John Truitt was unwilling to grant the 25-year sentence Stockton’s Public Defender requested. Judge Truitt condemned Stockton  for choosing to “leave her baby to die despite all the available options… adoption, legal abandonment at a designated safe haven or her own loving family who already cared for her then 4-year-old son.” He told Stockton  during the sentencing:

You did the incomprehensible. You gave birth, by all accounts, to a healthy, full-term baby girl and you chose to play judge, jury and executioner and put her by the roadside like yesterday’s garbage.

The day before Judge Truitt sentenced Katie Stockton in Rockford, IL, the Florida Baptist Witness ran an article  reporting on Florida’s proposed “Infants Born Alive Act” (HB 1129). The measure would require that medical attention be given to babies who are born alive after a failed abortion. Or to state it as a prohibition, the law would forbid abandoning these newborn babies to death (as Katie Stockton did), or precipitating their demise through suffocation or penetrating trauma (as Kermit Gosnell did  time and again). In light of this bill, you may wonder how often babies are actually born alive after a failed abortion and whether anyone actually endorses the practice of infanticide in these circumstances.

As to the first question, Florida Rep. Cary Pigman, the emergency medicine physician who sponsored the “born-alive” bill, testified  that in 2010 there were 1,270 infants in the United States whose deaths were reported as “mortality subsequent to an abortion.” Pigman believes the actual number of post-abortive, born-alive infants is significantly higher. As to the second question, Planned Parenthood opposes the bill. Their lobbyist, Alisa LaPolt Snow, who was in the courtroom to oppose passage of the “born-alive” bill, stated that it should remain up to the woman and her doctor (i.e., the abortionist) whether or not the newborn baby lives or dies. According to the courtroom coverage, even the pro-choice representatives were shocked by her declaration. Rep. Mike Clelland, D-Lake Mary, who declares himself a life-long pro-choicer (though there is no such thing) asked the Planned Parenthood lobbyist, “What objection could you possibly have to obligate a doctor to transport a child born alive to a hospital where it seems to me they would be most likely to be able to survive?” She evasively cited logistical concerns. Writing for the Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen declares:

When Rep. Todd Akin made his outrageous comments about “legitimate rape” it was front page news — and rightly so. But when a representative of Planned Parenthood is caught on camera defending infanticide, it merits barely a mention in the mainstream media.

Planned Parenthood has a legion of supporters who bend over backwards in a relentless attempt to “normalize”  their operations. Their public face is all smiles and “women’s health,” but as this case demonstrates, Planned Parenthood makes no ethical distinction between killing an unborn baby and killing a born baby. In other words, Planned Parenthood, through their lobbyist, supports the exact same behavior that earned Katie Stockton 50 years in prison. So, if you’re outraged by what Miss Stockton did but are sympathetic to the “work” of Planned Parenthood, do not forget the events of last week. The only difference between Katie Stockton and Planned Parenthood is that Katie Stockton doesn’t have a million-dollar PR firm to cover her tracks.

Whereas abortion aims to eliminate poverty and disease by killing the afflicted, Mother Teresa sought to eliminate poverty and disease by caring for the afflicted. One act is built on mercy and peace; the other act is built on violence. And though Mother Teresa may be the unlikeliest recipient in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, her diminutive stature did not prevent her from becoming an enormous cultural icon. Her life and ministry made her uniquely qualified to talk about peace, and her credibility as an advocate for peace remains off the charts.

I bring Mother Teresa up because of a video Abort73 released this week  on the topic of abortion and peace. The purpose of the video is twofold. First, it examines the disconnect between our cultural celebration of “peace” as a an abstract ideal and our rejection of peace as a meaningful, life ethic. Second, it draws upon selected statements from some of modern history’s most iconic defenders of peace to demonstrate that abortion utterly violates the most foundational principles of peace.

In terms of popular culture, I doubt that “peace” and “love” have ever been so… popular. I say that because I have a 9-year-old daughter, and almost everything she wears is emblazoned with some variant of these two virtues. Hearts and peace signs are everywhere! As noted in our new video, peace is big business, but the kind of peace that dominates the juniors section at the local mall has almost nothing to do with the genuine article. The very girls whose wardrobes claim an unfailing devotion to peace seem far more devoted to ease and pleasure. And they’re not alone. In large measure, our supposed principles don’t match our practice. We choose peace when it’s convenient. When it’s not, we choose abortion.

Fifty-five years ago this month, the peace sign made its public debut in Trafalgar Square, London—during an Easter weekend march. The now-ubiquitous symbol was designed by Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament but quickly took on a life of its own. The CND continues to use the insignia Holtom created for them, but their decision to forego a copyright opened the floodgates for its global saturation. As far as icons go, I suspect only the heart (and perhaps the cross) is used more often. Though, there are plenty of ominous theories about the history of the symbol, none can be definitively substantiated. According to published interviews with Holtom, the design is a combination of two concepts. The first is a stylized man in a position of despair—“with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad.” The second is the overlap of the letters “N” and “D” (for Nuclear Disarmament) from the semaphore alphabet.

More interesting to me than either of these explanations is the rationale provided by Eric Austen, the man who is most responsible for bringing the design to the masses. The ceramic badges he produced of Holtom’s design were distributed at the march and were specifically designed to withstand the rigors of history. A note that accompanied each badge explained that in the case of a nuclear holocaust, the CND badges would be among the few human artifacts to survive. Since their portability and longevity far exceeded the cardboard signs produced for the march, historians credit Austen for the logo’s singular assent. Pop culture’s infatuation with the peace sign began with Austen; he was the first person to make it “wearable.”

Explaining the visual significance that drew him to the design, Austen suggests that the logo’s interior is a runic symbol for the death of man while the outer circle is a symbol for the unborn child. This interpretation was repeated on at least one occasion  by a CND spokeswoman, who was explaining the symbol’s significance in a United States newspaper interview. Reading that, the peace sign suddenly took on a new level of significance for me. How ironic (prophetic?) that the global symbol for peace, which remains an almost unparalleled, pop culture phenomenon, has an explicit connection to unborn children. Why is this significant? Because as we highlight in the video, human beings are never more threatened by violence than when we are in the womb. Unborn children enjoy less peace than anyone.  

In America, almost 25% of unborn children are killed by abortion. In China, the percentage approaches half. In Russia, there are more abortions than births. In other words, you’re safer in a war zone than in the womb. Not even the most volatile locations on the planet can rival death rates of this magnitude. In light of that fact, and in light of Mother Teresa’s astute observation that abortion is the greatest threat to global peace, I decided to see what other iconic heralds of peace have said on the subject—having no idea what the results would be. Starting with a list of Nobel Piece Prize winners, I simply looked for names I recognized. That endeavor yielded seven of the names on my short list of “most iconic advocates for peace.” Gandhi, who somehow never won the award, made up the eighth (following Gandhi’s assassination, the 1948 Nobel Peace Prize was left vacant in his honor).

From there, I poured over their most famous quotations, looking for comments in regard to the sanctity of life and the significance of children. In Gandhi’s case, I read a short book about his various teachings on birth control. These are the statements that were included in the video:

“Every human life is of inestimable value…”
Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize, 1984

“By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive…”
Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize, 1952

“In the 21st century, I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life…”
Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize, 2001

“Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world…”
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize, 1986

“Medical men will earn the gratitude of mankind, if instead of devising artificial means of birth-control they will find out the means of self-control… It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts…”
M. K. Gandhi, 5-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness…”
Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize, 1964

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children…”
Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize, 1993

“The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion…”
Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize, 1979

Though the majority of these statements were not made in the context of abortion, it’s easy to see how they apply to abortion. And while I’m not suggesting that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has the market cornered on genuine peace, they are generally regarded (by the secular world) as the most authoritative and credible source on the subject—which is why the above statements are so significant. With the exception of Martin Luther King, these are not American evangelicals, and yet these most celebrated ambassadors for peace speak of the sanctity of human life, the unparalleled value of children and the importance of protecting the vulnerable.

At least one of the persons quoted above, Elie Wiesel, explicitly rejects applying his remarks to abortion—or at least he did twenty years ago. His bristling at their “pro-life” application is ironic in light of the broader arc of his message. Consider these words from Elie Wiesel, who is one of the Holocaust’s most storied survivors:

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Wiesel calls it a “blasphemy” to compare abortion to the Holocaust, rationalizing that the “monumental proportions” of the Holocaust make it incomparable to any other “human tragedy.” He calls those who oppose abortion, “fanatics,” and declares that he is “against fanatics everywhere.” It’s worth weighing this remark against another quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. He said, “When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.” In my mind, Wiesel’s use of “fanatic” are King’s use of “radical” are synonymous. To push back against accepted, cultural mores always requires a level of “fanaticism”—and it’s almost certain that those brave souls who harbored and hid German Jews were labeled “fanatics” by the culture at large.

In terms of sheer numbers, Wiesel is right. Abortion and the Holocaust are incomparable. Abortion kills more human beings every year than the Holocaust did in its entirety. What is most tragic about Wiesel’s dogmatic refusal to recognize any parallels between abortion and the Holocaust  is that he, of all men, should know better. He rejects the comparison because he doesn’t consider unborn human beings to be morally significant. He has mentally classified them as sub-human—which is precisely the rationale that was used to justify the Holocaust. It was entirely built on the assertion that because certain human beings are morally superior to others—they have the right to exterminate the less desirable.

Philosophically, Mother Teresa defended her assertion that abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace this way. If a mother can kill her own children, what is left to prevent me from killing you or you from killing me? There is nothing left. If the sacred, relational bond between mother and child becomes polluted by violence, what is left to prevent lesser relationships from also becoming violent? The bottom line is this. Abortion and peace are mutually exclusive. To embrace one is to reject the other. If you’re genuinely for peace, you can’t be for abortion. If you doubt that, simply ask yourself whether abortion promotes peace, harmony, and wholeness.

The strong and powerful need no peace. They can protect themselves by force. It is the weak and vulnerable whose livelihood depends upon peace. So until there is peace for the most vulnerable, there is no peace at all.

For the first ten years of my Christian life, I was internally “pro-life,” but externally “pro-choice.” I believed abortion was wrong, I voted like abortion was wrong, but I lived as if it were no big deal. At the heart of my indifference was the idea that combating abortion is not a kingdom priority. Abortion is a political issue… It’s not my calling… Why should I waste my time trying to moralize unbelievers? All of these excuses came crashing down on a Saturday morning in Nashville, when the story of the Good Samaritan was opened to me in a new light. Gregg Cunningham, the executive director for The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, was in town for a one-day seminar. My mom knew Gregg and wanted me to meet him. The trip I had scheduled for the weekend fell through. The tiny Baptist church hosting the event was a few blocks from my apartment. So I went. In fact, I was almost the only one who went, but the sparseness of that gathering has been a frequent source of encouragement ever since. Gregg could have packed it in and not bothered with such a small crowd. But he didn’t. And here I am. Central to his presentation was the story of the Good Samaritan—a story originally prompted by an extremely significant question: “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”⁸ When a lawyer asks this of Christ, Jesus asks him what is written in the Law. When the lawyer asks who his neighbor is, Jesus tells him the story of the Good Samaritan:

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”⁹

Who is my neighbor? The nameless, unconscious, socially-despised stranger on the brink of death. What does it mean to love him? To physically intervene on his behalf, even if it cost time, money, safety and prestige. Jesus builds his narrative on “neighbors” so different, so detached, so disconnected, that it becomes impossible to classify anyone as a non-neighbor. And though it is a relatively extreme example, it illustrates how far a genuine love for your neighbor is willing to go. When we understand the story of the Good Samaritan, not as an extraordinary act of kindness, but as an application of normal, neighborly love in extraordinary circumstances, we’re on the right track. But it still won’t hit us like it should if we demonize the priest and Levite. When you view them as self-absorbed villains, it’s much easier to escape conviction. When you see them as normal, busy, distracted people, the story hits much closer to home.

Jesus doesn’t tell us what the priest and Levite were thinking, but it’s unlikely that these spiritual icons were so hard hearted that they could look on a beaten countryman without feeling compassion. Nor is it hard to imagine the excuses that probably went through their heads. I’m on my way to the Synagogue… I can’t become ceremonially unclean… Mercy ministries aren’t my calling… I’m not a doctor… Someone else will help… I might be attacked and robbed myself… He’s probably dead already… I’ll pray for him as I go. Having used variants of these same excuses, I’m well aware how reasonable they sound in the moment. But Jesus makes it clear that feeling compassion and showing compassion are entirely different things. It doesn’t matter what they felt, it matters what they did. Since they did nothing, they stand condemned.

At some point in his talk, Gregg asserted that most Christians are responding to abortion in the same way the priest and Levite responded to the beaten man in the street. They feel bad but pass the victims by. His assessment was certainly true of me. Like so many others, I thought mental opposition to abortion was enough. As long as I knew it was wrong and didn’t endorse abortion myself, that was all I was accountable for. But what is the underlying warning in this passage? It’s not what we feel; it’s what we do. We can act without love,¹⁰ but we cannot love without acting. Loving your neighbor is not a special calling; it’s a response to those in need around you. And it’s worth noting that the hero in this story was not wandering around looking for someone to help. He was on his way somewhere else, but he stopped to help a neighbor in need.

How does this story connect to abortion? The parallels are many. Just like the man left for dead in the street, children threatened by abortion are utterly helpless. If someone doesn’t intervene, they will die. They have no capacity to communicate or ask for help. They are socially-marginalized strangers in a culture programmed not to care about them. And just like the people passing by on the Jericho road, we may be innocent of the crime, but Jesus still expects us to intervene. The violence of abortion is not as visible as a man lying beaten in the street, but it surrounds us every day. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Christ teaches us the significance of the insignificant. Even a nameless stranger on the brink of death is worth our time, labor, and love.

8 Luke 10:25

9 Luke 10:30-37

10 I Corinthians 13:3

As someone struggling to drum up an audience for my own abortion-related text, I know how hard it is to gain a hearing—which is why I’m generally willing to provide one for others whenever I can. That’s not to say I read everything that comes my way, but I do my best to start reading everything that comes my way. How far I get depends entirely upon the quality of the work. In the case of Abandoned, I made it through all 20 chapters, which is no small recommendation in its own right.

Monica Miller is an excellent writer. My only criticism of the book begins and ends with the cover–which struck me as eerie and dated. In light of the subject matter, perhaps that’s appropriate, but there’s a fine line between turning people off to abortion and turning people off to your book. For my part, I’m forever guilty of judging books by the cover, and Dinesh D’Souza’s prominently featured endorsement (calling Abandoned “the best book ever written on abortion”) didn’t help any. It’s not the sullied credibility of Mr. D’Souza I take issue with, but rather the brandishing of superlatives like best or worst ever. To paraphrase the wisdom of Kip Dynamite: Has Dinesh D’Souza even read every book on abortion?

Thankfully, once I got past the cover, the rest of the book was extremely engaging—particularly for someone like me, whose vocational foundation was laid by the men and women whose stories unfold within its pages. Abandoned may read like fiction, but it’s an entirely true account—right down to the names, dates, and places. And if I’m ever tempted to lament what a life combatting abortion has cost me, Abandoned  is a humbling reminder that it hasn’t cost me anything like what it cost those who went before me.

Miller calls her story “an important episode in the history of the anti-abortion movement seen through a narrative microscope.” I concur.  It is a story of tragedy and hope. Though the ultimate vision of these courageous activists was not realized, they stood in the gap in ways that few had before and few have since. The legal system may have denied their attempts to give the the unborn “their day in court,” but Miller and her colleagues held the line in remarkable ways. Their disappointments, and there were many, were mitigated by the knowledge that they did not sit idly by while babies were being killed. They crossed social and cultural barriers, even legal barriers, to intervene for the marginalized and oppressed. She writes:

One failure of the pro-life movement is that while we say and believe the preborn are human, we often fail to act as though they really are human—human beings whose very lives are destroyed with unspeakable violence… To be pro-life is to be enveloped by a desperate, agonizing moment in history… When I (first) heard about the rescue mission… I thought it would be a very good thing for me to be part of that, to see if I had the courage of my convictions, to see if I could be as defenseless as those little ones we tried to defend… That moment which crushes the life of the unborn also crushes my heart; and when that moment seizes you, it is no longer possible to live a normal life, as though the world were a normal place.

Monica Miller marks January, 1976 as the beginning of her pro-life journey. I was two months removed from the womb at the time. Her narrative continues through 1994, “the year that the anti-abortion clinic blockades basically came to an end” and the year I graduated from high school. Over that span, Miller would endure a lengthy imprisonment and, with the help of friends, reclaim the torn bodies of more than five thousand aborted babies—mostly from in and around Chicago and Milwaukee. And because she believed so strongly that these children deserved a burial—the only act of mercy they would receive on earth, she went to great lengths to make sure that happened.

But Monica Miller was also committed to publicly exposing the dark work of abortion, and that she did! Whereas I have been criticized for showing pictures of abortion, Monica, a stalwart sidewalk counselor, showed the aborted babies themselves—prior to their burial. At an event coordinated with Joe Scheidler, they conducted a press conference outside a Chicago abortion clinic, with more than 500 aborted babies present. She writes of that experience:

Most of those who looked at the crushed bodies were dumbfounded at the obvious humanity of the fetal babies and aghast at the evidence of violence written upon the torn flesh and severed limbs… The aborted babies, who were never meant to be seen, now intruded into the lives of these strangers… I knew that those who saw the fetal children would never think of abortion in the same way again.

We were disappointed with the media coverage. What we had hoped would happen did not… Despite over five hundred bodies of aborted babies laid out before them, the media chose not to show the victims themselves. The reporters took photographs of the coffins, but not what they contained. The television camera crews filmed us, but never the broken bodies that we held in our hands.

All the anti-abortion pickets in the world cannot convey the loss you feel when you look at a ten-week old fetus in the bright sunlight. You can be for abortion or against abortion. It doesn’t matter. You look and you look away and you feel lousy for a long time afterward.

Expressing the heart cry of my own book quite well, Monica continues:

These are the very least of Christ’s brethren, the poorest of the poor. Why are these aborted babies the very least? Because they’re small, helpless, utterly and completely dependent? Yes. Because in terms of what the world values, they didn’t contribute anything? Yes. But the real reason is because they received the least charity. Indeed, while they lived, they received no charity at all.

Through the course of its 400+ pages, Abandoned touches on the suicide of a fellow activist, a disturbing, abortion-clinic run-in with Jeffrey Dahmer, and a seedy animal cemetery/crematorium that was contracted to burn aborted babies alongside cats and dogs. It calls the extraordinary effort to delay a circuit-riding abortionist at a Chicago-area Oasis the most “serious, genuine and intense effort by pro-lifers to prevent an abortionist from killing the unborn” that the author had ever seen. Reading the account, you well might agree—though the tactical use of gutted cars, welded shut around protestors whose arms are chained together through barrels of cement is nothing to scoff at. Abandoned also tells of one pro-life activist who spent “twenty-two months in solitary confinement” and others who were arrested more than 100 times. When an obscure Florida pastor named Paul Hill came out in public support of killing abortionists, Monica pleaded with him by phone to retract his statement. “The greatest weapon pro-lifers’ possess to prevent abortion and to convert hearts and minds,” Miller argues, “is living a life of nonviolent self-sacrifice according to the teachings of Christ’s Beatitudes.” Paul Hill would go on to murder Pensacola abortionist, John Britton, and his bodyguard. Such killings “provided already eager pro-abortion politicians with a powerful excuse to quash what they perceived to be harassment of abortion doctors.” “Just a few years after FACE became law,” Miller explains, “the pro-life sit-in movement, in which thousands had participated, essentially dissolved.”

What’s the takeaway from all this? Among other things, Miller’s book demonstrates that “after nearly forty years of controversy, it appears that the war over abortion will not come to a quick and easy end.” As I spoke about last week, despite all our failures and all our setbacks, the decisive move has yet to be played. The crucial moment remains—“a moment in which we have before us that great struggle over life itself and the meaning of human existence.” How should we carry ourselves in such a moment? This is how Miller sustained herself during her time of imprisonment, and it’s a worthy model for us as well: “I tried to enter into the heart of Christ. He had every right to protest the injustices done to Him, but instead He acted as if He had no rights and gave Himself over completely to the suffering laid upon Him… I learned [to] expect rejection—and [to] not think another second about it.”

May we do the same.

As a stand-alone work, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? has much to commend it. Taken in its broader context, it is both inspiring and tragic—inspiring for the clear and compassionate ethic it espouses, tragic for what ultimately happened beyond its pages. Though first published in 1979, the worldview analysis feels remarkably contemporary. Were it not for the frequent citations of articles and studies from the 1970’s (including reference to a “current science-fiction film,” making use of the phrase, “the Force is with you!”), it could easily have been written decades later. In that sense, the book is prophetic, though not entirely prescient. Its most dire predictions, mostly relating to infanticide and euthanasia (but also including abortion-inducing tampons), have yet to materialize in the mainstream. That’s not to say their analysis was wrong, but the cultural dominoes have not fallen as quickly as they probably expected.

The book opens with the assertion that “we stand today on the edge of a great abyss.” It concludes with the assertion that if the Christian community “does not take a prolonged and vocal stand for the dignity of the individual and each person’s right to life… we (will) have failed the greatest moral test to be put before us in this century. And yet almost 35 years later (and 13 years into a new century), we seem to still be standing on the edge of the same abyss. Though the evangelical church in America has not mounted much of a prolonged and vocal stand against abortion, enough has been done to at least hold the line. That in itself is a mercy—particularly when you look at how quickly public perception has shifted in regard to homosexuality. It’s remarkable that 40 years after Roe v. Wade, abortion has still not carried the day—despite the steady barrage of media sympathy and the steady abandonment of biblical authority. The abortion divide remains as fixed as ever. Koop and Schaeffer would thank the Christian memory of our post-Christian culture  for that. They write:

For a while, Western culture—from sheer inertia—continued to live by the old Christian ethics while increasingly embracing the mechanistic, time-plus-chance view of people… (but) that memory will not last forever without the Judeo-Christian base… how long will it be before infanticide is socially accepted and perhaps legalized?… The next candidates for arbitrary reclassification as nonpersons are the elderly. This will become increasingly so as the proportion of the old and weak in relation to the young and strong becomes abnormally large, due to the growing antifamily sentiment, the abortion rate, and medicine’s contribution to the lengthening of the normal life span (USA Today recently reported that the nation’s fertility rate has slipped below replacement levels)… One wonders what the chances are for someone who becomes a burden in a society that practices the concept of the survival of the fittest and has begun this practice by starting to eliminate its children… Where the destruction will end depends only on what a small scientific elite and a generally apathetic public will advocate and tolerate… from abortion-on-demand to infanticide and on to euthanasia—the only thing that can stem this tide is the certainty of the absolute uniqueness and value of people. And the only thing which gives us this is the knowledge that people are made in the image of God… if a human being is not made in the image of God, why shouldn’t the malformed young and the elderly be put out of the way for the good of society—once society and the courts separate life and personhood? “Right” or “wrong” is then only a matter of what the majority thinks at that given moment, or what the courts judge is for the benefit of society at that moment.

Not surprisingly for anyone who has read Francis Shaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? relies heavily on presuppositional apologetics. Though Shaeffer’s academic work has endured plenty of criticism both inside and outside the church, I generally find his philosophizing to be reasonable and helpful. I also appreciate the central role he played in awakening the evangelical church to the depravity of abortion. By all appearances, its a position that cost him plenty of friends and support at the end of his life—earning him criticism for becoming “too political.” Whether that claim has any merit or not, there is no political component to Whatever Happened to the Human Race?—no call to contact your congressman and no call to get out the vote. Rather, the kind of engagement Koop and Schaeffer call for is to actively condemn abortion, actively care for people, and to actively proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ. They label abortion “an evil as great as any practiced in human history,” but they believe society’s ills run much deeper and call for a deeper solution:

[T]he Christian consensus gave great freedoms without leading to chaos—because society in general functioned within the values given in the Bible, especially the unique value of human life. Now that humanism has taken over, the former freedoms run riot… If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography, the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.

When absolute sexual standards are replaced by relativistic ones, and this is coupled with the generally low view of people that modern humanists have been teaching, society is not left with many barriers against the sexual abuse of children. After you remove the psychological and moral barriers imposed by a high and sacred view of human life, child abuse of all kinds becomes very easy… [H]umanists, far from reexamining the basis of their position now that the situation is souring, stubbornly propose remedial action to the problems that humanist philosophy itself has created… Current sexual mores, sexually permissive life-styles, and the breakdown of the family demand abortion. At the same time the availability of abortion contributes to a change in our sexual mores, our permissive life-styles, and general family breakdown… Those in the church who have not made these questions a burning issue have forgotten the church’s centuries-old tradition of social action on behalf of the weak and the unwanted.

We are concerned that there is not more protest, outcry, or activism in regard to these issues of life and death… Surely those who call themselves Christians, having a moral base, should make these things a principal issue and be willing, even at the risk of personal sacrifice, to strive privately and publicly for the dignity and sanctity of the individual… If we sit back and do nothing, our mere passivity and apathy will lead to actively evil results by removing resistance to those who are active and nonapathetic.

It is this last concern which Koop himself seemed to have entirely abandoned during his political career. World magazine published an article in the October 2, 1993 issue titled, “Whatever Happened to C. Everett Koop?” It asks:

Has C. Everett Koop become to evangelical conservatives what Barry Goldwater is to secular conservatives? Goldwater won his Strange New Respect Award this summer for supporting President Clinton’s gays-in-the- military gambit; Koop, the former surgeon general, won last week for endorsing Clinton’s health plan, which includes abortion on demand as part of its basic “benefits” package.

When questioned about his perplexing public behavior in regard to abortion, Koop comes off as brusque and arrogant. John P. Elliot suggests  that when Francis Shaeffer died in 1984, Dr. Koop’s moral compass died with him. Even more heartbreaking, perhaps, is the trajectory taken by the life of Francis Shaeffer’s son in the years following Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Franky Shaeffer (now Frank) was his father’s right hand man when the book went to press. His imprint is literally all over the book. He is named as the copyright holder, and readers wanting to order the five-episode, film series are directed to his California production studio. In the decades that have followed, Frank Shaeffer has completely disavowed his father’s life work, writing a series of books disparaging his parents’ practices and beliefs. He formally endorsed President Obama in 2008 and editorialized that being “pro-life” is perfectly compatible with legal abortion. Even L’Abri, the community founded by the elder Shaeffers in Switzerland, no longer embraces the teaching of its ideologic father—rejecting most of what Shaeffer stood for in favor of a less dogmatic form of Christianity.

So, as you can see, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is more than just a book. It’s a parable of our times—a reminder that we all have skeletons in the closet. Even the most morally astute have blind spots, which makes me tremble. Where will my son be in 10, 20, or 30 years? Will he come to reject everything I stand for? What does it profit a man to evangelize the whole world, yet lose his son? These are difficult questions. I do not blame Francis for the apostasy of Frank. Whose to say a different approach would have yielded different results? Rather, it’s a humbling reminder that for all we do as parents, the ultimate trajectory of our childrens’ lives is beyond our control. So wherever my children end up in the course of their lives, I hope they will at least say of me that I loved them well. As Koop and Shaeffer remind us, “there is no use in talking of offsetting the loss of humanness in society if we do not act humanly to all people about us in the contacts of our individual lives… So we who are Christians must, on the one hand, fight with determination and sacrifice for the individual in society, and on the other, provide the loving care of people as individuals.”

Towards the end of my collegiate career, I read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. The central character in the story is a runaway slave mother who, on the verge of recapture, slits the throat of her daughter to prevent her from reentering a life of slavery. I don’t know that I saw the connection to abortion at the time, but I have since reread the text in pursuit of the details I’d forgotten. Though I don’t know Morrison’s position on abortion, I found her account of this mercy killing far less sympathetic than I anticipated. After killing her daughter, Sethe is shunned by her own people—the very ones with first-hand knowledge of what she was trying to protect her child from. Her sons run away forever, terrified by what their mother had done. Baby Suggs, the town matriarch and Sethe’s mother-in-law, loses all hope, shuts herself up in her room, and dies. Beloved, the young daughter who was killed, haunts the family in a perennial fury until she finally shows up in bodily form to torment and almost kill her mother. Near the end of the book, we find this account of Sethe’s efforts to justify her actions to Beloved:

Sethe began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered, been through, for her children… None of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind… And Sethe cried, saying she never did, or meant to—that she had to get them out, away… That her plan was always that they would all be together on the other side, forever. Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one… Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again her reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute and hour of it, to take back one of Beloved’s tears.⁸

As bad as slavery was, what Sethe did was worse. When she tried to convince another former slave there was no other way, he simply stated, “There could have been a way. Some other way… You got two feet, Sethe, not four.”⁹  Human beings are image bearers. We are not animals. We have two feet, not four. We do not eliminate suffering by killing those who suffer. Though the focus of this chapter is on the secular reasons for condemning abortion, the front line arguments in support of abortion are almost all spiritual in nature—despite the fact that they’re being made by secularists. Their goal is to move the debate away from objective, measurable criteria so as to place it in a realm that science and biology can’t speak to. In it’s crudest form, they are arguing that abortion-vulnerable children are better off dead. To demonstrate just how deplorable this “mercy killing” mentality is, we must return to Scripture. The Bible does not paint a kind picture of suicide, which is a self-inflicted mercy killing. How much worse are those who kill others in the name of benevolence?

The final chapter of I Samuel records the death of King Saul. When he was mortally wounded in battle, Saul commanded his armor-bearer to, “Draw your sword, and thrust me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and mistreat me.”¹⁰ If there was ever an appropriate place for a mercy killing, surely this was it. But Saul’s armor bearer feared to lift his hand against God’s anointed and would not do it. In 2 Samuel 1:1-15, the news of Saul’s death is brought to David through an Amalekite witness. Because the details from the 2 Samuel account don’t quite match those from the I Samuel account, there are two possible conclusions. Either Saul’s attempt to kill himself was unsuccessful and the Amalekite finished the job at Saul’s bidding, or as is more generally believed, the Amalekite was lying to gain David’s favor. In either case, the material point is unchanged. Despite the general consensus that Saul “could not live after he had fallen,”¹¹ David had the Amalekite executed on the spot for thinking it commendable to put Saul out of his misery. This text gives no credence to the idea that killing someone is a morally legitimate means of sparing them from future suffering.

In a scenario that has striking parallels to the deaths of Saul and his son, Jonathan, J.R.R. Tolkien offers insight through the words of Gandalf in his conclusion to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Lord of Gondor, mad with despair at the pending fall of his kingdom and the condition of his dying, unconscious son, has commanded his men to set them both on fire. He believes it will be more honorable to die together, on his own terms, than at the hands of a cruel and merciless enemy. To that Gandalf says: “Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death. And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.”¹² Taking a life, even one that is suffering anguish with little hope of survival, is a grave and serious thing. At its core, it’s a prideful thing. Those who take such steps thumb their noses at the sovereign designs of God through suffering and set themselves up as the ultimate authority over their life or the life of another.

8 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) 241-242.

9 Morrison, Toni. 165.

10 I Samuel 31:4

11 2 Samuel 1:10

12 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955) 835.

In the video, all of the presidential quotes are presented without context or commentary. They are meant to speak for themselves. But in case there is any uncertainty as to how they relate to the issue of abortion, I’ve added a quick note of explanation to each one in the space below. I’m also including the quotations that were considered for the video but were ultimately left out for the sake of brevity. These are some of the most highly regarded presidents in American history, and they have plenty to teach us about abortion.

• “The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government.” George Washington—Making it lawful to execute the most helpless members of the human community, without trial or consent, is the height of injustice.

• “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” Thomas Jefferson—The right to life is the most fundamental of all human rights. If that right is not protected, all other rights cease to matter.

• “We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.” Franklin D. Roosevelt—Abortion is entirely built on excluding the most helpless and vulnerable members of the human race from the most basic, governmental protection. Abortion does not promote a more inclusive society.

• “Too often… we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” John F. Kennedy—From the very start, abortion on demand has been propped up by slogans and ignorance. Most of those who count themselves “pro-choice” have given little serious thought to the ethics of abortion. It’s more comfortable to just embrace the opinion of the masses.

• “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” Dwight D. Eisenhower—As a nation, we have sacrificed a sacred principle (do not shed innocent blood) for the “privilege” of commitment-free sex. Civilizations that abandon the most basic ethical principles do not last.

• “Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.” Abraham Lincoln—Just as there could be no compromise on the issue of slavery, there can be no compromise on the issue of abortion. Fundamental human rights leave no wiggle room.

• “No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.” Theodore Roosevelt—In most corners, abortion is sold as a “necessary evil.” Everyone who argues that we should take measures to reduce the frequency of abortion concedes on some level that it is an “evil” practice. People of sound character do not do what is morally wrong, no matter how advantageous the result.

• “Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.” Franklin D. Roosevelt—Abortion is the decision to sacrifice the life of a child for the well-being of the parent. This is the pinnacle of self-interest and the antithesis of true love.

• “There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child.” Dwight D. Eisenhower—Abortion causes the deaths of more than 3,300 American children every day. This is a tragedy like no other.

• “This is our first task as a society: keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged.” Barack Obama—If we are to be judged by how well we keep our children safe, then we must be judged an utter failure. Abortion has killed more than 50 million American children in the 40 years it has been federally legal.

• “Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.” George Washington—The right to abort is built on the assertion that the mother is a free moral agent whose reproductive choices cannot be interfered with. This completely misses the point that all of our individual rights end at the point where the rights of others begin. We all must give up those liberties that harm or destroy another person. This is the only way true liberty can persist.

• “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Thomas Jefferson—The close to $500 million Planned Parenthood annually receives in tax payer revenue stands in direct contrast to this Jeffersonian principle. So does the Obamacare mandate that requires all employers to include contraceptives and abortifacient drugs in their company health plans.

• “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Abraham Lincoln—Standing in opposition to abortion today is every bit as contentious as it was to stand against slavery in Lincoln’s day. It is the sin of silence that enables the sins of slavery and abortion.

• “We look forward to working with Congress… to [protect] America’s most valuable asset—our children.” Barack Obama—USA Today recently reported that U.S. births have dropped to their lowest level since 1920 and is sounding alarms about the nation’s ability to support its fast-growing elderly population. The article failed to point out that it is abortion that is destroying America’s most valuable asset en masse.

• “I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.” Ronald Reagan—Abraham Lincoln once said, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” It works for abortion too: Whenever I hear anyone arguing for abortion, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

The quotes below were not included in the video, but are still worth considering.

• “Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” George Washington—Abort73’s testimony section  provides abundant evidence that the abandonment of moral duty and the loss of happiness often go hand in hand.

• “The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.” Abraham Lincoln—The injustices of slavery and segregation were even more culturally entrenched than abortion. The obstacles to their removal were no less daunting and the prospect of success just as uncertain. But none of that matters.

• “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Thomas Jefferson—Like the quote above, the most important causes generally require that you go against the grain—at least for a while.

• “Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone…” George Washington—That includes the afflictions of unborn children, whose very lives hang in the balance and the distress of unwed mothers who are so desperate they are willing to kill their own child.

• “I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.” Harry S. Truman—At the heart of the Sermon on the Mount is the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No matter how you spin it, nobody would choose for their own life to end in violent assault—which is precisely what abortion does to unborn children.

• “If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” George Washington—Public officials have an obligation to their constituents, but some lines must not be crossed. The removal of basic human rights should never be up for vote.

• “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Thomas Jefferson—For forty years, injustice has been enshrined in law. That does not bode well.

• “Property as compared with humanity… must take second place, not first place.” Woodrow Wilson—Abortion and slavery are both justified on the assertion that it is just and reasonable to regard certain human beings as property under the law. This is a barbaric claim. Human rights trump property rights every time.

• “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” Abraham Lincoln—The real facts about abortion are available in remarkably few places. They are not provided in the classroom, in the clinic, in the news or even in most churches. If we really trusted people, we would trust them enough to know the ugly truth about abortion.

• “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” Thomas Jefferson—For 40 years, legal abortion has been propped up by a horrible misreading of the constitution, orchestrated by seven non-elected judges who were appointed for life. Abortion is not an institution of truth and transparency. It is an institution of shadow and deceit.

• “For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children… certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.” Theodore Roosevelt—Children are a source of great expense and a source of great joy. All manner of earthly achievements ring hollow for those who have no one to share them with.

• “Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.” George Washington—Our media, our schools, and our churches are not taking great pains to bring the injustice of abortion to light. Will you?

• “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” Theodore Roosevelt—Higher education is increasingly built on educating minds apart from morals. Children intrinsically recognize the injustice of abortion. College grads have been taught how to explain it away.

• “If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.” Franklin D. Roosevelt—Abortion does not cultivate healthy human relationship. It teaches us that violence is an acceptable way to eliminate the problematic relationships in our lives.

• “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.” Theodore Roosevelt—Don’t miss the forest for the trees. The mainstream press loves to highlight the abortionist-killing fringe. If you’re writing off the entire pro-life position for the actions of an isolated few, you’re not being honest.

• “He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.” Abraham Lincoln—Changing the way the public thinks about abortion. That is our great challenge, for until we do so, meaningful, anti-abortion legislation will remain an impossibility.

For those of you who are well connected to the pro-life subculture, you’re already familiar with October Baby. You probably saw it long before I did. But for those of you who aren’t, this may be the first time you’re hearing of it. And that’s a shame. October Baby deserves a much broader audience. Perhaps Netflix will provide exactly that. Let’s pray it does.

Without giving too much away, October Baby tells the story of a college coed who unexpectedly discovers she was adopted after a failed, 24-week abortion. Infuriated with her adoptive parents for keeping such a secret from her, she hits the road in search of answers—and in search of her biological mom.

In other words, October Baby has a loaded backstory that could have easily devolved into a painful and farfetched mess. But it doesn’t. Instead of over-the-top moralizing, we meet with flawed heroes and sympathetic villains—characters who bear the nuances of real life, just like we do. And even as the movie nears its conclusion, it’s hard to tell how the story is going to resolve itself. I was engaged from start to finish. So much so that I no longer begrudge the choice to cast John Schneider as the dad. He somehow managed to cease being Bo Duke to me (for at least two hours) and made me forget all about the Hazzard County of my youth (though part of me wishes he could have pulled up in an orange Charger to claim his awol daughter).

My only substantive complaint has nothing to do with the film itself. It has to do with the poster and packaging. The text of Psalm 139:16 appears just below the title, and the tagline, “Every Life is Beautiful,” is prominently placed alongside the imprint of two tiny feet. The scripture reference marks October Baby as a Christian movie, and the “precious feet” tagline marks it as a pro-life movie. Why does that bother me? Because I want people to see this movie, not to write it off as a niche film!

For the most part, I positively avoid Christian movies, and I’m a Christian! What is the average non-Christian going to think when they see a Bible verse on the movie poster or Blu-ray case? Christian films have an unfortunate but well-deserved reputation for poor acting, syrupy scripts, and shoddy production. October Baby has none of those things, so why give people the impression that it does? More to the point, religion barely enters the plot. And when it does, it remains generic and ecumenical. This is not a preachy movie—despite what you might think looking at the poster. I realize there’s industry pressure to market to your base, but I would have taken a different tact.

For me, the most compelling part of October Baby has nothing to do with abortion. It has to do with the relationship between a flawed, but loving father and the beautiful, 19-year-old daughter who has seemingly lost her way. That hits me close to home because I am a flawed father with a beautiful, 9-year-old daughter. In ten short years (Lord willing), I’ll be a flawed father with a beautiful, 19-year-old daughter, and that is an almost paralyzing thought. I’m not saying that fathers love beautiful daughters more, but beautiful daughters do give you more to worry about! So I feel the weight of this father’s agony—that tension between wanting to fiercely protect your little girl while having to release her into a cruel, dark world. God help us!

October Baby is not primarily a movie about abortion. It’s a movie about fear and failure and forgiveness. Abortion just happens to make up a key plot point—which itself violates Hollywood’s unwritten abortion policy (pretend it doesn’t exist!). Add in the fact that  so much of the marketing for this film has been directed towards pro-life, Christians and it’s understandable why October Baby has sort of been pigeon-holed as a pro-life movie. Don’t let that fool you. It is both more and less. October Baby is not going to single handedly turn the tide on abortion. No movie can. But it does highlight the fact that abortion has severe and irreversible consequences—which is true whether the abortion takes place at 4-weeks or 24-weeks.

So when you take some time to watch October Baby this week (and you should), don’t think of it as a Christian movie or a pro-life movie. It’s just a great movie. And that should be enough.

Which is why Mary Elizabeth William’s recent Salon article  is such a perplexing one. The piece is titled, “So what if abortion ends life?” and concludes with the following declaration: “The fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.” I saw numerous Facebook references to the article in the days following it’s post. Al Mohler made it the subject of his Friday blog, but yesterday was the first time I read the article for myself.

On the one hand, Williams’ concession that abortion kills a human being is an unremarkable one. Such concessions have been at the heart of Abort73’s “Medical Testimony” page  from the very beginning. Knowledgable, publicly-accountable abortion-advocates have affirmed this reality for years. It’s not a concession they choose to make; it’s a concession they have to make. The biology of human development allows no other alternative.

What struck me about Williams’ article is not her admission of life’s beginning, but rather her appeal to sacrifice. It is a perversely backwards one. Sacrifice has long been synonymous with parenthood. Sacrifice is culturally expected of parents but not the kind of sacrifice Williams is endorsing. Parents, as the stronger, more capable members of the relationship, make sacrifices for the good of their children. They don’t expect their children to make sacrifices for them. After all, what do children have to offer? Can they work longer hours or survive on less sleep? Parents have lots of things they can sacrifice without actually sacrificing their lives, but children do not. All a child has is his or her life, and that is precisely what Williams demands be sacrificed. She even goes so far as to say, “If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.”

Not surprisingly, the article doesn’t offer much in the way of substantive argument, but William’s basic thesis is this: “All life is not equal.” We can infer from the broader context that she is referring specifically to human life. All human life is not equal. That’s what she’s asserting. To support this claim, she appeals to two things: the dependence of unborn children and the decisions that are made to end human lives in other contexts.

In regard to the first claim, Wiliams says, “a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.” This is true. A mother has more rights than her unborn child, just as a mother has more rights than her born child. That isn’t the point. Rather, Williams is asserting that because the mother has more rights than her unborn child, she has the right to kill her unborn child. This is a philosophical leap without basis. She frames it in the context of more rights and less rights, but she is essentially arguing that unborn children should have no rights. After all, the right to not be killed is the most fundamental right on the entire spectrum. If you take that right away, you take every right away.

The closest Williams comes to making a rationale defense of this position is to declare that the rights of the mother “automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her.” “Non-autonomous” is the classification she employs to make an ethical distinction between mother and child, but it would have been more accurate to say the less-autonomous entity inside of her. There isn’t a person alive that is autonomous in any absolute sense. We all depend on sustained environmental input to survive. Just because children are comparatively more dependent than adults doesn’t mean their lives are less valuable. You could just as easily argue the reverse, that their youth and dependence make their lives more valuable. After all, the younger the victim, the more years are taken away from them when they die. And generally speaking, things that are vulnerable deserve more protection, not less. Furthermore, in declaring herself to support “unrestricted reproductive freedom,” Williams nullifies her point entirely. Because she believes women should be free to abort children for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy, she believes women should be free to abort children who are already past the point of external viability. If a baby can survive outside her mother’s womb, doesn’t that make her autonomous by Williams’ definition? And if she’s willing to support the abortion of autonomous children, then her argument isn’t even applicable in the first place.

Williams’ second appeal is built on the claim that the inequality of human life can be seen on three different fronts: drone attacks, capital punishment, and terminal illness. Her argument goes like this. Because we kill people in war, because we kill violent criminals, and because we take people off life support, it must also be reasonable to kill unborn people. Without knowing Williams’ specific positions on these issues, I suspect she would count herself among those opposed to the use of military drones and the death penalty. If that’s the case, it seems a bit  disingenuous to appeal to military intervention and capital punishment as arguments in favor of abortion. Be that as it may, it is still relatively easy to point out the fallacies in her reasoning. Unborn children are not military targets who pose a violent threat to our country. Nor are they the accidental victims of a military intervention that is at least ostensibly designed to protect innocent people. Unborn children are not violent criminals who have been duly convicted of a heinous crime. And unborn children, if left alive, will continue to grow and develop. They will soon depart their comatose state, if you want to call it that, and have every prospect for a long and full life. All that to say, the examples Williams uses to support her claim have absolutely no connection to the ethics of abortion.

Williams closes her editorial by asserting that abortion saves lives, “not just in the most medically literal way,” she says, “but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down… I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time.” Almost every abortion argument eventually descends to this claim that it is medically necessary to save lives. Never mind that abortion is almost never medically prescribed  and may never be necessary to save a mother’s life. When every other argument is set down, this is where abortion advocates finally land. Williams puts a new spin on it by suggesting that abortion not only saves women’s lives in a literal sense, it saves them in a figurative sense too. This claim is dubious at best, but let’s assume it’s true. We are still left with one HUGE problem. In this debate over whose rights should prevail and whose rights should be sacrificed, remember that the sacrifices in question are in no way equal. Parental sacrifice is real and significant, but it is not ultimate. Parents give up incalculable amounts of time and money, but they remain very much alive. Now consider that the required sacrifice on other side is life itself. It is the ultimate sacrifice, and it is made without their consent.

Williams affirms at one point in the article that, “Throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me.” She says she loved her children “from the moment she peed on those sticks.” She is not alone in loving her unborn children, which raises an interesting question in my mind. Even those with no religious affiliation would likely agree with the Scriptural assertion that the greatest expression of love is the willingness to die for the beloved. What parent worth their salt wouldn’t die for their child? And yet abortion-advocates consistently put forth the reasonableness of requiring children to die for their parents. And their argument goes like this: If the mother dies, the child will die. Now imagine some hypothetical situation, dreadful as it may be, in which your beloved, born child is trapped, and you have no way to save them—but you do have a way to save yourself, would you do it? Say they were drowning or stuck on a train track or locked in a burning building, and you had absolutely no way to free them. Would you stay with them until the end and die yourself or leave them to spare your own skin? I realize this an obscure example, and I realize it’s potentially complicated by obligations and love for other children, but I still raise the question. Is it really so unreasonable for a parent to hold out hope until the very end, even at the risk of losing his or her own life? Isn’t that what parents do?

People can be very clever in the arguments they put forward to explain why abortion is necessary and good, but at the end of the day, every one of them is a complete perversion of the natural parent/child relationship. Self-sacrifice is something to be honored and celebrated, but child-sacrifice may well be the most depraved act in all the universe. As a mother, Mary Elizabeth Williams should know that.

When I first began combating abortion as a full-time vocation, I was directed to an abortion cover story in New Age Journal.¹⁴ The author calmly asserts that abortion is a religious sacrament. She cites the book, Pagan Meditations by Ginette Paris, who says that it is only when we see abortion as “a sacred sacrifice to Artemis” that the sanctity of the aborted life is restored. The author dreams of the day when all daughters will be initiated into the “spiritual dignity” of abortion, “with prayers to Artemis or the Divine Mother, She who gives and takes life.” Unable to convince herself that her own abortion was an immaterial procedure, she finds comfort in counting it a sacrifice to the Divine Mother, and asks that “the spirit of this, my child, [may] come again—when the world and when I welcome its rebirth.”

Though most aborting women don’t have it in their minds that they’re sacrificing their child to a pagan goddess, virtually every abortion is performed in service to a false god. We may not worship stone statues, but we are surrounded by the idols of money, power, prestige, autonomy, and sex. Abortion after abortion is laid down at the feet of these gods. And the true God sees every one, which is worth considering in its own right. The only way for massive, violent injustices to survive is for the perpetrators to keep them hidden. The reason an entire nation of “decent” people isn’t outraged by abortion is because we don’t see it. The “pro-choice” lobby works hard to keep abortion out of the limelight, and the womb itself is an intrinsically concealed place. Truly, abortion is as hidden an injustice as there has ever been. In most instances, it’s a blind procedure; even the abortionist doesn’t see what he’s doing. But God sees every one. Our frame was not hidden from him in the womb; “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”¹⁵ I first felt the weight of this while reading Gary Haugen’s Good News About Injustice. He writes this:

In Rwanda, where I had to bear the burden of digging through the twisted, reeking remains of horrific mass graves, I tried to imagine for just a minute, what it must have been like for God to be present at each of the massacre sites as thousands of Tutsi women and children were murdered. Frankly, the idea was impossible to bear. But the thought led me to imagine what it must be like for God to be present, this year, at the rape of all the world’s child prostitutes, at the beatings of all the world’s prisoners of conscience, at the moment the last breath of hope expires from the breast of each of the millions of small children languishing in slavery. As I would approach my God in prayer, I could hear his gentle voice saying to me, “Son, do you have any idea where your Father has been lately?”¹⁶

I would add to that list abortion. You and I are protected from its stench by a chasm of separation. God is not. In reading through all the biblical inclusions of the word “hate,” I came upon a shockingly grotesque passage in Micah 3. It reads as follows:

Hear, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel! Is it not for you to know justice?—you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin from off my people and their flesh from off their bones, who eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them, and break their bones in pieces and chop them up like meat in a pot, like flesh in a cauldron.

Surely this is symbolic speech—meant to expose the depravity of their wicked hearts by attributing to them the most physically depraved acts one could possibly imagine.  For who would actually tear the skin off their victims, or flay the skin from their bones? Who would break their bones in pieces or chop them up like meat in a pot, like flesh in a cauldron? Such behavior is unthinkable, and yet this is precisely what abortion does. If you have never seen it’s violent aftermath, this is where you put the book down, visit Abort73.com and go to “Photographic Evidence.” It’s time to be shocked and horrified. But as shocking and horrifying as these images are, they are nothing compared with what it must be like to actually be in the womb as these tiny bodies are literally ripped apart. This is what God sees, thousands of times a day—the most innocent and helpless members of his most prized creation torn to shreds. Can you imagine his fury? Can you imagine what it will be like when the floodgates of God’s wrath finally open in response to the injustice of abortion?

To this, some will raise an objection. If God is physically present for every abortion, if his anger burns at every one, why doesn’t he act to stop them? We’ll wrestle through that question at the book’s conclusion. For now, I’ll offer two responses. The first is Paul’s—offered in the context of God’s choosing Jacob over Esau.¹⁷ Who are we to question the wisdom or goodness of God? Does clay have the right to question the potter? Second, I would suggest that abortion is both deserving of God’s wrath and an expression of God’s wrath. Romans 1 tells us that those who suppress the truth of God, truth that is revealed to everyone through the created order and the human conscience, will eventually be given over to their sinful desires. Verse 28 explains that, “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Those who continue to rebel against the authority of God will eventually get their wish. God will give them over to everything they want, and it will destroy them. It is only the mercy of God that spares us from our warped desires. When we are given over to pursue our “dishonorable passions” the results are socially devastating: “envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness… men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” Some see God’s commandments as narrow, arbitrary and inhibiting. In reality, they are a protection. When we abandon them, things go terribly wrong. In the case of abortion, we kill children in pursuit of a happier future and in the process, we destroy our future, we destroy our families, we destroy our culture, we destroy our consciences, and we destroy our peace. We want God to leave us alone, and so he does—which is a judgment in itself. 

The more important question for us is not what stays God’s hand, but what stays ours.

14 Brenda Peterson, The Abortion Debate: Can We Find Common Ground? (New Age Journal, October 1993).

15 Hebrews 4:13

16 Haugen, Gary. Good News About Injustice, Updated 10th Anniversary Edition: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World. (Downer’s Grove: IVP Books, 2009) 95.

17 Romans 9:14-24

In Numbers 5:11-28, Moses lays out an elaborate ritual for uncovering the secret sin of adultery. If a wife is suspected of adultery, she is brought before the priest, where holy water is mixed with dust from the tabernacle floor (vs 16) and ink from the priest’s written curse (vs 23). The woman must then swear an oath that if she has lain with another man, her body will be cursed upon drinking the water of bitterness. What is the bodily curse? In the ESV we read:

And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people.

The phrase, “her thigh shall fall away,” is an extremely perplexing one. One literal translation renders it this way: the “belly-of•her” is “turgid,” the “thigh–of•her…falls(-away).”²⁹ Commentators have been wrestling with this one for a long time. The translators of the NIV have rendered “her thigh shall fall away” as “her womb will miscarry.” This wording has led some to argue that Numbers 5 references nothing less than a priestly formula for abortion. For my part, I will simply note that here again, the normal word for miscarriage is not used. We don’t know what it means exactly for a thigh to fall away. The reason some tie it to pregnancy is because of the declaration in verse 28, that if the woman is innocent, she will be free of all guilt and able to have children. Clearly, one of the curses being prescribed to the adulterous woman is barrenness. Whether or not that includes the miscarriage of a child conceived through adultery is less certain.

What we can be sure of is that this passage in no way justifies abortion. If a miscarriage has taken place, it is because God decreed it, not because the priest gave her an abortifacient. Dirty water does not end a pregnancy. The curse was not in the water itself, but in the judgment of God. If God decrees that the penalty of adultery will be the loss of the child, that is his prerogative and well within his authority. He did as much through the death of David and Bathsheba’s first child. Returning to the text I opened with, God holds the keys of Death and Hades. As Creator God, he had the authority to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. We do not share that same authority—even when the circumstances of conception are suspect. The lineage of Christ was marred by nothing less than fornicators, adulterers, prostitutes, and rapists.³⁰ While that doesn’t make such behavior any less wicked, it certainly indicates that children conceived out of sexual immorality are no less valuable. God is at work in every conception—even those that begin as a result of sin.

For Abortion Supporters 

• If there is uncertainty as to when individual life begins, should we error on the side of protecting life or discarding life?
  
• Which right is more fundamental, the right to not be killed or the right to not be pregnant?
  
• Does it concern you that everyone who supports abortion is no longer threatened by it?
  
• Have you considered the fact that the arguments used to justify abortion were once used to justify slavery?
  
• Would you rather live in a country that protects the lives of all human beings or one that thinks some human beings are better off dead?
  
• Was your support of abortion arrived at by an honest examination of the facts or by a desire to justify the elimination of unwanted pregnancy?
  
• Does it bother you that 93% of abortions are performed on healthy mothers, with healthy babies, who chose to engage in sexual intercourse?
  
• Which is more noble, to sacrifice a portion of your life for the sake of your child or to sacrifice your entire child for the sake of you?
  
• Are poverty, parental immaturity, or unwantedness  sufficient rationales for killing children after they’re born?
  
• Is it more loving to kill a child you can’t raise or to give that child to someone who can?

For Abortion Opponents

• If your grandkids ask you someday what you did to combat abortion, will you have anything to tell them?
  
• If an outside observer were to secretly examine your life, specifically how you invest your time and money, would they conclude that abortion is a grave injustice or no big deal?
  
• If all abortion-opponents responded to abortion as you do, would that help or hurt the cause?
  
• Do you spend more money on coffee than you do on the defense of abortion-vulnerable children?
  
• Would you be doing more to combat abortion if the lives of your own children hung in the balance?
• Is it more important to believe that abortion is wrong or to act like abortion is wrong?
• If it was your life that was threatened by fatal violence, would you want advocates who politely held their tongue, or advocates who actually spoke up in your defense?
• How much time have you spent equipping yourself to be able to competently explain the injustice of abortion?
  
• Does your engagement come from a place of arrogance or humility?
  
• Does the way you treat people give credibility to your “pro-life” convictions or make them seem rather hypocritical?

For Christians

• Is Jesus more likely to criticize someone for doing too much on behalf of abortion-vulnerable children or too little?
• If you were to be judged according to what you did or didn’t do for the least of these among us, how would you fare?
• Does Jesus’ warning to not overlook the little children have any application to abortion?
• Does Jesus assertion that, “Whoever receives a child in my name receives me,” have any bearing on abortion?
• How much of your prayer life is devoted to the elimination of abortion?
• What are the chances your teenage daughter would have an abortion before she’d tell you she’s pregnant, for fear of your reaction?
• Does your service to those threatened by abortion more closely mirror the Good Samaritan or the priest and the Levite–who were too busy to stop and do anything?  
• Does the flavor of your life give those around you a positive or negative view of humanity?
• Is Jesus more concerned about how you feel or how you act?
• If faith without works is dead, what is pro-life conviction without action?

For Pastors and Elders

• Are you more concerned about your music and preaching than you are about intervening for the marginalized and vulnerable?
  
• What does your church budget say about your commitment to protecting abortion-vulnerable children?
  
• How many weeks, months or years could someone go to your church without hearing any public prayer or proclamation regarding abortion?
  
• Is there a culture of grace at your church such that a single woman need not fear being condemned or ostracized for showing up pregnant?
  
• If all churches were to follow your example, would we be looking at another 40 years of legal abortion?
  
• Since 85% of most ministry budgets are dedicated to salaries and facilities, how much of your salaried time are you devoting to abortion-vulnerable children?
• If John Ensor is correct, and abortion is the defining experience of this generation, are you faithfully equipping your people to be able to minister in a world full of post-abortive men and women?
  
• Do your middle school, high school and college students have a clear understanding of what abortion is and why it is an affront to God?
  
• In light of the fact that 65% of aborting women are professing Christians, how is your church doing with the Great Commission call to teach disciples to observe everything God has commanded—including the prohibition against shedding innocent blood? 
• If the church in America ever made the elimination of abortion an honest-to-goodness ministry priority, do you think Planned Parenthood would even stand a chance?