Recently two reporters went to a meat
processing plant undercover and made
disgusting videos of animals being mis -
treated. As bad as this was - and it is -
I would like to suggest a new assignment!
What I would suggest is that they go to any
abortion clinic and film what happens there.
Americans would be horrified. The pictures
would not be pretty of babies undergoing
gruesome slaughter worst than any meat
processing plant and I would suppose worse
than any murder of older humans.
Then I would like to see interviews of these
undercover reporters of women who have had
abortions at certain anniversaries such as at
1 year after the abortion, 5 years after the
abortion then 16 and then 21.
Here's what I would propose asking these
women and the men (fathers, boyfriends,
etc. - 70% of women are coerced into have
this major surgery) they were involved with:
Age 1: Do you ever wonder what your child
would look like on his/her first birthday and
whom you would have invited to their first
birthday party?
Age 5: Do you ever wonder what your child
would look like when he/she steps timidly
on the bus for the first time? What would
be his/her first excited words to you upon
their return that first day?
Age 16: Do you ever wonder what your
child's driver's license photo might look
like or whom they had a crush on and if he
scored a touchdown or the winning basket
or made the highest grade ever in math
or if she won homecoming queen or played
lead violin in the school orchestra.
Age 21: Do you ever wonder what your
child would look like at graduation and
walking down the isle for their marriage
ceremony or what their kids (your grand-
kids) would look like? I wonder?
Abortion has plagued us for many many
years but little has been said about the
women who can't become pregnant due
to a past abortion, the higher risk for breast
cancer, the depression and higher suicide
rate. This would be excellent material
for the reporters.
I wonder when I might see this in the
media? Some can call IT a product of
conception, a fetus or a viable tissue
mass but we all know what it really
is or at least would have been! Life
is too precious to waste.
Personal Factoid: Father of six daughters.
7 comments:
Shouldn't be too hard to find
people to interview - about
150 million babies have been
killed - the future of America!!!
Then there's Europe...
From The Sunday Times
March 16, 2008
Royal college warns abortions can lead to mental illness
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor
Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health.
This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion.
MPs will shortly vote on a proposal to reduce the upper time limit for abortions “for social reasons” from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, a move not backed by the government. A Sunday Times poll today shows 59% of women would support such a reduction, with only 28% backing the status quo. Taken together, just under half (48%) of men and women want a reduction to 20 weeks, while 35% want to retain 24 weeks.
Some MPs also want women to have a “cooling off” period in which they would be made aware of the possible consequences of the abortion, including the impact on their mental health, before they could go ahead.
Related Links
More than 90% of the 200,000 terminations in Britain every year are believed to be carried out because doctors believe that continuing with the pregnancy would cause greater mental strain.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends updating abortion information leaflets to include details of the risks of depression. “Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information,” it says.
Several studies, including research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2006, concluded that abortion in young women might be associated with risks of mental health problems.
The controversy intensified earlier this year when an inquest in Cornwall heard that a talented artist hanged herself because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins. Emma Beck, 30, left a note saying: “Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum. I want to be with my babies; they need me, no one else does.”
The college’s revised stance was welcomed by Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP campaigning for a statutory cooling-off period: “For doctors to process a woman’s request for an abortion without providing the support, information and help women need at this time of crisis I regard almost as a form of abuse,” she said.
Dawn Primarolo, the health minister, will this week appeal to MPs to ignore attempts to reduce the time limit on abortion when new laws on fertility treatment and embryo research come before parliament.
Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: “How can a doctor now justify an abortion [on mental health grounds] if psychiatrists are questioning whether there is any clear evidence that continuing with the pregnancy leads to mental health problems.”
Royal College of Psychiatrists statement on abortion and mental health, 2008
The college's stance on the psychiatric factors in abortion, 1994
http://xrl.us/bhq7j
Abortion Pride
by Matt Kaufman
For some years I've noticed that, in polls, most young women reject the word "feminist" to describe themselves. One reason I've noticed that is because I've heard feminists complain a lot about it: They just can't seem to reach today's generation. When they attempt to explain that trend, though, I seldom heard them conclude that there's anything wrong with feminism per se. Usually, they say their problem is bad P.R., or that young women have come to take the "gains" of the feminist movement — especially "abortion rights" — for granted.
Well, that's one way to look at it. But I think their bigger problem is something very different. And a recent campaign by the editors of Ms. Magazine — which, since its founding in the 1970s, has been the closest thing to a journalistic Bible of feminism — points like a laser beam to what their real problem is: how far they are from the hearts of most women.
Ms., you see, wants women who've had abortions to be out-and-proud about it — in fact, to tell the world about it.
The magazine (motto: "More Than a Magazine — a Movement") wants its readers to sign a statement declaring their abortions — to be sent to state and federal lawmakers, and posted online for anyone else to see. The editors call this a "campaign for honesty and freedom," composed of "women of conscience" whose sheer numbers will "change the public debate" on abortion, where the "pro-choice" side has been losing ground in recent years.
Just how many women do the editors think will actually go along with this campaign? Here they show a touch of realism: They regretfully "recognize" that "not every woman will be able to sign today." (Note, though, the bizarre implication: that every woman would want to tell the world if only she were "able" to do it.)
But hey, they say hopefully there are millions of women who've had abortions, and that can translate to political and cultural power. They want to make sure politicians never challenge or limit legalized abortion in any way. Just as important, they want to make abortion respectable, even honorable, in the eyes of society: Women who feel bad about their abortions, they say, feel that way because of "socially imposed guilt." And these women, like all women, must be liberated from "absurd" and "archaic" laws and beliefs.
That, apparently, is the way things look to the leaders of the feminist movement. It doesn't occur to them (or they don't admit) that "women of conscience" might oppose abortion, or feel guilty about having gotten one, precisely because of their conscience. Nor do they seem to notice all the ways in which abortion cuts to the very core of a woman's emotions, instincts and identity because of her very nature as a woman. In the world according to Ms., women who feel bad about undergoing abortion only do so because someone else made them feel bad.
How far this is from the spirit of the original feminists! As the group Feminists for Life of America points out, women like Susan B. Anthony were powerfully opposed to abortion; early feminists, they note, described abortion in terms like "child murder" and "a crying evil." (FFLA collects some of their quotes here.) To those women, abortion was anything but an exercise of "women's rights." It was — in the words of Alice Paul, author of the original (1923) Equal Rights Amendment — "the ultimate exploitation of women," for which men bore equal if not greater responsibility. ("Guilty? Yes," said an article in Anthony's periodical The Revolution: "No matter what the motive ... the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed.... But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!")
Maybe the language is, well, "archaic." Still, those women were much closer than today's feminists not only to the women of their generation, but of today.
If anyone needs research to point this out, there's a tragically large supply. Special credit goes to David Reardon of the Elliott Institute, which specializes in research on women who've had abortions. Reardon, whose work includes a book called Aborted Women: Silent No More, has collected mountains of studies and personal testimonies to just how much damage having an abortion does to the woman herself. After numerous interviews and surveying studies by even "pro-choice" researchers, Reardon writes:
The trend is clear to anyone who looks.... Many aborted women will deny it by hiding their emotions and telling little or nothing of their experience. Others may hide it behind the anger and bitterness they feel toward other persons who were involved, especially the male. But most will admit they are troubled. They simply don't know what to do other than to try to forget it and move on.
But they can't. Some women suppress the feelings for a time, and initially report that they feel "relieved" — but sooner or later the consequences come out in a host of areas of her life. Her relationships with men tend to be train wrecks, and the relationship with the father of the aborted child virtually always falls apart, usually quickly; if the man had anything to do with her getting her abortion (by pressure or various kinds of abandonment, including emotional abandonment) her ability to trust men is liable to be shattered. She may throw herself into promiscuity or she may withdraw from men altogether. Her nights (or even days) may be haunted by thoughts and dreams of babies. She's apt to struggle with extended depression not just at first, but for the long term. Oftentimes she may turn to drinking or drugs, or if she was already doing so before she became pregnant, she'll plunge even further into those habits, desperately trying to anesthetize the pain she feels in the depths of her soul.
The testimonies of these women are heartrending: You can find one after another on Elliott's Web site. (I've previously cited some here.) To take just one example:
I didn't realize why I felt bad. My boyfriend took me home. It wasn't long after I got home that I knew — it just hit me — that I had killed my baby.... I had six years of depression after my abortion.... I hated myself.... A lot of times I wanted to die....
Only an ideologue could dismiss the feelings and experiences of so many women as "socially imposed guilt." In the case of some feminists, it may be a defense mechanism to justify their own abortions. But above all, I think, it's a reflection of how feminist ideology itself has set itself at war with God's handiwork. It's not just His morality they're determined to reject; it's His design of feminine nature.
Happily, where feminism fails women, Christ doesn't.
Driven largely (though not entirely) by Christians, there are thousands of pregnancy care centers across the country that help women find alternatives to abortion — and healing in its aftermath. As Reardon has written, before the abortion, Christ condemns it and Satan makes excuses for it; but after the abortion, Satan is the one condemning it while Christ forgives it.
Here then, is the greatest source of comfort: When the falsehoods of the world stand in ruins, His truth and His love are still standing.
* * *
Focus on the Family has a staff of more than 20 licensed Christian counselors available to talk with you, free of charge. If you are struggling with an abortion-related issue and would like to talk with one of them, please call (719) 531-3400 Monday through Friday 9-4:30 (Mountain time), and ask for the Counseling department at extension 7700. One of the counselors' assistants will arrange for a counselor to call you back at no charge to you.
When I was in college, a friend of mine—a conservative columnist who wrote for a decidedly liberal student paper—was fired. The reasons given by the editors were unconvincing, and kept changing; the bottom line was that they just didn’t like his politics. But one claim they made still stands out in my memory. They accused him of fabricating a quote from a woman with a group called Women Exploited by Abortion (WEBA): “I killed my baby.” At first he was told “No woman would ever say that;” later, that it was “libelous.” The column was never published.
The fact is, though, lots of women say exactly what that woman did — and even more of them feel it, very deeply. If you have any doubts, read David Reardon’s Aborted Women, Silent No More, originally published in 1987 and just re-released by Acorn Books.
It may sound strange to speak of "aborted" women, since it's actually their children who were aborted. But Reardon — who heads the Elliott Institute, specializing in post-abortion research — understands that the women have also been subjected to a type of violence, both physical and spiritual. So he spends some pages simply letting them tell their own stories. Listen, first, to their voices:
Alice: [After the abortion] I didn’t realize why I felt bad. My boyfriend took me home. It wasn’t long after I got home that I knew — it just hit me — that I had killed my baby. . . . I had six years of depression after my abortion. . . . I hated myself. . . . A lot of times I wanted to die. . . .
Carol: One night Jim’s band was playing at a local club and he insisted I go with him. Up to that point [since the abortion] I hadn’t left the house. . . . people still thought I was pregnant. One of the wives came up and said, “You must be thrilled! When’s the due date?” I about died and had to think fast. My emotions about it all were rushing again; and as I looked at Jim, I could honestly say that I hated him. First the abortion and now this! I knew I’d have to lie in order to protect his rapport with our peers. I sadly told her that I had miscarried. We left shortly thereafter because I couldn’t handle the sympathy these people were giving to me — me, a murderer!
Sarah: The thought of having a defective baby . . . was enough to drive me to kill. That says a lot about my morally bankrupt condition.
Those feelings are undeniably real. The most hardened feminists will say they’re misplaced, a product of religious propaganda. And in fact, the women quoted above have embraced Christianity — but after their abortions. Prior to that, and often for years afterward, many who now oppose abortion were active feminists, abortion-rights activists, even atheists. It wasn’t Christianity that first made them feel the guilt. It was personal experience.
Karen: I was twelve weeks pregnant, so they performed a suction abortion. They inserted dilators into my cervix, one after the other, until the largest one was as big around as my little finger. It was really, really painful. . . . They turned on the suction machine. I could feel the baby being torn from my insides. . . . three-quarters of the way through the operation, I sat up. To my right and down, I saw the tube that led out of me, from the vacuum aspirator, and it led into a little glass cylinder. In the cylinder I saw bits and pieces of my little child floating in a pool of blood. I screamed and jumped up off the table. They took me into another room and I started vomiting. They responded by offering me Seven-Up and cookies. It was all just repulsive to me, and I couldn’t stop throwing up.
How many women feel the same way? There’s no way to know; studies are hindered by the natural reluctance of many women to talk about their experience, and of abortionists to cooperate with all but the most sympathetic researchers. Yet even studies by abortion-rights supporters (Reardon cites specific examples) have found substantial numbers feeling “guilty” or “dirty,” confused, violated, sad, lost.
Several studies show one in 10 women who get abortions are subsequently hospitalized for clinical depression or other psychological consequences related to abortion. (Among WEBA women surveyed, the number rose: One in five reported a “nervous breakdown” or “complete mental breakdown.”) For each of those women, numerous others suffer untreated through a string of broken relationships, alternating promiscuity or sexual frigidity, heavy drinking, drugs — behaviors that often were nonexistent or far less pronounced prior to the abortion.
Most important, these problems don’t go away or lessen with the passage of time. On the contrary, Reardon says, they get worse. While abortion supporters say women’s primary feeling after abortion is relief, follow-up studies show that regrets, guilt and other emotional consequences grow more severe years down the line. In fact, Reardon writes after reviewing studies from sources with a variety of views on abortion,
The trend is clear to anyone who looks. The negative, WEBA-like abortion experience is the rule rather than the exception. Many aborted women will deny it by hiding their emotions and telling little or nothing of their experience. Others may hide it behind the anger and bitterness they feel toward other persons who were involved, especially the male. But most will admit they are troubled. They simply don’t know what to do other than to try to forget it and move on.
And forgetting it doesn’t work. Not even in sleep, where persistent nightmares about aborted children are common. The sight of a child is enough to spark deep sadness and tears. And then there are cases like Carol’s, while waiting for a doctor’s exam five years after her last abortion:
After the nurse left the room, I started looking around, checking things out. To my shock and complete loss of control, I saw, two feet from my left foot, a suction aspirator machine! I freaked out. I had a total flashback of my abortion experience. I began crying uncontrollably, got up, dressed, and ran out into the hall, hyperventilating. I found the nurse and was near hysteria as I explained why I couldn’t go back in there. She understood, and tried comforting me, reassuring me their office did not do abortions but that the machine was used for other purposes. She took the machine out of the room. I returned shaken and surprised at my lack of self-control. I wonder . . . will it ever end?
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to recover from abortion. Thousands of pregnancy-care centers across the country help not only in giving women alternatives to abortion, but also in counseling those dealing with its aftermath. Healing, however, can’t come without first facing the reality of what abortion is. And that’s just what women are doing when they say “I killed my baby.”
It’s no mystery why people don’t want to face that: They can’t believe they could be forgiven. Yet here’s where Christianity comes in. Again, the Christian faith isn’t the source of guilt; that comes from what the Apostle Paul calls the law written on men’s hearts. But it is the source of healing — the only place where genuine forgiveness can be found. As Reardon has written elsewhere, before the abortion, Christ condemns it and Satan makes excuses for it. After the abortion, Satan is the one condemning it while Christ forgives it.
That redemptive theme recurs throughout Reardon’s book, making it — for all the ugliness he’s forced to depict — an ultimately uplifting work. Listen to one more voice:
Ila: The legalization of abortion and its rise to social acceptability did nothing to ease the loss and emptiness I felt. Eventually I became so lonely, guilt-ridden, and desperate, that I saw suicide as the only way out of my torment. I overdosed on Valium and Jack Daniels. When my suicide attempt failed, I was admitted to an alcohol rehabilitation program. . . . I prayed for the first time in years, and my prayer was answered. I suddenly realized there was a God out there, and he heard me. . . . My heart began to be filled with joy and hope. . . .
Today I know I must do all I can to help stop legal abortion in this country. I do this by speaking to groups and by reaching out to aborted women, helping them find the one answer to the emotional hell that follows abortions: forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Only in Him do I have hope for my babies who have died, and for my husband and son who live.
One of the most popular slogans of student protesters in the 1960s was “Question Authority.” This fall, posters will be popping up on campuses across the country with a new slogan: “Question Abortion.”
The placards are the product of Feminists for Life of America (FFLA), which is launching a campaign called the College Outreach Program.” “Students are always told to question the status quo,” says the group’s president, Serrin Foster. “Twenty-seven years after the Roe vs. Wade decision, abortion has become the status quo — one out of every five abortions is performed on a college woman.”
FFLA wants to change the status quo, and if enough people pay attention to their posters (eight in all, which can be seen and downloaded at www.feministsforlife.org.), they will. The images are eye-catching, straightforward and powerful: real people, women, girls and children, testifying to the human realities behind the euphemistic rhetoric of “choice.”
The faces tell the stories as much as the words do. There’s the high school or college-age girl who’s been through an abortion (pictured at left), headlined: “Been there. Done that. Hated it.” There’s the wide-eyed, innocent baby, accompanied by the straightforward question, “Is this the face of the enemy?” There’s the grown woman conceived in rape, looking you in the eye and asking: “Did I deserve the death penalty?”
Even if you’re not already pro-life, you can’t help but question abortion when you read these simple, compelling messages. And there’s plenty more where they came from: FFLA is promoting a whole host of subversive ideas, many of them embarrassing reminders of a history today’s feminists would just as soon forget.
For example, FFLA offers a poster of 19th-century founding feminist Susan B. Anthony expressing her pro-life views (sarcastic headline: “another anti-choice fanatic”). The group’s Web site is full of quotes from other early feminists who referred to abortion in terms like “child murder” and “a crying evil.”
To them, abortion was anything but an exercise of “women’s rights.” It was — in the words of Alice Paul, author of the original (1923) Equal Rights Amendment — “the ultimate exploitation of women,” for which men bore at least equal if not greater responsibility. (“Guilty? Yes,” said an article in Anthony’s periodical The Revolution:“No matter what the motive . . . the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. . . . But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”)
FFLA also recalls the immediate pre-Roe years, when liberals diagnosed “unwanted children” as the cause of social ills and prescribed readily accessible abortion as a remedy. “Abortion rights advocates promised us a world of equality, reduced poverty,” an FFLA poster notes—“a world where every child would be wanted. Instead, child abuse has escalated, and rather than shared responsibility for children, even more of the burden has shifted to women.”
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it: Why, when no one is “forced” to bear “unwanted” children (some 30 million have been aborted since the practice was legalized), are problems like child abuse so much worse today? Early feminists could have answered that one, if they could have imagined an era like ours: Once men are freed and encouraged to have sex without responsibility, many of them are bound to jump at the chance. And once self-indulgence replaces family commitment, we’re bound to get more men who, following the grim logic of abortion, feel free to abandon or mistreat older children as well.
It says a lot about the decline of feminism that a group like FFLA is now an aberration. Women naturally hate abortion; it wars against their identity on the most fundamental levels (mothers, nurturers, even sexual partners). For that reason, if feminism really were what it claims to be—“the women’s movement”—you’d think most of its leaders would be pro-life. It’s something of a testament to the power of propaganda that, instead, groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW), which favors subsidized abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy, have long been treated as the spokeswomen for Womankind.
But truth has a way of surfacing in the long run, which is probably why NOW is fading, fewer and fewer women identify themselves as feminists, and more and more women (as well as men) tell pollsters they’re pro-life — especially high school and college students. NOW simply has little of relevance to say to them. A group like FFLA, on the other hand, has a great deal to say.
All things considered, FFLA’s College Outreach Program has tremendous potential—to save lives, to rescue women from lifetimes of regret, to help shape the convictions of a new pro-life generation. Susan B. Anthony would be proud.
by Matt Kaufman
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the killing of minority children:
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As we come this morning to the matter of abortion, before I take you into
the scriptures and we look more closely at to what the Bible has to say, it
is probably fitting for us to get some kind of a grasp on the issue itself.
So, I want to address that, if I may, for a moment. What I am going to say
to you may sound like an article in the newspaper because it is full of
statistics and quotes and that kind of thing, but it does set the scene for
understanding the issue at hand.
To sum up what we are experiencing with regard to abortion in America, we
could simply say, "America, as a nation, is highly committed by law and by
practice to a form of mass murder." And that is really the bottom line.
This nation, which certainly prides itself on its humanitarianism, is in a
murderous cycle of violence that makes the Nazi Holocaust look mild by
comparison. Nearly 2,000,000 babies are aborted a year in America. Every
third baby conceived now is being murdered. Among teenage women there are
736 abortions for every 1,000 births. Among married women abortions now
exceed births! More babies are killed than are born. Some would tell us that
there is an abortion about every 15 seconds in America.
In some metropolitan hospitals, in the major cities of our nation, abortions
far outnumber live births. Planned Parenthood has gone so far as to say,
"This is nothing more than a means of preventing disease; pregnancy being
noted as a disease." If you think that sounds farfetched, I will remind you
of a paper by Dr. Willard Kates, from the Planned Parenthood Physicians
Association. The title of the paper is, "Abortion as treatment for unwanted
pregnancy: The second sexually transmitted disease." "
Pregnancy then is seen by Planned Parenthood as a sexually transmitted
disease that needs to be cured by abortion. Planned Parenthood has somewhere
approaching 1,000 abortion clinics doing somewhere approaching 75,000
murders a year, and are receiving millions of dollars of support from the U.
S. Government and the United Way, and other agencies like that. Our nation,
and other nations in the world are frankly wiping out an entire generation
of human beings in mass infanticide.
It is estimated that perhaps as many as 75,000,000 babies will be murdered
this year around the world—75,000,000! That's probably conservative. It's
more than all the deaths in all the wars, in all the history of the world.
This kind of murder is shocking and I don't want to be too shocking, but I
want to tell you how it is done and I hope that I don't offend anyone. The
processes of abortion are somewhat frightening and bizarre.
During the First Trimester, the methods are Dilation and Suction, called
DNS, or Dilation and Curettage, called DNC; basically this means that a
vacuum tears the child in pieces and sucks the pieces out through a tube.
Or, a sharp instrument dismembers the Fetus into sections, and then often
forceps are used to crush the head and reduce its size. This, of course, can
result in a torn uterus, a perforated uterus, sterility, [and] things like
that.
During the Second Trimester the safe comfortable home of the child, known as
the Amniotic Sack, is wounded by a needle which withdraws the Amniotic Fluid
and replaces it with a heavy saline solution (which basically burns the
child alive), and in 24 to 72 hours the body will expel the dead fetus.
During the Third Trimester, a Hysterotomy is used—sometimes "prostaglandin,"
a drug producing delivery by stimulating the uterus falsely into labor.
These sometimes produce children born alive, who are then left to die or
even be killed. A new way being advocated by the
National Abortion Federation in their recent meetings was advocated at a
workshop: puncturing the "soft spot" on the baby's head and then vacuuming
out what is in the head. Another abortionist at that meeting suggested that
the length of the baby's foot could be measured and used to determine the
price of the abortion.
It almost sounds primitive, certainly not characteristic of a culture as
sophisticated as our is. Even Cesarean Sections are performed as abortions
in the Third Trimester. I remember reading about a case in New York City
where twin babies were conceived in the womb. Both of them had "Down
Syndrome" and they were killed by puncturing their hearts directly. Hundreds
of these attempted abortions in the Third Trimester, are born alive and then
used in some kind of experimentation.
The IRS, jumping into the fray, as they are always wanting to do in order to
rule on how this all affects our taxes, has ruled, in "Revised Rule 73 dash
something," "That parents are entitled to a tax exemption, if after an
attempted abortion their child lives for any length of time." Now, you tell
me how a child, attempted to be aborted, can be considered a dependent child
if it lives, but not a child if it dies. What kind of dilemma is that? I
suppose it is the same dilemma that the Van Nuys Police had not long ago,
when a woman in Van Nuys had a baby in a bathroom—and she killed it with a
razor blade. Had she killed the baby before it was born, she would have had
no problems. But because she killed it with a razor blade after it was born,
she is serving an 11 year prison sentence. This is the stupidity of
Humanism.
Fifteen year olds can get abortions without parental knowledge or consent;
in fact, generally the law wants to say that parents are the enemy of the
freedom of the child; in fact, even the consent of the spouse is
unconstitutional. Dead fetuses are used in an industry of business and
experimentation. The "Journal of Clinical Pathology" indicates that fetal
organs have been grafted into mice and rats to see how long they live, and
other frightening experiments that I won't even speak about in a public
meeting. Squibb Company is involved in paying tens of thousands of dollars
to doctors to experiment with fetuses for use in research on high blood
pressure drugs, and this is all coming very rapidly. I saw something about
it the other night on television.
The U.S. Government funded experiments on live aborted babies. "The New
England Journal of Medicine" reports that tissue cultures are obtained by
dropping still living babies in the meat grinder after abortions, and they
determine something from the culture that is produced in that. Some are
thrown away. Dr. Jay Domingues (sp.) of New York City wrote, "On any Monday
you can see 70 garbage bags with fetal material in them along the sidewalks
of abortion clinics in New York City." Again, the "New England Journal"
article by Raymond Duff and Professor A. G. M. Campbell (sp.) of Yale
acknowledged that over a 21 year period, 14% of babies who died at Yale
Hospital did so through the physician's choice. So you are dealing with a
very, very, widespread problem.
It is now possible to do to a retarded infant what would be impossible to do
to a dog or a cat. In fact, a recent case in California, "Cerlander (sp.)
vs. BioScience Labs" makes it possible for children to sue their parents for
wrongful life, for letting them live and refusing abortion (this reported in
the newsletter, "The American College of Ob-gyn"). In other words, if your
parents didn't abort you and you lived, and you've got severe problems
[then] you can sue them for letting you live.
Bags of babies are found by trash compactors (as we all know); yet on the
other side of this, a wounded American eagle was found recently in Maryland
and rushed to emergency treatment. However, it died and a $5,000 reward was
offered for the arrest of whoever injured it. It is illegal to ship a
pregnant lobster: it's a $1,000 fine. In the State of Massachusetts there is
an anti-cruelty law that makes it illegal to award a goldfish as a prize.
Why? This is what it says, "To protect the tendency to dull humanitarian
feelings and to corrupt morals of those who abuse them." The same people
that want to save the goldfish are leading the parade, usually, to kill the
babies.
This of course has developed into a multibillion dollar industry, in the
terms of business. Many people make their money on this. I talked to an
abortionist who was attending our church, some years back, and presented to
him the gospel. We had several meetings together and he understood fully the
gospel. I don't know his spiritual condition at this time, but I remember on
the days that I talked with him that he told me that he himself alone did
$9,000,000 worth of abortions in a year in his own clinic (that's one
doctor).
The industry goes beyond just the abortion itself to the products of
abortion: the material (the fetus material) which is used for all kinds of
things and sold. It is a massive industry. This even gets more bizarre and
there is no need to get into it. The whole abortion industry is frightening
[and] mind boggling. How a nation of civilized people (if we are civilized;
advanced technologically yes, civilized—no), how we can tolerate this is
unthinkable, except for the fallenness and the wretched sinfulness of the
human heart.
In other countries in the world people are still reeling from the impact of
this. I will give you one illustration: Japan has been very aggressive in
the abortion field for a number of years, and in Japan there is severe
trauma on the part of Japanese women because there have been millions and
millions of abortions that have occurred there. Over the last say 40 years,
in Japan there has been an excess of 50,000,000 abortions that are known.
The women have been traumatized by these abortions, in terms of their own
emotional life, and so the Buddhists have erected temples for the expressed
purpose of dealing with the issue of abortion. These are temples which
memorialized what are called "water babies" (this is a term for an aborted
child). A "water baby," those who perish by abortion.
In order to secure peace for their departed souls, these women come to these
places. And they are now aware of the fact in their own conscience (at least
they assume this to be true without biblical revelation) that these little
aborted "water babies" have a soul, and they have got to do something for
the departed soul; so the Buddhists, in their religion, have erected temples
where the departed souls of "water babies" can be attended to by penitent
mothers. For somewhere between $340 and $640 a grieving mother can purchase
a small stone Buddha. And somehow purchasing this small stone Buddha not
only feeds the business enterprise but relieves some of the anxiety and,
apparently, does something for the departed soul of the baby.
In one temple alone, tens of thousands of these have been sold; the grounds
have become a commercial attraction where visitors pay to come and take
pictures of women who are there agonizing over their departed "water
babies." Priests will offer prayers at that place for "water babies" at $120
per baby and $40 for each additional baby that you have aborted. That is
just one illustration from one country of the trauma that has occurred in
the lives of these women.
400% to 800% is the range of statistic figures that regard suicide;
somewhere between 400% and 800% of suicide rates increase in women who have
had abortions. Hypochondria, depression, withdrawal, guilt, shame, drugs,
alcohol dependency, serious emotional trauma—all of these come from
abortions. Six to seven times more women die each year from legal than
illegal abortions. So the whole thing is a very, very frightening,
frightening scenario.
Just a few more things, and I am not going to give you all the
documentation, although I have it in hand—but let me just read you some of
the things that are coming out of this abortion issue with regard to how it
impacts women:
1. The risk of pregnancy outside the womb which threatens the mother's life,
is doubled for women who have had one abortion, and quadrupled where there
has been two or more.
2. Miscarriages are almost twice as common for women who have aborted.
3. A study of 26,000 births indicated a more than threefold increase in the
number of stillborn babies and deaths of newborns among mothers who have had
an abortion.
4. Since about two or three women per hundred need a blood transfusion,
there is an increased risk of exposure to hepatitis and AIDS.
5. Bleeding is more common in subsequent wanted pregnancies.
6. Many researchers have observed subsequent premature births and low birth
weights.
7. Among women who have had abortions there is an increased risk of damage
to the cervix.
8. A sevenfold increase in "placenta previa" (that's where the placenta
covers the birth canal and often requires a Cesarean Section).
9. About twice the risk of breast cancer when abortions were performed in
the first trimester, before completing a full term pregnancy. That's because
God, in part, has designed the body to begin to prepare itself for the birth
of that child; when that is aborted it creates certain risk factors in the
body as the body retreats to try to compensate.
10. There is up to 30% greater risk of pelvic infection.
The statistics, however, are probably even grimmer since a woman who is
injured will rarely go back to the doctor or facility where it occurred.
Furthermore, complications often develop later and are not reported in
connection with the abortion that caused them, nor is death always linked to
abortion in reports and in death certificates.
When you look at the emotional effect, as I noted about the women in Japan,
you find all kinds of interesting things:
1. Women having prior emotional or mental problems often become worse, and
having an abortion produced such problems in women who previously had none.
2. Women who have had an abortion are more likely to experience guilt,
depression, and be suicidal. However, the claim that a woman will commit
suicide if she is denied an abortion (and that's what the liberationists
tell us) is highly unlikely, because suicide is almost nonexistent among
pregnant women. Over a 20 year period, 13,500 Swedish women were refused
abortions—only three committed suicide. Very, very rare.
3. After an abortion a woman is far more likely to break up with her
partner, whether she is married or not. Abortion just destroys everybody in
the process.
The question then comes, "How did this ever get started? Whoever started
this?" Well, sad to say it goes way back. I mean if we want to know where it
all started we have to see that it started certainly in the mind of Satan
according to John 8:44, "He is a murderer." Certainly it started from the
same kind of fallen attitude that made Cain kill Able. Cain was a murderer;
that's the expression of fallenness. You can go way back and you will find
that there have been efforts on the part of Satan to murder babies in the
time of Moses and in the time of Jesus. And he was successful, as you know,
in the time of Jesus, in massacring babies under the age of two, in order to
try an eliminate the Messiah.
Looking around, for example, say the ancient time of Judaism, you can find
abortions practiced among pagans, but never among Jews, for obvious reasons.
They knew that life was sacred; life was granted by God, and they used to
"camp" on the second great commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself;"
and since a baby conceived was a person that became their neighbor and
therefore to harm their neighbor would be to violate the second commandment.
Coming into the New Testament time there were also pagans who engaged in
abortions, but again Jews did not do it in the New Testament time, nor did
the Church. Plato and Aristotle both recommended family growth limitation
through abortion. Abortion was used even in New Testament times among pagans
to conceal illicit sex. If you could remove the evidence, you could remove
the stigma of illicit sex. Rich women also didn't want to leave their wealth
to lower class children fathered illegitimately, so while they might have
wanted to have an affair with some low classed man, they didn't want to
support his child, and so abortion was a way to deal with that. And then,
abortion was a way (they said) to preserve their "sex appeal," not to
"trouble the womb with bouncing babies."
Abortion was also a form of contraception. In times of ancient cultures,
even around the New Testament era, the methods used varied from substances
introduced into the womb through the birth canal; sometimes oral drugs or
"poisons" as they used to be called; sometimes mixtures that were mixed for
the purpose of proving fatal to the unborn infant; sometimes they would bind
the body in these very, very, tight ropes or cloths to literally squeeze the
womb and crush the life of the child; sometimes they would locate the baby
in the womb and take a hard object and smash against that infant in the womb
and kill it that way; sometimes using blades and sometimes hooks going up
through the birth canal.
Pagans would do this; the Jews always rejected it because life was created
by God, and anyone created by God became your neighbor, and to take a life
was to violate the second commandment. The early church then took a strong
stand against it. In the Didache, which is a codification of early church
teaching, it says, "Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion." Abortion was
rejected in another early document, called the Epistle of Barnabus, as
contrary to "neighbor centered love;" so you can see the early church picked
up on some of the Jewish ideas. The Didache, again that same codification of
teaching, saw the way of death is full of cursing, murders, adulteries, and
murders of children. They saw the way of death as belonging to those who
killed children. They called them "Corrupters of God's creatures," and in
the third century a Latin word even emerged, the word, "abortuwantes"
(sp.)—abortionists. "Abortion," they said, "brought the judgment of God."
The Reformation didn't change this; the church has always seen abortion as
murder, an act of violence, and a lack of love towards one God has created.
So it isn't new: the people of God; Israel, stood against it; the church has
stood against it; and we must stand against it.
Here we are living in a time when this abortion movement has become a
massive industry, has become a reflection of our culture, and if you look
back a little bit you can see what the pieces were that sort of came
together to build the platform on which this whole thing stands. Let me just
see if I can't share some of them with you. This whole commitment to
abortion started;
Step one, the Sexual Revolution—the Sexual Revolution which basically said,
"We want to be free to express ourselves sexually." You go back to the early
sixties; everybody has got to be engaged in free love. Remember the
expression "free love;" you remember all the hippies and that whole thing.
The Sexual Revolution spawned abortion as an industry, because it basically
said, "We have to be free to express ourselves sexually, and we don't really
need to be dealing with the consequences." In fact, they would go so far as
to say, "If we are going to be free, we women certainly can't be victimized
by men. Men can jump in and out of bed with anybody they want all day long,
and walk away and there aren't any consequences to them. But what happens to
us is—we get pregnant, and so their freedom has no impingement; their
freedom has no consequence; their freedom has no detrimental results, but
our freedom does. So in order for us to be really free, you have got to
eliminate the consequence, the major consequence of free sex, free love, and
that is you have got to be able to eliminate pregnancy. Otherwise, we become
victimized by men, and we don't want to be victimized by men.
So the Sexual Revolution with its free love really set the stage for the
massacring of millions of babies, who were nothing but an intrusion in the
fornications and the adulteries of a wretched, degenerate society.
Then there was a second thing that jumped onto the "bandwagon," apart from
this whole free love thing, and that was the deformities issue. You all
remember back in the sixties, the big issue about Thalidomide. Many women
took Thalidomide because it was a birth enhancing drug and it would allow
them to get pregnant, whereas they otherwise may not be able to. And you may
also remember that Thalidomide had some severe side effects, in terms of
limbless children that were born. There were some medical doctors in England
who believed that these deformities and other deformities were serious
enough to lead them to argue for eugenic abortions; and that, of course,
came out of England, as I said, eliminating birth defect children because of
the cost on society, because of the trouble they give to parents (they are
difficult to deal with); they have all kinds of problems with these children
so we ought to come along and say, "Look there is no sense in bringing
deformed children into the world, it's a tough enough place anyway." So,
they jumped on the bandwagon for their agenda's sake and mounted, as it
were, more arguments for abortion.
Then came along the whole Feminist Movement. The Feminist Movement took the
expression of sexual freedom one step beyond. They basically said, "We not
only want to be sexually free without consequence, but we want to be able to
put on our blue suit and take our briefcase and go to work every day too. We
want to compete in a man's world as equals and if we have to have babies
[then] we can't do that." "Women are not equal," they said, and I am
quoting, "to men unless they are rid of childbearing responsibilities."
Betty Friedan (sp.), who is a leader of the Feminist Movement said, "Women
must have abortion as a backup to contraceptive failure." Contraception
first, and if it doesn't work then abortion because we can't be bothering
with children. We have got to go to work and make our way in a man's world.
So you had the Sexual Revolution compounded by this sort of genetic game
playing from those people who wanted to eliminate the deformed from society,
and adding to that compound problem is the third feature which is the
feminist argument: "If we are going to work in a man's world and to be equal
to men in every way, we can't be fussing around at home with kids, so we
have got to eliminate them from our lives."
Then you had another component, another piece came into the platform from
the population control advocates who were telling us that we all were going
to be standing on each others heads if we kept having babies. We were all
going to be crushing each other out of existence because the world was going
to be overpopulated; and I read all of that. Don't you remember reading that
in the 60's? Everyone was screaming about overpopulation. I remember finding
an old book that was written in 1918, in which a man said, "If something
doesn't change—we have too many horses in the streets of Chicago, and at the
projected rate it's going right now, in another 25 years the city of Chicago
will be 18 feet deep in manure." It is the same kind of reasoning: we are
all going to drown in a sea of babies.
All of this fed the building of this platform; it was all material fed into
this building project to build the platform upon which the Roe vs. Wade
legalized abortion verdict came down on January 26, 1973. At that point the
Supreme Court of the United States excluded unborn children from the
protection of the 14th amendment, which says, "No person shall be deprived
of life without due process of law." They said, "Unborn children aren't
persons." Yes, they are. Yes, they are, and we will see that in a minute.
One of the professors at the Master's College, Dr. John Pilky (sp.), very
astute (teaches in our English Lit. Dept), wrote me a little memo. Listen to
what it says,
The phrase "Pro Choice" (which is what the Pro abortionists use) strikes me
as one of the most depraved, apocalyptically wicked, rhetorical facts in the
history of western civilization in the Christian era. The phrase means "Pro
Sin" or "Free to Chose Sin." The phrase would actually be less dreadful if
it were "Pro Abortion" because that would confine it to the sphere of a
particular moral problem, but by turning it to what seems a euphemism, the
"Pro Choice" people have rung the final rhetorical "death knell" to the
entire Democratic experiment.
The phrase "Pro Choice" means "without conscience, or without inhibition, or
without restraint," and it parades itself under the Jeffersonian banner of
liberty of conscience and separation of Church and State. As a rhetorical
gesture, perfectly designed to function as a political banner,
this phrase constitutes the last word: the official formulation of official
apostate defiance against the God of Christianity. I am confident that God
will answer it apocalyptically.
Yes, I believe that he is right. I believe abortion is the last official
stand of the defiant apostate against God. It says, "God, you will not
determine who lives or dies—I will!" The ultimate apostasy.
That's where we are in our culture, and we are there by law—the law of our
own government. The court ignored the issue of when life begins, which is a
medical/scientific issue, even though criminals have been successfully
prosecuted for killing unborn children in an attack on a pregnant mother.
That child is considered a non-person if its own mother decides to kill it;
if a criminal kills it they are prosecuted; if the mother kills it is a
non-person.
As far a I can tell, and my research may not be exhaustive, but as far as I
can tell, there is no nation on the face of the earth with a more permissive
abortion policy than the United States, with the single exception of China.
It is reflective of our prurient, lascivious, immoral, perverted Sexual
Revolution; of the deviation from God ordained role for men and women. It is
reflective of our selfish, materialistic value system. It is reflective,
most of all, of our atheistic ethic hostile to God, and we now have a
holocaust; and we have a holocaust which God will judge, and I will talk
about that tonight, and I will talk about what it means that the blood of
the murdered victim cries out from the ground against the one who did the
murder.
Medical science has clearly established that conception brings about an
unique individual life. Life begins at conception; that is absolutely a
medical fact. [Here is] an illustration from a secular source, Dr. Jerome
LaJunge (sp.), professor of Fundamental Genetics at the University of Rene'
De Cart (sp.) in Paris; this is a quote, Life has a very long history but
each individual has a very neat beginning—the moment of its conception. The
material link is the molecular thread of DNA. In each reproductive cell this
ribbon is cut into 23 pieces or chromosomes. As soon as the 23 paternally
derived chromosomes are united through fertilization to the 23 maternal ones
the full genetic meeting necessary to express all the inborn qualities of
the new individual is gathered, i.e., personal constitution.
And if I may digress from the quote a moment to say: everything is there
that is reflected in full adulthood; all the component building material is
there. LaJunge goes on to write,
At two months of age, the human being is less than one thumb length from the
head to the rump. He would fit at ease in a nutshell, but everything is
there: hands, feet, head, organs, [and] brains; in the fourth week, his
consciousness. All are in place. His heart has been beating for a month
already and fingerprints can be detected. His heart is beating at two months
at 150 to 170 beats a minute. To accept the fact that after fertilization
has taken place a new human being has come into being is no longer a matter
of taste or opinion.
Well, there at least is an introduction to the issue. The Supreme Court of
the United States of America has voted under pressure, pressure and
influence from those who are engaged in a sexual revolution; from those who
want to eugenically control who gets to be born or who dies; from those
feminists who want to be sure there are no responsibilities that women have
that men don't have; from those who would pour unto our agenda, as it were,
a fear factor in terms of over-population. All these people have
orchestrated, I think, under the control of Satan, the Supreme Court into
doing what they did in 1973, and consequently, we are in a holocaust of
convenience killing so people can be sexually free, so people don't have to
deal with those who are disabled, so women can do whatever they think they
want to do to be fulfilled, and so we can live the kind of materialistic,
uncomplicated lifestyle that so many people want to live. The net effect is
we become mass murderers.
With all of that as background we ask this most significant question, which
will drive the focus of the rest of our discussion this morning and tonight:
and here's the question, "What does the Bible say about all this?" I have
about five points; I will give you one this morning and the rest tonight.
1. Conception is an Act of God.
We have already noted for you that from a medically scientific viewpoint,
conception yields a new person, and so life begins at conception. Personhood
begins at conception. We now say as we look to the Bible, that "Conception
is an Act of God." Psalm 127:3 says, "Behold, children are a gift from the
Lord." God creates personally every life—Scripture makes that fact clear.
Let me look at it from a negative standpoint, going all the way back say, to
Genesis. Looking at it negatively: Genesis 20:13 says this, "For the Lord
had completely closed all the wombs of the House of Abimilech." They
couldn't have any babies because God didn't allow it. God closed the womb.
Genesis 16:2, "And Sarah said to Abraham, 'The Lord has restrained me from
bearing.'" 1 Samuel 1:5-6, "The Lord had shut up her [Hanna] womb." It says
that twice. So here from a negative perspective you see that God closes the
womb. God says no child will be born in that womb. He has control over that.
From the positive side, Genesis 17:16, God said to Abraham, "I will bless
her [Sarah] and give you a son from her, and she shall be the mother of
nations." I am going to open her womb. In Genesis 21:2 it says, "Sarah
conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which
the Lord had spoken." God said, I closed it; I'll open it. In Genesis 25:21
Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord
was entreated by him and Rebecca, his wife, conceived. God enabled her to
have a child. 1 Samuel 1:19-20, goes on to talk about Hanna, and it says,
"The Lord remembered her." Though He had shut her womb, He remembered her
and after she had conceived she bore a son and called his name "Samuel,"
saying, "Because I have asked for him from the Lord." The Lord opened her
womb and gave her a son.
Boaz, in Ruth 4:13, took Ruth (she was his wife), "And when he went in unto
her, the Lord gave her conception." What a great statement: "The Lord gave
her conception." No conception occurs ever, anywhere on the face of the
earth, through all of human history, that is not a result of God's creative
purpose. In Judges 13:3, Manoah's wife is at issue, and she has asked and
the Lord responds. It says, "The angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and
said to her, 'Behold, now that you are barren and bearest not, but you shall
conceive and bear a son." That son was Samson, by the way. In other words,
God has not allowed you to have a child, but He will.
Now, these passages simply illustrate to us that God is the power behind
barrenness, and God is the power behind conception. Wherever there is
conception—God has made it happen. So you are tampering with that which God
has done. That's the point.
Now let's look at this from perhaps another viewpoint, not so much the
narrative of Genesis and other passages, as the theology expressed. Go to
Job, chapter 10, and here we find some statements with regard to Job's
understanding of God, something of his theology and how it plays to this
very issue. In Job, chapter 10, Job is musing over the fact that everything
has gone wrong in his life and he is querying God, as he often does, about
why. In Job 10:8, "Thy hands fashioned and made me altogether." I
acknowledge that you made me. And then he asked, "and why would you destroy
me?" He doesn't understand what is going on in his life and he says, "This I
know, you fashioned me, you made me completely."
That word "altogether" literally in the Hebrew means "together all around,"
comprehensively, in every sense, You made me. Verse 9, "Remember now, that
Thou hast made me as clay," in other words, it's just like picking up clay:
"You formed me." Verse 10, another picture, "Didst You not pour me out like
milk, and curdle me like cheese?" I mean, You extracted me, and You molded
me, and formed me. "You (verse 11) clothed me with skin and flesh, and you
knit me together with bones and sinews. You granted me life." You made me is
what he says, every way he could think to say it. Look at chapter 12 of Job,
and verse 9, "Who among all these doesn't know that the hand of the Lord has
done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath
of all mankind?"
In other words, God is the source of all life. Look at Job 31, and I'll just
show you two other passages that are very helpful. Job 31:15, "Did not He
who made me in the womb make him, and the same one fashion us in the womb?"
He's talking about one person (speaking of himself and someone else). Didn't
God make us all? Didn't He fashion us in the womb? That creative process
began in the womb at conception. Chapter 33 of Job, verse 4, "The Spirit of
God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." It is very
apparent here in probably the oldest book in the Bible—Job, taking us clear
back to the patriarchal time, (probably penned before the Pentateuch even)
that they understood that they were made by God.
The Psalmist has the same concept; look at Psalm 22. David in a similar
situation to Job, trying to figure out his problems, goes back to the fact
that he knows God made him; Psalm 22:9, "Yet Thou are He who didst bring me
forth from the womb; Thou didst make me trust when upon my mother's breast.
Upon Thee I was cast from birth; Thou hast been my God from my mother's
womb." From the time I was in the womb You made me and You were my God.
The 100th Psalm (we can't read all the scriptures related) says in verse 3,
"Know that the Lord Himself is God; it is He who has made us, and not we
ourselves." You say, "Well, we made a baby." No, you didn't really make a
baby; you were the human instrumentation through which God made a baby. Let
me tell you something: you can transmit the physical features, but you
cannot make a soul. Do you understand that? You cannot, through sexual
relationships create an immortal, eternal soul. At the time of conception,
when the physical factors come together, God has to impart a soul. In Psalm
104, and verse 30, "Thou dost send forth Thy Spirit, they are created,"
reminding us that the Spirit of God is the creating force.
The prophet Isaiah (and we will look at him just briefly), the prophet
Isaiah helps us to see the same thing. In chapter 44 and 45, and just
briefly, chapter 44:1, "Now listen, O Jacob, My servant and Israel, whom I
have chosen: Thus says the Lord who made you (and here it is again) and
formed you from the womb." Down in verse 24, "Thus says the Lord, your
Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb." Over in chapter 45 of
Isaiah, verse 9, he's talking about God being the potter and we are the
clay, and we can't argue with how we are made, and all of that. And then He
says, verse 11, "Thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker:
Ask me about the things to come concerning my sons, and you shall commit to
Me the work of My hands. It is I who made the earth, and created man upon
it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands, and I ordained all their
hosts. I have aroused him in righteousness . . . ." I, I, I, that's the
whole point: "God made it all." He made it all. He is the source of
creation.
In Jeremiah 1:5, God said to Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you." "I knew you,"
(Hebrew, yaddah), as a rational creature. Galatians 1:15, Paul says, "But
when He who has set me apart, even from my mother's womb, and called me
through His grace (and so forth)."
Paul knew, Jeremiah knew, any Christian knows that God has His hand on us
from the time of conception, and that our eternal destiny was set from that
moment and the purpose and plan for our service to God was set from that
moment.
The New Testament emphasizes this in a majestic way: look at Matthew,
chapter 1, the birth of Christ. This is quite an important illustration that
often is not considered. Matthew 1:18, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as
follows. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph (they were
engaged, not yet married; they had not yet come together in sexual
relationship), she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit." Now, this
is very embarrassing to Joseph, because here he believed in his heart that
this young girl was a spiritually committed girl, a righteous and holy girl,
that she was a virgin and pure, and all of a sudden she is pregnant.
He was a good man and a righteous man, and didn't want to disgrace her and
shame her publicly (He could have stoned her publicly), so he desired to
just divorce her secretly. He was embarrassed and couldn't understand how
this could happen, but when he considered this, "An angel of the Lord
appeared to him in a dream, saying 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid
to take Mary as your wife; for that which has been conceived in her is of
the Holy Spirit.'"
The point that I want you to note is this: that God is involved in the very
act of conception, not only in the case of Jesus Christ, but of any life
born in the womb. It is no less true of me or you or anyone else born into
this world, that God was involved in our conception. The difference is we
didn't have a virgin birth—Jesus had no earthly father, but we are
nonetheless the product of God's creative hand through His Holy Spirit, who
breathes life into everything.
Furthermore, the life in the womb of Mary was no impersonal blob, it was no
fetal material. It was the Son of God! That life began at conception. Christ
came into the world at conception. Look at Luke 1, and I'll see if I can't
give you another New Testament illustration. Luke 1:41 says, "It came about
that when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting (Elizabeth, you remember was
pregnant with John the Baptist), when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the
baby leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit." Of
course, John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit even from his
mother's womb also, as it tells us in Luke 1:15. So the Holy
Spirit was already involved in the life of John the Baptist as the Holy
Spirit is involved in any life, because He is the one who breathes life. But
in a unique way the Holy Spirit was somehow involved in the life of John the
Baptist even in the womb, as in the life of Jesus Christ in the womb. And
whatever that means, it says, "the baby leaped in her womb." It must mean
that somehow that child responded to what was occurring on the outside. The
Holy Spirit moved that little life into some movement, and that's a
wonderful thing to contemplate, even though it is mysterious to comprehend.
Notice the word "baby" and that's the key point here. The word "baby" is
(Greek, brephos): "the baby leaped." Would you please notice, this word is
used in 2:12; 2:16; 18:15-16; 1 Peter 2:2, and other places, for a living
baby that has been born. Here it is used for a baby that hasn't been born.
Listen carefully to what I say: it is the word used for unborn or born
babies; they didn't have a different word. They didn't call it a fetus; it
was a baby. Unborn it was a baby; born, no separate word was needed. Once
the infant is created it is "the baby," if it unborn or born. The actual
moment of birth doesn't determine the viability or the life; the life is at
conception and thus the babe is the babe in the womb: the babe out of the
womb—no different terminology. This is not a mere collection of cells, this
is a baby—this is a baby!
Conception, then is the act of God whereby a person is created by God's
sovereign will. A soul is breathed into the living tissue by the Holy
Spirit. That soul's destiny is already known to God and determined by Him
from before the foundation of the world. Abortion then becomes a violent
anti-God act. It is not only a murder of the individual, it is an affront to
the Creator.
Now somebody says, "Now wait a minute. What about the deformed people that
are born. Is God the creator of those?" Exodus, chapter 4, and verse 11, God
says, "Who has made man's mouth? Or who makes him dumb or deaf, or seeing or
blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" I make them that way. It is for His purposes
sometimes to make men dumb, and deaf, and seeing, and blind.
Do you remember in John, chapter 9, the man born blind, and the disciples
said, "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" And Jesus said, "Nobody. This
man was born blind for the glory of God." God made it that way.
So the first point, and the point at which you must start any biblical
discussion is that conception is an act of God. An act in which 23
chromosomes from a father and 23 chromosomes [from a mother] come together
in a strip of DNA that makes a life. And at the moment of that physical
coming together God then, by the agency of His Holy Spirit, breathes a soul:
an immortal, eternal soul, that transcends the body (for it will live
forever though the body will die). And at conception then you have life.
To kill that life is to "play God," and as serious an affront as it is
against the life itself, it is a more serious one against the God who is the
Creator. That is why it is the ultimate, the ultimate decline in our
culture. It is the ultimate evidence of the wretchedness of our culture. It
is the ultimate proof of how deep our atheism runs, that we kill life that
God creates. We have usurped the sovereign throne and we are now God, and we
will determine who lives and who dies. This is spilling over, my friends,
into euthanasia which is coming, you better know, like a hurricane to wash
away our whole old population because we are God now and we'll decide. This
kind of atheism will bring the wrath of God and we will see that tonight.
Well, Father, we thank You this morning that You have called us to a clear
understanding of these matters in Your Word. We are appalled, to put it
mildly, and we are saddened, and we are chagrined at the horror that occurs
in our own land. We thank You that in Your grace, we believe that You gather
these little ones to Yourself, that You collect them into Your kingdom. We
also thank You that You know from the very beginning that they will never be
born because they will be killed, and that does not exonerate the murderer,
and that you have planned for their future to be one of good and not harm.
We thank You that You can overrule all these things; and yet Lord that does
not expiate the sin for which people will be judged: those who do those
things, those who have them done to them, those who tolerate them.
We thank You also Lord that You forgive: You forgive the woman who had an
abortion, You forgive the man who did the abortion; You forgive the husband
who allowed it, the lover who wanted it. You forgive all our sins if we come
in the Name of Christ and ask forgiveness. We thank You that You can wash
and make as clean as snow that one who is stained by such a sin as this, and
you can give back peace for anxiety, and joy for sorrow, because of Your
forgiveness. We do pray today Lord that You will give us clear convictions
on this issue. Help us to know as a church, as Christians, we cannot
tolerate any kind of abortion, any kind of usurping of the Divine Throne
upon which You sit, any kind of violence, mass murder, without having the
ground cry out against us.
Help us to speak clearly on this matter and to take our stand where we must
take it. But Lord also we want You to give us compassion and kindness
towards those who have fallen into this sin, and may we bring to them the
saving gospel of Christ and His forgiving mercy. To that end we pray, and
even that Lord, somehow You will reverse all of this in this land, [and]
call us back to a righteous standard. Be with our leaders; give us leaders
who will move us in a direction that pleases You, not in a direction that
infuriates You. We ask for Your guidance, in Christ's Name. Amen.
****************************************************************************
The Biblical View on Abortion
Part 2
We continue tonight where we left off this morning in our discussion of this
matter of abortion, and as I did this morning, I want to begin with an
introduction that sort of defines the problem as we face it. I approached it
somewhat statistically this morning and tonight I would to approach it
somewhat from an ethical viewpoint. Let me just share with you some thoughts
that may help to set this thing in your mind and then we will go to the Word
of God for specific answers.
For centuries the Western World has operated on what we could call a
"sanctity of life" ethic. That is to say, a person had a right to life
simply because he was human and was considered human because he was alive,
but there has been a shift in recent years toward a quality of life ethic,
rather than a sanctity of life ethic. This new ethic basically says, "A
person doesn't have a right to live simply because he's human. A person only
has a right to live if he meets certain criteria, certain qualities."
According to that new modern viewpoint, a person has no rights simply
because he is alive. Even if he is physically alive he must meet some
additional criteria for being fully human. If he fails to meet the criteria
he doesn't have the rights of a human, including the right to live. The
unborn must meet some kind of a vague standard of genetic worthiness, or
they must have a life worth living, or they must be wanted by society, or
they must meet the mother's personal criteria to be considered human.
This shift subtly allows for the nightmarish scenarios of utopia's going
awry, as well as the kind of genetic purification programs that were pursued
by Hitler and the Nazi doctors. The same kind of ethic allowed the Nazis to
weed out unwanted genetic elements in the population. When one Nazi Death
Camp guard was asked how he could exterminate thousands of people his reply
was, "They were not regarded as human." The parallel to our modern situation
is uncomfortably close. According to a number of researchers, Margaret
Sanger (sp.) who, by the way, is the founder of Planned Parenthood, the
world's largest supporter of abortion—according to the researchers who study
her—she essentially agreed with Hitler's approach and sought to weed from
the human race blacks, southern Europeans, Hebrews, and other
"feeble-minded." She regarded abortion as part of a genetic improvement
program for the human race. This then moves us from the sanctity of life to
a quality of life right to live, and that quality of life is to be
determined by the genetic engineers or the philosophers or whoever.
Although shocking, these eugenic proposals are not very different in
principles from the present practice of aborting babies for any reason at
all. A baby who has "Down Syndrome," a baby who has some other birth defect,
or a baby who would be an inconvenience doesn't have a life worth living;
therefore, isn't human; therefore we can dispose of them readily.
Respected scholars have already proposed different criteria for this quality
of life and you can read endlessly on this. One illustration, Nobel Laureate
James Watson, proposed that a person not be declared having the quality to
live until three days after birth, to be sure he's healthy. In other words,
wait three days and then if the child doesn't meet the criteria—take its
life. Other proposals would require that someone be several years old before
he could be considered a human and thus qualify to live. I heard recently
that in some Scandinavian countries they are now saying a person may not be
truly considered to be human until they are seven years old.
Of course, if criteria can be imposed near the beginning of life then it can
be imposed at anytime in life. Joseph Fletcher (you associate him with
"situation ethics") suggested that to be considered a person one must have a
measurable IQ of at least 40. Infants would not qualify, nor would the aged
who are senile, nor would others who had certain types of accidents. "In
such cases," argues Fletcher, "abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are not
taking personal life, but merely biological life."
Attempts to justify abortion by claiming that it will eliminate suffering
not only forsakes the sanctity of life ethic, but also ignores the facts.
Some people say to do this will eliminate suffering—that's not true. It's
like the argument that the handicap don't have a life worth living; that
there is validity to the fact that unwanted children are going to be abused
children and, therefore, if they are unwanted abort them so they aren't born
and being unwanted become abused. By the way, studies show that there is
very little correlation between how much a child is wanted before birth and
how much that child is wanted after birth.
Furthermore, Dr. Lenoski (sp.) Professor of Pediatrics here at USC, showed
that 91% of battered children were from planned pregnancies. Another study
demonstrated more deviant behavior in wanted babies then in those who are
unwanted. So any argument that an unwanted child becomes an abused child
just doesn't stand up to any kind of test. On the contrary, there seems to
be a correlation between abortion and child abuse. When abortion was
legalized in the United States there were 167,000 child abuse cases per year
(it was legalized in 1973). By 1979 there were 711,000; in 1982 there were
1,000,000! Britain experienced a tenfold increase in child abuse after
liberalizing abortion laws.
Now you ask, "What's the correlation?" The correlation is: you begin to
educate the whole society that a child is a non-person, not worth living and
shouldn't be any kind of intrusion into your world, and you begin to treat
them that way. Professor of Psychiatry Philip Nay, concluded in a widely
publicized study, that the acceptance of violence against the unborn lowered
the parents resistance to violence against the born—that should be obvious.
Abortion is often portrayed as benefiting women; yet ironically when
decisions are made on the basis of sex, girls are aborted far more often
then boys. Out of 8,000 amniocenteses, that is abortions, done in Bombay,
7,999 of them were girls—one was a boy. This is true in China: they are only
allowed to have one child and if it is a girl they kill it. In one study in
the United States, 29 out of 46 girls were aborted—only 1 out of 53 boys
were aborted. So the idea that abortion benefits women doesn't seem to fit
the facts; it winds up in the slaughter of women around the world.
Some argue that abortion in necessary because of over population, but that
ignores principles of production and distribution. How in the world do
abortions in the United States alleviate over population in crowded parts of
Africa? There is no correlation. Furthermore, the United States and Europe
have a different population problem: the numbers being born are not
replacing the aging and dying! I was told this morning by someone who works
for the IRS, that one of the formidable problems the IRS and social security
is facing now is the fact that there are so many abortions that there is not
going to be enough people born to pay your Social Security by the time you
retire. So what they are doing now: in a very few years they are going to
raise the Social Security level to 67, and some years after that the plans
are to raise it into the mid 70's. Why? Because there is no funding because
there aren't going to be another wage earners to support us when we get old.
Pro-Abortionists argue that restricting abortions will return us the era of
back-alley butchers. Dr. Bernard Nathenson (sp.) who was one of those
abortionist and converted over to a non-abortion position replies that not
only were deaths in the pre-Roe vs. Wade days grossly inflated, in fact, he
said they lied about how many deaths occurred in illegal abortions because
they wanted abortion legalized for business reasons. So they fabricated all
the figures to make people think that more people were dying than actually
were in illegal abortions; but he went on to say that developments in
medical technology and pharmacology will mean that even illegal abortions
will be medically safe. Not that that is right, but they use that as an
argument that if we ever stop legalizing abortion—non-legal abortions done
in less than proper medical facilities and with less than proper medically
means will result in many deaths; and he says, "That's not the case, because
of the technologically we have."
The present toleration of abortion is deeply rooted in this new kind of
individualism and personal rights movement. The Pro-Abortion people always
argue that a woman has the right to control her own body and, therefore, she
has the right to abort any intrusion into that body. Yet society recognizes
rights must be limited when they conflict with another person's rights; and
certainly the person in the womb of the mother has rights. A Supreme Court
Justice Antonio Scalla (sp.) said, "Whether a woman's right over her body
extends to abortion depends on whether the fetus is a human life." We
already saw this morning that the fetus is a human life, not a part of the
mother's body but with an identity all its own: it has its unique set of
genes, its own circulatory system; its own blood type (very often), and its
own brain. It can live and die separately from the mother, and the mother
can live or die separately from it—it is a separate life! But we are
reengineering our thinking and the philosophies that are dominant in our
culture today are self-serving philosophies: then intend to remove any kind
of intrusion into people's freedoms and liberties.
Now what does the Bible say about this matter of abortion? We go back to
where we were this morning. The first point that I gave you was this: (and
we will cover the remaining ones with just a brief review of this one),
1. Conception is Act of God.
We pointed out this morning that God creates personally every life. Now this
morning I said to you that at the very moment of life God does a creative
work. Theologians have debated this issue for centuries I suppose. Those of
you who are familiar with theology might remember something called
"Traducianism." The debate basically is, "Do we have as male and female in
the procreative process somehow the element in our procreative power to
produce a soul?" The difficulty with that question is, "Can two dying humans
produce an eternal soul?" Well the answer to that probably is no. On the
other hand, the question is if we don't do that, if that is an independent
life being passed on [then] how is it that it is born with Adam's sin? You
say, "What is the answer?" I have no idea.
I find myself hard pressed to land on either side because I know that God
will not produce a sinful soul. I also know that two dying humans cannot
produce an eternal soul; and so I would simply say, to leave it as simple as
my mind can allow, at some point in the incredible procreative process God
injects the eternality into that soul—we stain it with our fallenness. But
every conception is nonetheless an act of God as we saw Scripture
indicates—You made me; You formed me; You breathed into me the breath of
life; You ordained that I would live; You opened the womb; You made me to be
the one You wanted me to be. This is the testimony of Scripture. Now let's
go to a second point.
2. The Person Created is Created in the Image of God.
The person created is created in the image of God. In James 3:9, "With it we
bless (speaking about our tongues)—with it we bless our Lord and Father, and
with it we curse men who have been made in the likeness of God." The person
created and we know now that creation occurs at the moment of what?
Conception. And at the moment of conception God puts the reality of life
(and I don't know if it's at the exact split second; if it's a few
milliseconds after that), at some point (I don't know where), at some point
God infuses personhood and that eternal soul that will never die is created
by God: that real being that is not just the collection of genetics, but is
something eternal. Exactly at what split-second in the process that happens
no one can know, but nonetheless whenever God does it—that creation is made
in the likeness of God, or in the image of God.
What we are saying here then is that what is created and what is conceived
is not an animal. It is not just a biological sequence. It is not just a
collection of cells. It is not fetal matter. It is not just human tissue. It
is created by God in His image, and everything that is there for acting, and
thinking, and feeling, and knowing, and trusting, and hoping everything that
is rational, and moral, and emotional is there.
Go back with me to Genesis, chapter 1. If you need a reminder, it says in
verse 25, "God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, the cattle
after their kind, everything that creeps on the ground after its kind, and
God saw that it was good. Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image
according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and
over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and
over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And God created man in
His own image, in the image of God He created him male and female, He
created them."
We are not mere mortals; we are not merely flesh—we are immortal. The shell
of skin and bones and muscle is only a vessel; it's only a repository in
which something of the very image of God resides. In Genesis, chapter 9,
verse 6, a familiar verse, says, "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his
blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man, and as for you: be
fruitful and multiply." If you kill somebody—you die! Not because of an
affront against that human flesh, but because of such an affront against the
image of God.
There is a dominion; there is a personhood in man that does not exist in
animals. There is a transcendence that rises above the rest of the created
order. Turn with me to Psalm 139. There is so much to say and I am kind of
editing as I go, but this is one of the more important texts to be reckoned
with. In Psalm 139 you have this great passage which teaches that the unborn
child is the special work of God created in His image. Verse 13,
"For Thou didst form my inward parts; Thou didst weave me in my mother's
womb. I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
wonderful are Thy works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not
hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the
depths of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Thy
book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me, when as yet
there was not one of them."
Verse 13, look at it, "Thou didst form my inward parts,": literally, "It is
You who made my kidneys," is what he says. "You made me in the deepest part
of my being, and You did weave me in my mother's womb." That is an
absolutely beautiful picture: the weaving together of all that is part of
humanity; the weaving of chromosomes in the DNA. The weaving together of all
the components in the incredible human body, woven together with the soul
and the spirit. In verse 14, "I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully
and wonderfully made." "Fearfully" means awesomely: used of God's great
power calling for surpassing reverential awe since we are made in His image.
He says we are "fearfully and wonderfully made," full of majesty as the work
of God.
In verse 15 he says, "My frame was not hidden from Thee," King James says,
"my substance," literally "my strength, my bones, and my sinews, and my
muscles." It was not hidden from you when I was made "in secret" (the secret
place is the womb). Then in verse 15 that interesting phrase, "and
skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;" literally "skillfully
wrought" in the Hebrew could be translated "when I was interwoven of various
colored threads." To put it another way, "When you embroidered me, You made
the very fabric; You pulled together every tiny little piece, and You wove
it all to make me."
It is a beautiful picture of the complicated, elaborate texture of the human
being; "and You did it in the depths of the earth," a reference to the womb:
you can compare Isaiah 45:19 for similar usage. Verse 16, "Thine eyes have
seen my unformed substance," my unshaped embryonic substance: literally,
again in the Hebrew, "something rolled together," when I was just a little
ball of life, when I was just a little ball of chromosomes. "And in Your
book they were all written," all my days, all my years, all the events of my
life, my eternal destiny—everything. Then verse 17, he says, "How precious
also are Thy thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them!" It is so
incredible to think about You thinking about me before I was ever made. The
whole thing behind this is this sense that this creation is so wonderful and
so awesome because it is a creation in the very image of God. That image has
been marred.
In Psalm 51, we read something of that marring of the image; Psalm 51:5,
"Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived
me." Now he doesn't mean that he was illegitimately conceived, because he
wasn't (David speaking); he simply means that from my conception there was
something else going on in me too—and it is sin. Did God create that sin?
No, I believe that we pass on the sin—God only creates the eternality: the
eternal soul and spirit. Only a person, by the way, can be a sinner.
That little tiny life, that little tiny baby, that little tiny rolled up
ball of genetics, that little fetus, is already designated as a sinner in
the womb from conception: and only a person is a sinner. So we are created
in the image of God, which image is stained by the sin of Adam, passed on
from generation to generation. So we can say that, that eternal soul is the
creation of God, but its sinful propensity is the legacy of man. No human
being, then, is ever conceived outside God's will or ever conceived apart
from God's image. Life is a gift from God created in His own image.
Thirdly, in considering points to understand the issue:
3. The Helpless Creation is the Special Object of God's Loving Care.
That helpless creation which He has conceived in the womb of a woman is the
special object of His loving care. First of all, I want to deal with that on
a general level if I might. We have now seen that, that little life is
considered a person, albeit a person created by God in His own image, and
yet a sinner. That person then becomes the special object of God's care. The
Lord identifies with sinners; the Lord identifies with the needy; the Lord
identifies with the poor; the Lord identifies with the widow; the Lord
identifies with the orphan; the Lord identifies with the defenseless.
In Psalm 82 we find a general reference to that which can be a basis for our
understanding. In Psalm 82:3, "Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice
to the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the weak and needy." It is true that
God has a special concern for the helpless. Is anyone more helpless, is
anyone weaker, is anyone more defenseless than that unborn child? So they,
as all others who are weak and defenseless, become the "Special Care of
God."
I don't have time to go over all of the medical phenomena that protects the
baby in the womb, but it is absolutely incredible. How wonderfully God has
insulated that little life for warmth, and health, and safety. How He has
designed the womb of the mother to be a protector. I will never forget when
Patricia was pregnant with one of our little ones, and I am trying to
remember which—I think it was Mark; yes, it was Mark (I have to associate
kids with certain houses and remember which house this happened in)—One day
I came home from wherever I was and I came in the house and she was lying in
the bed and she was not feeling well, and I said, "What happened?" She said,
"Well, I fell off the television." I said, "You what?" She said, "I fell off
the television." Now that is a strange place to be in the first place—on the
television. We had a little portable television sitting on a little metal
rack, and she climbed it to fix the drapes, and she fell. We had a concrete
floor covered with just a sheet of linoleum tile in this little room, and
she said, "The worse of it is—I landed right on the baby!" She had a huge
bruise right in the center of her stomach, and she said, "I know, don't give
me any speeches about 'You're not supposed to be climbing on top of the
television when you are nine months pregnant'" (and she was; Mark was born
soon after). Now the reason I hesitated to name the child is because you may
be looking at Mark oddly in the future, imagining that something might have
happened, but it didn't.
We were thrilled because, from then on until Mark was born we wondered if,
indeed, there would be some result; We were, after he was born, thrilled to
see with all of her weight falling full on concrete on that little life, how
perfectly protected that little one was. God has such compassion on the
helpless.
I remember reading some years back about a lady that I got to know, a lady
that some of you remember—her name was Ethel Waters. She was a real
instrument for the Lord; giving her testimony she shared a wonderful little
story. She said,
A pretty black girl was attacked and raped by a white man in Pennsylvania.
She was barely past her thirteenth birthday and soon was found pregnant. And
Ethel Waters said, "No, abortion, no." Instead, a healthy baby girl who came
to love Christ and sing for His glory and make millions happy: a girl whose
theme song was "His Eye is On the Sparrow;" and that girl was me.
The love shown to a helpless little baby without a father born because a
mother wouldn't have an abortion gave the world a wonderful gift. That story
can be repeated millions of times.
Innocent, defenseless people have a special protector in God who wants to
bring them to birth no matter what the circumstances might be that brought
about their conception or what difficulty there might be in the life to
come. God has His purposes. I might say on the other side that even sinners
who will spend an eternity in Hell will serve the purpose of God. "What if
God, willing to make vessels who are fitted unto wrath to bring Himself
glory," chooses to allow that—that's His own purpose.
I am convinced that the fury of God will someday fall on the murderers of
His creatures who have not sought His forgiveness. God is the protector of
the innocent. Now to illustrate this Biblically; go back to Exodus 21. This
is one of the really important passages about abortion, Exodus 21:22; and
here in this section of Scripture following the Ten Commandments, God gives
a number of laws that regard life and all of its myriad of circumstances. In
Exodus 21 we have a very interesting account; it says to us in verse 22,
If men struggle with each other (now you follow carefully) and strike a
woman with child (I don't know what you version says; some say "so she has a
miscarriage," some say, "So she has an untimely birth"), yet there is no
further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand
of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further
injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, hand
for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
Now what is this saying? One of the unfortunate translations in the New
American Standard is the translation "miscarriage." I don't know why they
translated the Hebrew term here "miscarriage." There is no reason, at least
in my mind, to believe that verse 22 refers to a miscarriage. There is a
contextual support for that as well as linguistic. The literal Hebrew
reading is simply this, "And if men struggle with each other and strike a
woman with child (here's the Hebrew) so that her children come out." That's
what it says. In other words, it causes the child to come out. "Yet there is
no further injury, then he shall surely be fined as the husband (or the
woman's husband) may demand of him; and be paid as whatever the judges or
the courts allow." Yalad is the common Hebrew word for child. The only
irregularity here in that word is that it is plural. And it is unlikely that
it means a developing fetus that has been miscarried.
The verb (Hebrew, yasa) often refers to ordinary childbirth, and so it says
the struggle happens: two men are fighting, one gets involved in this fight;
and probably a woman steps in (you know, the wife to try to stop the fight)
and she gets struck so that her children come out (just looking at it on the
plural sense); that is, an ordinary childbirth takes place. By the way, that
term (Hebrew, yasa) referring to ordinary childbirth is used in Genesis 15:4
and Isaiah 39:7 of a childbirth generated from the loins of the father and
also in Genesis 25 and 26, and Jeremiah 1, about a birth that comes out of
the womb of the mother. So from the father's side and the mother's side the
term is used to express a child that is born.
In no case does that term (Hebrew, yasa) refer to a miscarriage. Numbers
12:12 uses it but it refers to a still birth—not a miscarriage. The Hebrew
word for miscarriage (shakal) used in Exodus 23:26, Hosea 9:14, is not used
in this verse. So what you have here is a premature birth.
Now, follow the thought: two men are fighting, the woman probably steps in;
she gets hit in the process and consequently the trauma causes a premature
birth. If all that happens is that the child comes out and there is no
further injury, then there should be a fine for the discomfort, for the
problems that might come to take care of the child, and to take care of the
woman because of whatever trauma she suffered. If there is any debate about
it, then the judges can discern what that should be. "But if there is any
further injury. . . ." What would "any further injury" be? Well, it would
have to mean something more severe, including the loss of life; "then you
shall appoint as a penalty life for life."
What's the point? The point is: if you are responsible for killing an unborn
child you pay with your life. That's the point. It is constituted as murder.
"No further injury," then in verse 22, has been incorrectly taken to mean
that there has been some kind of a miscarriage. The equivalent of "further"
doesn't appear in the Hebrew text. It simply says (you'll notice probably
that "further" is in italics), it just says "if there is no injury." If the
child is born and there is no injury—fine. Settle whatever be the medical
costs, if there are any, but if there is more than that, if there is injury
to the child, if there is injury to the mother then "lex talionis" [Latin],
that is, "tit for tat" takes place. If the child has suffered in one
area—the penalty is the same. If the child dies then the penalty is life. It
is just the idea of appropriate punishment, but what it points out is: if
the child comes out and his eye is injured—you lose your eye. If he comes
out and his hand is injured—your lose your hand. If his foot—his foot, and
so forth, and so forth. Wound for wound—that's justice, but if the child
dies you pay with your life. "Lex talionis" the law of retaliation.
So Scripture teaches us then very, very clearly that conception is an act of
God; that every person conceived is conceived in the image of God, and that
each person is the special care of God. Nothing illustrates that more than
if you injure a child that is untimely born and you have inflicted that
injury—you pay a just punishment including, if you kill that child—you pay
with your life. God has special care for those who are helpless.
There is a fourth point in our little outline and it kind of ties in with
these others.
4. Compassion is to be applied to all of God's creation made in His image.
If this is how the Lord feels towards them then this is how we feel—but
going back to the Jewish principle this morning, "Thou shall love thy
neighbor as thyself," as we have it reiterated in Matthew 22:39. Romans
tells us in chapter 13, "Love fulfills the whole law." The unborn child is
your neighbor; it is a person in need of care and protection, and we are to
treat unborn children with the same kind of compassion that we would apply
to all of God's creation in His image. One of the things I hesitate to say,
but I must digress a moment to do so, is the fact that today what you have
coming out of the abortion movement is also the Animal Rights Movement. They
are inextricably linked because the animal rights movement basically says
that animals are the same as people; and you remember some months ago that I
reiterated to you one of the animal rights slogans, which is, "A rock is a
rat is a dog is a boy." In other words, everything that is created is of
equal value, and that is apparent to anybody who watches that bizarre and
evolutionary distortion that we call the Animal Rights Movement.
There is not a proper understanding that man is created in the image of God
and is to be treated with special care and special consideration and special
Christ-like compassion is to be applied to all made in the image of God. I
cannot even conceive how a mother could think of a baby as an enemy, whether
that baby was a product of rape, or whether that baby was in some way
malformed. How that woman could think that child in her was an enemy when
she has been given the God-given privilege of protecting that little life
with all of its weaknesses—certainly that is not natural instinct to a
mother. She would have to be sold that by a culture that had become
decadent.
Well, there is much more to say about that. Let me take you to a fifth
principle. We have said that conception is the act of God; creation is in
the image of God; care is the concern of God; and compassion should be
required by the people of God. Let me take you to a fifth one and this is
perhaps most startling.
5. Condemnation of Murderers is the Will of God.
We already read in Exodus, chapter 21, that if a person strikes a woman so
that the baby comes out and dies—it is life for life. We shouldn't be
surprised by that since we know that's a viable life and a person created by
God, but in our day we might be because we have been told that it isn't. In
Exodus 20:13, God said, "Thou shalt not murder," and I read you Genesis 9:6
which says, "Who so sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed,
for in the image of God made He man." In other words, clearly the Scriptures
indicates that if you take a life you are going to lose your life. Some
people say, "Well, that's Old Testament teaching; certainly Jesus changed
all that." No, He didn't Jesus was the leading New Testament advocate of
capital punishment.
In Matthew, chapter 26, and verse 51, it says, "Behold, one of those who
were with Jesus (that's Peter we remember) reached and drew out his sword,
and struck the slave of the high priest, and cut off his ear." You know that
he was trying to cut off his head and not his ear, and the guy "ducked" and
just lost his ear; and then Jesus said to him (Peter), "Put your sword back
into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the
sword." He is not giving him a prophecy; He is reiterating a divine law: if
you take a life you give a life. Jesus was articulating the Law of God: you
take up a sword and take that man's life and you will give your life.
In Acts, chapter 25, and verse 11, Paul said in verse 10, "I am standing
before Caesar’s tribunal, where I ought to be tried. I have done no wrong to
the Jews as you also very well know. If then I am a wrongdoer, and have
committed anything worthy of death, I do not refuse to die." Paul knew
capital punishment was God's way. He said, if I have done something worthy
of death, then I do not refuse to die. There you have the Apostle Paul
reiterating his own belief that God had established the law of capital
punishment. In Romans 13:4, he said that the police, the soldiers, whoever
in the government bear arms to protect the innocent and punish the evil, (he
says,) "Do not bear the sword for nothing; they are ministers of God, and
they are avengers who bring wrath." They are armed in order to take life.
They don't have swords to spank you with—they have swords to take your life.
Clearly the Scripture in the Old Testament designed the capital punishment
penalty for those who took life, and even the life of an unborn child fell
under that. Jesus reiterated capital punishment is suitable for certain
crimes and so did the Apostle Paul. In Proverbs 6:16, let me give you
further insight into God's attitude towards those who take life; "There are
six things the Lord hates, yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood." God hates
people who shed innocent blood. Is there anything more innocent than an
infant? Is there anything more innocent than a protected infant hidden
safely in the womb of its own mother?
In Proverbs 24:11, "Deliver those who are being taken away to death, and
those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back. If you say, 'See,
we did not know this,' does He not consider it who weighs the hearts? And
does not He know it who keeps your soul? And will He not render to every man
according to his work?" If you are allowing people who are innocent to be
killed, don't say, "Well, I didn't know what was going on." God knows your
heart, he knows whether you know, and if you are guilty He will render you
according to his work.
There are many other Scriptures that speak about God's attitude. In
Deuteronomy, chapter 27, verse 25, is worthy of a moment, "Cursed is he who
accepts a bribe to strike down an innocent person." God says, "If you are
paid to kill someone—curse you!" There are some other specifics: Leviticus
18, 2 Kings 24, Amos 1.
I want to take it a step further; God forbids any taking of innocent
life—that we understand. But I want to take it a step further and say this:
that where you have blood shed, you have a very interesting result take
place. Look at Psalm 106. Psalm 106, and I am going to show you several
passages as we wrap this up. Psalm 106, verse 38; here is an indictment
against sinful people who, verse 37, "sacrificed their sons and daughters to
the demons, and shed innocent blood." They actually killed their own
children to make them sacrifices to false gods. They "shed innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and their daughters, whom they sacrificed to the
idols of Canaan." Now notice this line, you might want to underline it, "and
the land was polluted with the blood." The land was polluted with the
blood—it left itself, as it were, in the soil. It stained the land.
Now go back to Genesis, chapter 4, and verse 10, God had said to Cain,
"Where is your brother Abel?" And he said, "I don't know." He did know—he
killed him. Verse 10, "And God said to him, 'What have you done?'" Now
listen to this, "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the
ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth
to receive your brother's blood from your hand." Now follow the thought: God
says you shed innocent blood, and that blood pollutes the land. It is as if
that blood is everywhere staining the land. The blood of 2,000,000 aborted
babies in our land, and somewhere between 60 and 75 million across the earth
every year stains the soil.
Then in Genesis 4, God says that blood cries out. He personifies that blood
as if it's alive. And what is it crying for? It is unrequited! It is crying
for retaliation. It is crying for justice. It is crying for the execution of
its murderer. Genesis 42:22, "And Reuben answered them, saying, 'Did I not
tell you, 'Do not sin against the boy'; and you would not listen? Now comes
the reckoning for his blood." And he was talking about how they had treated
Joseph. There will be a reckoning for the blood that cries out to God
because it has been shed innocently.
Several times Scripture says, "And the blood of a (certain person) shall be
on your head"—remember that? In other words, you are responsible. And so God
requires the death penalty when blood shed from innocent life cries out to
Him. And I believe that's the plight of America. I believe that the land is
stained and soiled with the blood of the innocents who have been, and are
continuing to be, even now as I speak, massacred. Nothing shows more clearly
the total moral and spiritual decadence of our society—its disregard for
God; its disregard for His creative work, for that which is made in His
image; its disregard for His compassion and the compassion of Christ—nothing
shows this more than the mass murder of millions of babies. This disdain for
the sanctity of human life and the substitution of what we call the "quality
of life," which causes us to be murderers of children, causes the very soil
of our land to cry out to God for retribution. And I believe we are now
under the judgment of God, a nation of murderers: the ground is crying out.
God has His ways. God has His ways.
Some of these women who murder their babies may suffer the judgment of God
in one way and some in another. Some may suffer the judgment of God only in
an eternal Hell. Some may suffer the judgment of God in an eternal Hell and
also in a hell in this life of drugs, venereal disease, and who knows what.
Some may suffer in the brokenness of life and shattered dreams.
Some may suffer with physical disease. Who knows what God metes out in
individual retribution to those who kill the innocents. I think of all the
medical doctors engaged in this. I think of all the advocates of abortion,
women's liberationists and politicians included, who aid and abet the
crime—God alone knows what He has designed for them.
Fearfully, I think about the Religious Coalition "for" Abortion Rights. Do
you know who's in it? American Baptist Churches, the Church of the Brethren,
Christian Churches, Episcopalian Church, Women's Caucus, The Presbyterian
Church in the U.S.A., The United Church of Christ, The United Methodist
Church, The United Presbyterian Church, The YWCA, etc. And the judgment of
God awaits these people—it awaits these people. And this is the sadness of
it—that God will judge because the ground cries out! There is a final word,
and that is this:
6. Condescending redeeming grace comes from God to the participants in this
tragedy.
First of all, I will say it is my conviction that God redeems murdered
infants. That His grace reaches out and takes those little ones to be with
Himself, because the Bible is so very clear, and I won't get into this in
detail; we have taught it on other occasions. But the Bible is so very clear
that people perish in hell because they refuse to believe—that Hell is for
those who rejected God and who rejected Christ—something an unborn infant
could never do. So, God, not having a just basis, either internally or
externally, by virtue of the attitude or the action of an unborn child,
would have no basis on which to sentence them to hell (except for the
depravity they inherited in Adam, which is never a cause for damnation apart
from its evidence in behavior or attitude). God must then embrace them into
His own kingdom.
Secondly, and I say this in conclusion, God is also graciously forgiving
those who have been the murderers of infants. I know that there are some
people here who have had abortions, because in a congregation this size it
is inevitable. I want you to know that the Lord Jesus Christ offers you
forgiveness for that sin. There may be some of you who have been engaged in
medical practice as a doctor, or a nurse, or attendant, in that and you have
been involved in an abortion. There may some of you who may have, at one
time or another, assisted a friend into getting to an abortion, or perhaps
worked in a place where that was done. The Lord forgives that if we come to
Him. Of course, when you come to Christ all your sins are forgiven,
including that sin, for He offers, as we know so well, grace that is greater
than our sin.
I received a letter that I want to share with you,
Dear John,
I have always been a Christian as long as I can remember, and at the age of
17, I had an abortion. I can't even begin to explain the despair and anger
which I felt then. My relationship with my parents was not good. At that
time I moved out our home to keep my parents from knowing. I worked
full-time and completed High School. It was hell. There was no one to help
me; there was no one to confide in; I was so frightened. I went to Planned
Parenthood and told them, "I wanted my baby." They thought I was crazy. In
no way did they offer me another alternative such as adoption or help. The
only advice they offered me was that of abortion and how to go to Medi-Cal
and tell them that I didn't know who the father was; that way Medi-Cal would
pay for it.
The ordeal was a horrendous nightmare I will never forget. I remember
especially the doctor singing opera while the procedure was being done. I
cried for months thereafter. The only thing that pulled me through was the
fact that Jesus forgave me, and with His blessing I now have three beautiful
little girls, and I keep reassuring myself that in heaven I also have a
child I haven't yet met.
God is gracious. As horrible, as horrendous, as unthinkable as this whole
thing is, God in His mercy is willing to forgive the penitent sinner: both
the one who is the mother and the one who is the medical practitioner.
There is so much more to say, and I have just raced through and left much
out, but I think that you understand, don't you what the Scripture has to
say about this? This is a time in our country to take a stand on this issue.
This is a time to share individually with people who are confused, because
the issue is very clear cut.
Now Father, we thank You that we have been able to share together tonight in
what is such a sad and disappointing subject. But we are thankful because it
is so essential for us to understand it. Lord we know that You hate those
who shed innocent blood, and we know that the ground cries out for that
blood to be requited; for retaliation. And we know that You will judge as
You will judge all sinners, unless they come to Christ, unless they repent
and are forgiven. I pray that if there are any here who have shed innocent
blood they would come to the foot of the cross and receive Jesus Christ as
Savior. And if there is even a Christian who had an abortion that that
person would come to You and confess, and repent, and ask for that cleansing
which You offer.
Father, we do pray for our nation. We know we stand on the brink of divine
judgment because of this horror that exists. We ask that You would cause
this nation to be drawn to Christ. Lord, we can't even imagine how such a
movement of God could happen, but we would boldly and we would hopefully
even ask that somehow, something might happen to stop this slaughter, and to
cause people to turn to you for forgiveness. To this end we pray in Christ's
Name. Amen.
Dr. John MacArthur
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