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For 29 years now, our nation has lived under the weight of a system that grants legal sanction to the massive and brutal extermination of the most helpless members of the human race. For me, as a 26 year-old, abortion is tragically normal. I’ve never known a society in which abortion wasn’t generally accepted and rampantly practiced. For years I’ve chalked it up to the depravity of the human heart. But the more I consider abortion, the more I marvel at the manner in which it is rationalized. It is an absurdity by even secular standards. The pursuit of sovereign and uncompromised autonomy has led us to the justification of the unjustifiable.
In debating the abortion issue with students from all over the country, I rarely hear things like, “fetuses aren’t human” or “it’s just a blob of cells”. The amount of scientific evidence against such claims is so staggering that they are easily refuted and quickly dispersed. The arguments I do hear, over and over and over, go like this. “So what if it’s human?…It can’t live on it’s own…it’s dependent on its mother to stay alive…why should a woman be forced to be an incubator for nine months?…until fetuses can survive on their own, they’re not people!”
It is this line of thinking that strikes me as so utterly absurd. If you think about it, this matter of dependency is the exact criteria for which we usually extend more protection, not less. Our nation is far more outraged when a gunman opens fire in a high school than when he opens fire in an office building. Why? Because we have more compassion on those who are more helpless and more dependent. The younger the victim, the more shocked we are, and rightly so. Just remember back two years ago to the Jewish day care shooting in Granada Hills, CA. Why is such behavior so unthinkable?. Because these are pre-schoolers! They are helpless. They cannot defend themselves against lethal violence. It was the presence of infants amidst the carnage that made the Oklahoma City bombing even more unbearable. How in the world, then, have we come to the place today where we justify abortion with the exact same argument that we should be using to eliminate it? The notion that the unborn are unqualified for rights of personhood because they are dependent on their mother for survival is insane. Dependence demands more compassion, more protection, and more provision, not less. But we in the United States appeal to the same weaknesses that merit special protection for born children as a way to justify the destruction of those children still in the womb.
Rather than dwelling any longer on why abortion is wrong (there are plenty of worthy defenses already), I’m going to skip right to the conclusion. First, I’ll offer a brief “by the numbers” look at abortion in the U.S. before focusing on what I see as a clear biblical mandate to actually do something about this great injustice.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) reports in its most current abortion fact sheet (revised 2/2000) that on average, 43% of American women will have had at least one abortion by the time they are 45. Sadder still is the fact that almost 1 in 5 abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “born-again” or “evangelical”. If those numbers are accurate, that’s a quarter of a million babies being killed every year in the evangelical church. Catholics are 29% more likely to abort than Protestants and are aborting at a rate that is indistinguishable from the population at large. With that said, it is an almost certainty that there are men and women reading this who have been involved in a past abortion or are contemplating one even now. Be assured that Christ is as eager to forgive the sin of abortion as He is any other sin, but if you find yourself using the promise of God’s forgiveness as a way to rationalize your yet future sin, be advised. Your very soul is in danger, and you may wonder if you’re even saved. The apostle Paul knew better than anyone how scandalous the offer of free grace would seem to the unredeemed world. It is a doctrine that is thoroughly biblical, but is also thoroughly abused. Romans 6 tells us, in no uncertain terms, that saving faith does not rationalize future sin with the presumption, “Grace will increase!” I am not writing as a way to magnify the pain of those who have had abortions, but rather in the hope that others will be spared from enduring the same pain.
For the last 29 years abortion has been legal through all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states so that a woman may abort for any reason or no reason at all. Roe v. Wade established the legal foundation for abortion and Doe v. Bolton established the criteria for which it may carried out. It defined health with such broad and sweeping strokes that even emotional and psychological health was included as a legitimate reason for killing a baby. No matter what kind of restrictions individual states try and place on abortion access, they are powerless to contradict federal law which guarantees abortion on demand.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute also reports that between 95% and 98% of all abortions are performed on perfectly healthy babies with perfectly healthy mothers who conceived under perfectly natural circumstances. The only reason these children are aborted is because the mother finds them unwanted or inconvenient. All the while, the National Council on Adoption reports that every year there are between a million to a million and a half pre-certified couples waiting to adopt babies that aren’t being born.
As an aside, I am compelled to comment on one staggering portion of the Alan Guttmacher fact sheet. It deals with contraception. Bear in mind that Alan Guttmacher was a former president of Planned Parenthood and an avid supporter of abortion rights. You needn’t read much of AGI’s “objective” facts before you see the spin. Nevertheless, when it comes to their reporting on contraceptive use, you will find something remarkable. AGI says that 58% of the women who had abortions in 1995 were using contraceptives during the month they became pregnant. On the flip side, 11% of the women who had abortions that year had never used a method of birth control. Furthermore, they report that 9 in 10 women at risk of unintended pregnancy are using a contraceptive method. Do you realize what that is saying? Do those numbers seem odd in light of the fact that birth control, the very mechanism that was supposed to end abortion, has vastly increased its frequency? On every single campus I visit with the Genocide Awareness Project, we are criticized for not distributing condoms or doing more to promote birth control. If we really wanted to end abortion, we are told, we would spend our money in support of sex-ed, not in showing students pictures of aborted babies. Look at the numbers!! The average abortion is five times more likely to be performed on a woman who used contraception than on one who didn’t. And doesn’t it seem convenient that an affluent industry whose profit is born in the blood of unborn babies will claim to be doing everything it can to reduce the likelihood of abortion while it promotes the very activities which actually drive its frequency up?
There are roughly a million and a half abortions a year in this country which brings our post 1973 total to over 40 million, a number that dwarfs even the holocaust. 4,000 abortions are performed every day, and in California alone, where a quarter of all US abortions are performed, that translates to approximately 1000 abortions every day. Roughly 14% of all abortions in the United States are paid for with public funds, and 19 states, including California, fund abortions for poor women. The numbers are staggering, but abortion remains an abstraction. We talk about choice and freedom and we lose sight of what’s really going on. Four thousand times a day, the most innocent, helpless, and vulnerable members of the human race are savagely executed all around us.
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