My own thoughts on abortion are unorganized. My tongue blunders. I could not write anything very stirring/good on the topic. So, I posted this sermon I unearthed by following a link on the baylyblog. I thought it addressed the issue really well. Please read:
excerpt from http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/07/a-simple-sermon-on-abortion.html {by Hunter Baker}
“The sanctity of life is an acid test for the Christian church. What is an acid test? One way the acid test was used was to distinguish real precious metals from fake ones. Take something that looks like gold and drip nitric acid on it. If it holds up and is not degraded by the acid, the gold is real. Our approach to the sanctity of life determines how we hold up to the acid test. We will find out whether our faith is real as we deal with a culture that denigrates unborn life, especially imperfect life.
Before I get too deep into this issue, I want to pause for a moment to acknowledge that people in our congregation have likely been touched by abortion. When there have been over 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, the consequences touch many of us. To any who fall into that category, I just want to say that my sympathy is with you, not against you. All have sinned and our hope is in Christ.
Let’s take a moment to consider a couple of references from the Bible on unborn life. Consider Jeremiah 1:5 where the Lord says to Jeremiah:
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.
And then Psalm 139: 13-16:
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance . . .
It seems to me that one can infer from these passages that God knows human beings from the moment of our conception or even before. This means that the unborn child is a person, not a mass of tissue, not a collection of parts waiting to be switched on.
People have often focused on dividing lines like when we first draw breath, because our understanding of the unborn child has been so poor throughout human history. We did not understand that the unborn child does breathe in a sense. The child simply receives oxygen from the mother. Another line that received attention, sometimes in the law, was the “animate” status of the fetus. People argued that the child in the womb was not really alive until its movement could be detected by the mother or by someone placing a hand on her stomach. Of course, now we know that the child is moving long before the mother or anyone else can feel it. The ultrasound has unlocked the mysteries of the womb.
I will never forget when Ruth was pregnant with Andrew. She was in private practice and had access to an ultrasound machine. I would come over to the office after work to meet her for dinner and would find her in the ultrasound room lying on her back or side moving the sensor over her stomach and watching Andrew moving about and listening to his little heart beat. Sometimes, she was excited and eager to tell me what she could see. Other times, she was simply entranced, transported by the show her little man was putting on for her. This was even in the very early stages of the pregnancy.
What I’m trying to say is that Andrew was alive. He lived inside his mother’s womb. His life didn’t begin when he was born and people sucked out his nose and started sticking needles in him. His life began in the womb. And as all of you parents out there know, he was not much less dependent on her when he came out than when he was in. In fact, during the late stages of pregnancy Ruth pointed out to me that Andrew would never be easier to care for than he was at that moment.
For the sake of argument, let’s concede that Andrew was conceived and born into an ideal situation. He had two well-educated parents with good careers ahead of them. Both of us were committed to loving him. But what if he hadn’t been? What if his mother had been 15 years old and the father had been absent or unable to take on any responsibility? Andrew would still have been a living baby inside of that fifteen year old. He would still have been a person created and known by God. Just because his circumstances would have been substantially less favorable, does that mean it would have been okay to kill him? Because that is what we are saying when we support the idea of legalized abortion. We are saying it is okay to kill a child who is alive.
Someone out there says that’s just my opinion or that’s just a religious point of view. No, it isn’t. Pick up an embryology textbook. Read about the life of the embryo and the fetus. Accept the testimony of someone who has spent the time, as we had the rare privilege to do, watching a child develop in the womb. The real life of a fetus is about as hard a scientific fact as you will find.
I’m thankful for the birth and development of the fields of embryology and fetology. We have finally reached the place where it has become ridiculous to refer to the unborn child as a “mass of tissue” or to compare the unwanted child to a tumor. That time is over. Some years ago, I was grateful for the honesty of the feminist Naomi Wolf, who called for an end to the charade. Despite her support for abortion, she felt it harmed women to act as though abortion did not mean killing an unborn child. The fact could no longer be resisted. Better to acknowledge it and simply argue abortion is still a needed right for women. What she did not say is that if you follow her logic, it means a person who is larger and in control of a smaller, dependent person has the right to end the dependent person’s life.
Wolf’s honesty has not carried the day, though. The pro-choice movement sometimes shows disturbing similarities to totalitarian movements of the last century. Just as the Germans who ran the concentration camps had to learn to speak in such a way as to shield their consciences from the horror of what they were doing, people who work in abortion clinics watch their words very carefully. You don’t speak the truth because the truth is unspeakable.
. . . .
Sometimes, you can’t get away from the truth even if you try. When I was in Georgia working in public policy, I was invited to attend an event at the capitol where women who had had abortions told their stories. It was an intense afternoon. Many women spoke, but one has stayed with me since that time. Speaking through her tears, a young African-American woman talked about her abortion. Her unborn son sometimes visited her in her dreams to ask her why she let him be killed. I have rarely had such strong sympathy for another human being as I had for her that day.
Listening to her and other women who have had abortions, I have heard them express their feeling of betrayal that this was an option for them. At first, this may sound like an attempt to divert moral responsibility, but I think they are right. When women choose abortion, they are usually confused and in distress. Is it really that surprising that they sometimes feel they’ve been let down by their families, friends, and their community even as they struggle with their guilt? After all, the result of our collective wisdom as a society is that this was a reasonable choice for them to make.
. . . .
I will conclude by noting the emergence of a disturbing trend in American life. Today, because we know so much more about the unborn child than ever before, we can learn things like whether the child has a possibility of having Down Syndrome or other genetic problems. Would it shock you to hear that in situations where doctors tell patients their child might have Down Syndrome when they are born, nearly 90% arrange an abortion?
. . .
Twenty years from now, there may be almost no people with Down Syndrome visible to us in our communities. There will be no children with Down Syndrome just as there are no children with polio. But the troubling difference is this. We cured polio. We have simply killed Down Syndrome.
We do it through doctors and genetic counseling and private decisions, but the basic logic of it is no different than that of the Third Reich. Imperfect life is not worth preserving. In the case of Nazi Germany, the government arranged for sterilization, abortion, and euthanasia to get rid of what they called “life without value.” What you may not know is that the Nazi’s were not the only enthusiasts for eugenics. It was popular all over the world. American states had pro-eugenics laws on the books. But after World War II, the nations recoiled at the culture of death in Nazi Germany. The U.N. rushed to proclaim the need for the respect for life born and unborn.
But the time of moral outrage has subsided. We have forgotten how far we are capable of falling. So, today, individuals make the choice to rid the world of the Down Syndrome child rather than a government. Has it become any more praiseworthy?
This idea doesn’t apply only to abortion. It comes up every time you face something that interferes with your plans for yourself and every time you face some kind of moral gut check or an acid test, if you will. What are you made of? Is there some real gold there or are you masquerading as the real thing?
The nature of most people is to want to flee when they find themselves in difficulty. And so, the girl in trouble seeks an abortion. The investment manager begins to engage in fraud to cover mistakes and poor judgments. An executive participates in inflating the value of assets to make his firm’s bad stock look good. I was reading about Bernie Madoff the other day. When he was caught by investigators who discovered his fraud, he simply said, “I always knew this day would come.” But of course, he failed the acid test. He never confronted the problem when he could have done some good. He hoped against hope that his failure would remain hidden. The result was that his clients, who thought they had the real thing, were left with fool’s gold.
Let us be the kind of people who pass these tests when we are tried. Let us support our friends and neighbors when their trials come. Let us be a witness to God’s love for human beings born and unborn. Let us pass the acid test.
Farewell, farewell.