“But if you bite and devour one another take heed that you are not consumed by one another.” Galatians 5:15
Have you ever heard of “Planned Parenthood International”? “Parenthood”- what could be more wonderful than that? And “Planned.” That’s important, isn’t it? “International”- around the world they are taking their ideas without prejudice. Sounds like a splendid group, the?
Yet the first credo of Planned Parenthood International is that, “A woman is entitled to a safe abortion.” And so effective has this organization been in teaching its beliefs and organizing political backing that for over ten years now the prevailing legal, social, and ecclesiastical attitude has been pro- abortion. The supreme court gave the legal right for abortion in 1973. Tax money by the millions of dollars is used to pay for abortions. And many religious denominations have sanctioned abortions as “A faithful act of stewardship before God.”
Yet my question is this, If a woman is entitled to a “safe” abortion, then please tell me, “For whom is it safe?”
“For the Baby”
Certainly no abortion is safe for the baby since it leads to his or her death nearly 100% of the time. It’s like Paul said in the text, someone is being “bitten and devoured.”
Yet the feminists are saying that the contents of the womb is not human. It is only “fetal tissue” which can be removed with no more moral trepidation than a wart or a mole. But I hasten to point out that overwhelming evidence points to the contrary.
Let’s say that you’re walking down the beach when you happen upon a large jelly-like creature washed ashore. What is it? Immediately you scan the files of your memory bank eliminating the things you’re quite certain it is not- not Jell-O or a basketball or a balloon, etc. Next a biology professor strolls up and tentatively identifies it as a sea creature. A lad is next who tells you with the authority of experience that one stung him last October. And finally a fisherman confirms it- he says it’s a jellyfish. Civilization is like that. Throughout history we have collectively decided what is and what isn’t true about the world in which we live.
And the same with the contents of a pregnant woman’s womb. We must not alone but collectively decide what is and what is not true. So, consider what the collective evidence has to say.
Medical: The rather new science of fetal physiology teaches that a fetus two to three months old already has brain waves and a heart beat. Every organ is in place. The child can blink his eyes, suck his thumb, and even wince in pain. Medical books even call the fetus the doctor’s “second patient.”
Historic evidence: The ancient Persian code of Hammurabi, the world’s first written law, made abortion illegal. Egypt, Greece and Rome-all cultures in which abortion was practiced- each denounced abortion as immoral.
The word “fetus” comes from the Latin and means “human offspring.”
In the early Christian church anyone who had an abortion was immediately excommunicated until his death bed.
John Calvin, church reformer from the 1 500~s in Switzerland, said flatly, “Abortion is murder.”
The centuries old Hippocratic oath to which doctors have traditionally subscribed says, “I will give no deadly medicine, nor will I suggest such, nor will I give a woman a pessary to produce abortion”
Social evidence: Here in the United States a woman who is pregnant and on welfare can actually get more food stamps because society recognizes the worth of the child in her womb and that child’s need for special nutrition.
If an expectant mother is involved in an auto crash and her fetus dies, she may sue the guilty party in the accident for the wrongful death of her baby.
Criminology: Detectives realize that every human being has a unique set of fingerprints. And frequently a criminal is traced to the scene of the crime by his own tell-tale prints. And it is a fact that the fetus in the womb has fingerprints unique among those of the world.
Biblical evidence: Dr. Luke, a medical doctor, who wrote Acts and Luke in the Bible describes in detail the birth of Christ. And he uses the Greek word “brephos” interchangeably for Christ while in His mother’s womb and out off His mother’s womb as a heal thy growing child.
God said to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” (Jeremiah 1:5).
The Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139:13-17, “For Thou didst form my inward parts, Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb… my frame was not hidden from Thee when I was being made in secret…”
But perhaps the clearest place in Scripture where the humanity of the fetus is taught is in the Christmas narrative found in Luke 1:39-45. Mary, carrying Jesus in her womb, visits her cousin Elizabeth who is pregnant with John the Baptizer. When Mary entered Elizabeth’s house, Elizabeth’s fetus, John, “leaped in her womb” with ‘joy.” To “leap” the fetus had to be alive physically. To recognize the presence of Christ he had to be alert Spiritually. To express ‘joy” he had to be alive emotionally. And to choose to acknowledge Jesus with such worship he had to be alive willfully. And he was!
So, from a wide selection of collective disciplines the evidence overwhelmingly supports the personhood of the fetus. In fact, there can be no reasonable doubt-the contents of a pregnant mother’s womb is fully human.
With this in mind, however, look at what our society has legally allowed to happen since 1973.
There have been 35 million abortions over the past 25 years. Last year there were just over 1.5 million abortions in the United States. That’s one abortion every 22 seconds. Here in North Carolina 26% of all pregnancies end in abortion. In Orange County, however, the rate is 42%.
Raleigh and Fayetteville last year had more abortions than live births.
Since 1973 more people have been killed by abortion than currently live in 10 Western states.
Or look at it this way, more children have been aborted than our country has had soldiers killed in all wars from 1776 to 1998 put together!
I tell you, there’s been a lot of biting and devouring going on!
“Safe For the Mother?”
Not only must we ask is abortion safe for the child, we must also inquire as to the safety of abortion for the mother. In the text Paul says that we should take heed that we ourselves are not consumed. And there is growing evidence that a mother who allows her baby to be bitten and devoured in the mill of abortion is herself much consumed in the process.
I’ve got to tell you about Mary. She’s 21. Pretty as a picture. A college student. Wealthy. A whole life before her. But Mary is a troubled woman.
You see, last year Mary had an abortion. It was one of those summer romances, and fall semester she discovered she was pregnant. Her boyfriend took off. She carried her child for 41/2 months trying to decide what to do. If she kept the child it would mean embarrassment, facing her parents and friends, the disruption of her student life, and the traumatic decision of whether to keep the child or give him up for adoption.
Then there was the option of abortion. A doctor told her that what she was carry in her womb was not human, only “fetal tissue.” The price was only a couple hundred dollars. Her parents would not be notified. She could start over afresh. No one would ever know.
Even her Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), had ruled that the termination of an unwanted pregnancy can be a “faithful act of stewardship.”
So Mary opted for abortion.
There was no counsel from the clinic before, during, or after. She simply ply drove herself over and back in the same day. All done. “A faithful act of stewardship ,” right?
But it’s not been that easy. Guilt and depression have been a part of her life for the 18 months since. She’s gone from 120 pounds to around 95. She’s quit going to church. She has nightmares, the worst of which pictures a tiny baby chasing her down an endless corridor, crying and crying. Mary’s parents still don’t know. They wonder why she’s lost the academic edge she once had.
Mary has read that women who’ve had abortions are more prone to infertility, problem pregnancies, nervous breakdowns… and suicide. And that troubles her. “Why wasn’t I told all this beforehand?” She bitterly complains. She feels abused by the impersonal institution of the abortion mill.
But mostly Mary remembers. She remembers that tiny life she
conceived in her womb. She recalls the flutters of life, the first one just a week before her abortion. And now all is still, so very, very still.
Mary didn’t go out on dates much after that. Mostly she just sat in her room and rocked and thought and thought… of suicide. Then the drinking began. Next the men. I don’t understand the psychology of it all, but Mary keeps giving herself away to the men she dates. And she’s gained quite a loose reputation on campus.
That’s when I met her. I was speaking at a student Christian meeting about forgiveness, and Mary stayed afterwards to talk. I wish I could say all is well with Mary just now. But even after hours of counsel she still has a long way to go. Yet, there is forgiveness for her in Christ Jesus. I believe God can meet her where she is and still bring a blessing out of her life. I believe there is healing for her, and slowly she 5 beginning to believe it, too.
But what troubles us both is that there were 1.5 million abortions in the United States alone last year. Every 22 seconds it happens to another woman. And it is all in the name of a church , a medical profession, and government that calls it “freedom of choice.” My question, as well as Mary’s is, “What freedom?” The child’s as he or she is evacuated from the womb? The mother’s as she wrestles with guilt, depression, and the greater likelihood of later medical complications?
“Freedom of Choice”: a convenient expression, but only the beginning of a sorry story. The rest of the story will tell you that a woman who has an abortion can face hemorrhaging, infection, infertility, and even death. It tells you that lingering remorse, clinical depression and nightmare flashbacks are a daily portion. And that statistically a woman who has had an abortion is ten times more likely to commit suicide than a woman who has not.
“Is it Safe for Society?”
Planned Parenthood International teaches that “A woman is entitled to a safe abortion.” And we are asking, “Safe for whom? The child? The mother? Most certainly abortion is not safe for them! And yet another question must be asked: Is abortion safe for society?
In the text the apostle Paul warns us that if we start biting and devouring one another we’d better watch out that we ourselves are not consumed. Look closer here and see what he means.
Behind the “safe abortion” argument is the value that allows for the weak, the unwanted, the troublesome- the unviable- to be quickly and quietly “eliminated.” Killed! But who decides who lives or dies? The President? A judge? The mother? A scientist? And who decides which quality of life is worthy of living and which merits death?
The man Job in the Bible awoke one day to discover the quality of his life drastically reduced. His wealth gone, his children dead his health ruined, his wife advised, “Curse God and die!” Yet Job left that decision to the highest authority. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord hath taken away” (Job 1:1,2:10?.
Let’s suppose a family comes to you for counsel. Here’s their situation:
the father has syphilis and is a drunkard. He hasn’t held a steady job in years and is known to severely abuse his children.
The mother has tuberculosis.
Already the couple has had four children. Their first child is blind. Their second child has died. Their third child is deaf. And their fourth child also has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant again. They are willing to have an abortion if you tell them that is what they should do.
So, what would you advise?
If you choose an abortion, allow me to congratulate you. You’ve just killed Ludwig Van Beethoven, born in Bonn, Germany, 1770, into these very circumstances.
So, you see, abortion is not safe because it kills the baby, wounds the mother, and impoverishes, yea! Endangers society by allowing its citizens to be destroyed because someone has determined they are unwanted. And when society is not safe from such arbitrary slaughter for everybody then it is safe for nobody!
Bear with me now as we digress briefly into a history and analysis of feminist theology. I think doing so will give us a better perspective of what’s going on.
Genesis I and 2 tells the story of man’s creation. God says in concert as the Trinity, “Let us make man in our image.” And “Adam” (which in the Hebrew means “red clay”) is formed as a single being who seemed to have within him both male and female qualities. He was perhaps unisexual. And God judged his creation to be “very good.” Later, however, God speaks the first negative statement in the Bible, “It is not good that the man live alone. I will make a helper fit for him.” So God calls man from his single, perhaps unisexual lifestyle, to the community lifestyle we call marriage. And He does it by causing the man to sleep while He surgically removes a rib (the Hebrew literally says “curved bone”) from the man. Many theologians believe it is here that God separates out of Adam his female qualities leaving only the masculine. A separate “other” is created who now embodies the feminine. And to be complete he must become one with her in marri age.
Modern radical feminists rebel against such givens by God. Their drive is to be unisexual, androgynous, self-contained persons again. Hence their push for equal pay for equal work, the right to vote, escape from unwanted pregnancies, unisexual dress, and freedom from male authoritarianism in the church and society.
Much of the feminist agenda is worthy! Their pursuit of equal pay for equal work, the right to vote, etc. is quite laudable. But where they rebel against the Lord’s order of creation into which they fit we must oppose them.
Actually, from Scripture it would appear that much of what feminists are trying to accomplish here on earth-justice, freedom from oppression, self-worth, and unisexualness- will be accomplished in heaven. Jesus, in Matthew 22:30, was being asked about marriage in heaven. And He said there would be none. Instead, we’d be “like angels.” Perhaps like Adam before Eve’s creation from him? Not sexless, but having within us wholly both male and female qualities. It appears so!
With this in mind let me humbly say something which might sound harsh and chauvinistic, but I mean it quite academically and theologically. The problem with the feminist movement is that it is humanistically trying to go backwards into Eden to the original Adam instead of going forward in the Spirit of Christ to heaven.
Well, that, something of the deeper level theology of feminism. Now, this, something of the history of feminism as propagated by Planned Parenthood International.
The organization was started during the first 25 years of this century. Its founder was Margaret Sanger and a clique of socialists Nazis, feminists and anarchists who regularly fellowshiped in Grenich Village, N.Y. Sanger, her parents Irish immigrants, was twice married and into frequent affairs. She rejected Christianity for the faith of secular humanism, the super-race philosophy of Nietzsche, and the morals of situation ethics.
Sanger published a magazine entitled ‘Woman Rebel “with the feminist credo, “To live. ..to love. ..to be lazy.. to be an unmarried mother.. .to create. ..to destroy.” She wrote that “the marriage bed is the most degenerating influence in the social order” and urged “voluntary association.”
Margaret Sanger believed in regulating marriage and births in order to produce “genetically superior” children. By following selective breeding a “race of thoroughbreds” could be created. And by abortion and sterilization we could “get rid of human weeds” which she labeled as the Jews, Blacks, the poor and the retarded.
After the death of her daughter Peggy, Mrs. Sanger became heavily involved in seances, practiced Eastern religion, unity, Rosicrucianism, astrology, and numerology. She died an alcoholic, Demerol addict, and Satan worshiper. But her ideas and organization live on!
During the 1930’s and 40’s Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party ruled Germany and put into practice Nietzsche’s and Sanger’s philosophy of creating a super race by selective breeding and planned genocide. The Aryan race was fed, educated, and legally protected while all other ethnic groups were enslaved, aborted, or slain in death camps.
Allied forces crushed Fascism in World War II, yet, as with any weed only cut down, it tends to grow back from its roots again. And today Fascism and Sangerism is quietly growing stronger and stronger in the hearts and minds of thinkers and power brokers around the world. Two-thirds of International Planned Parenthood’s multi-million dollar budget is paid for by United States money. Planned Parenthood literature is frequently taught as well as distributed in public high school sex education courses. And their view that “a woman is entitled to a safe abortion” is now the prevailing legal, social, and ecclesiastical attitude of our nation.
Consider how far they have been able to go in accomplishing their agenda of ridding earth of “human weeds” by the silent genocide of sterilization and abortion. More American Indians are sterilized per capita by ten times than any other minority group of our society. The abortion rate for Hispanics and blacks is double per capita what it is for whites, and Planned Parenthood is largely responsible.
And look what is happening right here in North Carolina. Doctors practicing against their Hippocratic oath are killing life on the bloom in the womb with the full support of the law. Euthanasia is beginning to creep into acceptance more and more with the terminally ill. It is no longer a matter of mercifully allowing someone to die who is seriously ill, but a matter of taking steps to terminate a life that someone has arbitrarily deemed unfit. And medicine is even being used in lethal injections to capitally punish criminals. The alarm is that doctors are now earn mg more and more of their money by taking human life rather than saving it. If we sit idly by and allow the fetus, the weakest and most oppressed segment of our society, to be bitten and devoured legally and medically, and if we allow those whose quality of life does not measure up to someone’s arbitrary standard of fitness to be euthanized, and if we quietly allow lethal injection to capitally punish criminals, then the question is, “Who is next?” Political deviants? The retarded? Blacks? Jews? The insane?
I tell you, if I were a member of a minority race today, I’d be scared. For more and more, as Paul wrote to the Galatians, we are a civilization that cheapens life. We’re biting and devouring one another and being consumed in the process?
“Conclusion”
The question must fairly rise about why women who have so long been oppressed, depersonalized and denied a political vote should now be enjoying their hard-fought freedoms and yet denying children their own. And the answer I believe is in Satan, ignorance, and over-reaction.
Back in the 1950’s, around Easter, stores sold baby chicks that had been died bright colors. Once the chicks gained stature they were put in the barn yard. But because they hadn’t completely outgrown the dye, the other chic kens pecked at them mercilessly. And fighting to survive the chicken often grew into the strongest hen who ruled the roost. And it has been the same way with other people historically. Sometimes it is the worst persecuted who later gain power and become the worst persecutors. The Puritans of England were hounded out of Europe, came to America, and often proved to be the most viciously intolerant, driving religious deviants like Roger Williams out of their New England colony in the dead of winter.
Now women who have unquestionably been demeaned are coming to power. They represent the largest single block of special interest votes, manage more financial capitol than men, are the largest segment of the population, but are systematically supporting a cruel and dangerous feminist agenda that is leading to the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent children. Freedom from such a satanic doctrine as feminism, from the accompanying bitter over-reaction to their pilgrimage from bondage, from naive involvement in Sangerism, and from rebellion against God for His order of creation will require nothing less than repentance from these sins, faith in Jesus Christ, the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and renewed obedience to the ways of God to the human race.
Until then, it is up to the rest of us to shout abroad the truth of Scripture and the constitutional guarantee of all citizens for “Life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness.”
The contents of a pregnant mother’s womb: is it living or dead? It is alive. Is it human or other? Human! Then we must secure for him the same rights as we have for all others here in our nation, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness.”
But you say, “Hey! We can’t do that! That’d be imposing our religious views on others.” Listen, it’s not just a religious view. It is a social, historic, medic al, and philosophical view combined.
Besides, here in the United States we’ve used collective will to clear the highways of drunk drivers, to prohibit drug abuse, and even to make prostitution illegal. And it’s time we come together and decide that life from conception to death is a really wonderful thing that should be protected from biting and devouring one and all.
Suggested Prayer
Father God, in Christ forgive us. Give us grace to live and help others to live. For Christ’s sake. Amen.
