Quotes by John Piper

My aim is to hasten the day when being publicly pro-choice will be as reprehensible as being publicly racist. My aim is to hasten the day when declaring yourself pro-choice would be like declaring yourself a white supremacist… Racism might…result in the killing of innocent humans in our history, it often did. But abortion always results in the killing of innocent humans. Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Black people were lynched in America. Today more Black babies are killed by white abortionists every three days than all who were lynched in those years.

Every day 1,300 black babies are killed in America. Seven hundred Hispanic babies die every day from abortion. Call this what you will – when the slaughter has an ethnic face and the percentages are double that of the white community and the killers are almost all white, something is going on here that ought to make the lovers of racial equality and racial harmony wake up… O that the murderous effect of abortion in the Black and Latino communities, destroying tens of thousands at the hands of white abortionists, would explode with the same reprehensible reputation as lynching.

If we were made to watch a doctor pull off the little baby’s legs and arms one by one and place them on the table like a dentist removing cotton from your mouth – if all Americans were made to see what it really is, the pro-life goal of abortion being unthinkable (not just illegal) would be much nearer.

The law of our land today is that any abortion is legal in America until birth if the mother can give reason that the pregnancy or the child will be an excessive burden or stress on her well-being.  Since that ruling 14 years ago Thursday, about 20,000,000 babies have been aborted in America.

The formation of the life of a person in the womb is the work of God, and it is not merely a mechanical process but a work on the analogy of weaving or knitting: “Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb” (psalm 139:13). The life of the unborn is the knitting of God, and what He is knitting is a human being in His own image, unlike any other creature in the universe… The destruction of conceived human life – whether embryonic, fetal, or viable – is an assault on the unique person-forming work of God.

James says, "You desire and do not have; so you kill" (Jas. 4:2). We kill marriages and we kill unborn babies because they cut across our desires; they stand in the way of our unencumbered self-enhancement. And we live in a culture where self-enhancement and self-advancement is god. And if self-enhancement is god, then the One who is at work in the womb shaping a person in His own image is not God and the assault on His work is not sacrilegious, but obedience to the god of self.

On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott vs. Stanford, ruled that no act of Congress or territorial legislature could make laws banning slavery. The fundamental argument was that slaves are not free and equal persons but the property of their masters. The ruling is analogous to Roe vs. Wade because today no state may make a law banning abortion to protect the unborn. The argument is similar: basically because the unborn are at the sovereign disposal of their mothers and do not have personal standing in their own right.  There was no consensus in this country on the personhood and rights of salves. We were split down the middle. But the issue was so fundamental that the states went to war, and in the end the Lincoln administration overturned the Dred Scott decision. And today, 130 years later, we look back with amazing consensus and marvel at the blindness of our forefathers.

Use your imagination to see what abortion really is! Fight against the kind of social stupor that gripped Nazi Germany – the feeling that the problem is so huge and so horrendous and so out of our control that I just can’t be wrong to let it be. Use your imagination to see and feel what is really happening behind those sterile clinic doors. If you could see each little handiwork of God and what it looks like when it is being crushed or poisoned or starved, you would say, this can’t be happening. Civilized people do not do this! The children will not be saved and God’s work will not be reverenced without an act of sustained sympathetic imagination. Otherwise it is out of sight out of mind – just like Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. It just couldn’t be happening and so we act as if it isn’t.

The root cause of abortion is the failure to be satisfied in God as our supreme love. And, for all the great legal work that needs to be done to protect human life, the greatest work that needs to be done is to spread a passion – a satisfaction for the supremacy of God in all things. That’s our calling.

God is calling…all Christians to expose the dark and fruitless work of abortion:
1. To expose the fact that there are 1.5 million abortions in America every year – 27 million since the Supreme Court overturned the public conscience of 48 states 19 years ago.
2. To expose the fact that 30% of all babies conceived in America are killed by abortion.
3. To expose the fact that medically women are told not to have abortions before the seventh week of pregnancy (see the Yes/Neon booklet), and yet by the eighth week the heart of the baby has been beating for a month, there are measurable brain waves, there is response to touch, there’s thumb-sucking, grasping with the hands, swimming with the arms in the amniotic fluid, distinct arms and legs and sexual organs. This much must—not may, must—be present before most abortion centers will cut the baby to pieces with a suction machine 4,000 times a day.
4. To expose the fact that 9,000 babies were killed after the 21st week of pregnancy in 1987, fully formed and on the brink of being able to breathe for themselves – killed, legally!
5. To expose the fact that in Minnesota we have a fetal homicide law that makes it “murder to kill an embryo or fetus intentionally, except in cases of abortion” – in other words, it’s unlawful to kill the unborn child unless the mother chooses to have it killed. And that is a strange and dark criterion for lawful killing.
6. To expose the fact that “There is inescapable schizophrenia in aborting a perfectly normal 22 week fetus while at the same hospital, performing intra-uterine surgery on its cousin” (Steve Calvin).
7. To expose the fact that viability outside the womb is not a criterion of personhood and right to life, because we ourselves don’t want to give up our personhood and our right to life if we must be sustained on a respirator or dialysis machine the way a baby has to be sustained by a placenta.
8. To expose the fact that the size and reasoning power of a tiny person is irrelevant to human personhood because if it were, we might allow tiny and unthinking newborns to be killed.
9. To expose the fact that genetically human embryos and fetuses are utterly different from all other animal life; if they are just left alone, with nothing added but nourishment, they will grow up.
10. To expose the fact that if it is unlawful to crush the egg of a bald eagle, it is not excessively restrictive to make it unlawful to crush the egg of a human.
11. To expose the fact that when two legitimate rights conflict – the right not to be pregnant and the right not to be killed – justice demands that we give place to the greater right, the right that does the least harm – the one that does not willfully kill.
12. To expose the fact that there are thousands of crisis pregnancy centers in this country ready to help, and almost all of them are free – unlike the abortion mills that charge plenty of money – and the older the baby, the more they charge.
13. To expose the fact that there are no unwanted babies in Minnesota. Mary Ann Kuharsky (President of ProLife Minnesota) said in the Tribune she would take any baby whose life depended on it, and there are hundreds like her.
14. To expose the fact that it is hypocritical to speak as though choice were the untouchable absolute in this matter and then turn around and oppose choice in matters of gun-control and welfare support and affirmative action and minimum wage and dozens of other issues where so-called pro-choice people join the demand that people’s choices be limited to protect others. It’s a sham argument. All choices are limited by life.
15. To expose the fact that trespassing to save life is not a crime and that it does not undermine our legal system, but on the contrary endorses the one foundation stone without which that legal system in this land will fall, namely, the inalienable right to life. There will be no law but the law of individual choice (=anarchy) if the foundation stone of life’s value is destroyed. And abortion is destroying it.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention about 43% of all American women will have at least one abortion by the age 45 (p. 18). 20% of these are performed on teenagers (p. 28). 50% are performed on women who have had at least one abortion already (p. 31). Every third baby conceived and viable in this country is killed by abortion (p. 35).

The vast majority of abortions are performed between the seventh and tenth week when the baby is already sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All his organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. His genetic code is uniquely and unquestionably human. And, if we are willing, he can be seen by ultrasound.

Christ died that we might live. This is the opposite of abortion. Abortion kills that someone might live differently.

It isn’t sex by itself that makes abortion. It is sex plus covetousness: desiring things that God does not will for us to have because we are not willing to find our satisfaction in him. Illicit sex and unencumbered freedom without children: for these we covet, and abortion is the result.

How do you get from, “We do not know whether this is protectable human life,” to “Therefore, we will not protect it?” Wouldn’t the logic just as likely (some would say far more likely) be, “Since we do not know whether this is protectable human life, therefore we will protect it?” Why does the judicial uncertainty about the humanity of the unborn lead to unbridled license to destroy it?

Ways to be actively involved in the solution:

1. Consider adoption.

2. Be a regular giver of your money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

3. Volunteer in a Crisis Pregnancy Center.

4. Be involved in spreading truth with good literature.

5. Make your presence know at the abortion clinics in town (by) writing or phoning or visiting and talking, if you can, with those who work there.

6. Dream a new kind of ministry.

7. Pray!

One accurate way to describe abortion is subtle infanticide. That is: child-killing done in a way that the people don’t recognize it as child-killing. That reality is why the word abortion exists. Some words are created to cloak reality the same way procedures are created to cloak reality. “Abortion” is cloaked child-killing

Questions to ask a pro-choice legislator:

1. Are you willing to explain why a baby’s right not to be killed is less important than a woman’s right not to be pregnant?

2. Are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals, but you oppose laws forbidding cruelty to human fetuses? Are they not at least living animals?

3. Are you willing to explain why government is unwilling to take away the so-called right to abortion on demand even though it harms the unborn child; yet government is increasingly willing to take away the right to smoke, precisely because it harms innocent non-smokers, killing 3,000 non-smokers a year from cancer and as many as 40,000 non-smokers a year from other diseases?

4. And if you say that everything hangs on whether the fetus is a human child, are you willing to go before national television in the oval office and defend your support for the “Freedom of Choice Act” by holding in your hand a 21 week old fetus and explaining why this little one does not have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to life? Are you willing to say to parents in this church who lost a child at that age and held him in their hands, this being in your hands is not and was not a child with any rights of its own under God or under law?

The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases – or any other way – is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long – like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald.

The abortion industry kills as many Black people every four days as the Klan killed in 150 years.

It is evil to justify killing [the unborn] by the happy outcome of eternity for the one killed. This same justification could be used to justify killing one-year olds, or any heaven-bound believer for that matter. The Bible asks the question: “Shall we sin that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1) And: “Shall we do evil that good may come?” (Romans 3:8). In both cases the answer is a resounding NO. It is presumption to step into God’s place and try to make the assignments to heaven or to hell. Our duty is to obey God, not to play God.

You have to decide what those issues are for you. What do you think disqualifies a person from holding public office? I believe that the endorsement of the right to kill unborn children disqualifies a person from any position of public office. It’s simply the same as saying that the endorsement of racism, fraud, or bribery, would disqualify him – except that child-killing is more serious than those.

Thirty-eight states treat the killing of an unborn child as a form of homicide. They have what are called “fetal homicide laws.” It is illegal to take the life of the unborn if the mother wants the baby, but it is legal to take the life of the unborn if she doesn’t. In the first case the law treats the fetus as a human with rights; in the second case the law treats the fetus as non-human with no rights. Humanness is thus defined by the desire of the strong. Might makes right. We reject this right to define personhood in the case of Nazi anti-Semitism, Confederate race-based slavery, and Soviet Gulags. When we define the humanness of the unborn by the will of the powerful we know what we are doing.

High risk pregnancy specialist, Dr. Steve Calvin, in a letter some years ago to the Arizona Daily Star, wrote, “There is inescapable schizophrenia in aborting a perfectly normal 22 week fetus while at the same hospital, performing intrauterine surgery on its cousin.” When the unborn are wanted, they are treated as children and patients. When they are not wanted, they are not children.

We know the principle of justice that when two legitimate rights conflict, the right that protects the higher value should prevail. We deny the right to drive at 100 miles per hour because the value of life is greater than the value of being on time or getting thrills. The right of the unborn not to be killed and the right of a woman not to be pregnant may be at odds. But they are not equal rights. Staying alive is more precious and more basic than not being pregnant.