Quotes about Abortion

1

Psalm 139:13-16 paints a vivid picture of God’s intimate involvement with a preborn person. God created David’s “inward parts” not at birth, but before birth. David says to his Creator, “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (v. 13). Each person, regardless of his parentage or handicap, has not been manufactured on a cosmic assembly line, but personally formed by God. All the days of his life are planned out by God before any come to be (v. 16).

2

All that was necessary to prohibit an abortion [in the Bible] was the command, “You shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13). Every Israelite knew that the preborn child was a child. So do we, if we are honest. We all know a pregnant woman is “carrying a child.”

3

Like toddler and adolescent, the terms embryo and fetus do not refer to nonhumans but to humans at various stages of development. It is scientifically inaccurate to say a human embryo or a fetus is not a human being simply because he is at an earlier stage than an infant. This is like saying that a toddler is not a human being because he is not yet an adolescent. Does someone become more human as he gets bigger? If so, then adults are more human than children, and football players are more human than jockeys. Something nonhuman does not become human or more human by getting older or bigger; whatever is human is human from the beginning, or it can never be human at all. The right to live does not increase with age and size; otherwise, toddlers and adolescents have less right to live than adults.

4

The comparison between babies’ rights and mothers’ rights is unequal. What is at stake in the vast majority of abortions is the mother’s lifestyle, as opposed to the baby’s life. In such cases, it is reasonable for society to expect an adult to live temporarily with an inconvenience if the only alternative is killing a child.

5

No child is a despicable “product of rape or incest” but God’s unique and wonderful image-bearing creation. Having and holding a child can do much more good for a victimized woman than the knowledge that a child died in an attempt to reduce her trauma.

6

In their book, Victims and Victors, David Reardon and associates draw on the accounts of 192 women who experienced pregnancy as the result of rape or incest. It turns out that when victims of violence speak for themselves, their opinion of abortion is nearly unanimous and the exact opposite of what most would predict: nearly all the women interviewed said they regretted aborting their babies conceived via rape or incest. Of those giving an opinion, more than 90 percent said they would discourage other victims of sexual violence from having abortions. Not one who gave birth to a child expressed regret.

7

Imposing capital punishment on the innocent child of a sex offender does nothing bad to the rapist and nothing good to the woman. Creating a second victim never undoes the damage to the first. Abortion does not bring healing to a rape victim.

8

The biblical view of children is that they are a blessing and a gift from the Lord (Ps. 127:3–5). However, Western culture increasingly treats children as liabilities. We must learn to see all children as God does, and we must act toward them as He commands us to act. We must defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed; rescue the weak and needy; and deliver them from the wicked (Ps. 82:3–4).

9

If it were possible for the unborn child to choose to be wanted or unwanted, the child would predictably and rightfully choose to be wanted. But if the alternative to being wanted is being eliminated, what kind of choice is that? Since the child cannot even make the choice (fruitless though it would be, considering the alternatives), there are those who make its choice for it by killing it, and then piously pretending that their killing is really not an act of murder but of mercy because it is done as a humanitarian favor to the child.

10

You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shall you destroy it after it is born.

11

Because we bear the image of God, all mankind, and, by extension, each and every human life has a “specialness” and worth that demands respect. Each human life, from its earliest stage of development, is a unique Person which bears God’s likeness, and should have the same protection of law that is afforded other “persons” in our society. For this reason, all human life should be respected in law. This respect is due regardless of the manner of conception, whether through the marital act, fertilized “in vitro” (IVF), or through the “ex utero” process of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT, otherwise known as cloning).

12

It is no more reasonable to destroy a child by abortion because it could not live if suddenly delivered than to drown a non-swimmer in a bathtub because he could not live if thrown into the middle of the ocean.

13

The Bible does not deal specifically with abortion. For that matter, it does not deal specifically with infanticide, the killing of babies. Nor does it talk about parricide, fratricide, uxoricide (killing of one’s wife), nor genocide (the killing of a whole race). Examples of such crimes are mentioned, but not singled out for special treatment. In fact, the Bible does not even discuss suicide (self-killing). There are specific provisions against homicide – the deliberate taking of human life (“killing” or “slaying” is the usual expression). The Bible prohibits the taking of innocent human life. If the developing fetus is shown to be a human being, then we do not need a specific commandment against feticide (abortion) any more than we need something specific against uxoricide (wife-killing). The general commandment against killing covers both.

14

The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.

15

Abortion – often referred to as the legal, systematic elimination of the most vulnerable members in our society – is one of the most heinous crimes known to man. I vehemently oppose it, and I ardently agree with the scriptural teaching regarding the origin of life at conception. My goal as a Christian has never been to force others to agree with me. Instead, my goal has been to rightly divide the Word of Truth. Abortion is a subject mentioned in political debates, but is primarily a subject found deep in the Word of God.

16

[In the Bible] the word “child” or “babe” is significant. The Greek word used for the pre-born is the same as the born. God does not distinguish the soul of the pre-born from the soul of one who has been born. God sees both as souls – children – who He has created.

17

Medieval authorities determine a person to be “alive” if there is either a detectable heartbeat or brain-wave activity. With that in mind, it is eye-opening to realize that unborn children have detectable heartbeats at two and one-half weeks and detectable brain-wave activity five and one-half weeks after conception. What is so shocking is that essentially one hundred percent of all abortions occur after the seventh week of pregnancy.

18

Former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop said, “In thirty-five years of medicine I have never seen one case where abortion was necessary to save a mother’s life.”

19

Though gradually, though no one remembers exactly how it happened, the unthinkable becomes tolerable. And then acceptable. And then legal. And then applaudable.

20

A. Scriptures about God’s effecting conception:
Gen. 29:31 – “the Lord opened her (Leah’s) womb”
Gen. 30:22 – “God opened her (Rachel’s) womb”
Judges 13:3-5 – “committed to God from the womb”
Ruth 4:13 – “the Lord gave her conception”
Luke 1:15 – “filled with Holy Spirit while yet in his mother’s womb”
B. Scriptures about God’s involvement in forming unborn:
Job 10:8-12 – “God knit me together with bones and sinews and granted me life”
Psalm 127:3 – “the fruit of the womb is a reward”
Psalm 139:13-16 – “God weaved me in my mother’s womb”
Eccl. 11:5 – “bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman”
Isa. 49:1,5 – “the Lord called Me from the womb…formed Me from the womb”
Jere. 1:5 – “before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I consecrated you”
Luke 1:15 – “filled with Holy Spirit while yet in his mother’s womb”
Luke 1:39-44 – “the baby leaped in my womb for joy”
Gal. 1:15 – “set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me through grace”
C. Scriptures to consider about alleged “sacredness” or “sanctity” of human life:
Gen. 1:26,27 – “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’”
Psalm 8:3-8 – “God made man a little lower than God”
D. Scriptures to consider if abortion is murder:
Gen. 9:6 – “whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”
Exod. 20:13 – “you shall not murder”
Exod. 23:7 – “do not kill the innocent or the righteous”
Prov. 6:17 – “God hates hands that kill innocent blood”
Amos 1:13,14 – “God punished those who ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead”
I Peter 4:15 – “do not let any of you suffer as a murderer”

21

How does a simple journey of seven inches down the birth canal suddenly transform the essential nature of the fetus from non-person to person?

22

Even if all the world were to combine forces, they could not bring about the conception of a single child in any woman’s womb nor cause it to be born; that is wholly the work of God.

23

America, as a nation, is highly committed by law and by practice to a form of mass murder…. 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.

24

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.

25
  1. Somewhere between 400% and 800% of suicide rates increase in women who have had abortions.
  2. Hypochondria, depression, withdrawal, guilt, shame, drugs, alcohol dependency, serious emotional trauma – all of these come from abortions.
  3. Six to seven times more women die each year from legal than illegal abortions.
  4. 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 have been two or more.
  5. Miscarriages are almost twice as common for women who have aborted. 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.
  6. Since about two or three women per hundred needs a blood transfusion, there is an increased risk of exposure to hepatitis and AIDS.
  7. Bleeding is more common in subsequent wanted pregnancies.
  8. Many researchers have observed subsequent premature births and low birth weights.
  9. Among women who have had abortions there is an increased risk of damage to the cervix.
  10. There is up to a 30% greater risk of pelvic infection.
26

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… 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!”

27

Abortion is often portrayed as benefitting women. Yet ironically when decisions are made on the basis of sex, girls are aborted far more often than boys. Out of eight thousand amniocentesis, that is abortions, done in Bombay, seven-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them were girls, one was a boy. This is true in China. You’re only allowed to have one child and if it’s a girl, they kill it. In one study in the United States, twenty-nine out of forty-six girls were aborted, only one out of fifty-three 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.

28

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 a 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.

29

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’s not natural instinct to a mother. She would have to be sold that by a culture that had become decadent.

30

Some of the things we can do to oppose abortion are:
1. Realize the urgency of the situation – each year over one and one-half million unborn babies are aborted. Over 5000 every day.
2. Realize that God’s judgment rests on a nation that allows or condones murder, unless it truly repents. Numbers 35:33 warns: “So shall you not pollute the land and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it except by the blood of him who shed it.”
3. Communicate to elected officials and legislators that God has His moral standards that we must honor, and that one of those standards condemns abortion.
4. Educate and organize your Christian friends to stand unashamedly for the sanctity of human life in their own communities and before their state legislators.
5. Establish and get involved with a local chapter of the Christian Action Council.
6. Keep yourself informed by subscribing to one of several good pro-life newsletters, such as Action Line (Christian Action Council), A.L.L. (American Life Lobby), etc.
7. Involve yourself in crisis pregnancy ministries in your local church, ministering to women with unwanted pregnancies.
8. Check with local Christian adoption agencies for the possibility of adopting an otherwise unwanted infant.
9. Consider taking unwed pregnant women into your home.
10. Teach your children about marital sexuality, the sanctity of human life, and the joy and beauty of pre-marital chastity.
11. Check with your Ob-Gyn and find out if he does abortions. If he does, drop him, and encourage other Christians to do the same.
12. Have funerals for children who die before birth.
13. Identify the Planned Parenthood Federation as an accomplice in this holocaust.
14. Write letters to editors of newspapers and elected officials about the holocaust. Push for pro-life legislation in your state legislature. Send petitions to your representatives.
15. Get involved in a sidewalk counseling program.
16. Leave denominations which are either pro-abortion, or which are not actively pro-life.
17. Pray Psalm 58 against abortionists.
18. Find out where political candidates stand on the issue of abortion.
19. Evangelize!! Evangelize!! Evangelize!!

31

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.

 

 

 

32

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.

 

 

33

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.

 

 

34

Ten Reasons Why it is Wrong to Take the Life of Unborn Children:

1. God commanded, “Thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13).

2. The destruction of conceived human life – whether embryonic, fetal, or viable – is an assault on the unique person-forming work of God.

3. Aborting unborn humans falls under the repeated biblical ban against “shedding innocent blood.”

4. The Bible frequently expresses the high priority God puts on the protection and provision and vindication of the weakest and most helpless and most victimized members of the community.

5. By judging difficult and even tragic human life as a worse evil than taking life, abortionists contradict the widespread biblical teaching that God loves to show His gracious power through suffering and not just by helping people avoid suffering.

6. It is a sin of presumption to justify abortion by taking comfort in the fact that all these little children will go to heaven or even be given full adult life in the resurrection.

7. The Bible commands us to rescue our neighbor who is being unjustly led away to death.

8. Aborting unborn children falls under Jesus’ rebuke of those who spurned children as inconvenient and unworthy of the Savior’s attention.

9. It is the right of God the Maker to give and to take human life. It is not our individual right to make this choice.

10. Finally, saving faith in Jesus Christ brings forgiveness of sins and cleansing of conscience and help through life and hope for eternity. Surrounded by such omnipotent love, every follower of Jesus is free from the greed and fear that might lure a person to forsake these truths in order to gain money or avoid reproach.

35

A conservative estimate of unborn babies killed in the world each year is 30 million – about a third of those in Russia. Romania is reported to have the highest abortion rate in the world (3 out of 4 pregnancies). In America, since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 made it legal to take the lives of an unborn baby for any reason, there have been about 43 million abortions. One baby aborted every 26 seconds, 151 every hour, 3,629 every day.

36

At this time in American history, (this) is one of the most powerful sentences a person can speak: “I do not want a child at this time.” It’s powerful, because in a world without God, and without submission to His will, the will – the “want” – of a mother has become the will of a god. I say it carefully and calmly and sadly: Our modern, secular, God-dethroning culture has endowed the will (the “want”) of a mother not just with sovereignty over her child, but with something vastly greater. We have endowed her will with the right and the power to create human personhood. When God is no longer the Creator of human personhood, endowing it with dignity and rights in His own image, we must take that role for Him, and we have vested it in the will of the mother. She creates personhood.

37

The offspring of the woman, Jesus Christ, came into the world to save women who have dethroned God, taken His place, defined personhood as tissue, and willed the death of their own child. It can’t be reversed, but it can be forgiven. That is why Christ died.

38

It is evil to justify killing (unborn babies) 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.

39

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.

40

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.

41

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.

42

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.

43

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.

44

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.

45

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.

46

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.

47

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.

48

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.

49

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).

50

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.

51

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

52

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.

53

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?

54

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!

55

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

56

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?

57

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.

58

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

59

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.

60

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.

61

Abortion is an affront to God’s sole and sovereign authority as the Giver and Taker of life. Abortion, like murder or suicide, asserts human beings as the ones who control life and death. But God the Creator alone has the right to determine when someone lives and dies, and abortion flies directly in the face of His authority.

62

No woman or man has a right to a private conversation with a doctor to conspire how to end someone else’s life. If the unborn are people, then we must protect them.

63

Scripture is clear: that womb contains a person being formed in the image of God. Any distinction between the unborn and a person (or a human and a person, for that matter) is both artificial and unbiblical. God recognizes the unborn as a person and designs the unborn for life from the moment of conception. While our culture is continually pushing against this idea, it is not possible to believe the Bible and deny that the unborn are persons. And once followers of Christ accept this, we can no longer sit idly by while people are mercilessly murdered in their mothers’ wombs.

64

Remember God’s character. He is the holy and righteous Judge of all, and He hates injustice. He detests the taking of innocent life, and He is the Judge of all who participate in it. God is the Judge of mothers who have aborted babies, fathers who have encouraged abortion, grandparents who have supported abortion, and friends who have advised abortion. God is the Judge of doctors who have performed abortions, leaders who have permitted abortions, pastors who have counseled people to have abortions, and legislators who have worked to make abortion possible.

65

God does not desire for you or anyone else to live with the pain of regret. It is altogether right to hate sin in your history. The pain of past sin is often a powerful deterrent to future sin, but don’t let it rob you of the peace God has designed for you in the present. Remember what Jesus said to a woman who had lived an immoral lifestyle: “Your sins are forgiven… Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:48–50). God desires that peace to be yours today… To all who trust in Christ, remember this… You do not walk around with a scarlet A on your chest, for God does not look at you and see the guilt of abortion. Instead, he looks at you and sees the righteousness of Christ. God restores, and he redeems. Even as we saw earlier, God has a track record of working all things, including evil things, ultimately for good.

66

State officials must know that we are serious about stopping abortion, which is a matter of clear principle concerning the babies themselves and concerning a high view of human life.

67

Certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity “(this godless) worldview” can be rolled back with all its results across all of life.

68

Though woman who choose to abort may be ignoring God’s moral standard in the moment, they rarely escape the lifelong guilt and heartache that results from their tragic choice. They have been designed by God as nurturers (cf. 1 Tim. 2:15; Tit. 2:4); they have God’s law written on their conscience (cf. Rom. 2:14-15); and they have often been manipulated into their decision by others (perhaps a boyfriend or husband). As a result, they are often scared by feelings of regret and shame even if they do not know the Lord (cf. Psm 32:3-4).

69

I tried to get my mind around the arguments from the so-called “pro-choice” position. Most of them could seem very defensible from the surface. Who am I to determine a woman’s “reproductive rights?” What’s wrong with removing meaningless tissue? Why not stop a pregnancy when you can spare a child the pain of entering this world disabled or subjected to a life of poverty? Why would any humane person willingly deny women access to “health care?” But when you dig just a little below the surface, you see how ridiculous these claims become. A baby with a face and heartbeat, sensitive to pain (early in the pregnancy) is not meaningless tissue. Taking a person’s life is not “health care.” It’s just the opposite. Personal reproductive rights are between a woman and God, but don’t ask me to fund it in any way with my tax dollars. For a moment leave out the Bible. Leave out what science says about DNA. Leave out a picture from an ultrasound. Can we please just get back to simple common sense?

70

So what are the issues government should be concerned about? There are many, but personally speaking, none are greater than the need to protect the lives of the unborn. Though I know of Christians that disagree with me on this, but if a man or woman supports abortion, I believe he or she, in my opinion, is immediately disqualified from office. I compare it to a dynamic leader that could be our greatest President in history but wanted to reinstitute the institution of slavery. Immediate disqualification.

71

[Abortion is] the most serious ethical issue that the United States has ever faced.

 

 

 

72

From sacred Scripture [2 Sam. 12:1-15; 1 Ki. 21; Mt. 14], we see representatives of the church not trying to become the state but offering prophetic criticism to the state – despite the potential consequences. The church is not the state, but it is the conscience of the state, and it is a conscience that cannot afford to become seared and silent.

 

73

The evangelical church’s chief strategies to end abortion have been to put pressure on abortion clinics and on elected officials. There is nothing wrong with these strategies; however, one strategy that has not been used or adopted widely is that of protesting those churches that support the ghastly murder of unborn babies. It is time for Christians to give prophetic criticism to the church, specifically to those churches that support abortion on demand or remain silent on this major issue…[and] when the church is silent in the midst of a holocaust, she ceases to be a real church.

74

The great tragedy of the last thirty years is not ultimately that the heathen, those who the Bible tells us “love death,” are killing their children.

75

The Christian Right stands now at a crossroads. Our choices are these: Either we can play the game and enjoy the honor that comes from being players in the political arena, or we can become fools for Christ. Either we will ignore the silent screams of the unborn so that we might be heard, or we will identify with the suffering and speak for those who are silenced. In short, either we will speak for the least of these, or we will continue to sell our souls for a mess of political pottage.

76

Christians should be at abortion mills, all of them, every day. And we should not be silent. What we should be doing is proclaiming the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We should be imploring butchers, butchers’ assistants, boyfriends, grandmothers, pregnant moms to turn from their sin, to repent and throw themselves on the mercy of God in Christ. We should be pleading with the blind that they not further sear their consciences, and dance across the precipice of hell. We should be calling men to be men, to protect rather than murder their children.

77

That which distinguishes man from the animal kingdom is the imago Dei, the image of God. The image of God has traditionally been identified with such things as rationality, self-consciousness, the exercise of dominion, and moral conscience. However, we must be careful in defining the image of God in wholly functional terms. The image of God is as much a state as it is a capacity. The image is not to be conceived as an end in a process whereby an unborn entity progresses into personhood. The image is a given, not a goal to which the fetus moves in its physiological development. No one denies that the fetus develops. But this development is not from non-person to part-person to full-person, but rather from full-person to the consummate expression and experience of all that personhood entails.

78

Less than half of 1% of all abortions are for rape. As horrible and devastating as rape is, I do not believe it justifies abortion.

1. It is not morally right to punish the child for the sin of his/her father.

2. While rape is an act of violence against the mother, so too is abortion.

3. It is never right to commit murder to alleviate suffering. It is not right to require the child to forfeit life in order to ameliorate the mother’s pain.

4. A child conceived by rape is no less human, no less a person with dignity and value, than a child conceived in love. Nowhere in Scripture is a person’s right to life conditional on how one’s life began.

79

I agree with Raymond Johnston, the director of CARE Trust, when he wrote in a newspaper article: “I personally am convinced that the destruction of the unborn on this massive, deliberate scale is the greatest single offence regularly perpetrated in Britain today, and would be the first thing an Old Testament prophet redivivus [revived; back to life] would reproach us for.”

80

Imagine a boy in the backyard calling to his dad, “Hey Dad, can I kill this?” What does the dad need to know before he can answer his son’s question? Just one thing: what is it? If it’s a cockroach, the dad will cheer his son on. If it’s the neighbor’s cat, it’s another matter altogether! The application of this commonsensical principle is this: determining what is in the womb determines how you will treat what is in the womb.

81

Try thinking of…the acronym SLED and you’ll see [the evils of abortion] even more clearly: Size. How big you are doesn’t determine who you are. Level of development. How developed you are doesn’t determine who you are. Environment. Where you are doesn’t determine who you are. Degree of dependency. How dependent you are on another doesn’t determine who you are… No amount of size or development or location or dependency makes you more human or less human than another.

82

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker or T-shirt that says, “Against abortion? Don’t have one.” It’s basically making the [point]: if you oppose abortion, good for you – don’t have one; but also don’t tell other people what they can and can’t do. I wonder why no one applies this to other issues: Against child abuse? Don’t do it. Against slavery? Don’t own one. Against rape? Don’t do it. The bumper sticker sounds compelling at first – until you stop and think about it.