“Did not He who made me in the womb make them?
Did not the same One fashion us in the womb?”
“What about child abuse?”
As I shared in the opening of this piece, I recently discussed abortion with a couple of colleagues that left me stunned. One believed abortion should be legal because the death penalty is legal. The other sees abortion as an answer to child abuse.
“If you’ve worked with unwanted and abused children, you’d understand why abortion is needed,” he said.
“So, to protect children from abuse we should kill them,” I asked.
“Well...yeah.”
To his reasonings, I reiterate the faithfulness of God’s character and His ability to bring good from evil. Further, I would ask all who’d cling to such reasoning to place the onus back on the parents who chose to engage in the very activity that creates children, for a better statement would have been, “If you’ve worked with unwanted and abused children, you’d understand why abstinence is needed.”
It is not a sin to not want children. The issue comes when one waits until a life is created to rid themselves of the children they don’t want. To hold this position requires one to skip steps, pass “go” and treat the unborn as if they were created out of thin air. Meanwhile, the only immaculate conception in history was God using Mary to carry, birth, and raise Jesus in the flesh. Everyone else knows EXACTLY where their unplanned child came from and the part they played in creating him or her. There are abused and neglected children in the world because their parents and/or caregivers are abusing them, not because there’s a group of people who support their right to live. We are not the enemy.
Indeed, there are numerous reasons people support murdering the unborn, though not a single one valid. No reason I’ve heard holds merit before God, as such, it also doesn’t hold through to its logical conclusion. This goes for the aforementioned as well as for the following.
“It’s just a clump of cells.”
A single cell is the basic unit of LIFE, so that “clump” is life indeed. Moreover, unless one has had intercourse with another species (which is a sin), that “clump” is also HUMAN. That’s science. That’s truth. For God knows us BEFORE we are even formed in our mother’s wombs, as He is life eternal and all life in creation begins with Him (Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:16; Job 31).
“Women should be able to abort until the child is viable.”
The unborn rely on their mothers for their growth and development just as those outside the womb do, for even those born still require nurturing, assistance and care to develop into fully functioning members of society. Based on the “viability” argument, babies born prematurely should skip the trip to the NICU and be executed on sight. So too those who live with the aid of pacemakers and ventilators. Taking the viability argument further would mean a class preschoolers could be murdered without issue because they can’t yet speak in full, coherent sentences, their reasoning faculties are limited, and they too can’t yet survive on their own. A mother’s womb is simply a haven for a child to grow and should be the safest, most nurturing and peaceful places of their existence, not an execution chamber.
“Pro-life supporters don’t care about lives outside the womb.”
Life is valuable inside and outside the womb. It’s why many pro-life proponents work and volunteer in fields that address the needs of others - as this pro-choice Twitter user was surprised to learn. Our disagreement with certain public policies doesn’t dictate our ability or willingness to look out for our fellow man. So until someone can provide the study which supports the claim that we “only care about lives inside the womb”, this defense has no credence and is simply a strawman argument meant to deflect from the topic at hand.
I SAID ALL OF THIS TO SAY…
Most who support abortion KNOW that it's evil, which is why they defer to rare and extreme cases to offer it justification; it’s why they harp on the worst of hypothetical situations to appeal to raw emotions; it’s why they deflect with strawman arguments and ad hominem attacks; and it’s why they try to wholly remove God, their creator, out of the equation.
Yet no individual who had no say in their own birth - who woke up this morning and are breathing by God’s grace with all of their sins and shame before Him- should feel it their “right” to take an innocent life. For if anyone deserves to die, it is surely those of us who have lived long enough to actually practice sin and iniquity. Yet and still the Lord extends to us His mercy, allows us to live, and has provided a way for us to live life abundantly (through Christ in this life and with Christ in eternity).
The unborn are innocent and deserve the right to live and glorify their Creator, for it is God who knits them together. Who are we to interrupt His work, and how dare we presume we have the right to do so? Humanity is made in His image, so it’s His choice!
But so goes a society where God isn’t truly known, loved and reverenced. So goes a society that’s gone so far down the slippery slope of rebelling against God’s design for the family order and His intentions for sex and sexuality. It’s like Adam + Eve all over again. There are parents according to the flesh who do what is right in their own eyes, despite God’s counsel, thus their offspring are perishing. For the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) and, in the case of abortion, generations of children have died thanks to the sins of those God appointed to give them life.
May their parents find repentance, forgiveness and healing in Christ Jesus.