Legalizing abortion: no-one is safe anymore
Compromise on ‘made in the image of God’ is taking us into Hitler’s
gas chambers
Photo by Piotr Ciuchta, www.sxc.hu
Children? Discarded like unwanted toys …
by Gary Bates
Published: 5 September 2008(GMT+10)
On 9 September, 2008 the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, Australia will consider
a bill to decriminalize abortion in that state. What is being proposed is nothing
short of horrific and there are lessons here for Christians and governments in all
democratic nations.
Under a model recommended by Victorian Law Reform Commission the government is proposing
the following:
- For pregnancies less than 24 weeks, a woman would be allowed to
have an abortion done by a medical practitioner for any reason.
- For pregnancies of more than 24 weeks gestation (in other words,
right up until the time of birth) abortion would be lawful if a doctor determined
that it was necessary to prevent risk of harm to the woman if the pregnancy continued.
As has been shown in other countries the ‘risk’ or harm may include
factors that merely impinge upon a woman’s social life.
The Australian newspaper reported that:
‘Julian Savulescu, who holds the Uehiro Chair of Practical Ethics at the University
of Oxford, said legislation before the Victorian parliament that would legalise
abortion on request before the 24th week of pregnancy was flawed, because it did
not give couples enough freedom over the number or the type of children they have
… .’1
He was advocating terminations purely on the basis that the sex of the baby might
be unsuitable for the parent(s).
Open the gate and the bulls will stampede
In the early days, those campaigning for legalized abortions argued that abortion
should be allowed when pregnancies were the result of incest or rape. Although these
are tragic circumstances the fact remains that the unborn baby is still fully human
and entitled to the inalienable right to life. Nevertheless, lawmakers in most countries
around the world acceded to validity of such arguments. In other words, by using
these worst case and incredibly rare scenarios the advocates of abortion have used
emotion to drive changes in the law as a loophole kind of argument. But in addition
to this, rampant feminism, supported in main by Hollywood celebrities screaming
‘Get your morals off my body’, has now created an environment where
if you oppose abortion for any reason (religious or medical) then you are labeled
as a woman-hater (although far more girl babies are aborted than boys). Similar
discrimination-labelling arguments are often used by various homosexual lobby groups.
Also, exploiting medical ignorance, abortion advocates promoted the idea that the
human fetus in the early stages of development was not fully human. In effect, they
told us that abortion was not really killing a baby.
Early-term abortions were sanctioned on the basis of some of these arguments (see
Refuting contrived pro-abortion arguments). All
these ideas were part of a ‘wedge tactic’. That is, get a foot in the
door, and then once open, the candy store is up for grabs. Now, the Victorian government
is pushing for the termination of unborn children right up to the time of birth.
How did we reach such a state? There is no question that the broad acceptance of
evolution within our culture, the idea that we evolved from apes, and tapeworms
and pondscum, is confusing the issue of what it is to be human. No longer are we
created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–28). But we are thought to be evolved
from animals, so where do you draw the line, in treating animals like people and
people like animals. The pro-abortion lobby has simply used this confusion to push
for the justification for abortion.
The power of ideas
But the idea that we are evolved from apes is not supported by the scientific evidence—it’s
based on speculation and, worse still, long abandoned arguments that are still circulating.
Even today, high schoolers and medical students are still exposed to pictures of
Haeckel’s famous frauds—the idea that
human embryos ‘recapitulate’ their evolutionary common ancestry, looking
no different from perhaps a pig, a chicken, a salamander or whatever—although
this idea has been known to be false for nearly 100 years.
I know of no country where it is legal to kill innocent people. I cannot grab a
gun or a knife and do away with another human being. So how come it is legal to
kill a human being while they are still in the womb? Surely, it can only be because
the unborn baby is not regarded as human. And there is no question that this false
idea is the fruit of evolutionary ideology.
But why is it actually legal to kill a human baby while it’s still in the
womb? I know of no country where it is legal to kill innocent people. I cannot grab
a gun or a knife and do away with another human being. So how come it is legal to
kill a human being while they are still in the womb? Surely, it can only be because
the unborn baby is not regarded as human. And there is no question that this false
idea is the fruit of evolutionary ideology.
While that may have been one of the original reasons, modern medical science now
clearly knows that every human life begins at the moment of conception. But the
gate was opened and now the bull is in the china shop wreaking havoc. Even many
pastors, church leaders and Christians are still hoodwinked into thinking that life
might only begin at some later stage in the development process. In fact, according to
research 18% of all US abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as
‘Born-Again/evangelical’.2
Because church leaders have accepted some of the faulty and since-disproven ideas
to justify abortion, they have not stood against this evil and have now opened a
veritable Pandora’s Box. As former US President Ronald Reagan once said:
‘The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What
is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and
legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s
body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and
for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected
by the law—the same right we have.’3
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, a potential future President of the United
States has a different view. Senator Barack Obama agrees
with rabid humanistic bioethicists that infanticide should be legal. That
is, killing a child even after he/she is born.
Same-sex arguments? Same problems
The same ‘my rights’ arguments are used by the homosexual lobby, including
emotive arguments as, ‘How dare you tell two people they cannot love each
other.’ This tries to portray any dissenting parties as bigots or lacking
in compassion, and is a similar wedge tactic designed to open up the floodgates.
Just prior to the last Federal Election in Australia in 2007, the push for same-sex
marriage became a major political issue and Australia’s largest Christian
lobby group became involved with the major political parties on the issue. To appease
those pushing for same-sex marriage, this lobby group agreed to allow a same-sex
register for homosexual couples. The Christian lobby group said, ‘If we didn’t,
they would have legalized same-sex marriage.’ This is not an acceptable reason
because the compromise has effectively given a stamp of ‘Christian’
approval of same-sex relationships contrary to the express teaching of Scripture.
And the compromise won’t stop the push against marriage but will only encourage
a further widening of the goalposts.
Once again this push on marriage is a consequence of evolutionary thinking. If Genesis
doesn’t mean what it says about origins, then one can dismiss the Creator’s
defining of marriage as being one man for one woman. If the biblically defined boundaries
are not adhered to then who is to say that a man and two women, or three women or
vice versa should not be allowed? Why shouldn’t this occur if all parties
‘love each other?’ Islamic groups too might well be in favour of relaxing
the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman for life.
Why should it stop there?
We would be fooling ourselves to think that it will just take a slight compromise
to stem the tide of same-sex marriage, and more. Similarly, abortionists initially
argued for first trimester abortions but now advocate killing up to the point of
birth. Already Peter Singer, Professor of bioethics
at Princeton University, is advocating a 28-day probationary period before the newborn
should be granted full human rights. With this sort of thinking no one is safe anymore.
It’s the sort of thinking that produced Hitlers’s gas chambers.
If this world was not created by God but it simply evolved on its own over billions
of years then there are no absolutes. And when there are no absolutes, anything
goes. The loss of moral absolutes in our societies has gone hand in hand with the
loss of authority of the Bible. And one of the leading reasons for this was the
theory of evolution and its attack on the most foundational of all books in the
Bible—Genesis. It was in this area, in the explanation for our origins, that
the gate was first opened. What you believed about the book of Genesis became relegated
to a matter of opinion because secular scientific views supposedly told us how we
really got here—we evolved and God had nothing to do with it. God is just
a human invention, a delusion as Richard Dawkins would say, so the secular ‘scientific’
view has priority.
Sadly many Christians have been fooled by the clever arguments of evolution and
have not been strong enough to stand on the truth of Genesis. Instead, they have
compromised, saying themselves that Genesis is not important and that perhaps God
used evolution, etc. Compromised views are, sadly, what is commonly being taught
in our Bible colleges and seminaries with devastating effects
on the moral backbone of evangelical Christianity. Without a knowledge of
the truth and the ability to defend the Bible, beginning at Genesis, many Christians
are too frightened to stand on what Genesis clearly says, and they don’t want
to upset others. History is replete with the fallacy of appeasing aggressors, such
as former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s
appeasement of Adolf Hitler. By not drawing the necessary ‘line in
the sand’ millions of people died unnecessarily in the conflicts that raged
across Europe during the Second World War.
We should not make the mistake of confusing appeasement with peacemaking. Decision-making,
discernment and action is always going to be required to give legs to our faith
(James 2:20).
Shockingly, the number of unborn children that have been killed in the US through
abortion is dozens of times more than in all the deaths that country has
suffered through all its wars. No one would disagree that wars are tragic,
yet we have all—including many Christians—become comfortable and accepting
of the murder of unborn children in our societies. We should not make the mistake
of confusing appeasement with peacemaking. Decision-making, discernment and action
is always going to be required to give legs to our faith (James 2:20). The judge is not us—it is the Bible—the
Words of the very Creator who created and gave us life in the first place. He certainly
considers human life is special, sacrificing His own life in place of ours so that
we may have eternal life.
Related articles
Recommended Resources
References
- Baby the wrong gender? Abort it, says expert, The Australian,
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24273462-5006785,00.html, 1 September
2008. Return to text.
- Abortion Facts, The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, www.abortionno.org/Resources/fastfacts.html,
1 September 2008. Return to text.
- The Human Life Review, Ronald Reagan, www.humanlifereview.com/reagan,
1 September 2008. Return to text.
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