Jettisoning Genesis and the silent genocide¹

by Gavin Cox

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In Britain since the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, there have been nearly nine million abortions performed—that’s an average of 4,000 per week.² This is a truly shocking, sobering, and gut-wrenching statistic. It is nothing short of a silent genocide that has continued unabated in the half century since, and has been accepted by society and culture as a ‘normal’ part of ‘health care’ and ‘reproductive rights’ for all. Of course, taking Europe as a whole we can multiply such figures even further—and the worldwide death toll from abortion is mind-boggling.

Of course, the world is in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and the death toll has been tragic—at the time of writing, almost 550,000. However, annual abortion deaths are two orders of magnitude higher than those who have died from this coronavirus, which people are trying their utmost to prevent. Abortions are intentional deaths (murder) and the average annual death toll of unborn babies, astonishingly, exceeds 56 million.³ In addition, bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the Guttmacher Institute report that, every year, over 22,800 women tragically die from complications due to botched abortions, while a further 2–7 million women who survive unsafe abortions go on to suffer chronic complications (injury, sepsis and disease).⁴

As Bible-believing Christians, these statistics should make us hang our heads in shame and disbelief, stirring us to cry out in prayer and repentance to the Father of life.

The reason why abortion is so wrong is that it destroys a person made in the image of God and is an affront to the divine command to be fruitful and multiply. This is based upon the clear biblical doctrine of Creation, as revealed in Genesis 1:27–28, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth … ’.” The doctrine of the sanctity of life, from the moment of conception, is derived directly from Scripture.⁵

Eroding foundations

Britain was once considered a Christian nation by many people, one founded upon biblical principles. Of course, the same could have been said for many other countries. But our Judeo-Christian foundations have been incessantly eroded since the acceptance of evolutionary belief, which was working its insidious influence even before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859.⁶ His writings replaced, in the minds of those who accepted his ideas, the fundamental and unique concept of divine creation as revealed in Genesis. Creation as outlined in Scripture was exchanged for ideas of undirected processes of evolution, involving death of the unfit through millions of years of struggle and violence—the very antithesis of the “very good” origins revealed in Scripture.⁷ Evolution prepared the seedbed for the fruit that was to eventually grow within culture—including liberalisation of abortion laws, over a hundred years later, along with the wholesale abandonment of biblically based principles. We now live in a post-Christian culture.

Sadly, my own country, the UK has recently imposed abortion on the province of Northern Ireland, which previously had the strictest abortion laws in Europe.⁸ This followed an earlier vote by MPs in London, both to liberalise abortion and to extend same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland.⁹ And more recently, politicians attempted (but thankfully failed) in their attempt to hijack the UK domestic abuse bill to introduce abortion on demand.¹⁰ In the face of the godless agenda and bullying tactics of certain of our politicians, Christians must earnestly and prayerfully engage.

Pressuring the vulnerable

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According to The Christian Institute (UK) there is a dramatic rise in instances of health care professionals pressuring patients to have abortions. However, there have been many cases of misdiagnoses, whereby terminations were offered based on faulty information. For instance, a Scottish mother was pressured every week into having an abortion, after her baby was identified as having problems at 13 weeks of pregnancy. She refused, and has since given birth to a healthy boy. Another case centred around a misdiagnosis of spina bifida, where the patient was offered abortion ten times. The mother resisted, and her child was born healthy, only requiring a post-natal operation.¹¹ In June 2019 an expectant mother of 22 weeks, with learning difficulties, was pressured into abortion despite her protests and the wishes of her parents to adopt. Thankfully, after a massive online petition, the judge’s decision was overturned.¹² According to the Society for the Protection of the Unborn (SPUC), coercion to have abortions is commonplace, with patients regularly being misinformed as to what abortion involves.¹³ Without doubt, such worrying reports could be multiplied across other nations of the world.

Even more shocking in the UK is the dramatic rise in litigation against the National Health Service (NHS) for ‘wrongful birth’, whereby parents have sued the NHS for not aborting their babies whom they considered undesirable; an eye-watering £114 million (143 million US dollars) has been paid out since 1995. Two cases of children born with Down’s syndrome made recent headlines, with resulting litigation against the NHS eventually running to £10.5 million.¹⁴ More macabre still was the scandal of some UK hospitals being heated by medical waste including aborted babies. We live in desperately tragic times.

Restoring Creation’s foundations

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All this makes for grim and sad reading and we might be tempted to close our eyes in despair. Maybe some readers have even experienced the pain and guilt associated with abortion. There is forgiveness and healing available from our ever-merciful Creator, demonstrated through the cross of Christ. It is only through our Creator/Saviour Jesus that the image of God in us, marred by the Fall of our forefather Adam, can be renewed through Jesus Christ, the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). Only through Him can hearts and minds be changed regarding the abortion issue. When eyes are opened to the bankruptcy of the evolutionary philosophy that undergirds such moral issues, by the grace of God, world-views can be radically realigned to godly standards.

Accepting Genesis Creation as history provides a solid foundation for the hope of the new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). When it comes to the question of who can be saved, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). As a ministry, CMI exists to see people returned to a knowledge of Christ as Creator, Lord and Saviour.

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