Abortion Series

SE102404

STOP THE WORLD

4. Abortion

As we’ve seen today, Abortion is not new. It may be one of the hottest political topics in this nation for the last 30 years, but it’s not new. For instance, the Roman Empire had elaborate abortion laws, way more liberal than any country in 2004. When we place our current dilemma in historical perspective, we realize abortion spans every century and every culture with techniques ranging from herbally-induced abortions to ancient mechanical devices.

In fact, if you want to expand the issue to simply include unwanted pregnancies, then the scope is even wider historically because all societies have had a desire to be rid of pregnancies at difficult times:

- In ancient Canaan, the practice of child sacrifice was a crude form of abortion, dressing it up in religious ceremony.

- It was also common in ancient societies to simply abandon newborns because people lacked the money or skill to abort the child in-uteri.

- Parents abandoned almost all deformed babies. Many parents abandoned babies if they were poor.

- And most common of all, children were abandoned in the woods or on garbage dumps if they were female. In fact, this practice was still popular in China as late as the 1890’s.

Now, we may not wish to draw parallels between modern abortion and infanticide, but in purpose they are identical: Be rid of unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes for economic reasons, sometimes for religious, sometimes for social reasons, sometimes against public opinion, sometimes with public blessing.

So we may ask the question,

“if abortion is so pervasive, if all societies see the need for it, then why shouldn’t we see it as one of those unpleasant yet necessary parts of being human?”

Well, before we make any judgments about abortion, we need to be honest about where it comes from.

1. CHANGING RELIGIOUS CLIMATE

As humanism becomes the dominant public orthodoxy today, we’re told there is no role for God to play in creation. Chance, random processes are entirely responsible for our creation. Therefore, first conclusion, humans are like all other animals, perhaps a bit smarter, but there is absolutely no intrinsic, special value in human beings.

2. CHANGING SEXUAL MORES

Secondly, related to this, we live in a climate where sexual rules of conduct have changed. Humanism means there is no law giving God at the center, so no ultimate standard or anchor for ethics and that means we make up the rules.

Now, people have always had sexual liaisons outside marriage. But in almost every culture we’ve known this somehow doesn’t meet an IDEAL for sexual expression. However, because of the sexual revolution of the past 30 years, we’ve been saying,

“hey, if we get to make up the rules, why beat ourselves up about sex? We’re just like other animals, we’re sexual beings and we’re going to have sex. So let’s stop feeling guilty about it, let’s take the rules off of it and just do it.”

And “do it” we have, helped immensely by the invention of cheap and easy contraception. But interestingly, pregnancies didn’t stop happening. Less rules, meant more sex and more sex meant more pregnancies and especially more pregnancies that did not take place within marriages.

The result, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, has said, is that

“Current sexual mores, and the breakdown of the family demand abortion. At the same time, the availability of abortion contributes to a change in our sexual mores, and general family breakdown - truly a vicious cycle.”

So follow this progression: No real God, means the human animal has no special value and there are no ULTIMATE laws and no laws means sex rules are arbitrary and meant to be broken. Sex rules broken, means more babies - but not just more babies, more babies outside of the kind of unions that are best suited to care for them.

Therefore ABORTION on DEMAND.

It’s that simple. It’s like gas stations. We drive cars, so no one would think of outlawing gas stations. The existence of cars demands the need for gas stations. The existence of the current state of sexual practices in our day demands abortion. So why - with all this change demanding abortion – would Christianity continue to oppose it?

1. SERVE A CHANGELESS GOD

Well, mainly because Christians refuse to bow to humanism. The church doesn’t accept that God has no role to play in creation. A real God, means, principles revealed by God to be in keeping with his nature are not relative to a given time or context – no expiration date on them. Some local expressions of God’s principles may change from time to time, but the principles themselves are as firm and unchanging as God is.

2. PEOPLE MADE IN GOD’S IMAGE