Invaluable Life

We have in our bulletin a list of people who are serving in the military. It’s there for us to remember to pray for them, by name. It’s also there as a reminder that we should be thankful for them and their families. Many of them are deployed and serving in Iraq. We’d all love for them to be home instead, but they’re there, committed to their mission until it’s done. No one wants the loss of life that comes from war. It’s one of the ways that we have measured the magnitude of each conflict involving our nation through the years – how many lives has it cost? Right now, the toll in Iraq is around 4,000. If you could represent every 25,000 military members who died from combat-related deaths in each war, it would look something like this: (show graph - text for this is pasted after this sermon, below)

35 years ago, January, 1973, our Supreme Court legalized abortion through 2 court decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The combined effect of the rulings made abortion:

1) legal for any woman, regardless of her age, and

2) legal for any reason through the first 6 months of pregnancy, and for virtually any reason after that.

So, in 35 years this month, over 47 million babies have had their lives ended before they were ever born. Compared to the loss of American lives in war, it looks like this: (1840 crosses)

More than one in five pregnancies ended in abortion in 2005. 1 in 5. That makes the American womb more than 8X more dangerous a place to be than Iraq.

Abortion isn’t the only issue here. We have at least one state, OR, that has legalized physician-assisted suicides. Technology has sparked debates over embryonic stem-cell research, genetic manipulation, and euthanasia. On top of that are examples of environmental extremism and the erosion of the family – all of them really a human life issue at the heart.

How did we get here?

1. Evolutionary theory as a basis for belief

Throw out the fact of creation, throw out the idea of a Creator Who made all that is from nothing, and you throw out the sanctity of human life.

If we weren’t created, then all life is the same. Animals are just as important as any human. Baby trees are just as important as baby people. Our worth is no greater than any other living thing.

If we weren’t created, then the ones that deserve to survive are the ones most fit to survive. That’s what natural selection is all about, right? It’s what keeps the gene pool cleaner, right? The ones that are weak, that have some deformity, are naturally selected to die.

If we weren’t created, then there is no outside source for what’s right or wrong. Man is his own god, and my opinions about right and wrong are just as valid as anyone else’s.

2. The sexualizing of our society

I’ll be addressing this whole subject in a different message later in this series, but let me make this point: Abortion is mostly an issue of sexuality. When the outcome of sexual relationships is an unwanted pregnancy, the seemingly easiest answer is abortion. Pleasure without cost. Sin without consequences. At least, that’s what they want us to believe about it.

Ill - In Arizona an Iguana is considered an endangered species and there is a $500 fine for destroying an Iguana egg. In Florida, you can go to the beach and be fined $20,000 and be put in prison for a year for taking one Sea Turtle egg from the nest. Both those states consider what’s growing in those eggs to be worthwhile and yet in both states unborn babies in the womb can be legally killed and removed, and the person performing the removal will charge a fee for his work.

That’s the world’s thinking process when it comes to the unborn. It’s all based on convenience. Call him or her an “it” – a mass of tissue, an embryo, a fetus, not a person. If it gets in your way, get rid of it. Sin without consequences.

3. The slippery slope

Ill - Dr. Leo Alexander was a consultant to the Secretary of War in the Nuremberg Trials. He had open access to accused Nazi war criminals in the medical community. He wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1949, about the slippery slope – how the compassionate killing of the terminally ill set the stage for the Holocaust: “these crimes…had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude…That there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-germans.”