GOD IS AGAINST ABORTION
Dallas E. Henry & Eric J. Hanson (2017 update)
44 years ago today, on January 22, 1973, The Supreme Court made an incredibly poor decision. In deciding the case of Rowe vs Wade, The Court struck down the abortion laws in all 50 states, deciding that a woman’s right to privacy gives her the right to abort her unborn child. In the Court’s opinion, an unborn child was not a person as defined by the Constitution and was therefore not entitled to or guaranteed the right to life. Instead, the baby was nothing more than the property of the mother, to choose, along with her doctor, whether the child lives or dies.
Just one year earlier, in 1972, the Supreme Court amended the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 authorizing fines up to $500,000 in addition to jail time for destroying an unborn eagle in its egg.
It is very interesting that today, in all 50 states, if a pregnant woman is murdered, the suspect will be charged with two counts of murder. This is blatant doublespeak in the law. Either the unborn child is not a person, as Row vs Wade posits, or that child is a person, as the double murder statutes state.
Percentage breakdown of abortion “reasons”:
Babies that are aborted because of rape or incest is 1%.
fetal defects, 1%.
mother’s life endangered, 4%.
financial instability 66%.
interference with life choices 76%. (Some people indicated more than one reason.)
Abortion is the greatest of human tragedies – nothing compares to it – not even war: Counting all of America’s wars from 1775 to present we have lost 1.1 million Americans to battle. Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews claimed 6 million lives. The total dead in all theaters of World War II was 66 million people. The abortion total in our nation alone, since the 1973 legalization is already around 64 million. Worldwide, the numbers are more than 10 times as much!
The Abortion procedure is a modern-day holocaust. It is largely a holocaust against Black people, whose abortion rates are sky high. If you are an unborn baby, conceived to a black man and woman in New York City today, your chances of making out of the womb alive, are less than one in two. More than 60% of all such pregnancies get “terminated”.
God sees each unborn child as a person who is created in God’s image. Genesis 1:26-28 states “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created man; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.’”
We are all created in His likeness – Body, soul, and spirit, intentionally created for a relationship with God.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made Psalm. 139:13-16: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
We were known before being formed in the womb Jeremiah 1:5 states “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
God sees each unborn child as His possession. Psalm 139:13 states “For You have possessed my inward parts; You have covered me in my mother's womb.”
As the One who authors life, God does not just know every part of me, He possesses me. I am His divine creation. I only have life because He breathed life into me.
God sees each unborn child as purposeful. (Psalm 139:16) The days of my life have been mapped out in advance beginning with my embryonic members and each stage of my development process.
A well recognized professor at a world famous medical school proposed to his class an ethical question. Mother has TB. Father has syphilis. They have four children. One is blind, one has died, one had TB, and one is deaf. The woman is informed that she is pregnant. The parents come to you and want to know if they should have an abortion. What advice would you give them? Every group advised the parents to have an abortion. With that decision, they would have aborted Beethoven.
Spiritual Warfare
What can Christians do in the wake of abortion? The first thing is to pray and draw near to God and ask for His intervention. Abortion is a spiritual problem – and it is foolish to think that we can fight a spiritual battle in our flesh with earthly weapons. In fact, Abortion is a very clear street level example of spiritual warfare, as the forces of Satan attempt to kill, steal, and destroy, ultimately killing off Western Culture altogether, and replacing it with rapidly expanding Islamic populations.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power… For or struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Eph. 6:10-12
Christians need to vote and elect people into office who will promote life. We can support other ministries that work to prevent abortion. We also need to encourage people who are faced with abortion to let their baby live.
Christians can also peacefully protest, using non-violent means to voice our outrage.
May we dare to believe that, by the grace of God and the perseverance of His people, in prayer and piety and political pressure, there could emerge in the coming decades a consensus for life, and perhaps in this 21st century, we could look back at state approved abortion with the same dismay that we look back on the slave laws of this land and on the concentration camps of World War II. Nationwide reformation has happened before – with Wilberforce in England and with Lincoln in America. It can happen again.
May God help us as we stand for the unborn!
One step at a time
Charlmaine Yoest
The pro-life movement 20 years ago moved away from an all-or-nothing position that wasn't accomplishing much—a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, or nothing—to an all-or-something position: We'd like an amendment but we can't get it now, so let's save as many lives as we can. We've already established that I'm a football fan, and my 16-year-old son is a quarterback, so I'll mix metaphors: Sometimes you go for that "long bomb" pass, but you've got to get those 10 yards for a first down, so a lot of times it's a ground game of moving that ball relentlessly down the field. Our goal is a touchdown, but you get it by moving the ball little by little.
And are we doing that? In this past year's legislative sessions, 28 pieces of pro-life legislation passed across this country, that were based on our model legislation. We are seeing a downward trend in the overall number of abortions: We can't point to one specific reason why, but pro-life legislation at the state level is part of why you're seeing this downward trend.
What legal changes have been the most helpful? The research of Michael New (U. of Michigan-Dearborn) has found that depending on whether you have parental notification or parental consent, and parental consent that is one-parent or two-parent, on that continuum you can guess there's a 12-to-25 percent decrease in abortion in a particular state.
Is defunding Planned Parenthood important? Why does abortion persist in this country so long when most Americans are against it? One million dollars per day of our tax dollars subsidizes the world's largest abortion provider. Our attorneys put together what we called "The Case Against Planned Parenthood," a report this summer that showed what Planned Parenthood has been doing with its funding.
What about women being able to see their babies on sonograms? Informal studies show decreases in abortion associated with ultrasounds, and the people working in pregnancy care centers see that they can be extremely effective.
Clinic regulation? The story broke earlier this year in Philadelphia of a doctor facing the death penalty for murdering babies after birth. The American people were horrified when they heard of his clinic conditions, but in plenty of other clinics across this country exactly the same thing is going on.
What about the personhood amendment that lost in Mississippi? There is not a pro-lifer out there who does not believe that the unborn baby is a person, but there are different strategies for defending life in law. My AUL colleague Clarke Forsythe (see WORLD, Jan. 29, 2011) was the intellectual architect of fetal homicide laws, now passed in 38 states across the country. They are a very effective way of establishing the personhood of an unborn baby.
The Mississippi amendment would have defined an embryo as a person from the moment of fertilization, but it was very broadly written. That made it easy for the other side to come in and make really wild allegations about what it would do. We are working to educate people, who are energized by the idea of defending the personhood of the unborn, that there are several different ways of going about it.
Twenty years ago pro-life leaders were asking whether younger people would be pro-life. What are you seeing now? The data are clear: This generation of young people is much more pro-life than their parents were. Part of the reason is that we're on the side of science, of technology. This is the post-sonogram generation. The first baby picture in their baby books is a sonogram picture. Sonograms are not just getting stuck on the refrigerator, they're getting put on YouTube and set to music, linked on Facebook, shared via Tumblr and Twitter, and sent all the way around the world in the time it takes to finish the sentence. I love being on our side of the issue!
Copyright © 2012 WORLD Magazine
January 28, 2012, Vol. 27, No. 2
Race, Poverty and Abortion
By Political Calculations
1/17/2012
How are the number of annual abortions in the United States distributed by race? And how does that compare to the distribution of the potential child-bearing (Age 15-44) population of the United States by race? Or for that matter, how does that compare to the racial distribution of the poor in the United States, as measured by enrollment of the non-elderly in Medicaid?
Our chart below provides the demographic snapshot of what we found in answering each question asked above, for the years spanning 2008 through 2010:
Data Sources
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abortion Surveillance - United States 2008. Table 21. Reported Abortions, by Known Race/Ethnicity, Age Group, and Marital Status of Women Who Obtained an Abortion --- Selected States, United States, 2008. 60(SS15);1-41. 25 November 2011.
Kaiser Family Foundation. Distribution of the Nonelderly with Medicaid by Race/Ethnicity, States (2009-2010), U.S. (2010).
U.S. Census Bureau. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012. Table 10. Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Age: 2000 and 2009.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2009 Population Estimates. T4-2009: Hispanic or Latino by Race.
Political Calculations
Political Calculations is a site that develops, applies and presents both established and cutting edge theory to the topics of investing, business and economics.
Dear Eric ,
As you know, this upcoming Sunday marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Since this tragic decision, over 51 million unborn children have been destroyed in the womb, and that many mothers left hurt. 1.2 million abortions are performed each year. That’s 3,228 per day, 137 per hour, 1 abortion every 26 seconds.
This grim anniversary causes Americans of conscience to act. Some attend a local pro-life rally, others board a bus and travel through the night to the annual March for Life here in Washington. Others will bow their heads in prayer and beg for an end to the bloodshed.
No matter what your plans are next week, I am asking you to take just 60 seconds right now to be a voice for innocent unborn children in the womb by urging your elected officials to defend Life. After you’ve taken action, I urge you to forward this message to at least five or ten of your like-minded friends and members of your family.
Simply use the SBA List Action Center to send an instant message to all of your federal and statewide elected officials asking them to defend Life.
With one click, send a message to:
• President Obama & Vice President Biden
• Your 2 U.S. Senators & Your U.S. House Representative
• Your Governor & Lieutenant Governor
• Your State Senator & State House Representative
Take Action Now: Tell your elected officials to do everything they can to get taxpayers out of the abortion business and defund Planned Parenthood.
With your help, we will flood the inboxes of thousands of elected officials across the country and urge them to stand up for Life, especially as many state legislatures are convening this month as the House and Senate begin the second session of the 112th Congress.
Eric , I know the statistics I pointed out earlier are saddening to say the least. But I hope you’ll take comfort in the fact that momentum in the battle to save lives is on our side.
Just last year in Congress, the pro-life House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood and passed both the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and the Protect Life Act. Furthermore, the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation into Planned Parenthood. And at the state level, 92 pro-life laws were passed in 24 states, an all-time high. And nine states stripped Planned Parenthood of over $61 million in taxpayer funding.
There is no doubt about it: These successes are because of YOUR unrelenting activism and voice for unborn children.
But we must keep up the momentum, and we must grow our voice by urging our friends and family to take action as well.
Please take just 60 seconds today to speak up for the voiceless and then pass this message on to as many like-minded friends as possible.
Finally, hit “reply” to this e-mail to let us know how you plan to remember the lives lost due to abortion as the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade comes upon us this Sunday. We’ll be sure to share some of the responses with the SBA List family.
Thank you for being a voice for unborn children and their mothers.
For Life,
Marjorie Dannenfelser
President, Susan B. Anthony List
www.sba-list.org
Business No, Government Yes
Embryonic Stem Cell Research
January 16, 2012
Once again, government rushes in where business fears to tread.
Just before Christmas, the National Institutes of Health made three more lines of embryonic stem cells eligible for federal funding.
Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that a month before, a major private company decided that there was no profit in embryonic stem cell research?
You see, in November, the drug company Geron announced that it would be abandoning its embryonic stem cell research program. Geron was a leader in the embryonic stem cell field, the first company to be approved to run trials with these stem cells.
Geron’s particular project — treating spinal cord injuries — was incredibly ambitious, and Geron’s willingness to spend money on it showed a seemingly unshakeable faith in the power of embryonic stem cells.
So why did Geron abandon the trial? I wish I could say that it was for ethical reasons, but that is not the case.
Its decision was due to the hard facts of economics: There’s no market for a product that doesn’t work! As you probably know, for years we’ve been told that the use of embryonic stem cells, which destroy human embryos — that is, people — will lead to miracle cures for all kinds of diseases and conditions. The problem for embryonic stem cell advocates is that they failed to produce a single cure.
Geron’s decision shows that private companies will not put funds into something which has no possibility of profit. Drug companies all the time spend billions because they know it will pay when they get the results. But the cold economic reality here was that Geron had to abandon embryonic stem cells research because it isn’t economically viable.
But economic reality is clearly no barrier to the federal government, which barely a month later decided to make more taxpayer funds available for this ethically barbaric and ultimately unprofitable line of research. Scientists want the money to do research whether there is any payoff at the end or not.
Never mind that adult stem cells, which are produced without the destruction of embryos, are continuing to show promise and are already being used to treat over 70 diseases and medical conditions. Just this year, a team of UCLA researchers showed they can be used to engineer blood cells that could attack skin cancer. They hope this discovery will lead to treatments of other types of cancer as well. And a firm in Israel has recently started using them to slow the progress of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
All of this goes to show that we can care for the sick and suffering and use the best science to help them without destroying other lives, as embryonic stem cell research does. Scientific advancement and the sacredness of human life don’t have to stand opposed to each other.
But when it looks like they do, we are right to stand for the sanctity of life.
Scientific knowledge can change, of course – in fact, it does so all the time. But the fact that human lives are precious and made in the image of God will never change. And when we ignore that, it seems like the science and even the economics don’t work out very well.
The Culture of Death Grows Desperate: War Declared on Crisis Pregnancy Centers
By Albert Mohler|Published Date: January 17, 2012
Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Crisis pregnancy centers deserve the support of all who cherish the sanctity of life, the defense of the unborn, and the right of free speech.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s declaration of war upon the unborn in its infamous 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, caught most conservative Christians unprepared and unaware. This shock to the nation’s conscience required Christians and other pro-life activists to develop arguments, strategies, and organizations in order to confront the Culture of Death and the legalized killing of the unborn.
The Roe v. Wade decision was quickly repackaged by pro-abortion forces into a “pro-choice” argument that was intended to avoid the scandal of being pro-abortion. Nevertheless, the pro-choice mantra never really worked as a public relations strategy for pro-abortion forces for one simple reason: the only “choice” the pro-abortion forces would accept or respect is the choice to abort.
If that sounds extreme, just consider recent developments in cities like Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco. First in Baltimore and then in New York City, municipal governments passed laws intended to shut down or curtail the work of crisis pregnancy centers in their cities. The crisis pregnancy centers have been among the most important platforms for saving unborn human lives and reasserting human dignity. This is especially true in more recent years, as many of these centers have begun using sophisticated ultrasound imaging technologies in order to show pregnant women the unborn babies within them.
These centers are staffed by brave workers and an army of volunteers who are committed to counsel women against killing their unborn babies. The ultrasound images have been massively important in this counseling process. Once the woman sees the unborn life within her, the chances of that baby surviving to live birth are tremendously enhanced.
As one abortion rights activist famously declared, “The fetus beat us.” When the fetus is seen for what it really is, the mother has a much harder time deciding to abort it. Crisis pregnancy centers generally offer a variety of services, ranging from counseling and adoption services to medical care and support for new mothers. All this is too much for the abortion industry, which rightly sees crisis pregnancy centers as their increasingly powerful opposition.
In Baltimore, government officials severely tried to curtail the ability of crisis pregnancy centers to do their work, only to have their law set aside by a federal judge. In recent days, the same thing has happened in New York City, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Christine C. Quinn, Speaker of the City Council, pushed through a law that would have required crisis pregnancy centers to state upfront whether they offer abortion services and so-called “emergency” contraceptives and whether they have a licensed medical provider at the location.
As David W. Chen reported in The New York Times, “The City Council had enacted the law in March, framing it as a matter of consumer protection and truth in advertising, not long after Naral Pro-Choice New York released a report saying it had found crisis pregnancy centers using deceptive tactics and false claims to dissuade women from having abortions.”
Note that the law was tied to this report by Naral Pro-Choice New York, a local affiliate of the nation’s leading abortion rights group. Consider also the fact that 40 percent of all pregnancies in New York City end in abortion (and fully 60 percent of all pregnancies to African American women). Those horrendous and chilling percentages are evidently not enough for the abortion industry and its ideological supporters. They want to shut down crisis pregnancy centers or render them ineffective.
As in Baltimore, a federal judge has blocked the New York City law, at least for now. The city is expected to appeal.
Now, city officials in San Francisco have launched their own effort to shutter crisis pregnancy centers, claiming that staff at the centers impose “anti-abortion propaganda and mistruths on unsuspecting women.”
Note the reference to anti-abortion arguments as “propaganda,” as if there could only be one side to the issue. Dennis Herrera, the San Francisco city attorney who is running for mayor, called the crisis pregnancy centers “right wing” and “politically motivated.” There was no acknowledgment of the fact that pro-abortion groups, such as Planned Parenthood, are “left wing” and “politically motivated.” Furthermore, given the millions of dollars of income made by Planned Parenthood and other major components of the abortion industry, the phrase “financially motivated” should be added as well. Where are the calls for honesty from Planned Parenthood?
The way this issue is framed by many in the major national media was made clear in an August 2, 2011 report in The New York Times. Reporter Jesse McKinley began his article with this remarkable sentence:
“Seeking to stem what they call misleading advertising, San Francisco officials on Tuesday began a two-pronged attack on ‘crisis pregnancy centers,’ which are billed as places for pregnant women to get advice, but often use counseling to discourage abortions.”
Look carefully at that sentence. The conjunction “but” is intended to contrast the phrases linked together. Thus, McKinley writes that the crisis pregnancy centers “are billed as places for pregnant women to get advice,” but they “often use counseling to discourage abortion.” In other words, he insinuates that if crisis pregnancy centers “use counseling to discourage abortions,” they are not “places for women to get advice.” Evidently, the only acceptable “advice” is counseling that encourages a woman to abort the baby within her.
This is the logic of the Culture of Death laid bare for all to see. Crisis pregnancy centers deserve the support of all who cherish the sanctity of life, the defense of the unborn, and the right of free speech. As defenders of life, crisis pregnancy centers should be committed to nothing less than comprehensive truth-telling. It is the Culture of Death, not the Culture of Life, that fears the truth.
Planned Parenthood Now Exporting Genocide
By Steven Aden
Last year, Planned Parenthood committed nearly 330,000 abortions, received almost $500,000,000 in taxpayer subsidies, and started a texting campaign so that girls as young as 14 can interact with the abortion provider and receive propaganda from the same. And that was just in the United States. The latest news is that Planned Parenthood is now thinking large, and hopes to bring their existing international abortion services up to par with what they’ve done in the U.S.
In other words, they’re pursuing death on an even grander scale. What a worthy pursuit.
And it appears Africa will be ground zero for this new growth. There, between now and 2015, Planned Parenthood hopes to increase their “abortion services” by 82 percent. In hard numbers, such an increase will mean more than 212,000 “services” by 2013 and nearly 274,000 by 2015.
To be fair, Paul Bell, of International Planned Parenthood Federation, is quick to point out that these figures aren’t intended to be a raw indicator of the number of abortions that will be performed in Africa. Instead, he contends that the “numbers seen in relation to abortion services include post abortion care services following unsafe abortion, counseling services related to abortion, post-abortion family planning services and safe abortion services, including medical and surgical abortions.”
(It’s hard not to notice how many different times and in how many different contexts Bell used the word “abortion” to assure us that the new Africa numbers aren’t about “abortion,” per se. And do you wonder, like I do, why Planned Parenthood needs to offer “counseling services related to abortion” if it’s a “simple medical procedure” as they insist it is? I don’t remember being “counseled” after my colonoscopy.)
In other portions of Planned Parenthood’s “Strategic Plan” for broadening the international reach of their scalpels and their propaganda machine, there are specific numbers on the increases the abortion provider hopes to see in family planning by 2015 as well. The two crucial numbers here are the 68 percent increase in the number of “new users” of family planning services and the 64 percent increase in the overall volume of planning services.
Here it’s important to note that the “Strategic Plan” which so frequently mentions family planning and abortion, but isn’t meant to give the impression of increase in abortions per se, doesn’t mention “abstinence” or “adoption” even once. And to be honest, this makes it look like a common-sense approach to avoiding pregnancy (abstinence) or choosing to see a pregnancy to term and allowing another couple to raise the child (adoption) aren’t going to rank very high in the “family planning” Africans are going to receive.
Abortion has killed sixteen million African-Americans in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, by many accounts. No matter how one slices it, Planned Parenthood’s goal of matching that record overseas is ignoble at best, blood thirsty at worst, and it portends the cultivation of a culture of death in Africa like the one that the abortion mammoth long ago began perpetrating in the U.S.
Steven Aden
Steven H. Aden is senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund
