I usually stay out of political debates, because legislation is not my business and legislating morality has never worked. The Mosaic Law is proof enough of that. No one can meet God’s standard of morality.
But the arguments going on right now about abortion laws are often insane and I’m going to post my position on the subject just so my position is there.
I’ve heard people talk about making exceptions for abortions in the case of rape and incest and how it proves that pro-lifers are actually sell-outs. Laws are about compromise and about reality and not about morality. I’m okay with granting exceptions in these situations because everyone who knows understands that these are such a small percentage of the actual abortions performed in the United States that I’ll take it to prevent 99.5% of abortions. (That’s right. According to a 2004 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, only .5% of abortions are the result of rape. See how I post sources for my statistics?)
So why do we hear so much about this? Because it’s the tragedy card. It must be awful for a woman to find out she’s pregnant as a result of being a victim of a crime. This case invokes sympathy from everyone, and rightly so. If we take this away from the argument, then people have to make an argument about abortions to spare someone from the consequences of their decisions and that’s not a great position to be in.
So much of our culture is about sparing people from the consequences of their decisions. I guess, for the most part, I’m okay with this because Jesus came to spare us all from the consequences of our decisions.
I am not judging. I have done plenty of stupid things in my life that I regret. Fortunately, as far as I know, none my of stupid mistakes resulted in long-term damage to someone else. This is not a position to look down on someone else, it’s just by God’s grace, I’ve never had to live for the rest knowing that I altered someone else’s life forever. Believe me, I’m grateful to God for that.
My sympathy goes out to people that are pregnant with babies that they never wanted. They are faced with lots of choices on how to deal with that situation and all of them are hard. They have my sympathy, they truly do, but they made choices that put them into that position. Again, I’m not judging, but part of being a grown-up is facing the consequences of our actions. Read Proverbs.
What I’m not okay with is saying that a baby must be murdered so that someone can be saved from the consequences of their actions.
This is where the pro-choice people scream, “You can’t prove it’s a baby! It’s just a fetus.” The answer is, you can’t prove that it’s not, either. Saying it’s not a baby is not based on scientific evidence or anything else. It is said because people want it to be true.
If I am standing on a street corner and a mother comes up in a stroller with a one-month old baby in it. She leaves the stroller for a second to look at a pair of shoes on sale at a sidewalk sale.
In the meantime, a man walks up with an ax and hacks the baby to pieces. If I stand by and watch this happen and do absolutely nothing about it, how would you feel about me? Legally, I’m free of any prosecution, but how would my friends and family feel about the situation?
So if the baby is, let’s say, six months younger, does that change my responsibility?
If, in my heart, I feel like there are around 700,000 babies murdered each year in my country, the Land of the Free, and I did nothing, what would you think of me?
I don’t do politics. Among the reasons is that legislating morality is not effective. We must attack sin at the root if there is to be true change in people’s lives.
But if I feel that this is a baby, am I not morally obligated to say something about it? Because, no matter what anyone says, I must live with my conscience and my conscience says that this is a baby and I applaud people who stand up for lives that other people don’t care about.
Regardless of what the law says, my heart says abortion is murdering a child. Everything else is window-dressing.