Twenty-four long years ago the Supreme Court enacted abortion rights legislation. They called it reaching a decision, but how can you “interpret” something our constitution never dealt with? The answer is that you find a clause that contains the word privacy, and, voila!, that sentence must mean that a woman is able to exercise the right of privacy over her own body.
If this is not the exact situation of what happened in Roe vs. Wade all those years ago, it’s close enough to communicate the silliness of the logic of the “decision.” Since that time there have been some occasional arguments advanced trying to soothe people’s consciences, uh, I mean, trying to explain the validity of the practice. Seldom (try never) has an apologist emerged that could say anything more intelligible than, “A woman has a right to her own body.” It is rarely pointed out that if she had exercised that right properly, she would not be considering an abortion in 99+% of the cases.
The pro-choice crowd has no intelligent spokeswoman, but they don’t need valid arguments because they have the law, the liberal media, and emotion on their side. The Supreme Court effectively wiped out the laws of 46 states which made abortion illegal. The media have for years on this cold, anniversary date shown three seconds’ footage of frozen marchers and a brief clip of a speaker; then (out of their extreme sense of “fairness”) they interview one of the twelve brave feminists in a warm room somewhere meeting to “protect the liberties of all women.” When it looks as if any restriction will be placed upon abortion “rights,” they run to their closets and start waving coathangers frantically.
In other words, when it appears that the majority is on your side, you don’t have to prove anything. Over the years one feminist strategy has been to present this as a woman’s issue which is being opposed by MEN whose highest goal in life is to keep women barefoot and pregnant. Now does that notion make even a little bit of sense? Even among those who are pro-life, the vast majority of them have only two or three children. Some pro-life couples have more, like the Catholic woman we knew in Peoria who had given birth to 18! I never saw her barefoot, but she had to have spent several years in pregnancy. Anyway, she was opposed to abortion (birth control, too, apparently).
Not only do a large percentage of women oppose abortion, a tremendous number of men support it. Now that’s not hard to figure, is it? If you were a young pup enjoying the sexual revolution, and the woman who’d been sharing your fantasies suddenly announced she was pregnant, what would you do (besides swallow your bubble gum)? This free-and-easy lifestyle is thunderously threatened! But then she says, “I think I’d better have an abortion; we’re not ready to be parents.” “Whew!” he thinks, having already estimated what a child is going to cost him from infancy through college graduation. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he acquiesces. He is so thrilled at not having to bear the consequences of his actions that he offers to pay for it. It’s a bargain for him. Then he gets to continue to act irresponsibly. Wouldn’t you think this entire sordid sequence of thoughts would dawn on at least one major feminist? Why hasn’t even one of them advocated keeping the child and making the male chauvinist pay?
The “Fetus”
Some people enjoy playing semantic games; one invented by feminists is to call the unborn child a “fetus,” which is so nondescript and not nearly so personal as “baby.” Until the feminist movement began to influence society (with the help of the media), when did a doctor ever say, “Good morning, Mrs. Gray, how are you and the fetus doing”? When did a wife ever tell her husband, “Honey, I felt the fetus move today”?
Nobody in her right mind would deny that the “fetus” is a human being. Not only have pictures of the developing child been available (long before Roe vs. Wade), but now surgical procedures are being performed two to three months before birth to correct the baby’s health problems. Biblically, there has never been a question of the child’s humanity. Consider Mary and Elizabeth.
When Mary was informed that she was chosen to bear Jesus (Luke 13:31), she was also told that her cousin Elizabeth had conceived a son in her old age (Luke 1:36). Mary went to visit her and stayed from the sixth month to the ninth month, but she departed before John was born (Luke 1:36, 39, 56). Notice that Elizabeth’s son “leaped in her womb” when Mary greeted her (Luke 1:41). He didn’t just wiggle a little; he leaped. The Greek word, consistently translated “leaped,” is used only three times in the New Testament: Luke 1:41 & 44; Luke 6:23 is quoted below.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy!
For indeed your reward is great in heaven,
For in like manner their fathers did to the prophets.
The leaping of Luke 6:23, which is enjoined upon men, is the same done by the “babe” in the other two verses. According to Kittel the Septuagint also uses it in Joel 1:17 (our v. 18) of “calves tearing at their stalls in fear” (7:401). In the New Testament, however, the leap is one of joy.
The second thing about Luke 1:41 and 44 is that the Greek word translated “babe,” referring to the child in his sixth month of development is the same word that is used of Jesus after his birth in Luke 2:12 and 16. In other words, God makes no distinction; a “babe” or a “child” is such whether in or out of the womb. God did not use a neutral word for the child in the womb and then assign him human status after birth; the “fetus” is always regarded as a human being.
Guess who agrees with this assessment? If you chose Margaret Sanger, “the mother of the modern-day birth control movement and the founder of Planned Parenthood,” you got it right. William D. Watkins, in his book, The New Absolutes, lists several quotations from the founder of the agency that performs the most abortions annually (and that recommends many more).
On the status of the fetus, Sanger wrote, “No new life begins unless there is conception. From this beginning grows the embryo which in time becomes a child.” Abortion kills life. Birth control “prevents the beginning of life” (79).
Whether or not Sanger would agree with her organization today is speculation. The fact is, however, that she stated it correctly in 1934. She also called abortion “repulsive,” “cruel, wicked, and heartless,” “abnormal, often dangerous” and “an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn” (78-79).
Selfishness and Guilt
Watkins’ book contains several quotations from women who have been honest enough to admit that they wanted their abortions for purely selfish reasons.
“There was no question about this pregnancy. I really don’t want the hassle. I don’t want to be bothered with a baby, and that’s the cold, hard truth” 157).
“I had three abortions in five years. . . . I have to say that I had my abortions for convenience. The reasons were selfish” (157).
Of course, feminists disguise this motivation by emphasizing a woman’s “rights,” all the while denying the child, a separate human entity, any rights whatsoever. Groups such as Planned Parenthood also fail to warn women that they may be plagued with guilt. And while some women claim not to experience any, others are engulfed and consumed by it.
“I chose to abort my baby in January of 1980. I was seventeen years old. The tremendous guilt and sense of loss since then have, at times, been insurmountable. I tried, for nearly five years, to justify my decision to abort. “I was too young,” “I was going to college in the fall,” “Where would I be now if I had a baby,” etc. I came up with all the really good excuses–but none of them eased the turmoil that was inside me” (158).
Another woman tells of how she tried to compensate for the pain she felt after her abortion by anesthetizing herself with drugs and alcohol; another planned her own suicide (158). Some have probably succeeded. Another woman’s response was becoming “the strongest pro-choice supporter you could find. It was my way of making sure that what I had done was right. . . . You have to keep telling everyone that you did the right thing” (159).
Abortion advocates continue to hold the upper hand despite not having a single logical argument or the endorsement of their founding “mother.” The media will continue to side with the feminists; more innocent “babes” will die. And, according to Biblical teaching, abortion is still murder.