Sonography
“Will Roe vs. Wade be overturned?” is the topic of a recent post at the Desiring God blog (actually, the DG post just quotes a post from Justin Taylor’s blog). In the post, Princeton legal expert Robert George is quoted as saying, “It is no longer possible to believe that abortion is merely `removing some tissue.’ It is plain that abortion is the killing of a human being.”
I am very thankful for these posts and for Robert George’s exhortation to prayer. Amen! However, in response to the above quote, I would like to emphasize that it never was possible to believe that abortion is merely `removing some tissue’, and that it always has been plain that abortion is the killing of a human being.
In fact, if we were to look back before the development of sonography, I expect we would find very few pro-abortionists talking in “fetus is not a baby” nonsense language. Abortion is an ancient evil, like all others. Yet in the old days Christians didn’t argue the obvious fact that the thing inside of a pregnant woman was a baby. Come on, every peasant from the 6th or 16th century knows that! Taking for granted the obvious fact that abortion kills babies, the Christians of old got right down to the business of declaring that such murder is evil in God’s sight:
For the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light. - John Calvin, Commentary on Exodus 21:22
Abortion was also a form of contraception. In times of ancient cultures, even around the New Testament era, the methods used varied from substances introduced into the womb through the birth canal; sometimes oral drugs or “poisons” as they used to be called; sometimes mixtures that were mixed for the purpose of proving fatal to the unborn infant; sometimes they would bind the body in these very, very, tight ropes or cloths to literally squeeze the womb and crush the life of the child; sometimes they would locate the baby in the womb and take a hard object and smash against that infant in the womb and kill it that way; sometimes using blades and sometimes hooks going up through the birth canal.
Pagans would do this; the Jews always rejected it because life was created by God, and anyone created by God became your neighbor, and to take a life was to violate the second commandment. The early church then took a strong stand against it. In the Didache, which is a codification of early church teaching, it says, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion.” Abortion was rejected in another early document, called the Epistle of Barnabus, as contrary to “neighbor centered love;” so you can see that early church picked up on some of the Jewish ideas. The Didache, again that same codification of teaching, saw the way of death is full of cursing, murders, adulteries, and murders of children. They saw the way of death as belonging to those who killed children. They called them “Corrupters of God’s creatures,” and in the third century a Latin word even emerged, “abortwantes” (sp.) –abortionists. “Abortion,” they said, “brought the judgment of God.” - John MacArthur, The Biblical View on Abortion, http://www.biblebb.com/files/MAC/ABORT.HTM
(More abortion quotes can be found at http://onelord.cn/blog/essays/abortionquotes.html.)
The pro-life movement in America, though well intentioned, is unfortunately falling into a trap. The trap is getting entangled in arguments about whether fetuses are babies and whether abortion kills a human being. Ask any UCLA medical scholar, any Princeton judicial scholar, any Australian Aborgine, or ask my one and a half year old son. All of them, if they are honest with you, know full well that inside of a pregnant woman is a baby. Duh!
The real issue is this: Is the slaughter of babies a worthwhile price to pay in order to have unrestricted access to free sex? That is the question that we pro-lifers in America need to tackle, without getting too entangled in the silly “fetus is not a child” sham argument.
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:27 pm
The”fetus is not a child” is a sham argument, particularly for liberal pro-choice professing “Christians” in the Democratic party. Call it what you like, even just “living tissue”, it was still created and given life by God, the Creator. Christ could have just appeared on Earth as a 30 year-old man and skipped the manger scene and being a carpenter’s son and all that kid stuff, but instead He chose to enter life the same way everyone else did, through a mother’s womb. Even while He was just “living tissue” or a “fetus” in His mother’s womb, He was still BABY JESUS!