Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Really A Human Life

"You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit them together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! It is amazing to think about. Your workmanship is marvelous—and how well I know it. You were there while I was being formed in utter seclusion! You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your book! How precious it is, Lord, to realize that you are thinking about me constantly! I can’t even count how many times a day your thoughts turn toward me.And when I waken in the morning, you are still thinking of me!" Psalms 139:13-18

For over 40 years God's people, lovers of life, have grieved over the legalization murder of innocents in the womb. Nearly 60,000,000 have been offered on the altar of "a woman's right to choose". In this post I want to deal with the main reasons offered to justify this abominable practice:
  • What if the pregnancy is unwanted?
  • A fetus isn't really a human life.
  • To save the life of the mother.
  • What about cases of rape or incest?
Let's be honest, this is far and away the largest reason for abortion, an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Being pregnant just isn't convenient at the moment. Perhaps it interferes with a new career or a job promotion so the choice is made to terminate the pregnancy.

With abortion being legal the access is readily available and the moral stigma is significantly diminished. 

If women finding themselves with an unwanted pregnancy would realize they are carrying a wanted child, perhaps that could help stem the rate of abortions.

My oldest son, Matt, is adopted. He was an unwanted pregnancy but thankfully, his mother understood that there were couples eager to adopt her child. Unwanted pregnancies produce wanted children!

It is estimated there are 2,000,000 parents eager to adopt a child in the United States. They desperately long for the children produced by unwanted or unplanned pregnancies.

Until it is able to live outside it is just an nonviable fetus, right?

Wrong!

Consider these undeniable medical realities:
  • Eighteen days after conception a baby's heart begins to beat with its own blood.
  • Twenty-eight days from conception a baby has eyes and ears.
  • At forty-two days the baby has brain waves.
  • At ten weeks babies can feel pain and even have developed tiny fingernails.
  • Babies have been born and have survived at only twelve weeks.
  • When it was discovered the so-called fetus had a heart-beat we continued killing them.
  • When sonograms were developed allowing us to physically view the form of a baby we did not cease the killing. When Jane Roe from the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion through the third trimester, came out admitting she never actually had an abortion and admitted the case was the "biggest mistake of her life" - we did not halt the killing. Roe said in a television ad, "You read about me in history books, now I am dedicated to spreading the truth about preserving the dignity of human life from natural conception to natural death - we did not stop the killing.
  • When abortion was exposed through the Silent Scream documentary the killing did not stop.
  • When Planned Parenthood began dismembering post aborted babies' body parts and selling them for profit - we still did not stop the killing.
Don't you wonder what it will take? Are we as numb as Nazi Germany when six million - some say eight million - men, women and children were marched off to gas chambers? As a nation, we have ignored every ounce of science and turned our backs on millions of dying people.

What about the life of the mother?

Performing an abortion to save the life of the mother is one of the most popular comebacks against pro-life arguments, yet this circumstance makes up only 0.118 percent - that is 1/10 of 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S. This is the only scenario different from all the others, because in this circumstance the choice is between saving one life, the mother's, or losing two lives, mother's and baby's. In reality, both lives are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and worthy to be protected with whatever medical means available. It is extraordinarily rare to have to take the life of the unborn child to ensure the mother lives. Even in this case, God is sovereign over both lives and does not grant any arbitrariness over when life is to be taken. (I Samuel 2:6)

Okay, so how about cases of rape and incest?

Quite frankly killing a child because of the circumstances of its conception is not Biblical.

Deuteronomy 24:16 states, “Fathers shall not be put to death for the sins of their sons nor the sons for the sins of their fathers; every man worthy of death shall be executed for his own crime." Killing the child because of someone else's crime is wrong and can never be justified. What is the crime that the child has committed that is worthy of death? Taking the innocent life of a child because of the sin of the parent is committing an even worse sin, one that can never be rectified. We also need to realize that abortions due to rape and incest make up only 1 percent of all abortions. Ninety-nine percent of abortions have nothing to do with these extreme situations.

Two key moral standards must be acknowledged in order to offer protection for innocent human life. The first is the Sixth Commandment in Exodus 20:13, "You shall not murder." The second moral standard is found in Psalms 139 - "You knit me together in my mother's womb." Human life begins at conception and has a God-ordained right to live until natural death. When these standards no longer have any moral authority with our national leaders, religious liberty suffers.

God have mercy on our nation.