Responses:
Is it possible for someone to be pro-choice and a Christian?
No. Christian doctrine declares that God is the author of life and that He is incapable of making mistakes. From those beliefs, the only logical conclusion one can draw is that when life exists in the womb, it is God’s will that it be there. Given that support for legal abortion denies both of these realities, by definition, it is incompatible with Christian belief.
People who claim to be both pro-choice and Christian are, basically, asserting three things. The first is that life is not a right inherited from God, but a privilege bestowed by human beings who can withhold it if they “choose” to do so. The second is that God is neutral on whether a child He created is brutally torn limb from limb. Finally, they are saying it is possible to reject the innocent new lives which God creates without rejecting God Himself. From a Christian perspective, these arguments are absurd.
The bottom line is, a Christian cannot be pro-choice about the intentional destruction of innocent human life any more than they can be pro-choice about rape, robbery, slavery, incest, child abuse, etc.
The Bible does not condemn abortion and Jesus never spoke out against it.
To suggest that the Bible is silent on abortion is a lie. In both the Old and New Testaments, the language used to describe born and unborn people is the same. For example, in Luke 1:41, the unborn John the Baptist is called a “brephos” which means “babe” or “baby” in Greek. Then, in the very next chapter, the born Jesus is also called a “brephos.” We are also told that Elizabeth’s baby leapt in her womb upon being in the presence of Mary. Should we conclude that this makes no statement about the unborn? If so, and if the Bible is silent on abortion, then it is logical to also conclude that Scripture is indifferent about whether these women would have aborted Jesus and John the Baptist. After all, by pro-choice reasoning, at this point they didn’t even exist. (A few Scriptural references to the unborn include: Genesis 25:22-24; Job 31:15; Psalm 22:9-10; Psalm 139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; Hosea 12:2-3; Luke 1:15; Luke 1:41; and Exodus 21:22-24.)
Moreover, not every word Jesus uttered is recorded in Scripture so there is no way to know whether He ever addressed abortion or not. We should also remember that there is no record of Jesus ever speaking out against slavery – a point which apologists for slavery routinely made. In fact, most of our laws relate to behaviors which neither Jesus nor the Bible specifically addressed.
I know abortion is wrong, but I don’t feel the Lord leading me to take a stand on it.
Imagine that a group of men are standing outside their church on a Sunday morning when they witness that a screaming young girl is being raped and murdered in a field next door. When the police arrive, they ask these men what they did when they saw what was happening. They reply, “Well, we gathered together and prayed for her and we prayed for the rapist to have a change of heart. But you know, we’re Christians and we didn’t feel the Lord calling on us to do anything about it.”
No one would be stupid enough to buy that nonsense. Everyone would know that these guys didn’t get involved because they were more concerned for themselves than they were for the girl. It was safe and comfortable inside the church and the girl was not worth the risks they would face trying to save her.
That is a perfect analogy to how the church has addressed the abortion holocaust.
God gave us free will and it is not our place to judge women who have abortions.
First, we are not judging women who submit to abortions – we are trying to stop them. Second, should we apply this “free will” standard to a man who is on trial for killing his wife? Should we say we have no right to judge him? Does this philosophy apply across the board or only to the unborn?
Issues like this are good examples of how “open-minded” people can be about murder once they figure out that they cannot be the one who is murdered. In fact, the biggest factor in the battle over legalized abortion is that the people who defend it are already born. At its core, this battle is about arrogance and selfishness. It is the formerly unborn turning their backs on the currently unborn and saying to them, “You’re not as good as us. You don’t deserve to live in our world.” Of course, if these people could be transported back into the womb, it’s a pretty safe bet that their views on “choice” and “free-will” would be quite different – at least until they were born.
Abortion is just one of many issues the church has to be concerned about.
If abortion is the taking of a human life – and even many pro-aborts now openly admit that it is – then our country is engaged in the largest holocaust in world history. To suggest that this is even in the same universe as any other issue is indefensible. If those who say abortion is just “one of many issues” were the ones who might be sliced open alive and have their skulls crushed, you can be assured that they would be singing a different tune.
The strategy behind equating abortion with other issues is to neutralize the abortion issue and silence pro-lifers. It is generally used by (a) closet pro-aborts trying to conceal their position, (b) abortion agnostics, (c) luke-warm pro-lifers desperate for some way to excuse their own – or their church’s – inaction and (d) people who call themselves Christians but want to justify voting for a pro-abortion politician. To expose just what a scam this argument is, ask someone who makes it if they would ever vote for a white supremacist on the basis that race is just “one of many issues.”
I believe that abortion is wrong, but the solution is prayer.
To begin with, belief is irrelevant if it does not control behavior. A rapist might believe that what he is doing is wrong, but that means nothing to his victim. Likewise, today it is not unheard of for abortion clinic workers to say that they believe abortion is wrong. Of course, that belief is little comfort to the baby whose head is being ripped off.
Second, prayer is not intended to be a substitute for action. Imagine that a five-year-old girl has been hit by a car and is possibly dying in the street. As Christians, we believe that God has the power to reach down from Heaven and instantly heal her. But does that mean we shouldn’t call an ambulance or take any other action on her behalf? Should we just stand around and pray?
Obviously, not even the most sincere believer in the power of prayer would suggest such a thing. So the question becomes, if we believe that the unborn has the same right to life as the born, why are we so willing to say that all we will do to save their lives is pray for them? How can we justify one standard for protecting the unborn but a different one for protecting our own born children, while claiming that both have the same right to life?
That double standard is hypocritical, cowardly, and inconsistent with the pro-life principle. While prayer must always remain a central part of the pro-life effort, it must not be used as an excuse for inaction.
My job is to save souls, not bodies. Besides, those babies go to heaven anyway.
In other words, abortion can be tolerated because the victims are sinless. This perverted theology is often the refuge of a Christian minister who is looking for a way to justify his cowardice and inaction over abortion.
The question is, would he apply this standard to anyone other than the unborn? If his own daughter was about to be murdered, would he try to stop it or just shrug it off because she is going to go to heaven anyway? If he was on a jury and it was clear that the accused was guilty of murder, but the victim’s pastor testified that the victim went to heaven, would he let the killer go free? If an ax-murderer came into his church and began hacking at people who were saved, would he just look on with a smile comfortable that the victims were going to heaven?
Better yet, would he be willing to put this philosophy into action by immediately killing everyone he leads to the Lord, thus removing the possibility they might one day reject Him?
If a woman isn’t ready for a baby, maybe it’s best that she abort and ask God to bring the child back at a better time.
When a woman is pregnant it doesn’t matter whether she is ready for a baby or not. She has a baby. The only question is whether she is going to keep her baby, place it for adoption, or kill it. Furthermore, it is pure idiocy to think that a baby can be aborted and then “brought back” later. The mother of this dead child might have another baby one day, but the one she aborts is dead forever.
Finally, don’t for a moment believe that God is going to conspire with a woman to butcher a baby that He gave to her.
When a woman miscarries, did God do an abortion on her?
If a man dies of a heart attack, from a moral perspective that is quite different than if he had been shot to death by a carjacker. That distinction also exists between a miscarriage and an induced abortion. There are many things which God is allowed to do that man is not allowed to do. The refusal to accept that reality is the basis of the pro-choice mentality.
Theologians can’t agree when a soul enters the body.
So what? Theologians don’t make law. Further, we can’t legally or scientifically prove that souls even exist, much less show that one has entered a body. So if we can kill the unborn because we don’t know whether souls have entered their bodies, we can also kill 30-year-olds on the same basis.
The fetus is only a potential human life.
Only through mind-numbing stupidity could someone suggest that when human sperm and human eggs unite they produce something that is only a “potential human life.”
If the word “potential” is suggesting that the unborn is only potentially alive, that is easily disproved. Even in the earliest stages of pregnancy, sonograms show movements and heartbeats that do not belong to the woman. Whatever else the fetus is, it is impossible to logically argue that it is not, at least, alive.
On the other hand, for “potential” to be referring to the word human, a fetus would have to have the potential of becoming either a human being or some other form of life. Perhaps a parrot or a spider. Of course, the problem is that there is no record of such a thing having ever occurred.
So while it may be reasonable to say that a fetus is a potential major league baseball star or a potential school teacher, it is idiotic to say that a fetus is a potential human being. If for no other reason, the fetus is a living human being because that is the only thing it can be.
Also, if the issue is “development,” let’s not forget that human beings develop for their entire lives. A fetus is less developed than a newborn just as a child is less developed than an adult. But being less developed than an adult does not mean that a child is any less a human being. That’s also true of the unborn.
Pro-lifers aren’t the only ones who know that it is a baby who is killed in an abortion.
At a National Abortion Federation conference in Philadelphia during September of 1994, Texas abortion clinic director, Charlotte Taft, said, “When [a pro-choice activist in the Dallas community] came into our clinic – we were inviting her to learn more about abortions – this is a quote from this woman – she said, ‘If I believed that abortion was the deliberate ending of a potential human life, I could not be pro-choice.’ I said, ‘It would be best for you not to see a sonogram.’”
Less than two years later, at another National Abortion Federation conference in San Francisco, a New York abortion clinic director, Merle Hoffman, stated “…I mean, we are talking about an abortion here. And uh, also that the staff is uncomfortable when a patient said, ‘I think I’m killing my baby.’ So I’m comfortable with saying, ‘Yes, you are, and how do you feel about that?’”
No one can prove when life begins. It is up to the woman to decide.
Trying to rationalize abortion using this argument is utter nonsense. If we don’t know when life begins, then we can’t say it has begun at birth, or at age five, or at 50. By this logic, the law could never convict someone for murdering a 30-year-old woman because there is no way to prove that she was alive.
The fact is, no scientific, biological, or medical textbook says that life begins at any point other than conception. Further, simple deductive reasoning proves that life begins at conception because that is the only time it can begin. Any other point is strictly arbitrary.
However, even if it were true that no one can prove when life begins, that is not a justification for legalized abortion.
The pro-life position is that the unborn should be left alone. Obviously, a person does not have to prove anything about the unborn in order to justify taking that view. On the other hand, the pro-choice position is that it should be legal to butcher the unborn by the millions because no one can prove that they are living human beings. To appreciate just how irrational this is, imagine that the judge and jury in a capital murder case sentenced a man to death because no one could prove that he was not guilty. The public would be justifiably enraged. They understand that the state is the one taking action and that, therefore, the burden of proof belongs to them. The prosecution is required to prove that the man is guilty in order to convict him, but the defense has no obligation to prove anything in order to justify leaving him alone.
In other words, our judicial system is designed to err on the side of life. We would rather let a thousand murderers go free, than execute even one innocent person.
The question is why we don’t apply this standard to the unborn.
Why aren’t we saying to the pro-choice mob, “Before we’ll let you kill the unborn, you have to prove that they are not living human beings.” After all, to say that no one knows when life begins is, at the very least, an acknowledgement that it might begin at conception. Shouldn’t we leave the unborn alone until we find out for sure? Saying we can execute the unborn because no one can prove when life begins, is no different than saying we can execute an accused murderer because no one can prove he’s innocent.
Amazingly, when cornered on this, some abortion apologists will contend that abortion should be allowed even if we accept that the unborn are living human beings. The question then becomes, if the humanity of the unborn is irrelevant when deciding whether they can be killed, why is the humanity of a five-year-old relevant when making the same decision?
As for this brainless contention that women must be allowed to decide when the lives of their children have begun, imagine two children who are conceived at the same moment. Three months later, one mother talks about her baby, knows its sex, has named it, and has even seen it on an ultrasound screen. The other mother believes that the life of her child hasn’t begun yet and decides to have it killed by abortion. The pro-choice mentality is that both mothers are right, despite the fact it is physically impossible for that to be true.
Also, if women are to be the ones who decide when life begins, why should they lose that right by giving birth? If a woman who sincerely believes that life doesn’t begin until speech is possible, kills her three-month-old daughter, should she be charged with murder? What makes her belief that life begins at speech less valid than another woman’s belief that life begins in the second trimester, or at birth, or at any other arbitrarily chosen point? And what gives society the right to charge this woman with murder, while saying that women are the ones who decide when life begins?
If a baby is not a white, healthy, newborn it stands little chance of being adopted.
The National Counsel for Adoption says that while there is indeed a long waiting list for healthy white babies, there are also parents on waiting lists for minority and physically challenged babies. This is confirmed by Christian Homes and Special Kids, a non-profit organization founded to support families with special-needs children. At any given time, they have a database of several hundred families waiting to adopt children with even the most severe physical challenges, including children who are terminal and those who are born addicted to drugs. The truth is, the chances of a newborn not being adopted are minuscule regardless of circumstances.
Today, the problem with adoption is not babies, but older children, and since they are already born that problem has nothing to do with abortion. The abortion lobby counters that if newborns are not available, families would be more likely to adopt these older children. In other words, the pro-choice solution is to force people to take the children society wants them to adopt, by brutally slaughtering the children they want to adopt.
If the abortion lobby wants us to believe that they are only killing babies no one wants, here is a suggestion that will settle the whole abortion debate once and for all.
Let’s create a national computer database of people who want to adopt a baby. Any pregnant woman who doesn’t want her baby would have access to this database. If there is someone in the database who wants to adopt her baby, she could not legally have an abortion. But if no one is willing to take her baby, she could legally have the child killed by abortion.
Of course, the abortion industry is never going to take this deal because they know it would immediately bankrupt every one of their death camps. They realize that there is no such thing as an unwanted baby and that every single child they butcher is wanted by someone. Their “every child a wanted child” rhetoric, and this “disease of unwantedness,” are simply scams they conjured up to justify abortion and create a market for their product.
There are more abortions than people waiting to adopt. What do we do after these people have gotten a baby?
This assumes that once abortion is illegal every woman with an unplanned pregnancy will place her baby for adoption. That is clearly not true, given that even the most unwanted pregnancies do not automatically produce unwanted babies.
This issue also erroneously assumes that the people on waiting lists to adopt would only adopt one child. If the supply of babies increased, the cost of adoption would go down and most of these people would jump at the chance to adopt more than one child. Also, the reduced cost of adoption would increase the number of lower and middle income families who could adopt. Other factors that increase the pool of potential adoptive parents is the growing problem of infertility, and the fact that there is now less stigma attached to single parent adoptions.
What about the children who get adopted by people who abuse or neglect them?
Only the pro-choice mob would try to sell this concept that people spend thousands of dollars, endure a grueling adoption process and wait for years, just so they can have a child to sexually abuse, torture, abandon, neglect or kill. Even in those incredibly rare cases where abuse might occur in adoptive families, it can’t approach the horror of being brutally sliced up by some abortionist. It is safe to assume that unborn children would rather take their chances in the worst adoptive family than in the best abortion clinic.
Let’s make one other thing clear. The pro-choice solution to the incredibly rare bad adoption is not a good adoption, but an abortion. As is always the case, the only solution these people have for any problem is baby killing. In this example, their suggestion that we can solve adoption problems by executing the adoptees, is like saying we can prevent rapes by executing women.
What about a woman who says she could not carry a child for nine months and then give it up for adoption?
If a man told the police that he beat his ex-girlfriend to death because, “If I can’t have her, nobody can,” no one would buy that as a defense for what he did. That’s because society expects men to accept that they don’t own their wives or girlfriends, and to have the emotional strength to deal with knowing that “their woman” is with someone else. But the pro-choice mentality is that women are too hysterical and weak to live up to that standard. Instead, behavior that is reprehensible and criminal in men, must be treated as a “choice” for women. It is also interesting that the same people who say women risk being traumatized by placing their babies for adoption, also sell the idea that women are never traumatized by having their babies butchered.
Why don’t you help people who are already here, like the homeless?
First, unborn children are already here. If that were not the case, there would be nothing to kill.
Second, there are about 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers in America, each funded and staffed by the pro-life movement and each providing its services free of charge. Third, when pro-life groups solicit money to finance these centers, our biggest problem is that almost every pro-lifer we approach is also contributing to other organizations whose sole purpose is to help people. This claim that pro-lifers only care about abortion is an outright lie.
However, let’s assume that no pro-lifer anywhere in the world is involved in even one effort to help other people.
What does that have to do with our efforts to keep the pro-choice mob from killing every baby they can get their hands on? Where is it written that when someone tries to prevent innocent human beings from being butchered, they are responsible for solving all the world’s social problems? If a man tries to stop a poor child from being murdered in a drive-by shooting, do we say it’s none of his business unless he has a plan to end poverty?
There is a legal group called the Innocence Project which represents prisoners who claim they were falsely convicted. They have been successful in numerous instances where they were able to prove that a man was on death row for a murder he didn’t commit.
When they are trying to save the life of a condemned prisoner who may be innocent, should they be told to butt out unless they are doing something about homelessness, child abuse, hunger, and all of the world’s other social problems? As ridiculous as that sounds, that is precisely what the pro-choice crowd says about abortion. They say that unless the pro-life movement can solve all the problems an unborn girl might face in her life, then we have no right to keep them from killing her.
The reality is, when the choice is between helping people who have no place to live or helping people who are being butchered by the millions, we have to choose the latter.
However, if the pro-choice crowd is so concerned about homelessness, they have the power to end it anytime they want to.
All they have to do is pick out one homeless person and take him home. Since there are more abortion advocates than homeless people, this would end the problem instantly, without controversy and without tax money. In fact, they could use this “adult adoption” plan to eliminate hunger, poverty, unemployment or any other social problem.
Of course, the pro-choice crowd is never going to go for this. Their only interest in the homeless, or the poor, or the unemployed, or the hungry, or any other disadvantaged group is to use them as a skirt to hide behind so they don’t have to defend abortion.
We have a nation of babies having babies.
Why is a pregnant 14-year-old who wants to give birth just “a baby having a baby,” but a 14-year-old who submits to abortion is “a young woman exercising her constitutional rights?” And why isn’t the abortion industry referring to these girls as “babies having abortions?” Are they marketing abortion as some kind of sick rite of passage? If you’re 14 and give birth you’re a baby, but submit to abortion and you suddenly become a woman.
Millions of children are already starving.
Of the more than 3,000 American children slaughtered every day by abortion, the percentage who would have lived in hunger is tiny and the number who would have one day starved to death is, for all practical purposes, zero. The children who are starving in this world live almost exclusively in third-world nations with corrupt political regimes who sometimes starve their people on purpose, and in countries with inefficient farming techniques and poor food distribution systems. We could kill every unborn child in America for the next 50 years and it would not solve any of those problems or provide a single bite of food for even one starving child.
Besides, if bloodshed is the solution to hunger, it doesn’t make sense to kill the unborn. We should be killing adults since they eat more. We could save even more food by establishing a pre-set age at which we have determined that the elderly take more calories out of the food chain than the amount of good they do for society. When someone reaches that age, we would simply “put them down” and take the food they would have eaten for ourselves.
Given that abortion clinics are already set-up for this sort of thing, expanding their services to include the elderly would be easy and highly profitable. The government might even be willing to kick in a few tax dollars since killing these folks would be considerably cheaper than keeping them on Medicare and Social Security.
What about overpopulation?
It is debatable whether overpopulation is a problem or not. Some recent data suggests that a bigger problem is declining birth rates which do not even replenish existing populations. However, if overpopulation is a problem, why limit our options to killing the unborn? It would be easy to put a legal limit on life at the other end as well, and enforce it through mandatory euthanasia at a pre-determined age. At the very least, we should immediately outlaw any medical research that’s intended to extend life. After all, if overpopulation really is a problem, it makes no sense to spend billions of dollars every year looking for ways to make people live longer.
In fact, whether it’s prohibitions on research or mandatory euthanasia, bumping off the elderly makes more sense than killing the unborn. The elderly use up more of our resources and they put a tremendous strain on our health care system. With our population growing older, and the baby boomers starting to retire, this plan could be exactly what we need to save Medicare and Social Security.
I don’t want to pay for all the social problems created by unwanted children.
The pro-choice crowd has had over 30 years to weed out all the “unwanted people,” and no one can argue that they’ve been stingy in carrying out the death sentences. So far, they’ve butchered between 45 and 50 million babies and they continue to kill them at the rate of over 3,000 a day. Meanwhile, we are asked to ignore the fact that, since this holocaust began, America has suffered huge increases in teen pregnancy, homelessness, hunger, welfare, divorce, poverty, child abuse, spousal abuse, deadbeat dads, gangs, illegal drugs, sexually transmitted diseases, high school drop outs, and the list goes on and on.
The fact is, every single social problem which the pro-choice mob says will get worse if we make abortion illegal, actually became worse after we made abortion legal. Beyond that, the financial burden of these social problems is overwhelming. Any way you cut it, the American taxpayer is subsidizing the abortion industry.
However, let’s say for a moment that instead of getting worse our social problems had been helped by killing babies.
Would that justify it? Do we really want to be the kind of country that uses child sacrifice as a tool of social engineering? Is the wholesale slaughter of innocent and defenseless people justified if it solves our problems? And if that is going to be our attitude, why kill the unborn? They are the one category of human beings who had nothing to do with creating these problems and whose death would not solve them.
The bottom line is, as a solution to social problems, abortion is ineffective and morally indefensible. It is also the ultimate example of selfishness. For proof, notice that no one ever volunteers to give their own life to solve social problems, they only insist that others do so.
To end child abuse, we need to make sure that every child is a wanted child.
First, this completely ignores the fact that abortion is itself the ultimate example of child abuse. Second, the right to life of a human being is not determined by whether or not some other human being wants them. There are many born people in the world who we could label as unwanted, but that doesn’t mean we can kill them. As for abortion, wantedness is a function of the humanity and character of the mother. It has absolutely nothing to do with the right to life of her child.
Third, this idea of preventing child abuse which might occur sometime in the future by executing the potential victims today, makes about as much sense as trying to eradicate wife-beating by executing all married women.
This issue also assumes that unwanted pregnancies always produce unwanted children. The truth is that even among women whose pregnancies were the most unwanted, it is rare for them not to want their baby.
Further, there is no evidence that unplanned – or even unwanted – children are any more likely to be abused than planned or wanted ones.
To the contrary, in 1980, Professor Edward Lenoski at the University of Southern California studied over 600 cases of child abuse. He found that in over 90% of these cases, the parents said that the child they abused had been a wanted child.
The fact is, since abortion was made legal in 1973, we have killed unborn children by the tens of millions yet child abuse has increased dramatically. According to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, in 1973, there were 167,000 cases of child abuse reported in the United States. In 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services reported 1,694,756 child abuse investigations in the United States. In 450,817 cases, the abuse was confirmed, and in another 58,964 it was determined that abuse was “indicated.”
Some of this 10-fold increase in child abuse could be due to better reporting, but better reporting could not possibly explain an increase of this magnitude. There is no other rational conclusion but that our country has suffered a staggering increase in child abuse since we legalized abortion. That fact demands that we force the pro-choice gang to answer one very simple question. If legalized abortion reduces child abuse by making sure that every child is a wanted child – and since you’ve executed between 45 and 50 million children so far – where did all these children who are being abused today come from?
Some children are forced to lead terrible lives. Isn’t abortion better than that?
In other words, abortion is done out of compassion for the one being ripped to shreds. Using this perverted logic, slavery could also be rationalized. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, it could be argued that a person is better off as a well-cared-for slave in America, than slowly starving to death in some filthy AIDS-infested third-world dictatorship.
Also, how do we identify which unborn children will lead these terrible lives so we don’t inadvertently butcher some who might have lived good lives? Should only women who promise to give their children terrible lives be allowed to have them killed?
We also know that a lot of born children already live terrible lives. So why don’t we start killing them as well? After all, if it is compassionate to kill people who might live a terrible life someday in the future, surely it is even more compassionate to kill people who we know are living terrible lives right now.