David Harsanyi of the Denver Post said that if the pro-life movement is going to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the nation, it’s not going to need more God. It’s going to need more reason. He appears to be generally against abortion, but he is concerned that other irreligious people like himself might be turned off by anti-abortion signs that say Baptists for Life, Catholics for Life, Lutherans for Life. He did not take a stand on the practice of showing gruesome pictures of cut-up little babies, but I suspect he thinks those turn off people, too.
His article was spurred on by two events in the news: The March for Life in Washington, DC, and the arrest of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell for violating the sensibilities of the Philadelphia prosecutor, Seth Williams, who charged him with waiting two minutes too long to kill seven of his victims. You see, some of the pesky babies in late-term abortions manage to outwit their assailants and survive. That is bad form and gives assassins a bad reputation, so it was necessary for Gosnell to finish the job with a sharp pair of scissors to the back of the neck. It is similar to the old adage about making sure you don’t miss when you shoot at the king. No one wants a living baby out there testifying against you in a wrongful life suit.
In his 1980s book, Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality, Frank (Franky) Schaeffer once wrestled with the insanity of a culture charging one person with murder for being two minutes too late, while applauding the same brutality committed a few minutes earlier. He referred to laws requiring hospitals to affirmatively try to save babies they just tried to kill. Barack Obama is at least consistent on this, so look for him to issue a pardon to Gosnell. Some in the pro-choice crowd bemoan the squalid conditions of the “doctor’s” office, others focus almost solely on the women.
Schaeffer has since recanted most of his arguments because he thinks his own rhetoric was too strong and may have led to the killing of George Tiller the Killer. Schaeffer makes the same error that Harsanyi makes: Thinking that the voice of reason will prevail[1].
The invention of ultrasound and pictures of little infants sucking thumbs at age 8 weeks have only had the affect of hardening the populace against rationality. All of our reasons for abandoning abortion, albeit good ones, have had little impact on abortion rates and attitudes, all hoopla from the pro-life community and politicians to the contrary. Harsanyi cites few examples of reason that he thinks will overcome the day, only
citing former presidential candidate, Ron Paul:
“People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite.”
Another question. Why are 14-year old mothers called “babies having babies”, but those who choose to kill their babies are “women” exercising their rights and control over their own bodies. Abortion itself is irrational, on a hundred levels, and a few babies are rescued with these arguments or by the offer of adoption options. But millions of fathers and mothers (and grandmothers and grandfathers, too), ignore these offers by sidewalk counselors or crisis pregnancy centers and head right into the killing centers. Godless reasoning is NOT ENOUGH!
I will grant that signs that say “Thou Shalt Not Kill” do not always work either. But it is the truth. The moment we stray from the truth, ignore the truth, or fear offending people with the truth, we move further away from overcoming evil with good.
Rick Santorum has taken some heat for comparing the killing of unborn children with the institution of slavery, which ended in the civil war. He is right to do so. Note what Abraham Lincoln said about
God, slavery, and bloodshed in his Second Inaugural Address.
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other….The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?…. Yet, if God wills that it continue until …every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Oh! that we could see a less bloody end to this evil than more bloodshed! Much better than civil war would be if God would raise up Christian statesmen like William Wilberforce who in England faithfully spoke the truth and overcame the evil of slavery with good, he warned against vain human reasonings and advocated use of the Word of God:
Policy, Sir, is not my principle, and I am not ashamed to say it. There is a principle above everything that is political. And when I reflect on the command that says, ‘Thou shalt do no murder,’ believing the authority to be divine, how can I dare set up any reasonings of my own against it? And, Sir, when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is here in this life which should make any man contradict the principles of his own conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion and of God?
[1] Schaeffer, son of the late author, Francis Schaeffer, now also defends the killing of babies in early pregnancy and has virtually abandoned historical and biblical Christianity.