Information Related to "To Kill a People"
| Audio/Video |
Zffoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Lately I've begun to think America has crossed a line, a point of no return, and awaits the judgment of God for the horrendous national sin of legalized abortion. More than 60 million legal abortions have been performed in America since the Supreme Court legalized abortion with its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Since this ruling, which in effect legalized the procedure in all 50 states, it has become the most divisive social issue of this generation.
Politicians seeking high office stand a precarious chance of being elected if they advocate an anti-abortion stand. Every nominee to the United States Supreme Court must avow sup-port of a woman's right to abortion, assuring all that he or she would not seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, or face outrageous and horrendous opposition. In the meantime, clinics perform thousands of abortions each day, and a generation of children are unborn, their lives and tiny bodies ripped from their mother's womb.
In the pages of Beyond Today we've covered abortion a number of times, citing scriptures showing that a life in the womb of a mother is considered by God to be human and that to take that life is murder. We've also done Beyond Today television programs on this subject. We have raised our voice when the annual March for Life rally takes place in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of this horrible Supreme Court ruling. (Search for "abortion" on our website at ucg.org to learn much more.)
The Supreme Court decision on abortion is an affront to God's sovereignty over human life. He is the Creator and Giver of life. He tells mankind, "You shall not murder." The Bible shows that the unborn within their mother's wombs are individual, living human beings (Exodus 21:22-23; Jeremiah 1:5; Luke 1:39-45). God views the killing of innocent children as evil and an abomination (2 Kings 16:3; 2 Kings 21:2-6; Jeremiah 32:35) -- depraved actions that are utterly reprehensible and deserving of death (Leviticus 20:2-3). The invasion of the mother's womb to remove a developing human life violates a space created by God to nurture life until it is fully brought forth in birth. Make no mistake: The Supreme Court's ruling has transgressed the eternal spiritual law of God.
It's bad enough that more than 60 million legal abortions have been performed since 1973. It's made worse by the fact that it has gone on so long in plain sight of all Americans that it has become an accepted part of our culture -- a culture rightly called by others a culture of death and a "silent holocaust." We go about our lives giving in to the "established law" thinking, as we are told, that it is a "woman's right" and that nothing can be done to reverse the carnage.
Perhaps nothing can be done through the nation's legal system to turn back this great evil. Marches, protests and lobbying have changed nothing. A few months ago a news report mentioned that in one recent year, abortions did go down slightly in America. For that I am glad. I pray abortion will suddenly end through our selfish, hedonistic culture turning around to acknowledge God in a true change of heart. But, hope as I might, I do not see that happening.
In January, the New York State legislature passed what is called the "Reproductive Health Act," which legalizes the unthinkable. To a cheering crowd of politicians, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed this macabre law that allows medical personnel (no doctor required) to kill a fully formed child up to the moment of birth if needed to protect the "mother's health" -- a loophole that, when construed as including mental and emotional health, is large enough to allow abortion for practically any reason at any time.
The bill also removed all criminal penalties -- meaning if a child escapes the forceps, the vacuum, and the potassium cyanide often administered for abortion and is born live, even at full term, its life can be terminated without any criminal charge. To celebrate this law, the governor ordered the Freedom Tower in Manhattan to be lit pink -- signifying a "victory" for women's rights. It should have been illuminated in blood red for the unspeakably horrible law that it is.
Not to be outdone, the Virginia statehouse a few days later saw similar legislation introduced. As it was being debated, the supposedly moderate Governor Ralph Northam, an obstetrician, went on radio to describe what the law meant:
"When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way," Northam said. "And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that's non-viable. So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother . So, I think this was really blown out of proportion."
Did you catch what he really said? A baby could be born alive, then "kept comfortable" while the mother and physicians decided whether it would live or die. And the newborn could then be executed with no legal consequences for its murder.
The Virginia bill would have allowed such procedures to be done in unlicensed clinics with the consent of only one physician -- and as late as the end of the third trimester of pregnancy. This bill was killed in committee, but damage was already done. The brazen raw desire of abortion rights activists has been laid bare. The brutal evil will of governors, state legislators and activists who, in the name of "women's reproductive health" and "women's rights," are willing to kill fully formed, live-born children is an unspeakable horror.
Vermont passed a law very similar to the proposed Virginia law. Other states will enact similar legislation. It's said that Rhode Island Democrats will go even further with a law proposing to allow abortions up to the end of pregnancy for any "health" reason, including "age, economic, social and emotional factors," these advocates describing all protections for unborn babies as "insidiously restrictive, harmful and patriarchal reproductive laws."
Some conservative states like Mississippi and Kentucky have passed their own laws prohibiting the procedures allowed now by New York law. These laws have been challenged in courts and blocked for the short term. Again, as happened with Roe v. Wade, the issue will likely be determined by judges rather than legislators.
The revulsion many citizens feel at the passage of these laws seems to have created something of a backlash against these extreme acts. But it will probably be for only a short time. It's highly unlikely that we will see legal abortions eliminated in the nation.
We have reached a point in America where it seems all restraint has been cast off regarding this issue. Gone is the restraint cautioned not that long ago by former President Bill Clinton, who said abortion should be "rare, legal and safe."
While that statement in no way agrees with what God says about killing the unborn, in the current climate it sounds moderate -- and that is the problem. The nation has become drunk on this discussion to the point that it has lost all moral and spiritual mooring. Those who want to protect life at any stage of development are not heard or not strong enough to make a difference. No leader in politics, education or religion is strong enough to lead a repentance to God and an embrace of the sanctity of life as defined by God in His Word, the Bible.
All kinds of legal protections are in place for birds, mice, turtles and the like, complete with stiff fines and significant prison time for harming their eggs or young. But protections for innocent unborn human beings are rapidly disappearing. Thousands upon thousands of unborn infants are killed by lethal injections every year, but they draw nowhere near the protests or media coverage given to one murderer executed by lethal injection for his despicable crimes. In any sane world this would rightly be viewed as in sanity!
America and much of the world has reached a moral collapse at a level from which they seem unlikely and unwilling to return. It's painful to write these words. But this issue of abortion has become the defining issue of our age, and God will call the nation to account for what it has done.
The raw brutality of these recently passed laws, and the ever-escalating toll of young lives literally poisoned and ripped apart, should stun all who value human life and decency. That a people would put forward legislation allowing the ending of a life just minutes after leaving its mother's womb reveals a stark level of brutality and inhumanity that's now entered our culture -- courtesy of those we've chosen as our leaders!
The Bible contains a graphic description of what our world today has become: "But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, with-out self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!" (2 Timothy 3:1-5).
Notice the word brutal used here . I think that expresses the attitude behind the current wave of abortion legislation.
How can a doctor who has taken an oath to preserve life perform an abortion? Doctors trained in the biological science of human life in the womb know there is a heartbeat, developing brain and nervous system. They know a life is developing and that it's far more than inert fetal tissue to be removed and disposed of.
To hear Virginia Governor Northam calmly describe what the Virginia law would allow to be done in a clinic with a fully born baby is chilling. It is raw brutality. It is ungodly, and those who practice, support and encourage abortion on this scale are leading the nation to ruin. They are killing the next generation. They are killing the soul of a people.
Paul wrote the words above from 2 Timothy at the height of the Roman Empire in the first century. His words describe the Roman culture as much as our modern time. The ancient Romans practiced abortion. They and other pagan cultures also allowed infanticide. The father in a Roman family had the power of life and death over his children. If a newborn was deformed or simply unwanted, for whatever reason, it could be rejected by the father and removed from the home and left in an open place, sometimes in the city center or outside on a large flat rock. Left to the elements, the child would soon die.
Yes, there were some people with compassion who might come and take the baby into their own family, and some who might take the child away for a life of slavery. But more often the child would be left to die. Its corpse was then disposed of as a piece of unwanted refuse. This was a brutal civilization that eventually came to an end.
What is to prevent America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia or any other nation that practices large-scale abortion from disappearing? The facts of history warn us that it will happen. Every nation in history that has practiced child sacrifice, infanticide or abortion has collapsed and disappeared. The Bible shows that the nation chosen by God, Israel, also collapsed because it lost its way and was caught up in idolatry -- especially the idolatry of the self, the same evil Paul identified in his letter to Timothy.
While gathering material on this topic I came across a review of a movie released in the fall of 2018, Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer. It received very little press coverage. After a brief theatrical release it went straight to video streaming channels, and I was able to watch it on one.
Kermit Gosnell was an abortion doctor running an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. For years he performed abortions on poor black women from the west side of Philly. He was busted by police for prescription drug dealing. For anyone who paid his fee, he would sell prescriptions for drugs like Percocet, Oxycontin and Xanax.
When police raided his clinic, they discovered a horror shop filled with frozen fetal parts stored in dairy cartons and plastic containers. Unsanitary conditions and broken equipment were the setting for years of operations where pregnant women, many in late term, were induced into labor to enable partial-birth or full-birth abortions. The babies born alive had their necks snipped with large scissors. Evidence of such murder led to his conviction. Gosnell today serves a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Watching this movie was a horrible experience. The man was a monster. Gosnell would use discarded fetal body parts as bait to fish clams and oysters out of the bay to use in feeding the exotic turtle collection he kept in his abortion clinic.
Such cold, brutal habits are barely fit to be spoken. The film shows the vile conditions in which Gosnell practiced for decades, without inspection and investigation by public health authorities.
Abortion clinics in America are comparable in some ways to concentration camps and gulags of another time, with death practiced in plain sight while life goes on. People know they are there and what they do, but it becomes part of the landscape of indifference in the never-never land of the human psyche. Tragically, we fail to realize that the soul of a people is being killed every day these clinics of horror are allowed to operate.
I realized after watching the movie that Gosnell would not be convicted under the grossly misnamed "Reproductive Health Act" recently passed by New York. What he did in severing the spines of live babies would be considered legal and unindictable. Today he would be continuing his practice unhindered. And maybe he will yet get out on account of laws he was sentenced under being overturned! That's how much we have changed in just a few years.
We have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7). The abortion issue will continue to divide America, tearing and trampling our humanity, all in the name of "women's rights" and personal freedom.
I fear it may be too late for a moral revival in America and other nations. God help us all if it is. I hope you as a reader will prayerfully consider your own view of abortion and its impact on us individually and on our nation and the world at large.
Abortion > View additional content on this topic. ©1995-2022 United Church of God, an International Association
Related Information:
Table of Contents that includes "To Kill a People"
Other Articles by Darris McNeely
Origin of article "To Kill a People"
Keywords: abortion
Abortion: