Man eats underwear to beat Breathalyzer. Midget sues grocer, cites belittling remarks. Man marries smartphone at Las Vegas chapel. Shout your Abortion editor meets with children to normalize abortion. These headlines reveal something about the society in which we live.
Most people agree that society would be better off if there were true justice in the land. The first headline illustrates how far a person will go to beat what he sees as immoral laws against drinking and driving. The second seeks justice in a court to punish another for using words that make him feel bad. The third was trying to emphasize that his actions with his phone resembled in nearly every way the actions of a marriage. In the fourth the Shout your Abortion proponent wants all people to embrace the positive and radical view that abortion is liberating and good.
Our nation has had many moral reformers. There are people who have stood in the face of adversity and evil and called the nation to change. We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. due to his work in trying to promote equal rights for all people in the United States. He grounded much of his work in the natural law tradition, which says there is a transcendent moral law to which governments must answer. Civil laws that the people have in their society must be judged according to this higher law. When there is a conflict between the higher and the lower, the higher moral law supercedes the lower civil law.
Dr. King lived what he preached. He went to jail in Birmingham, Alabama in defiance of immoral laws. The city of Birmingham, nicknamed Bombingham due to the over sixty bombing cases that remained unsolved, was one of the cities that had institutionalized injustice. In King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail he lambastes the ‘moderate’ people in society for not standing against the evil in their midst. He leverages three moral arguments from great philosophers.
1. Following St. Augustine, we should break some laws because “An unjust law is no law at all.”
2. Following St. Thomas Aquinas, “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”
3. Following Martin Buber, unjust law is based upon replacing the “I-thou” relationship between person with an “I-it” relationship where the other is demoted from a person to a thing.
Part of the natural law tradition upholds the view that even when society accepts something immoral, one should follow the natural moral law rather than the immoral civil law. Consider one Supreme Court decision regarding rights for some of those living in America:
The question before us is, whether the class of person described in the plea of abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizen” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…. (Chief Justice Taney, The Dred Scott Decision, p. 10)
The Supreme Court reasoned that the group under consideration were a subordinate and inferior class of beings. As such, they didn’t have rights.
We all know that just because something is legal does not mean it is morally good. What would Dr. King stand against today?
There are grave evils and injustices across our land. Some are worse than others. My children lament that they can’t watch movies that the neighbor kids can watch. Our ‘kids at play’ figure from our front yard was stolen. These are minor compared to other crimes where people are assaulted, kidnapped, tortured, or trafficked. Yet there is an even greater injustice where an entire class of beings are considered as subordinate and inferior and so are killed at the whim of their mother. This group is the more than 56 million unborn that have been killed in the U.S. and many millions more worldwide.
Of course lots of questions need to be answered about this group. We are living in the most scientifically advanced age, but there is still much ignorance among the general population about the unborn. Consider the following dialogue abortion activist Amelia Bonow has with children about abortion:
Amelia Bonow: I believe that life begins when a person has a baby. Do you know what conception is?
Female Teenager: At conception, the sperm goes into the egg, it becomes a fetus, and then a fetus is in a lady’s … womb. It’s not really a human being yet.
Amelia Bonow: That’s how I feel.
Male Teen: I like to compare it to a sea cucumber, it’s not thinking, it is just living. It’s like, your arm is not capable of complex thought. Neither is a baby inside your womb.
Amelia Bonow: I like your take.
In many ways it is tragic given the emphasis on science in our schools that ignorance like this abounds. Let’s discuss what we know from science, and specifically, embryology (which is the science dealing with the earliest stages of human development). After reviewing scores of college textbooks on this subject, here are three representative quotes that unanimously affirm the scientific perspective:
Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (or spermatozoon) from a male. (p. 2); … but the embryo begins to develop as soon as the oocyte is fertilized. (p. 2); … Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual. (p. 18)
Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (6th ed.)
“Zygote. This cell results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm during fertilization. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).”
Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology. 7th edition.
Although life is a continuous process, fertilization … is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.
Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Muller, Human Embryology & Teratology, 3rd ed.
Science is not the only way that we can know things about how to deal with the unborn. Philosophy, and specifically ethics, guides us in how we ought to act upon facing different circumstances. Let’s start with some ethical scenarios that are easy before moving to the more difficult cases of abortion.
The scientific knowledge we know about the unborn is that the zygote or embryo is both living, human, and distinct. As living the unborn can die. The unborn in a woman is not a plant or any other animal, it is a human being. As distinct the unborn is not the mother’s body. The unborn can have a penis, a different blood type, and has a body that can be removed from the mother. We can see from this picture of eight-week old Annabelle Danison that whether inside or outside her mother’s womb she is human and not her mom.
Ask yourself, would society be justified in killing you if you have done nothing wrong? What if the government wanted to kill your brother who has also done nothing wrong, would this be justified? What if you wanted to kill your ten-year old or two-year old? I think we can see it is immoral to kill them even if it is a doctor doing the procedure instead of the government. Why? Because we all know that killing innocent people is wrong no matter who does it.
The argument runs like this:
- Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
- Abortion kills innocent human beings.
- Abortion is morally wrong.
Some may object to this argument applied to the unborn. The reason is based on certain attributes of the unborn like their size, level of development, environment (inside the mother’s womb), or the degree of dependency. One can apply the tools of ethics to work out these moral scenarios. Ask yourself for each of these four things, is a human more valuable simply from each of these qualifications.
So, consider the size of two different humans. I am a giant compared to my aunt. She is not even five feet tall. Do I have greater moral value because I am so much bigger? Of course I don’t. Dr. Suess’s character Horton knows, “A person is a person no matter how small.”
What of level of development? My wife is more developed than a twelve-year old girl. She is more developed than my little girl. Is my wife more valuable? Of course not. In the same way, the unborn doesn’t have less value just because she is less developed.
What of environment? Does my position in the world affect my value? Do I have less value on one side of the tracks versus the other? If not, how can moving six-inches from inside the womb to outside the womb change the value of the unborn? It should not.
But, some will say, the unborn is completely dependent upon the mother. There is no disputing that. All of us are completely dependent upon our mother at the earliest stages of our development. In fact, some of us were dependent upon our mother well into our teen age years! That did not mean that our mother had the right to terminate our life. Our legal system recognizes that children have the moral right to their parents. Parents are not permitted to kill their children who are born even if the parent does not think the child has a right to his or her body. In the same way, the unborn actually does have a right to the mother’s body.
Those promoting abortion claim the right to bodily autonomy (or self-rule). They may claim that they are being forced to create life in carrying the unborn. As a matter of fact, the life is already created within them if they choose abortion. Moreover, a person’s autonomy (or right to self-rule) is limited when another person is injured. Thus, the autonomy argument only works if the unborn is the mother’s body (which science has shown us it is not).
This is where people will often say, “You can’t tell me what to do with my body!” They are wrong. When you use your body to harm it is wrong. Some people should be punished for doing so under certain circumstances. Some people accidentally hurt others and others do so on purpose. The person who accidentally runs over a child due to no fault of their own is not culpable. This is very different from the mom who drowns her children in a lake so she can renew her relationship with a separated lover.
Misinformation abounds about how pregnancies are terminated in abortion clinics. When speaking with children, abortion activist Amelia Bonow expIains, “They put a little straw inside of your uterus and they suck the pregnancy out. It was like a crappy dentist appointment or something. It was just like, ah, this is like a body thing that is kind of uncomfortable. But then it was over, and I felt really just grateful that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.” This is a terrible misrepresentation of what happens. The two most popular ways of aborting children are much more gruesome. One method is called Dilation and Evacuation (D & E). In this method the doctor dilates the woman’s vaginal canal and pulls out body parts of the fetus with a long toothed clamp. After removing the limbs the doctor grasps and crushes the head to remove it from the vaginal canal. The remains and the placenta are then suctioned from the uterus. Another method called vacuum aspiration involves suction and curettage. A speculum holds open the vaginal canal and a cannula sucks as much of the amniotic fluid, placenta, and fetus it can into a collection jar tearing apart the fetus. Then the uterus is scraped with a metal curette to make sure no significant amount of tissue remains.
What about the many objections people have to outlawing abortions? As a rational person there is a way to navigate these difficult objections. Ask yourself, in each objection, whether for the same reason being offered one could justify killing an adult. The reason for preserving the life of one is the same for preserving the life of the other. They have equal moral value as fully human innocent individuals.
Let’s consider two examples. Suppose someone says, “The unborn will be born into a family that is poor. It is better to terminate the unborn than it is to allow them to be born into that family.” You can ask, “Would we be justified in killing the 19-year old son as the family is so poor?” If not, then neither should you kill the unborn son. Another common objection is, “If a woman is not allowed an abortion, this will hurt her career.” Would we be justified in allowing the woman to execute her 14-year old daughter to advance her career? If not, neither should we allow her to abort her unborn daughter.
There are two other objections that are popular that you may hear. One is promoted from abortion activist Amelia Bonow that ‘old white dudes in the government’ shouldn’t tell her what to do with her body. Arguments don’t have a gender. Arguments can be made by a woman or a man. One can’t dismiss the argument due to irrelevant aspects of the person making it. Second, someone will say that if abortion is made illegal then people will have back-alley abortions. Suppose someone says unless we keep murder legal, then we would have to deal with the fall-out of hit-men illegally killing people. We should not make killing innocent human beings safer for the murderers.
Some people reading this may find it as a surprise that abortion is infanticide. Abortion is killing infants in the earliest stages of human development. We love and pray for the many families among our close friends that have suffered from losing their child via miscarriage and abortion. There is love and forgiveness through Jesus and there are ministries and other support groups. We also know there are many health issues for those who have chosen abortion and this is another reason to seek help. For a couple examples,
- The suicide risk is six times greater for women who have had abortions than those who haven’t.
and
2. There is a greater risk for infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease, sepsis, endometriosis, and breast cancer for women who have had abortions.
Although all people need to stand against the injustice of abortion and provide help for those suffering from the effects of this, the primary group fighting for the unborn should be the church. As Dr. King writes,
There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer from what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But they went on with the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven” and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. (King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail)
We should try to return to such a time when Christians stand against the evil practice of abortion. Instead we find ministers blessing abortion clinics and saying abortion is part of God’s plan. As a result, we find ourselves in the very situation King warns about:
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. (King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail)
The day is coming when each of us will give an account for what we have done in this life. Church leaders should ensure that it is not dismissed as an irrelevant social club. Our lives are a testimony to all who are around us. People value integrity, honesty, justice, and courage. We need these virtues to fight the injustice of abortion. Let us be marked with a spirit of love to reach all people with the truth so that we will not simply shout at the darkness, but battle against it with all that is good.
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