Protect Human Life

Protect Human Life (Ex. 1:15-20, Jer. 19:3b-6, 33:6-9, Rom. 8:1) All children are gifts from God and valued by God (Ps. 127:3-5, Luke 12:7) Life begins before conception, in the heart and mind of God (Jer. 1:5, Eph. 1:4) God causes all of us to come into being (Ecc. 11:5, Ps. 139:13-16, Isa. 44:2, 24, 49:1-5) All human beings are created for God’s glory (Isa. 43:7) We are all created by God for His good purposes (Gen. 25:21-26, Eph. 2:10) Charles McCarry can claim a varied career. In addition to being the author of The Tears of Autumn and The Last Supper, he served as assistant to the Secretary of Labor in the Eisenhower cabinet and has done two stints in the CIA. But he almost wasn’t born. In Readers Digest, McCarry says, “My mother became pregnant with me at the age of 39. She had nearly died while giving birth to my only sibling. Her doctor, who believed the second pregnancy was a serious threat to her life, advised an abortion. The advice made sense, but my mother refused to accept it. Just before she died at age 97, I asked her why. Why didn’t she just abort me?” She replied, “I wanted to see who you were going to turn out to be.” Diary of an Unborn Baby • Day 1 – fertilization: all human chromosomes are present; unique human life begins • Day 6 – embryo begins implanting in the uterus • Day 22 – heart begins to beat with the child’s own blood, often a different type than the mother’s • Week 5 – eyes, legs, hands begin to develop • Week 6 – brain waves detectable; mouth, lips present; fingernails forming • Week 7 – eyelids, toes form; nose distinct, baby kicking and swimming • Week 8 – every organ in place; bones begin to replace cartilage, fingerprints begin to form;

• Weeks 9 and 10 - teeth begin to form, fingernails develop; baby can turn head, frown • Week 11 – baby can grasp objects placed in hand; all organ systems functioning; the baby has fingerprints, a skeletal structure, nerves, and circulation • Week 12 – the baby has all of the part necessary to experience pain, including the nerves, spinal cord and thalamus; the baby is nearing the end of the first trimester • Week 17 - baby can have dream (REM) sleep • Week 20 – the earliest stage at which partial birth abortions are performed Innocent blood (Jer. 19:4) God acknowledges the sanctity of all human life So should we God has never sanctioned child sacrifice (Jer. 19:5, Lev. 18:21, Deut. 12:31) The shedding of innocent blood invites God’s wrath/judgement (Jer. 19:6) Estimated 43 million unborn children murdered since Roe v. Wade (1973) 37 million more babies have died in American abortion clinics than Jews who died in the holocaust in Germany. Planned Parenthood, an organization that performs abortions, states plainly that one of out of three babies conceived in the United States is deliberately aborted. Since about 40 percent of all pregnancies are unplanned, this means that well over two out of three unplanned pregnancies are terminated by abortion. 1.6 million abortions are reported in this country every year. Over 4000 abortions occur each day. There were more that 140,000 second and third trimester abortions in 2000. In 2000, more children died from abortion than Americans died in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. Worldwide, 55 million unborn children are killed every year. Around the world, every day 150,685 children are killed by abortion; every hour, 6278; and every minute, 105. Those are only the reported cases.

There should be great mourning in America over this! (Matt. 2:18) Partial Birth Abortion (Warning, this section is rather graphic!) Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse from Dayton, Ohio, assisted Dr. Haskell in a Partial Birth Abortion on a 26-1/2 week (over 6 months) preborn baby boy. She testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee (on 11/17/95) about what she witnessed. According to nurse Shafer, the baby was alive and moving as the abortionist “delivered the baby’s body and arms - everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby’s head just inside the uterus. The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby was completely limp.” With forceps, the doctor turns the baby around in the womb to be positioned feet first. The baby’s legs are pulled out into the birth canal. The baby is alive at this point. The abortionist delivers the baby’s entire body, except for the head, which remains inside the birth canal. The baby’s hands and feet move The abortionist stabs the scissors into the base of the baby’s skull. The scissors are spread to enlarge the opening. The suction catheter is then inserted and the brains are sucked out, causing the skull to collapse. The head slides out easily. Justifications Right to privacy It was not until the U.S Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which voided a state statute preventing the use of contraceptives, that the modern doctrine of privacy emerged. In his opinion, Justice William O. Douglas argued that a protection from state intrusion into marital privacy was a constitutional right, one that was a “penumbra” emanating from the specific guarantees of the constitution. The right to sexual privacy as set forth in Griswold was one of the main foundations of the court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) to overturn state abortion statutes. Later attempts to extend the right of privacy to consensual homosexual acts in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) were initially rejected by the court. In 2003, however, the court reversed that decision and rejected all antisodomy laws. You can find a summary of the holdings of the Griswold/Roe line of cases at: http://hometown.aol.com/abtrbng/conlaw.htm#roe

Right to choose One of the most frequent arguments is that every woman has a right to control her own body. This philosophy stems from the ideas of Margaret Sanger who was the mother of the modern-day birth control movement and founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger wrote that women are enslaved through their reproductive powers by men who dictate and control the standards of sex and morality. “No woman” she said, “can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” Dehumanizing is the first step towards legitimatizing maltreatment (e.g. Nazis/Jews) Dr. Bernard Nathanson was the leading abortion doctor in the United States in the 1970’s. He had campaigned vigorously for the legalization of abortion and he himself had performed 60,000 abortions. He even believed his intentions were good and that he was doing a righteous thing by providing a service that guaranteed a woman’s right to control her body. But something changed Dr. Nathanson’s point view, it was a medical breakthrough called the ultrasound, introduced in 1976. This device literally opened a window on fetal development. The first time Nathanson saw an ultrasound in action, he was with a group of residents gathered around a pregnant patient in a darkened examining room watching a demonstration by a technician. The technician applied a conductive gel to the woman’s abdomen and then began working a handheld sensor over her stomach. As the screen clarified, Nathason was amazed. He could see a throbbing heart. When the technician focused closely on the image, Nathanson could see all four chambers of the heart pumping blood. And during the scan Nathanson became convicted. He said that his mind had dropped the word fetus in favor of the word baby. Suddenly, everything he had been learning about the child in the womb since his entry into the medicine snapped into focus. He had known what took place in the womb but somehow seeing it for the first time changed everything. Bernard Nathanson, the leading abortion doctor in America, became convinced that human life existed with in the womb from the onset of pregnancy. In an article he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine he wrote, in abortion “we are taking life.” That fetus is not mere tissue it is human life. "Probably nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about the fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something

that I have an easy answer on how to cure.” - -- Harrison Hickman, pollster for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League In Collier’s pregnancy center in Naples, Florida, Colson notes that 95% of the women who see their babies on the ultrasound choose not to have an abortion. The preborn are called “babies” in God’s Word. “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb...” (Luke 1:41). The concepts of Evolution & Relativism (Judges 17:6) contributes to this devaluing of human life. A recent study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute shows that the number of abortions in the United States dropped more than 17% between 1990 and 1997. The Centers for Disease Control has stated that one of the contributing factors for this decline is the changing attitude about the moral implications of abortion! Christians are making a difference – and churches that have the courage to speak the truth in love are positively affecting our culture. The bad news is that abortion clinics have started to aggressively compete for more clients and have begun to diversify by dispensing the abortion pill called RU-486 (BreakPoint with Charles Colson, 1/4/01). (Curiously enough R-U-4-86 = abbrev. for Are You For Homicide? 86 is police code for a homicide. In an interview with one company in the abortion industry on ABC’s 20/20, it was revealed that the income for the abortion industry is well over 1 billion dollars. They profit even more from whatever they can get from the sale of fetal material. Life of the mother? Statistics show that only about 4% of abortions are for the sake of the mother’s life or health. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said that in his thirty-five years in medicine he has never seen one case where an abortion was actually necessary to save a mother’s life. Rape and Incest Statistics show that less than 3% of abortions are related to cases of rape or incest

Even children conceived through rape or incest are still innocent and not deserving of capital punishment They are not responsible for the circumstances of their birth Fetal Abnormalities Statistics show that less than 1% of abortions are performed due to fetal abnormalities. Convenience If less than 8% of abortions are from the “Hard reasons” stated above, that means that the remaining 92% are basically for the convenience of the mother. Of these, 25.5% of women deciding to have an abortion want to postpone childbearing, 21.3% of women cannot afford a baby, 14.1% of women have a relationship issue or their partner does not want a child, 12.2% of women are too young or their parents object to the pregnancy, 10.8% of women feel a child will disrupt their education or career. Note the “feminist” argument used by the U.S. Supreme Court in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, while discussing Roe: “The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Repentance leads to forgiveness and blessing (Jer. 33:6-9) The Elliot Institute in Springfield, Illinois recently conducted a comprehensive survey of 260 post-abortive women. Not surprisingly, 92% of these women report that they have experienced feelings of guilt and 87% indicated that they suffered some depression (see the web site called, www.afterabortion.org) We need to show compassion and not just condemn We need to give hope to the hopeless and comfort to those in despair over having unwanted pregnancy, or having had an abortion We need to demonstrate grace as God has demonstrated his grace to us.

Blessing or curse? (Deut. 11:26-28, 30:19-20, Prov. 14:34) As Christian’s we have a positive obligation to speak up for “the perishing” who cannot speak up for themselves (Prov. 31:8) We must take an strong and clear position against abortion if we want to help bring about a change to the status quo (1 Cor. 14:8) We must obey God rather than man (Acts 5:29, 1 Sam. 5:24) We need to fear God more than we fear man (Ex. 1:17) Failure to do so invites judgement upon us as well.