What Is Human Life Worth

What is Human Life Worth? (Genesis 9:5-6; Ps. 139:13-16; Prov. 1:10-11, 15-16, 18; 24:10-12) The Scriptures point out the connection between life and blood (Lev. 17:14; Deut. 12:23-24) Blood represents the life force. Disregard for life is an affront to the Giver of life. Approximately 16,000 cases of murder or non-negligent homicide occur each year in the US according to official FBI crime statistics; among solved cases, almost half of murders are committed by a narrow social group of black males age 17 to 50 (constituting less than 3% of general US population) N.C.G.S., Subchapter III, Art.6 § 14-17 defines murder and its punishment as follows: A murder which shall be perpetrated by means of a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon of mass destruction as defined in G.S. 14-288.21, poison, lying in wait (see Prov. 1:11), imprisonment, starving, torture, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing, or which shall be committed in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of any arson, rape or a sex offense, robbery, kidnapping, burglary, or other felony committed or attempted with the use of a deadly weapon shall be deemed to be murder in the first degree, a Class A felony, and any person who commits such murder shall be punished with death or imprisonment in the State's prison for life without parole as the court shall determine pursuant to G.S. 15A-2000, except that any such person who was under 17 years of age at the time of the murder shall be punished with imprisonment in the State's prison for life without parole. Provided, however, any person under the age of 17 who commits murder in the first degree while serving a prison sentence imposed for a prior murder or while on escape from a prison sentence imposed for a prior murder shall be punished with death or imprisonment in the State's prison for life without parole as the court shall determine pursuant to G.S. 15A-2000. All other kinds of murder, including that which shall be proximately caused by the unlawful distribution of opium or any synthetic or natural salt, compound, derivative, or preparation of opium, or cocaine. or other substance described in G.S. 90-90(1)d., or methamphetamine, when the ingestion of such substance causes the death of the user, shall be deemed murder in the second degree, and any person who commits such murder shall be punished as a Class B2 felon. God Himself holds accountable those who shed a man’s blood (Gen. 9:5-6) Shed man’s blood = own blood shed by man The shedding of innocent blood invites God’s wrath/judgment (Jer. 19:6) Currently, in 38 states and the federal government itself, there are laws allowing capital punishment for certain categories of murder. Retribution: An “eye for an eye”, intended as a limitation not a license. A measured response to restore the moral balance upset by offense. The practice of "getting even" with a wrongdoer. The suffering of the wrongdoer is seen as good in itself, even if it has no other benefits. One reason for societies to include this judicial element is to diminish the perceived need for street justice, blood revenge, and vigilantism. Sometimes called the “mirror-punishment” or “poetic justice”.

Retribution is found in “Old Testament” or Hebrew Scriptures of the Bible and in the Code of Hammurabi. It often involves punishing the part of the body used to commit the crime. Extreme examples include the amputation of the hands of a thief, as still permitted by Sharia (Islamic) law, or during the Middle Ages in Europe; or disabling the foot or leg of a runaway slave. A less extreme example is the American tradition of putting soap into a child's mouth for using inappropriate language ("washing your mouth out with soap"). Another form of retribution involves mirroring the physical method of the crime, e.g. executing a murderer with his own weapon. No person’s life or well-being is outside of God’s concern 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) Every human being is made in God’s image and is precious in His sight (Gen. 1:26-27; 2:7; Jer. 18:1-6) God has a special and unique purpose for each person (Gen. 25:21-26; Jer. 1:5; 29:11-12; Eph. 1:11; 2:10; Ps. 139:13-16; Isa. 49:1; Acts 26:16-18) 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.” All human beings are created for God’s glory (Isa. 43:7) Because the Bible reveals God’s calling and care of persons before they are born, the pre-born share in this basic human dignity (Ps. 139:13-16; Genesis 25:22; Luke 1:15, 41 & 44; 2:16). These little beings will grow up if left alone. If we do not intrude with violence on their life, they will come to maturity. They are not becoming human, they are growing "into the fullness of humanity that they already possess." (John Stott. Christianity Today, 5 Sept. 1980, p. 50f.) Several years ago a group of 60 prominent physicians, which included former presidents of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Academy of Neurology, met in Cambridge MA and presented a declaration that said: "The fetus is not a sub-human species...the embryo is alive, human, and unique in the special environmental support required for that stage of human development." The bottom line: The biological facts are absolutely conclusive that the fetus is a living human being. All children are gifts from God and valued by God (Ps. 127:3-5, Luke 12:7)

God has never sanctioned child sacrifice (Jer. 19:5, Lev. 18:21, Deut. 12:31) Abortion, euthanasia, and unethical human experimentation violate the God-given dignity of human beings. As these practices gain social approval and become legitimized in law, they undermine the legal and cultural protections that our society has provided for vulnerable persons. Human dignity is indivisible. A threat to the aged, to the very young, to the unborn, to those with disabilities, or to those with genetic diseases is a threat to all. But not everybody values human life (e.g. abortion, euthanasia, genocide (e.g. Dafur), abuse, violent crime, embryonic stem cell research, etc.) On the government sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo (see http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43463 In 2004, all of top 10 video games sold in the U.S. involved killing or violence as a major theme. 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. 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) pre-born 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 anti-sodomy 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 pre-born 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. 43% of all U.S. women will have at least one abortion before their 45th birthday. In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the most common surgical procedure in the United States is not by-pass surgery or even cosmetic surgery—it is abortion. Indeed, in 2002, approximately 1.29 million women in the U.S. had an abortion, and 49% of all unintended pregnancies today result in abortion. 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.”

Article XV of the Baptist Faith and Message says, “We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.” But it may not be enough to oppose practices that devalue life, we also need to affirm practices that honor it (e.g. Supporting crisis pregnancy centers) God expects us to take responsibility for one another Jesus summed up God’s law by commanding us to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:35-40) By deed and parable, he taught us that anyone in need is our neighbor (Luke 10:29-37). We have an affirmative duty to act to protect the lives of others (Prov. 24:11) and to seek justice generally (Prov. 31:8; Ps. 82:3-4; Isa. 58:6-7; Micah 6:8; James 1:27; 2:14-17; 1 John 3:16-17; Jude 1:23) Neighbors in the Kitty Genovese case in New York City admittedly ignored her desperate pleas for help for more than half an hour as they watched a killer stalk and stab her in three separate attacks. None of these witnesses were charged because, as a matter of law, they had no duty to act. Failing to do so diminishes us (Prov. 24:10) By contrast, God will empower those who act (Isa. 40:28-31; 2 Cor. 4:16) Those who stand will be commended by God (Rev. 2:13) We will be held accountable by God for failing to act (Prov. 24:12) As Christian citizens, we believe it is our calling to help government live up to its divine mandate to render justice (Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Pet. 2:13-17). We are called to emulate the Lord’s compassion (Zech. 7:9, Matt.18:33, Luke 10:33, Heb. 10:34, 1 Pe. 3:8) Refusal to show compassion is one of the sins for which Edom was condemned (Amos 1:11) Going through trials ourselves helps to make us compassionate (Heb. 5:2) Whether or not we demonstrate compassion a way of determining whether or not the love of God is in us (1 John 3:17, Jude 1:22) “When evil seems dominant in a culture is the time for believers to summon the courage of their faith and take godly actions. We must act courageously to find ways to help vulnerable human beings whose lives are unjustly threatened.”

“Evangelicals may not always agree about policy, but we realize that we have many callings and commitments in common: commitments to the protection and well-being of families and children, of the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the unborn, of the persecuted and oppressed, and of the rest of the created order.” - For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. 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 judgment upon us as well. (Prov. 24:12) Alongside the death of 20 million unborn humans stands the tragedy of over 10 million women enduring abortions and dealing with that loss. In the first ten months of its existence the organization called Women Exploited By Abortion grew from two women to 10,000 members who had had abortions but were now strongly pro-life. (Cited in Abortion, by Paul Fowler, Multnomah, 1987, p. 172). 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) In 1981 the regional director of Suicides Anonymous testified to the Cincinnati City Council like this: "This Cincinnati group has seen 5,620 members in 35 months. Over 4,000 were women of whom 1,800 or more had had abortions. The highest suicide rate is in the 15 to 24 age group. There is a direct linkage between suicide attempts and [abortion]." (Quoted in Abortion, by Paul Fowler, p. 195) 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. Repentance leads to forgiveness and blessing (Jer. 33:6-9) We must resist being persuaded to buy in to a mind set that devalues human life (Prov. 1:10-11)