Gregg Cunningham and a Gospel-less Debate

http://blog.abolishhumanabortion.com/2015/06/gregg-cunningham-and-gospel-less-debate.html

The Holy Innocents' Foundation of Oklahoma is guilty

What do you know? Roman Catholics actually opposing abolition of human abortion.
Whodathunk.

Are abortive women murderers?

A powerful trailer for the upcoming documentary "Babies Are Murdered Here" has been making the Internet rounds, and the creators of the film have been busily promoting it, as well they should. It promises to be a very important addition to the abolitionist arsenal of societal agitation. If the trailer is any indication of the finished product, it is a very necessary and very solid rebuke to the fundamental problem that leads to abortion in the United States - a culture of uncaring, indifferent, sinful apathy that has pervaded not only the society at large but also most of the church and virtually all of "the church".
The creators of the film, among them Marcus Pittman, have made some noise recently in their proclamations that women who abort their child are themselves murderers.

We have some thoughts on the matter.

Legally speaking?
First, for mutual understanding, everyone must understand that these brothers who are labeling abortive women as murderers do not mean they are murderers in the legal sense. They do not mean that under the current structure of law relating to homicide these women must be arrested today and brought before a judge and convicted of murder in a court of law. This is a category mistake. Of course the way that American law currently reads would not support such actions. We all know this.
These brethren are digging deeper when they say this. The laws of any given society and any given government are transient and can change. The law of Almighty God never changes, however, and that is what they mean. God has made it very clear throughout His Word that He does not tolerate murder.

-Genesis 9:6 - (God said,) "Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man."
-Deuteronomy 5:17 - You shall not murder.
-Matthew 19:16-19 - And someone came to Him and said, “Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?” And He said to him, “Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One who is good; but if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Then he said to Him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not commit murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and mother; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
-Romans 13:9 - For this, "You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet," and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
-Revelation 21:8 - But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
-Revelation 22:15 - Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.

God's law is higher than American law, higher than the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Supreme Court of the United States. And it is very real, so in very real ways, those who violate it are guilty of that of which it convicts them.
Listen to the words of Jesus for an analogy.
Matthew 5:27-28 - “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Looking lustfully upon someone to whom you are not married is not illegal in the USA. One could probably make a strong argument that it is actually encouraged. So a man who looks lustfully at women his entire life of 80 years, say, will never suffer any legal ramifications in a human court. Even if such a law were on the books, it would be nearly impossible to enforce and it would also land pretty much everyone behind bars.
But that man, at the moment of his death, will stand before God for judgment (Hebrews 9:27), and at that time, the fact that he never experienced consequences for his legalised sins during his earthly life will be no comfort for him at all. He will be found guilty for that sin of looking with lust, for in God's eyes, he has spent 80 years committing adultery.

In God's eyes, he is an adulterer.

He had no punishment on Earth, but his punishment in eternity will be more severe and longer-lasting, for it will be an eternal punishment.

God seeing you as a criminal is a much bigger deal than the society in which you live seeing you as a criminal.

Mayflower UCC agitation and pro-abortion martyr complex

Yesterday, abolitionists converged upon the ground outside a gathering of one of the most pro-abortion "church"es in the state of Oklahoma to make known our presence, our dissent, and the law of Almighty God.

Our location was Mayflower Congregational UCC, home church of Dr Robin Meyers, leftist theologian extraordinaire, denier of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, professor of rhetoric at a local university, and incoherent, hateful interlocutor in the comments sections of his online opinion column.

Our purpose: to join with our brethren from jeremiah7.com and call this "church" to repent.
We did this not because we believe we are better than them, or anyone.
We did this not because none of us have lives or better things to do with our time.
We did this not because we were or are overcome with hate or bitterness.

We did this for all of the reasons that we have already given, the reasons that we are abolitionists. The Lord Jesus has commanded us to love our neighbor, and He gave no exceptions and no exemptions to that loving command. It is our joy, privilege, and responsibility to stand up for the preborn and to agitate to inform our culture and destroy misinformation about their daily fate. We sought the repentance of this evil church.

The people of Mayflower UCC stand condemned for their uncaring support for this murderous system, for sitting complacently under teaching from the pulpit that inflates their arrogance over being enlightened, unlike those right-wing nut job fundamentalists, for refusing to listen to the arguments, easily available and accessible for decades, that soundly (and really, pretty easily) decisively refute pro-abortion/choice rhetoric, and for actually materially and financially assisting in the murder of preborn children by devoting a portion of the church's benevolence fund to Planned Parenthood.

We may have the opportunity to prepare a fuller report of our interactions and activities this morning a little later. For now, suffice it to say that the images and posters we employed depicted in a graphic manner the horrible results of Planned Parenthood's favorite service*.

Some were offended that we would display such disgusting images and expressed their displeasure in angry words, yet had no answer to the reasonable and obvious question: Why such emotion over showing these images while no such emotion exists over the fact that the images represent the reality of death and mutilation for these precious children, created in the image of God? Still others responded as if they were robots, replying with a hollow "God bless you", showing no recognition of our obvious purpose. Several times we informed congregants that they are supporting abortion with their tithes and offerings. Yet the depths of their stiff-necked unwillingness to repent remained yet unplumbed. No, rather, the police were called for little other discernible reason than that our presence made the Mayflowerians uncomfortable.

Later this evening we have seen some of the reactions on Facebook pages of congregants who saw us there.  They exhibit an amazing martyr complex. Witness this sham of feigned earnestness:

Dale Halfacre

Thank you for reminding me today to "Turn the other cheek"

Like ·  · about an hour ago

• Mayflower Congregational UCC likes this.
• 

  Abolitionist Admin When Jesus said that, do you really think He meant that we should refuse to repent when our sin is exposed, and ignore the messenger of that sin?

  about an hour ago · Like
• 

  Dale Halfacre May God bless you.

  49 minutes ago · Like

Matthew 5:38“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. 40“If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. 41“Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. 42“Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.

From Dale's (and other commenters') reaction, you'd think that we abolitionists are guilty of violence against Mayflower, that we are comparable to cruel Roman legionnaires, who would insist that Judeans carry their gear for them on pain of death or malicious abuse. Their history of martyrdom leaves a great deal to be desired.

Jesus specifically says "an evil person" as the person to whom one must turn one's other cheek, in a particular type of situation. Yet where is Dale's argument that we are the evil abusers of whom Jesus spoke? Is he thinking of the gory images again? Where is his outrage against the actual fact of this evil's rampant existence?

Such pompous self-victimisation is its own reward.

Let this serve as a warning, not of abolitionists' power, reach, or tenacity in and of ourselves.

No, the Lord Jesus will judge evildoers and those who hate the good and refuse to listen to the law of Almighty God. We resort to these kinds of tactics partly because Mayflower, like so many others, is so far gone that if a change is to come, it might only come through drastic measures and shock. We will never resort to violence to further the agenda that Jesus has given to all people, but we will most certainly not be silent.


*Note that we did not say "the service it most commonly renders". All the controversy surrounding PP's existence has centered around the fact that it provides abortions. If abortions are really the tiny % of the services it provides, as it loudly (and falsely) claims so often, why not merely give up that service for the good of the greater organisation? Obviously, it is because PP has long carried on an irrational and evil love affair with murdering preborn children firsthand.

Answering attacks - Bringers of the Light, Part 2

Continuing with Bringers of the Light from last time:


10. BotL contends:

God cannot be used to justify your arguments unless you either a) prove conclusively without a shadow of a doubt that God exists

OK, well, proving conclusively without a reasonable doubt has been done.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt? Proof is not the same as persuasion, and in fact the Bible tells us not merely to prepare for, but to expect, wide unbelief in the God of the Bible. So if you're looking for an explanation as to why so many people don't believe in the God of the Bible, the Bible's own explanation (ie, humanity is sinful and rebellious, suppressing the truth and their knowledge that God exists, in unrighteousness) certainly accounts for all the facts.

admit that your viewpoint is based purely on your religious convictions and not facts as you so often claim..."I believe abortion is wrong because I believe in God's divine plan" is not even remotely close to "I believe abortion is wrong because the facts say so"

a) This has already been addressed here and here.
b) BotL needs to argue, not assert, that the facts are not indeed on our side.
c) The facts are expressly laid out in Scripture, since BotL asked. There is literally no higher standard of truth, no more reliable witness, no more trustworthy informant, than the omniscient God Who never lies. Anything He says is the most certain of fact. And He has said that He brings good out of evil of all kinds. It doesn't matter whether BotL believes it.
d) The facts of the matter are actually pretty plain. When one male and one female mammal engage in conjugal relations, any life form that results is always the exact same species and is always just that - a life form. It is not a rock, nor a liquid, nor a computer screen. Not all products of conceptions are viable - ie, not all will go on to be born or survive delivery - but when two humans engage in conjugal relations, a human baby is the result of any conception.
The question to be debated is: What are our obligations, given this fact? What ought we do? On this question, empirical data can make no statement. Convictions about morality are necessary to know how to proceed, and those depend on different kinds of supporting argumentation. BotL has not, honestly, shown that he has thought through this issue with sufficient sophistication to realise this fact.
BotL is committing a category error and would need a way to bridge the IS/OUGHT gap before saying this kind of thing.

Extended interaction with Pro Choice Oklahoma, part 1

The Facebook page known as Pro Choice Oklahoma has attempted a rebuttal to one of our most useful articles, which itself refutes the common pro-abortion argument that "nobody is justified in using a woman's body without her consent". The end value of this argument is that, since the woman did not expressly consent to housing the baby for nine months, she is justified in expelling the baby from her body so as to retain her bodily autonomy. Our article wrecks this argument, and only a few people have tried to interact with its arguments. Pro Choice Oklahoma represents the latest attempt, and due to their serious effort, we will give a serious response.

AHA's argument: The "woman's rights > fetus' rights" is a very poor inequality because it is trading on a fundamental dissimilarity. In well over 95% of cases, it does not come down to the choice of the mother's life or the baby's life. Thus what the pro-abort should be saying is "woman's convenience/freedom from some life struggles for a year or so > the life of her child". Funny that they never state it that way.

PCOK rebuts: Funny how that argument that you are rebutting doesn't say woman's life>fetal life, but women's rights>fetal rights.
The courts do in fact decide that the right to life NEVER trumps the right to bodily autonomy, Shimp V McFall for additional information on this.
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/judpol/mcfall.html

We respond: PCOK has forgotten that not all rights are equal, as we indicated in our original point. It would be one thing (a more complex question, in point of fact) if we were weighing a mother's life against the baby's life in a one-to-one correspondence. If women always died during childbirth, then the question of the mother's obligation to proceed would most certainly be much more difficult. This is not the case, however. In the vast majority of cases, the choice at hand is between on the one hand, in many cases, some months of some discomfort, some expense, and some inconvenience and in some cases, some years of more serious complications, and the entire life of the child on the other hand.
PCOK needs to show us the means by which they come to their conclusion that this virtually-always-temporary condition (ie, pregnancy and any complications) is a more important consideration than the always-permanent result of abortion, namely that the child loses his life for good.
There's no coming back from being dead (unless you're Jesus).

As for the legal case cited:
1) We are well aware that in many cases the law is not on the side of abolition. Such was the case in the UK and the USA before the abolition of slavery as well. That which is legal is not always morally correct. We intend to change the surrounding culture and change the laws while we're at it.
2) The case suffers from a few key differences that make it sufficiently disanalogous as to be irrelevant.
In point of fact, the court case is virtually identical to the "Thomson's violinist" argument, which our original article dismantles from many different angles. PCOK needs to show us why our arguments are wrong, not assert that it is wrong just because some Pennsylvania judge made a decision in that particular situation with which he was faced, which is, however, not very relevant.
3) Abortion is not a woman refusing to grant the use of her body to a stranger when asked to. It is intentional intervention by the woman into the natural process of new human life coming into being. This court case deals with one man attempting to intervene in another's life to preserve his own. The defendant is not attempting to end the plaintiff's life or vice versa. In abortion, that is the case.


AHA's argument: Abortion isn't just "unplugging". Abortion is an intentional destruction of life. The intent is to destroy the life. Left alone, the very small baby will become a larger baby, and eventually a born baby. Left alone, the violinist will die. Not the same.

PCOK rebuts: Abortion is the same as deliberately unplugging the self aware, life support machine that has a life, thoughts, feelings, and is at medical risk from continuing pregnancy, and thus should have the right to decide how much risk they are willing to accept, and if they are willing to play life support machine for that embryo/fetus, everything else is just appeal to emotion fallacy.

We respond: There is actually not much substance to this rebuttal from PCOK. It is nothing more than a naked assertion that their view is correct rather than an argument dismantling our own argument.
Of course the woman is self-aware and has a life, thoughts, feelings, etc. Yes, she is at some medical risk, though in most cases the risk is quite small.
We do not deny that the woman is fully permitted to choose how much risk she is willing to accept...before she is with child. Once a new human has come into being as a result of her conscious choice and actions (again, in the vast majority of cases excepting rape), she is responsible for not murdering the helpless human who is depending on his mother.
Finally, notice how PCOK, like so many other pro-aborts, callously sucks the life, honor, and love right out of the mother-child relationship. No longer is the child a tiny bundle of love and reliance, to be shown love and compassion and to be nurtured and brought up to be, himself, a loving, compassionate person. Now the baby amounts to a parasite and the mother to a machine. These are PCOK's words, not ours. We fully and strongly believe that the mother and the child are made in the image of God and as such bear dignity and deserve love and compassion.
Pro-abortion treats the child like a clump of tissue and the mother like an animal, or worse yet, a robot.


AHA's argument: The stranger in the violinist scenario never consented. In ~99% of cases, the woman consented to sexual intercourse. Are 99% of women asleep when their "involuntary hook-up" happened?

PCOK rebuts: Consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy and consent to pregnancy is not consent to parenting.
As you can have sex without pregnancy, pregnancy without sex, pregnancy without live birth, parenting without giving live birth, live birth without parenting, etc.
In the same way that consent to being on or near the road, either as a pedestrian or a driver, is NOT consent to being run over by a drunk driver, or a distracted driver, or in some weird accident.
Most people that seek abortion were using some form of contraception, even non forms like NFP and "pull out" are at least trying to reduce the risk of pregnancy, so to then go on to say they consent to pregnancy is laughable, at best.
And no, women don't decide to become pregnant, they don't push a magic button to make implantation possible, if they could, there would be no fertility clinics or forms of contraception (except to regulate health related issues such as ovarian cysts).

We respond: PCOK needs to demonstrate, not merely assert, that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy.
Matthew Martellus has quite ably demonstrated that this distinction is in fact impossible to substantiate.

It is not analogous to being on the road and ending up with these terrible outcomes. (Notice again how PCOK turns the idea of pregnancy into a bad outcome, as if it is something terrible, to be avoided at all costs, like being run over by a drunk driver.) Of course those things are not consent, but they are realistic risks that one takes in getting on the road. Of course, life is full of danger and our lives can end at any time, so it's not as if always staying at home will guarantee that a drunk driver won't in fact kill any of us.
And herein resides yet another disanalogy - the objective of driving a car is not to be killed by a drunk driver. The objective is to achieve a faster and fairly widely available mode of transport.
One of the objectives of conjugal relations is to make babies. That's just the fact of the matter. Now, it's certainly not the only objective, and many will want to separate that one from the others and we don't necessarily have a problem with that, but sometimes the means of that separation fail (condoms break or aren't used, etc); one should hardly be surprised that when driving a car, one arrives at a different destination than where she started. That's what driving a car is for.

Yes, it is true that the decision to become pregnant is not a separate decision from the decision to engage in conjugal relations, much like arriving at a different place is not a separate decision from driving a car. But where is PCOK's argument that the fact that an unintended consequence of a woman's action occurred means that she is then justified in murdering someone?


AHA's argument: The baby is not an invader. He is an innocent party. Are Thomson and the pro-abortion crowd ignorant of what causes pregnancy? The parents are responsible, not the baby. The stranger hooked to Thomson's violinist had nothing at all to do with the violinist's predicament. Parents of very small babies do - they had sex. Sex sometimes causes babies.

PCOK rebuts: Actually the "baby" is an invader, and innocence is debatable. TO be innocent, one must first be capable of guilt, without the choice to not do wrong, one cannot be innocent.
OR in medical terms, to be innocent one must be harmless, we all know pregnancy can have negative effects on women's health, mental, physical, etc, so in the medical sense it is not innocent either.
The only belief I've seen in which a fetus could be innocent, is mormonism, because in mormonism you choose your family in advance, meaning the fetus makes a conscience decision to, yes, invade a woman of it's choosing, in which the fetus would know if it was likely to die in utero or not, and in the case of being unwanted, is in fact, guilty.
What causes pregnancy is a fertilized egg attaching itself in a woman, typically in the uterus, but could also be ectopic, often tubes, which would require an abortion, or else the woman will die, or at the very least become infertile.
Zygotes do attach themselves to a woman, I certainly wouldn't choose for one to attach in me, again, there is no magic switch.

We respond: Notice again that PCOK chooses to assert ("actually the 'baby' is an invader") rather than demonstrate.
And the baby's innocence is debatable because the baby is not capable of guilt? Does PCOK believe we are guilty until proven innocent?
PCOK fails to make the necessary distinction between the baby himself and the surrounding consequences of mothering the baby. The baby is not causing health problems for the mother. The mother's body is reacting to the baby's presence and preparing her body to nourish the baby and bring him to birth in good health, and that leads to the changes and difficulties she experiences.
The connection to Mormonism is strange, since, for one thing, we're not Mormons, and for another, if the child chose his mother, it would seem he would possibly be held guilty, not innocent.

If the PCOK admin writing this rebuttal doesn't want a zygote attaching himself to her uterus, then I'd recommend she not engage in conjugal relations. It's still up to her to show, however, that if she does engage in that behavior and a zygote comes into being because of her actions, she is justified in putting that tiny baby to death.


AHA's argument: Even if the baby were an invader, execution without due process of law is not justified. Killing him is an unconstitutional violation of his right to trial by a jury of his peers. (And best of luck to the prosecution!)

PCOK rebuts: Only applicable if the government is mandating abortions. I have never heard of the US doing such a thing and would condemn it.
As long as a woman is choosing for herself, it's a matter of self defense, self defense doesn't require due process, if a rapist is attacking you you don't wait for due process to condemn him BEFORE you kill him in self defense.
When something is using your body against your continued consent (consensual sex can turn into rape if you say no, or a safe word and it continues against your continued consent, pregnancy is no different, it also needs continued consent), especially if it poses a health risk to you of any sort, self defense including lethal force is 100% justified and does not require "due process".
I'm unsure as to where this idea even came from.

We respond: By PCOK's logic, lynchings are justifiable since they are not performed by the government. Of course killing, say, a rapist in self-defense is justifiable because the rapist is attempting a grossly immoral act and people are permitted to defend themselves. In the heat of the moment, during an attack, the assailant has opened himself up to whatever retaliation the assailee might dispense.
The claim of self-defense depends on the dubious and so far unsubstantiated assertion that the baby is an assailant and on forgetting that the mother's actions brought the baby into being.


AHA's argument: The right to be in the womb - Conception followed by eviction from the womb could be compared to capturing someone, placing him on an airplane, and then shoving him out without a parachute in mid-flight.

PCOK rebuts: Not true, I never consented to pregnancy so I never "captured the baby stuck them in my womb and then just shoved them out mid-pregnancy"

We respond: But the woman did consent to conjugal relations.
But let's look at this from another angle - we again don't see any reason why not to apply the same logic to 2 year old toddlers. If a woman doesn't want to deal with the surrounding consequences of parenting a toddler, is it OK to put that toddler to death?


AHA's argument: We have no right to endanger others without their consent.

PCOK rebuts: Well your equal rights for zygotes crowd seems to not have gotten the memo, considering pregnancy is often not wanted, and is always endangering to a woman's health and/or life

We respond: But, again, the woman did consent to conjugal relations.
Note that many of PCOK's central arguments depend on the defeated claim that consent to sex does not imply consent to pregnancy. This is merely wishful thinking, for those who are unwilling to take obvious biological facts into account.


AHA's argument: and then intentionally or negligently fail to protect them from the harm...When parents mutually enable their sperm and ova to join, the parents are not enslaved -- they've volunteered.

PCOK rebuts: I personally use a contraceptive implant in my left arm, I do not consent to sperm and ova meeting, nor for the zygote to implant, and nor for an embryo to mature to a fetus, nor for a fetus to mature to birth age.
Most people that get abortions don't consent to that either, others don't consent to a previously unknown risk, had no real way to prevent pregnancy when they became pregnant, etc.

We respond: This evinces the thought that wishes can somehow change reality. If PCOK thinks hard enough and hopes with the sufficient level of strength and willpower, maybe, just maybe, engaging in sex will change somehow.
It's bizarre to watch this kind of reflection take place. Sperm want to get to the ovum. One of them may succeed, and if it does, you're a parent. It's really that simple, and no amount of wishing or rhetoric changes facts.
PCOK wants to think that her contraceptive implant removes the possibility of conceiving a child. It doesn't - it reduces the possibility. The only sure way to avoid becoming pregnant is to abstain from intercourse. But PCOK doesn't want to do that. We understand, but it is childish to attempt to avoid the consequences of one's actions and then to murder someone else in case those consequences come to fruition anyway. Someone else should not pay the ultimate price just because something happened that you didn't want to happen.


AHA's argument: Causing a child to be is not, in itself, endangerment (it's a normal, natural fact of life), because the very fact of pregnancy automatically protects the child against the possible dangers of an unsupportive environment.
But by conceiving a child, parents give themselves a life-or-death power over her, and they do this without her consent.
If parents intentionally or negligently use their power to put her in harm's way (let her starve, say), they cause the danger. If the child gets harmed, they caused the harm. They initiated force and violated the child's rights.

PCOK rebuts: Not true, many pregnancies end due to stress and other hormones released by the mother that is toxic for the unborn, not to mention if the mother needs to use medication which could be harmful, or has some sort of an addiction that could be harmful, smoking, drinking, illegal drugs, prescription drugs, etc.
For both life and death. I, along with others, wish I was aborted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/15/i-wish-my-mother-aborted-me
As the fetus can make no choice of it's own, it is up to the mother to make the best decision for both her health and life, and the well being of her unborn, even if that means abortion.
Actually the initial force was when the "child" violated her body. Sorry you can't personify a fetus and then say that it can't do or choose anything, either it's a human capable of choosing and thinking and feeling and doing things, or it's not, and in either case abortion is justified, you do NOT get to pick and choose when to personify it or not to use it as emotional blackmail.

We respond: PCOK misses the point about the woman's body protecting the child. Yes, of course, miscarriage is a very real possibility. The point is that invading the uterus with a scalpel and forceps is unnatural. Sharp pointy objects don't belong in a uterus. Soft tissue, fluid, and babies do.
As for PCOK's and others' wish that they had been aborted: Not to be callous, but if the statement "I wish I'd been aborted" appears anywhere except on a suicide note, I do not believe the person who said it.
Nor does PCOK have the right to project their feelings onto others, unless it's fair for everyone. And if we're doing that, then the rapist could say, by PCOK's own logic, not mine, the following: "I would really like to be held down and forced to have sex today. Therefore, those three women right over there would like the same."
This is simply fantastically bad argumentation.
However, it is equalled in its quality by a phrase I can't believe PCOK wrote with a straight face: "it is up to the mother to make the best decision for both her health and life, and the well being of her unborn, even if that means abortion".

The best choice for the preborn child could conceivably be a violent death? What planet are we talking about, exactly?
Now, given that PCOK apparently has some angst-riddled half-formed death wish, I suppose that kind of talk could make sense to her, but honestly, again, think this through. Is anyone else justified in deciding, on someone else's part, that violent death is in their best interest?

Lest we descend too far into the madness here, I will leave further response to part 2.

(Please leave any comments at the Abolitionist Society blog.)

Ugly black babies

I invite you to view this brief video of Charlotte, NC abortician Ron Virmani during what seems to be the aftermath of some Christians knocking on his front door. I believe this video is profitable for numerous reasons, and I would like to share them with you.



We most certainly applaud the good brethren at Operation Save America for their gutsy willingness to take a camera crew to the front door of this serial child murderer and knock. Such men (for they are virtually always men) deserve to be exposed for what they do.

Abortionists are those who “lie in wait for blood” (Proverbs 12:6), “make the fatherless their prey” (Isaiah 10: 2), and profits exceedingly from the extermination of innocent human life. They live in our towns and walk freely in our world, yet murder the innocent in their hidden places (Pslam 10:8-9).

Christians who have embraced their calling to walk in the light and expose the deeds of darkness in our present age while they work to bring about their lawful abolition must confront these vicious men of lawlessness with both truth and love.

Scripture plainly instructs Christians to refuse to "participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light." (Ephesians 5:11-13). Yet Scripture also commands us to "Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God" (1 Peter 2:13-16).

We are to be "blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom [we] shine as lights in the world" (Phillipians 2:15).

Now... Consider how the Operation Save America people in the video above spoke to Dr. Virmani.

Granted, it is only a 38-second video clip until Virmani rudely closes the door, but notice who is emotional, angry, and hostile, and who is peaceable, laid-back, and calm.

In my personal experience, in these kinds of encounters it is virtually always the experienced follower of Jesus who is calm and collected in those kinds of face-to-face exchanges, whereas the non-Christian very often (certainly not always, but far more often than otherwise) is belligerent, raises his voice in anger, and fails to retain coherent thought due to his rage. The stereotypical view that Christians' hackles are easily raised in offense and anger is, in my view, probably a product of experiences that some people have had with immature Christians and even false professors of Christianity, who lack confidence in what they are saying. Very rarely will an experienced believer in Jesus get all bent out of shape (again, in my experience), whereas I have seen numerous instances of unbelievers, atheists, pro-aborts, etc of a roughly equivalent level of experience and training become very easily provoked and offended.

Virmani begins in the clip by insisting that pregnancy and adoption not be "put... on the taxpayers". One would assume that he does not, then, take any money from the government for his abortions. Or is he only willing to assign "murdering tiny humans" to the taxpayers' dime? Is he concerned that raising humans to thrive is more expensive than murdering them? That is certainly true, there's no denying it. Applying this reasoning consistently, why would we not extend the murder-grace-period to born children? Those are often quite expensive.

The OSA brethren ask an excellent question: "What does that have to do with the babies?"
The correct answer is, obviously, that it has nothing to do with them. Virmani, of course, has no desire to admit the obvious.

The lady with OSA asks Virmani: "You would rather profit off of those children?"
Virmani responds: "No no no, I am not profiting."
This is a lie. I wonder if Virmani really thinks that anyone believed him?
It certainly seems like he's doing OK financially to me.

Virmani continues with a bizarre tangent: "I as a taxpayer do not wish to pay for those babies to be brought up to be born and kill those people in Colorado."

Apparently Virmani believes that the children he is dismembering in the womb will grow up to be serial killers, so he is doing us all a favor by killing them before they can do that.

The answer to this twisted thinking is obvious - nobody knows what any of these now-dead children would have grown up to become. Perhaps one or more of them would have discovered a way to prevent all further gun massacres in the world. Perhaps one would have cured cancer and AIDS and perhaps another would have become a great philanthropist and composer of music. Virmani can't see the future. We don't know and neither does he. 

Since we don't know and since life and death are not given into our hands in that way, we must not impose ourselves into what God has said is His business, His alone.

Virmani: "Let me see you adopt one of those ugly black babies."
He would, obviously, do well to either avoid all confrontation with anyone in the future or get some serious PR and debate training, and I mean immediately. A semi-public figure like him has no excuse to let slip his racist ideology like that.

Notice, by the way, that these three OSA folks pictured on camera are Caucasian, while Virmani appears to be of Indian origin. Aren't Caucasian Southern Christians supposed to hate black people, according to the stereotype? Yet we are the ones offering to adopt them and thus intentionally create a mixed-ethnicity family and we are the ones who want the African-American population to increase instead of decrease because of mass abortion. Ironically, however, pro-aborts want to paint us as the ones who are full of hate.

He goes on to further challenge the OSA folks to adopt. We have addressed this low-quality objection at great length already. I have to say, it is sort of pathetic that this career abortician has not bothered to familiarise himself with even the most basic of pro-life argumentation. Perhaps he finds it too emotionally bothersome to read because it convicts him of his sin, but it seems to be a breach of professionalism not to know the justification for why one does what one does.

Virmani finishes: "Take them off the taxpayers' money."
Apparently he is not a fan of President Obama, who wants more people to be on the government welfare payroll. Or perhaps he is merely extremely inconsistent and a fool (Foolishness, Godlessness, and shedding the blood of innocent human beings goes hand in hand. See the Psalms. In particular Chapters 10 and 14).

Virmani's poor thinking and weird argumentation are merely evidence of a depraved man trying to justify himself while his conscience, while seared and nearly dead, is still kicking and wiggling inside his soul. Unfortunately for him, continuing in obstinate, unrepentant sin just tightens the screws on that conscience and lessens any chance he will have for forgiveness and eternal life. He has his reward in full.

Here's more:




(Please leave any comments at Abolish Human Abortion.)

“Pro-Life” = “Pro-Imprisonment”?

A regular pro-choice poster on our Facebook wall directed us to this article from the poorly-named RH Reality Check site, by authors Lynn Paltrow and Emma S. Ketteringham.
I would like to comment on the most relevant portions of the article here.

if these prosecutions continue, pregnant women who are addicted to drugs and who cannot overcome that addiction in the short term of pregnancy will be pressured into having unwanted abortions to avoid criminal penalties

Or they could work harder to overcome those addictions.
Like it or not, endangering a preborn human being is endangering a preborn human being. You may not like that fact, but there are plenty of distasteful facts out there. You may not like the responsibility, but adults have responsibilities. It's the way it is.
If a friend confides in me that he has an overwhelming compunction to fire off machine guns at playground equipment when kids are playing on it, I will tell him that he has no option - he is absolutely not permitted to do so. If he tells me he can't stop himself, I will take away his guns. If he persists, I will get him professional help. If he does it anyway, that's what laws against reckless endangerment are for. He is not an automaton, a 100%-unthinking slave to his desires to fire machine guns at occupied playground equipment. He made a choice. Neither is any person an automaton with zero choice in the matter of addiction. One has to want to be free of the addiction to become free. Putting laws on the books against behavior that often accompanies addiction is one way we deter people from becoming addicted, one way we help people realise they need to want to break the addiction more. No one can do it for them, but it must be done.

in which a pregnant woman had an abortion in order to get the state of North Dakota to drop “fetal endangerment” charges against her.

This is a perfect illustration of why many abortions occur - to escape unsavory consequences of someone's actions.
Had sex and got pregnant, but the baby would get in the way of your internship? No problem - just murder the baby and you'll be fine.
Unwilling to try hard enough to break free from a drug addiction and now you're facing charges of endangering your preborn baby? Just get the danger over with, murder the baby, and you're in the clear.

Incidentally, I'm no expert, but illegal drugs are often quite costly, and one of the pro-aborts' favorite hobbyhorses is "what about pregnancies that poor women undergo, who are in no financial shape to sustain a child?". I don't see how these two things can coexist. How do these poor women who are barely scraping by, barely paying for a studio apartment and Ramen noodles every night pay for illegal drugs? Maybe the pro-aborts don't really care as much as they claim about women, but rather have ulterior, unstated motivations.

why would a group that claims to value life urge Alabama’s highest court to uphold an interpretation of the chemical endangerment law that coerces women into having abortions and punish the ones who don’t?

I can think of a few reasons, actually.
Thanks to a decision by five highly-placed and ill-informed men 39 years ago, it is illegal to punish women for having abortions. Why would the authors of this article imply that they are unhappy with this arrangement?
Also, even if there were strong anti-abortion laws on the books (which there will be in the near future, God willing), the question of what penalties should be applied to abortive women is far from clear or easily answered. Here is our answer as it stands right now.
The motivation behind abolitionism is that human beings are created in the image of God, and we have a standing command, a heart, and a burden to preserve those lives, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to fight against suppression of the rights of the weakest and voiceless of our society. If it is possible to deter people from putting lives at risk by passing legislation and assigning criminal penalties to violators, that is, all other things being equal, what we would want to do. Why? Because of the effect of deterrence. Of course this is not one-size-fits-all, but where deterrence is a reasonably expected outcome, we want to put the deterrent in place, to save lives.
Taking illegal drugs during pregnancy is very dangerous for the preborn child. It can lead to death or serious birth defects and disabilities. Since the state is often saddled with much of the high costs of living for disabled people, the state also has a standing interest in protecting people from unnecessary debilitating conditions that would prevent them from being self-sufficient producers.

It is difficult, however, to see what is “life-affirming” about hauling off to jail new mothers who just gave birth and leaving their children motherless? Penalties under the Chemical Endangerment law range from not less than 1-year-and-1-day to up to 99 years (life) in prison.

It is not often that pro-aborts come up with good arguments, but I have to hand it to the authors here. Despite pro-abortion's history of getting virtually everything wrong, the authors swam upstream and made a good point, albeit on a relatively minor matter.
I am not an experienced legislator. From what I've seen of most legislators, that improves the probability that my judgment is reasonable and well thought out.
Nor am I an expert in law, however, and nothing comes immediately to mind with respect to how one could improve the sentencing structure. Obviously, the range of sentencing can't be so light as to remove all deterrent effects; on the other hand, we must avoid the extreme of cruel and unusual punishment.

But let me propose this to the authors and to you, the readers. The issue at hand is chemical endangerment. This means the pregnant woman is taking illegal drugs. Now, the authors may be pro-legalisation of drugs, so they may be consistent on this issue, but as it stands now, most usage of drugs that anyone cares about entails legal consequences as well. There is a really good chance that a woman addicted to drugs is not in a position to mother her children effectively anyway, since that's what happens with addiction - most everything else of value in one's life is thrown out the window in pursuit of the next hit or high. Even family relationships are torn apart because of this problem.
The authors apparently forgot to think that part through before they wrote their article.

Since 2005, National Advocates for Pregnant Women has documented hundreds of cases in Alabama and elsewhere in which women have been arrested for allegedly endangering their pregnancies including: Christine Taylor in Iowa who was charged with attempted fetal homicide after she fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant

I would not be in favor of having prosecuted Christine Taylor if the situation is as described in the article covering the topic, but it is irrelevant to this law regarding chemical endangerment of the preborn.

Bei Bei Shuai in Indiana who has been charged with murder for suffering a pregnancy loss after a suicide attempt.

If I shoot myself in the head, miss, and the bullet also happens to travel through the cranium of my friend, killing him, am I culpable for that death, morally and in the eyes of the law?
Of course! Even if I frantically call 911 and get the ambulance there and provide full cooperation, if he dies, am I not up on manslaughter charges? Not 1st-degree murder, of course, but manslaughter, most certainly.

The Liberty Counsel has established that the “pro-life” position is “pro-punishment,” not just for doctors who perform abortions

The authors of the article seem to think that's a bad thing. It is, rather, one of the best hopes for abolitionism in this nation. Aborticians are intentional liars who deliberately withhold full information from their clients, clients who often feel themselves in a desperate situation with only one way out. Thus they take advantage of these women, manipulate them into paying them to dismember their children, and then pat them on the head and say "don't worry, this will never come back to haunt you. Yeah, I know that thousands of other women are heartbroken years later and never get over it, but I'm sure you'll be just fine. Now, where's your $500?"
Pro-aborts like to talk like aborticians are modern heroes. They're not; they are the worst of the citizenry that is not currently in prison or under warrant for arrest.

If “pro-life” does not mean “pro-imprisonment,” now would be a good time to speak up and stop the growing assault on the dignity, sanctity, and liberty of the women who bring forth life. Where are they?

Right here.
What in the world are these authors even talking about? Women who "bring forth life"? Do the authors realise that the entire point of this article has been to discuss women who intentionally and repeatedly take dangerous drugs while pregnant? Are we supposed to laud such women?
You know, there is a difference, a vast one, between being a father and being a daddy. One can become a father with as little as a few moments of extreme pleasure - it's not that hard.
Being a daddy requires a lifetime of some level of sacrifice, discipline, self-denial, and love for weak, helpless children who have no way to pay Daddy back except in hugs, squeals, and kisses. "Daddy" is an earned title.
In the same way, one can be the biological mother of a child, sure, but let's not lower our standards so far that we applaud women who "brought forth life" in spite of everything they did, lest we drain the meaning from the position of motherhood such that there is no room in term to praise legitimately great mothers.

The authors have been answered, and unfortunately for their strident tone and opinions, their thoughts are too simplistic where right, and flat wrong where they're wrong.

(Please leave any comments at the Abolitionist Society blog.)

Don't you trust women to make the right decision for themselves on their own?

Abolitionists are frequently challenged not to interfere with a "woman's right to choose" abortion on the basis of a perceived lack of trust in women's ability to make the right decision. We have several responses:

1) Many women do make the right decision, and we thank God for that.
Many make the wrong one, too, and we pray we can prevent that in the future.

2) Why have laws against rape? Don't you trust men to make the right decision for themselves on their own?
Why have laws against new mothers drowning their 1-month old children? Don't you trust women to make the right decision for themselves on their own?

In other words, no, we don't trust any sinful human being to make the right decision without guidance and authoritative, true laws to let us know what is right and wrong. Abortion is wrong; we should tell people it is wrong. Similarly, rape is wrong; we should tell people it is wrong.
This is why the argument must be theological. If we are adrift in this life and world without any communication from our Creator, we have nothing to go on. We make it up as we go. We have no guidance, no light.

3) Given that American women consistently poll majority pro-life, could we not ask you the same question? Maybe they know something you don't.

4) The number of women who bitterly mourn their aborted children over the course of decades is high, and testimonies thereof are easy to find. These women, with the benefit of hindsight, will tell you they made the wrong decision. Their lives and grief testify to the bad foundations of this challenge.

5) The objection is disingenuous. The pro-abort decries a perceived lack of education about abortion and contraception among Americans. S/he also fights against mandatory pre-abortion ultrasounds and discussions about what the baby actually is at that age (ie, that the baby is not merely a clump of cells).
Yet women make the wrong decision all the time. 54 million times in the USA alone, to be more nearly exact.
How can we trust women to make the right decision when those who are asking us the question routinely fight against legislation that would protect women from predatory business practices in abortion offices? That would mandate that those who stand to profit from women's crisis pregnancies educate the women fully on all the implications of the action before proceeding? Is it consent they want, or is it informed consent?

6) Apparently pro-aborts don't "trust women" either, since another common and mutually-exclusive objection is that this decision should be left between a woman and her physician.
So which is it?

7) This challenge is irrelevant to the central question in the debate. If the preborn child is a human being, then that human being must be protected, for he has the right to life. If the preborn child is not a human being, then why are we even asking the question?
Don't you trust women to make the right decision for themselves about whether to remove their wisdom teeth? Or have an appendectomy? Or a tonsillectomy?
Of course - nobody cares about that.

The thing is, deep down everyone knows that this is a preborn human child. People want to hedge their bets and try to act appropriately sober about "this difficult decision", but it's really not difficult, at all.
Either the child must have full protection of law, or it's not a child and we need have no pangs of conscience. It's really that simple.

(Please leave any comments at the Abolitionist Society blog.)

Hypocrisy

Also, there's a new article at the Abolitionist Society blog.

The Consistent Abolitionist: The Extreme Case of Dr Gisella Perl (Part 2)

Having set the stage and described the context of Dr Gisella Perl's controversial actions in Part 1 of this series, let us proceed to their multifaceted analysis.

The Nazi butchers bear the most blame

Abolitionists of human abortion have made it clear from the beginning that the principal reason to oppose human abortion is that it is nothing less than an assault on the image of God in human beings. It is murder. It is a refusal to submit to God's commandments with respect to how we are to treat other humans; namely, to love them as we love ourselves. Murder is in fact the exact opposite of loving others as we love ourselves.

This is what makes the Nazis' actions so horribly detestable, and this is why modern abortionists' attitudes toward very young humans mirror so closely the Nazis' attitudes toward humans of Jewish ethnicity. (We are oversimplifying the scope of the "Final Solution" for the sake of argument. We are fully aware that other people-designations were singled out for elimination.)

The Nazis arbitrarily ruled out of full humanity a specific segment of human beings. Simply by virtue of their being Jewish, they were no longer to be considered human. Similarly, modern pro-choicers arbitrarily rule out of full humanity a specific segment of human beings. Simply by virtue of being very young and not looking like you and I do, they are not to be considered human. They are "clumps of cells", "products of conception", "uterus contents" etc.

The Nazis carried out an organised assault on the image of God in Jewish people on a scale and with a pointed ferocity that had never before been seen in human history. While modern abortionists have killed ten times that many human beings in the USA alone, it has also required a larger population and geographical area (and thus less population density) and around ten times as much time.

And even aside from the direct murders for which the Nazis are responsible, to reduce human beings made in the image of God to the point of basic survival mode, to withhold from them even the most basic decencies of human treatment, to surround them with death, decrepitude, and violent indifference, is to shoulder a great deal of the responsibility for whatever desperate measures those oppressed people might take. To oppress them for no other reason than their ethnicity is that much worse, in terms of the Nazis' own guilt as well as the provocation of what more "civilised" people (ie, people who have never been in that situation) might call sub-human behavior.


Dr Perl bears some blame


Step inside Dr Perl's shoes, living in Auschwitz, among squalor and death, having seen a terrible and nearly-infallible pattern emerge - pregnant women either burn to death or endure vivisection.
Perl's motivation is defensible - she knew with high probability that the babies and mothers would be experimented upon and the final outcome would be much worse than otherwise.
It was once rightly said of Perl and the situation: "Everyone did things that in normal situations they would never do."

Perl's nearly uniform experience was that pregnant women got especially brutal attention, such that their pregnant status meant their deaths were nearly certain. If they were not pregnant, their death probabilities returned to around the same level as the other death camp prisoners.
Thus, average death camp prisoner's probability of death = elevated.
Average pregnant death camp prisoner's probability of death = extremely high.

Balance that, however, against the fact that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. The moral dilemma thus arises from the conflict of two prima facie moral duties:
D1:  One ought to help those who are very likely to be killed in the near future, and take measures to prevent their death.
D2:  One ought not to purposefully kill innocent human beings.

The dilemma in this context arises from the problem that to fulfill D1, Dr Perl had to purposefully kill innocent human beings, which violates D2.  In order to fulfill D2, Dr Perl would have had to stand by and watch pregnant women be tortured and killed at the hands of Josef Mengele, which violates D1.  Obviously, this is not an easy choice.  This raises the question of whether or not a solution can be found to the dilemma, on the abolitionist position.

It is important to note that both D1 and D2 are predicated upon the value of human life, and the importance of preserving it.  This is especially true in the context of Judeo-Christian ethics, which was a part of Perl's ethnic and cultural heritage.  Thus, D1 and D2 are expressions of a more fundamental duty, D0.

D0:  One ought to preserve innocent life.

However, it is a violation of D0 to attempt to fulfill D1 by purposefully taking an innocent life.  Thus, the scope of D1, as stated, is too broad for D1 to be coherent with D0.  If D1 is to be kept consistent with its fundamental life-honoring purpose, then it should be reformulated in a manner such as D1', to eliminate these kinds of self-defeating scenarios:

D1':  One ought to help those who are very likely to be killed in the near future, and take measures to prevent their death, short of purposefully killing innocent human beings.

D1' and D2 are not in conflict in the Perl scenario, as D1' does not mandate an action that violates D2, and neither does D2 mandate an action that violates D1'.  As holding D1' and D2 together would have resulted in Dr. Perl refusing to perform abortions, the combination of holding D1' and D2 as an expression of D0 is consistent with the abolitionist position.

One might complain, however, that this is unsatisfactory in the context of Auschwitz.  After all, if Dr Perl had refused to perform abortions, what else could she have done?  The answer is that she probably could not have done much.  She certainly could have refused to tell the camp doctors that the women were pregnant, and perhaps tried to hide the signs of their pregnancy.  But in an environment such as Auschwitz, there was not much that could be done to escape Nazi brutality.

This brings us back to the question of moral responsibility: would Dr Perl have been morally responsible (or culpable) in any sense, if she had refused to perform the abortions?  If there had been no other means available to her (or to her knowledge), short of performing abortions, for sparing the pregnant women of Auschwitz horrific torture and death at the hands of Mengele, would she have been morally culpable to have refused to act (by performing abortions)?  The answer is no.  The moral responsibility of the deaths of both the mother and child lay solely at the hands of the Nazis.  They were the ones seeking the deaths of these innocent Jews.  They were the ones who had no respect for innocent life.  To put it more generally:

C1: It is not a morally culpable act to refuse to purposefully kill an innocent person in order to try to prevent a murderer from murdering another innocent person.

The moral culpability for the deaths lies with the murderer intent on killing both, not the person who could try to foil the murderer's plans by killing one of them ahead of time.  Thus, we conclude that Dr Perl was not morally obligated to perform the abortions.

This brings us to the other side of the issue: was Dr Perl morally culpable for performing the abortions?  Was there any sense in which her actions were morally justified?  To answer these questions, one must consider the intent of Dr Perl's actions, and then the actions themselves.  Dr Perl is to be commended for her desire to save life and prevent the pregnant women of Auschwitz from experiencing further pain and suffering.  While there is something in the intent of Dr Perl's actions that is commendable, that does not mean that the actions themselves are commendable.  A particular type of act may be morally unjustified, but that does not mean that all instances of that type of act bear equal moral culpability.

For example, the legal system distinguishes between acts causing the death of human beings that are intentional and unintentional.  In the case of unintentional deaths, the degree of negligence on the part of the defendant determines the degree of his culpability, and sentences are meted out accordingly.  In the case of intentional deaths, the intent of the defendant determines his culpability, and sentences are meted out accordingly.  Murder committed in the passion of the moment is considered a lesser offense than a premeditated murder committed in cold blood.  So also would we consider that purposefully killing another human being out of a desire to save life (especially in an environment of such death and suffering, where thinking straight would have been practically impossible) bears less moral culpability than purposefully killing another human being out of a rage, or in cold blood.

Thus, there are strong mitigating circumstances that reduce Perl's culpability in performing these abortions, but that does not mean that the abortions themselves are morally justified.  Inasmuch as D2 holds, then there is no circumstance in which abortion is justified.  More generally: 

C2: By D2, it is a morally unjustified and culpable act to purposefully kill innocent human beings.

In summary, C1 and C2 state the abolitionist position on the moral culpability of abortion in different contexts, and this is grounded on the combination of moral duties D0, D1', and D2.  To recap:

1) There is no situation where abortion is morally obligatory, including Dr Perl’s situation in Auschwitz.
2) There is no situation where abortion is morally permissible, though there may be mitigating circumstances that reduce moral culpability in rare, extreme situations.

Principle (2) is especially applicable, as we observed in Part 1, when the surrounding environment is as bad as it was for Dr Perl. We balance the clarity of God's command not to murder against the unimaginable difficulty she must have undergone to think straight even about the most basic of issues when encircled by death and horror on every side.


Two analogies to consider

1) The example of a pregnancy that is extremely hazardous and is days from killing both the mother and the baby. In that case the surgery to save the mother's life is not an abortion; rather, it is a lifesaving procedure with the motivation of saving life. Cf Stand to Reason's excellent analysis.

2) A man hands you a loaded handgun and brings a person with a black bag over their head into the room. He instructs you to shoot this person. If you refuse, he informs you that he will kill not only that person but also that person's mother, and not quickly with a round to the head, but slowly with a knife and a blowtorch.

Some things to note:

-What if some of these babies were aborted mere days before the liberation of the death camp by Allied forces and the relief of these women's suffering? The problem with the business of predicting the future is that we humans cannot do so. How does the doctor know that the high-risk pregnancy will kill the mother and the child? And how did Dr Perl know that any individual pregnant woman would without question be put to death by the Nazis? She did not, and modern doctors do not know until much later than many would like to admit.

-One major difference between the two scenarios is the potential reaction time. In a high-risk pregnancy, a woman who is determined to do all she can to carry her baby to term and give him the best chance at life may put herself under close medical supervision. If the situation becomes unsustainably dangerous to the point that the mother's life will be lost within a matter of hours (or less) and an operation must be performed to save the mother's life, yet the life of the child cannot be preserved, then we would say it is justifiable to save the mother's life, and we mourn the loss of the child as a de facto miscarriage.

On the other hand, taking it upon oneself to commit the murder that another was going to carry out does not excuse the deed. Someone in Dr Perl's position must balance on the one hand:

• the culpability of killing an innocent person to prevent the probable, more painful death of that person and another, versus, on the other hand:
• the culpability of obeying God's command not to murder and thus doing nothing to prevent the probable two murders by someone else's hand and leaving the consequences to God.

-In #1 the motivation is the same as Dr Perl's - to save one life rather than seeing two lost.  We must remember, however, that such a surgical procedure is not designed to purposefully kill the unborn baby (whose death is an undesired consequence), while the act of abortion is purposefully designed to kill the unborn child.  Purposefully killing an innocent human being, even for such a noble end as saving human life, is something that is not morally justifiable (per the previous analysis).

Thus we conclude our analysis of the morality of Dr Perl’s actions. Yes, it is very complicated, and that’s part of the point. We have the benefit of the Internet, advanced education, email, cell phones, and freedom of movement and association with which to analyse in depth such questions as these. Dr Perl had some dirty towels and her bare hands.


Dr Perl's idea of God was faulty

That said, Dr Perl did not trust God to be sovereign, as He has revealed Himself to be.
One of the Ten Commandments is: Thou shalt not murder. No mitigating circumstances are named. No "...unless someone pushes you really, really hard".

Let's be honest - we here in the modern West, we modern Christians fail all the time. The tests and trials we experience are nothing like Dr Perl's trials. We fail to trust God.

Dr Perl also failed to trust God. Ultimately, we can trust God to do what brings Him glory, above anything else. Along the way, He will do and let happen many things that are difficult for us to understand. God knows everything. Even such evil as the Holocaust occurred for God's purposes, and will result in His glory. If we are inclined to argue, when we stop and soberly consider, what % of all knowledge do we possess? Can we hope to achieve 0.1% of all that there is to know?

Further, God is perfectly good and knows best what is perfectly good. We trust Him to define good for us. With what moral standard will we judge God? Can we talk back to Him, inform Him that He really didn't know how bad a situation we were in when we decided to violate the commandment not to murder (cf Job 38:1-7 and Job 40:7-14)?

God owes nothing to any of His creation. Yet in her post-Holocaust obstetrics career, Dr Perl made a habit of saying, as she prepared to deliver another baby: "God, you owe me a life - a living baby."

This is understandable, but it is wrong. The Bible clearly describes human beings as guilty, rebel sinners, who routinely spit in God's face and refuse to obey His law. Every second we live, every breath we draw, all is because of God's grace.

Rather, let us give thanks in all things to God for any blessing. What we fallen sinners actually deserve, outside of God's grace, is an eternity of Holocausts.


Dr Perl regretted the necessity of her actions, whereas most modern pro-choicers do not

The statements we have highlighted from her interviews illustrate the vast difference between her attitude toward what she thought she had to do and the general attitude of modern Western people toward abortion. Some are radically supportive of a "woman's right to choose" and celebrate it to a sickening degree. Some set their jaws and harden their gaze when the issue is brought up, ready to defend women from what they consider the oppression of carrying out one of their bodies' God-given, God-designed, and frankly quite amazing functions - that of assembling a new human inside their own bodies. Some shrug away the responsibility, figuring that women are going to have sex, and that it's probably better to go ahead and trim off some societal dead weight rather than allow everyone the chance to be born.

Dr Perl knew and confessed that the Nazis were ending two lives when they sent those pregnant women to the crematorium, and added:

No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.

1) Dr Perl was aborting these babies before their mothers' pregnancies became visible, which means that Dr Perl believed that what some call "fetuses" or "products of conception" - very young babies at a very early stage of development - were babies, which she was destroying.
2) One does not murder an appendix, a part of the mother's body. Nor does one murder a non-person or a non-human.

65 years later, busy professionals earn $6-7 figures per year from women who, for the most part, don't want to alter their lifestyles just because they've gotten pregnant. Compare the environment of these women by looking around yourself right now. Is any element of your surrounding context comparable to Auschwitz?


The consistent abortionist's response


This question, while horrible to consider and yet important for a test for consistency, is quite answerable from within the abolitionist framework. The proponent of legalised baby murder, however, if s/he is to be consistent, should respond to this with a shrug. If the modern abortionist gets to arbitrarily choose to remove humanity from a given class of people (the very young), then so do the Nazis. What was so bad about the Holocaust, again? Those weren't humans in those death camps. Their society decided they weren't, so they weren't, just like those aren't humans inside the womb. Aborted babies' society has decided they aren't.

Nobody on the pro-choice side will accept this conclusion, but remember that this subsection is entitled "the consistent abortionists' response". The pro-choice position is fundamentally internally inconsistent.

The consistent abolitionist's response

When pushed to the extreme in probably the most awful, terrible situation that humanity has ever put itself outside the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, what what would any of us do? We'd like to think we would fulfill in our actions what we know to be right, but our own failings given far fewer challenges must give us pause and make as beg for God's mercy.

Yet we must not make hard and fast moral standards out of the most extreme cases. At most we can subject our moral compunctions to the scrutiny of an extreme situation and see if we are able to act our morality out consistently.



And the abolitionist position can do that, even in this case, which is thankfully exceedingly rare and extreme. We do not know how much suffering any life will hold in the future. We trust God to take care of that; we hold to and obey His command not to murder as well as His commands to love our neighbor as ourselves and to protect the weak and helpless.


What else can we learn?

That the exigencies of the 0.0001% of most extreme cases are not well-suited for creating normative ethics for the remaining 99.999% of cases.
That abortion is unjustifiable even if committed by someone many regard as a hero or angel. This is at its base nothing more than an argument from authority.

That the dissimilarities between Dr Perl's situation, motivations, and moral assessment of her actions versus that of the modern pro-abortion movement are so vast as to make her case far more powerful a defense of the abolitionist position than of modern abortioneering.

That a robust abolitionist position can deal consistently with the worst horrors of human existence and emerge with its moral authority and prophetic admonition intact.


(Please leave any comments at the cross-post at the Abolitionist Society blog.)