I know that’s a title that makes many of you upset. But this is no secret. Everyone knows this…call it a fetus all you want, everyone knows the second the egg has been fertilized that we have a baby in the womb. Theologian John Piper made this argument forcefully in a post back in January 2013 and little has changed since then. Note his first main point: “I took an abortionist out to lunch once, prepared to give him ten reasons why the unborn are human beings. He stopped me, and said, “I know that. We are killing children.” I was stunned. He said, “It’s simply a matter of justice for women. It would be a greater evil to deny women the equal right of reproductive freedom.””
This was my point last August in my post “A Balance of Rights.” There really is no debate on this, not if everyone is candid. There is a baby, and yet since the latter 20th century, our culture has made a historic decision, moving into the vast, vast minority to declare that in our society, the right of life is no longer the top right to humans.
It’s not just in abortion of course. Look at how we are treating each other around the nation. We aren’t yet to “open carry,” but we are close. This is taking us AWAY from civilization. If you go back to our “Wild West” days, whether looking at when the West was Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio or once we crossed the Mississippi River…those who came first came armed. They had to. And, as small villages and towns followed along, there remained a wildness inherent in living in, well, “the wild.” But eventually, civilization came afterwards in terms of the school teacher, the postmaster and the lawman. Note that the story of the Earps and the “shootout at OK corral” was around the issue of the lawman trying to bring civilization by stopping open carry. In effect, the coming of those signals of civilization was an arrival of the social contract of Hobbes and Locke. We could, in essence, reaffirm the right to life protected not by carrying one’s own gun but by laws. As in the social contract, I will leave you alone as I expect you to leave me alone. That works as long as there is agreement about the order of rights.
Life has always been on top of any list of rights. Not anymore. I mean, in one sense, we could perhaps trace our own moral decay as a culture where violence reigns supreme, where no one values any other human (often treating them verbally with death in one’s tone, full of derision and hate) and the only thing that matters is whatever I want, back to Roe v Wade. Yes, I know…the decade prior to that decision was also filled with death, both of babies in the womb and of protesters. And I know of the horrific killings done to African-Americans in the 1950s. But even then, the deaths were counted in the hundreds, maybe the thousands. With the coming of Roe v. Wade, the killings exploded into the millions.
Piper has pulled no punches because he should not. Neither will I. Murder of a baby is wrong. Yes, the life of the mother is also important, and she does deserve the right of choice…the choice to have sex, the choice of continuing the pursue her dreams, the choice of leaving an abusive husband or situation. But, her choice should not trump the right to life of another.
It’s not a tough issue at all. Till we turn back from this constant murder, we will continue to slide into our doom as a society, long before the ice melts or ISIS shows up in our town.