Posts Tagged with “abortion”

June 29, 2016
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The Dichotomy of Gun Control and Abortion Rights

I’m not a protector of gun rights. As I’ve previously argued, I’m not sure Christians should be. In fact, I’d give up the 2nd Amendment in heartbeat if it guaranteed an end to abortions. But it seems that some people want to have it both ways.

Access to abortion services is not in the Constitution. Yet liberal powers claim that it is so important that is should not be restricted by any safety measures that hinder access. Their arguments in Whole Woman’s Health et al. v. Hellerstedt claim that Texas’ attempt to increase the safety standards of abortion clinics in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell atrocities must be stricken because it increases the barrier to access.

President Obama celebrated the decision, saying, “[The Texas laws] harm women’s health and place an unconstitutional obstacle in the path of a woman’s reproductive freedom.”1

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in her own opinion paper, “When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners.” Ginsburg continued, “…targeted regulation of abortion provider laws that do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion, cannot survive judicial inspection.”2

Note Ginsburg’s “desperate circumstances” straw man, as if no pregnancy is ever terminated in order to preserve a current lifestyle. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, most abortions occur because “having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents, or she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems.”3

In Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s majority opinion, “Gosnell’s behavior was terribly wrong, but there is no reason to believe that an extra layer of regulation would have affected that behavior.”4

I’ll summarize these arguments: First, regulations should not overly restrict rights. Secondly, there is no evidence that these regulations reduce abuse of the right in question.

These are both arguments that advocates for 2nd Amendment rights make on a regular basis in resisting increasingly restrictive gun control laws. The liberal community argues that, when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, safety should trump open access to an actual Constitutional right. But when it comes to abortion, even though it is not a constitutional right, liberals will not tolerate the same arguments they themselves use in attacking the 2nd Amendment.

Why is this so?

Laws restricting both abortion access and gun access may seem to be common sense, but restrictions on abortion violate the core beliefs of the current moral revolution and its idolatry of human autonomy.

“Abortion in this case becomes the sacrament of this new idolatry,” Albert Mohler writes. “It is the sacrament of a modern humanistic religion to which the society is increasingly committed. Abortion is absolutely central to the sexual revolutionaries and to the moral revolution around us.”5

  1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/27/statement-president-whole-womans-health-v-hellerstedt [↩]
  2. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf p. 47 [↩]
  3. https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/psrh/full/3711005.pdf [↩]
  4. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf p. 32 [↩]
  5. http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/06/28/briefing-06-28-16/ [↩]
July 15, 2015
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Abortion – The Modern Moloch

In the Old Testament, the Israelites were constantly straying into idolatry, and one false god that snared them is specifically connected to the hideous practice of infant sacrifice. The Ammonite idol Moloch was worshipped first by the Canaanites, who then transmitted their practices to the Israelites. The worship of Moloch, which included ritualized carnal acts as well as infant sacrifice, was associated with intercession for the idol’s favor – a plea for prosperity.

Jewish tradition describes the practice of infant sacrifice:

Tophet is Moloch, which was made of brass, having the face of an ox; and they heated him from his lower parts; and his hands being stretched out, and made hot, they put the child between his hands, and it was burnt; when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat a drum, that the father might not hear the voice of his son, and his heart might not be moved.1

This practice is depicted as possibly the worst offense committed by the Israelites, as it is often listed first, and frequently singled out – though it could be included in the general condemnation of idolatry. God, speaking through Ezekiel, said,

Moreover you took your sons and your daughters, whom you bore to Me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. Were your acts of harlotry a small matter, that you have slain My children and offered them up to them by causing them to pass through the fire?2

This offense is so great that, even after its chief perpetrator, Manasseh, repented in his old age and his grandson, Josiah, led a great revival, God still pronounced destruction on the Israelites of Judah:

Now before [Josiah] there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses; nor after him did any arise like him. Nevertheless the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of His great wrath, with which His anger was aroused against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked Him.3

modern molech cartoonThroughout history, Moloch has been portrayed as a proxy for the sacrifice of innocents in order to gain material well-being. In 1923, backlash against a frightening increase in the number  of pedestrian children being killed by motor vehicles led to a St. Louis Star political cartoon entitled, The Modern Moloch, in which a man offers a platter of children’s corpses to the leering grill of a monstrous car. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 blockbuster silent film Metropolis, workers are thrown to their deaths to oil the cogs of Mol0ch, a giant machine that powers the wealthy upper city.  In his volume, The Gathering Storm (1948), Winston Churchill described the near worship of Adolf Hitler and his prewar economic reforms in Molechian terms.

The similarities between this idolatrous infant sacrifice and today’s mass murder of the unborn are revealing. Most abortions are at the alter of modern prosperity – a sacrifice in order to increase the chance of gaining or keeping prosperity. Attempts to keep mothers from seeing imagery of the unborn children conjure up the drowning out of infant cries with beating of drums in an attempt to keep the mother’s “heart from being moved.” The methods of killing are far more cruel than even Rabbi Itzhaki’s chilling description.

Despite American evangelicalism’s fixation on sexual impurity, it does seem “a small matter” compared with the fifty-six MILLION unborn legally killed in America since Roe v. Wade in 1973. By 2020, the number of children killed in the U.S. will be higher than TWICE the current population of Canada. I fear that, even if we experience a revival equal to that of Josiah, the “great wrath” of God will not be stayed, because of “all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked Him.”

God help us.

 

  1. Commentary on Jeremiah 7:31, by Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, 1040-1105AD [↩]
  2. Ezekiel 16:20-21 [↩]
  3. 2 Kings 23:25-26 [↩]
January 23, 2013
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“Simple morality dictates that unless and until someone can prove the unborn  human is not alive, we must give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it is (alive). And, thus, it should be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

– Ronald Reagan http://www.amazon.com/Abortion-Conscience-Nation-New-issue/dp/0964112531/