Posted on 09/12/2014 8:30:31 AM PDT by wagglebee
Keli Goff ‘s essay at the Daily Beast was headlined “A Christian Case for Abortion Rights?” Does that not sound like the vegetarian’s case for meat, Barack Obama’s case for decisive leadership, or the devout atheist—contrary at its core?
This oldie but badie argument merits a rebuttal, not because it is so original but because it is like the 700th iteration of a Xerox.
So what IS the Christian case for abortion rights, you ask? It’s really more like how Goff has concluded that a pro-life position, for Christians, at least, is problematic because of “four primary complications.” These are so old, you have to wipe cobwebs off of them.
First, Goff tells us, “the unresolved debate within Christianity regarding the extent to which our modern-day actions should be governed by Old Testament law.” So, by Goff’s logic, if the Old Testament talks “about sacrificing bulls and turtledoves,” which “are no longer held to ironclad interpretation and practice by 21st-century Christians and clergy,” therefore the application of Old Testament scripture such as Exodus 21:22 to abortion is no longer “ironclad” either.
I assume we are supposed to take this seriously. I won’t and I assume no one else who can count to 66 will either.
Since this is a brief post we’ll not talk about the many, many passages which emphasize how God is in communion with us before we are born and the continuity between life before and after birth. To take one example, in the Psalms. As Peter Saunders has observed, “The baby in the womb is the Psalmist, the same person, not a different person and not a non-person.”
What else? “The next complication is the lack of scientific and religious clarity over how to define when life begins.” There is no lack of scientific clarity over when life begins. Life begins at conception. Period. Whether you protect that life—whether that life has “meaning” or “significance”—is a separate question.
Religious “clarity”? How about “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful…My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place…your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
The Bible is also crystal clear that there are no separate categories of human beings. We are all—each one of us—unique and of infinite value because we are made in God’s image.
“The third issue for debate among devout Christians regarding abortion rights, and one of the most important,” Goff writes, “is determining whether something that one may believe morally to be wrong or even a sin should be legislated.”
What is that supposed to mean? Whether you believe it is “morally” wrong to knock your fiancé out cold and someone else says it’s just wrong (or a “private matter”) is not the issue. The law is intended to protect the weak from the strong, to say some behavior is out of bounds and will be punished, and that you can’t get away with something by pretending someone—aka the law–is foisting their “morality” on you.
Goff’s concluding point—reduced to its essence—is that even if someone (presumably a Christian) concludes that something (in this case having an abortion) is a sin, who gets to decide whether having an abortion is the more “humane” choice?
As we have discussed countless times, there are difficult cases. No pro-lifer denies that. How would or could we when so many of us have experienced the hardest of the hard cases in our own lives?
Two things we’ve learned. First, if you go all the way back to the abortion “reform” movement of the 1960s, a narrow band of proposed “exceptions” had, by 1973, swallowed the rule. Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton essentially gave us abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. These decisions’ progeny, so to speak, is softness on infanticide and assisted suicide.
Second, with the rarest of situations—ectopic pregnancies and a threat to the life of the mother—the hard cases are manageable cases where the choice can and should be for life.
Does that require courage and resolution and character? Absolutely. But is not the life of a wholly dependent, helpless baby worth that?
If you are Goff and talking about Christianity and abortion with much about the Bible, the answer is that that baby is most assuredly worth that to the Author of Life, as He has made clear in His word, the Bible.
And unborn children are the weakest among us.
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There’s a far,far better case to be made *against* the death penalty than there is in *favor* of child murder.
That's what these clowns are doing...lookin' for loopholes.
“Some religious leaders say yes.” I wish these folk would use the correct terminology. Some pharisee’s might say yes.
Abortion should be cause for a civil war. A mass cleansing of those who murder the innocent. Hitler would be shocked that those who pushed his armies back into Berlin and seized it have killed around 10 times as many innocents as he did. Perhaps he would be proud that the world has fallen to lunatic despots and evil at the head of every country on Earth.
Anyone who has advocated abortion in cases where the child is a “burden” to the mother have at least in my mind been accomplices to murder. Murderers, especially heinous ones that brutally kill the innocent should be put down. Charged, convicted and a bullet to the head out back. Every person that identifies as “pro-choice” falls into two categories. Accomplice to murder, or murder. Both should end in the same result. I find it sick that “pro-life” people have tolerated it for so long. Myself included. Evil should be met with merciless justice, and killing innocent children should be our reason for war. It’s gone on far too long, evil must be punished. Instead we are allowing it to flourish.
Nobody cares anymore about what happens outside of their bubbles as long as they are meeting their needs. The age of great men and women is gone. Words and letters and polite peaceful protests will no longer get anyone anywhere. Evil is flourishing in this country, but there is no one to stomp it out. So we all get to pay. Right now we could get off our lazy asses and destroy the evil in our nation. But we aren’t going to, and by the time you all realize that is our only chance, it will be too late.
you know I have forbidden you to kill, generation! if you call yourself Mine and call yourself part of My Church and you preach against killing, how is it you kill? do you presume to maintain that you are in the right and insist of your innocence before Me in the day of Judgement when you heap up crimes of unborn children? from Heaven I watch frightful sights; ah! how I suffer to see how the womb that shapes this child, rejects him and sends him to his death without a name and without regret; the womb that shaped him recalls him no longer; for these, I say:I think we should end legalized abortion yesterday, if not sooner."you may sharpen your sword, but the weapon you prepared will kill you; now you are not pregnant with child but with iniquity; you are going to conceive Spite and you will give birth to Mishap; you have dug a pit, hollowed it out, only to fall into your own trap! your spite will recoil on your head and your brutality will fall back on your head;
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/09/a-christian-case-for-abortion-rights.html
I wonder what religion Keli Goff is. Maybe she’s not Christian.
She seems so detached from this issue.
Many women will fight for abortion because it is framed as a woman thing.
I have seen a great many “good” Christian women get very angry when the topic of banning infanticide comes up. Often the reasons are.
1. Hard life for the child (so better to kill it I guess).
2. Hard life for the mother.
3. It is all the father’s fault anyway.
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