What Causes People to Make a “180″ on Abortion?

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:39 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Ray Comfort, evangelist and producer of the “180″ movie

“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.  I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:13-14).

Two generations and 53 million abortions later, it would be natural to assume that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that made killing one’s unborn child legal, is now “water over the dam”.  In other words, the United States doesn’t appear to be going back to pre-abortion days anytime soon.  Not enough minds could be changed, right?

Wrong, according to respected evangelist and author Ray Comfort.  He says “the cause [against abortion] has to be a hill to die on” and that people’s minds on the issue can be changed in seconds?

In seconds?  How so?  Comfort has just released a powerful 33-minute documentary movie (already with over 1 million views on YouTube) entitled “180” where people who were for abortion change their minds completely after being asked one question.  What is that question and how can Christians help in ending our own “American holocaust”?  Tune in to The Christian Worldview this weekend to find out!

In His Own Words: A Radical Pro-Abortion President

published with permission from Dr. Albert Mohler

When Barack Obama was running for President, he was described by some observers as one of the most radical candidates in the nation’s history, in terms of support for abortion. Once in office, President Obama has done little to dispel that judgment. Even as the President is tracking to the middle on many issues, this is not the case when it comes to abortion.

This past Saturday, on the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the President issued a statement that is remarkable, even for presidents who support legalized abortion. The President’s statement included not one word that indicated any recognition that abortion in in any case or in any sense a tragedy. There was not even a passing reference to the unborn child. President Obama did not even use the language used disingenuously by President Bill Clinton — the pledge that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters,” the President stated. That “fundamental principle” was not actually the principle claimed by the Supreme Court, which located the “right” to abortion with the woman, not with a family.

The President continued: “I am committed to protecting this constitutional right. I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption.” So, the President of the United States puts his high office behind his hope to “encourage healthy relationships,” but not behind any effort even to reduce the number of abortions in this country. Currently, in America one out of five pregnancies ends in abortion.

As he concluded his brief statement, the President said: “And on this anniversary, I hope that we will recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

That paragraph is just a recitation of the feminist argument that was enshrined in Roe v. Wade — that women, no more than men, should be encumbered by the professional and personal limitations required by a pregnancy. That logic is enshrined as orthodoxy within the Democratic Party, and President Obama is one of its most ardent defenders.

Ever since Barack Obama emerged on the national political scene he has been promoted and protected by a corps of preachers and religious leaders who have tried their best to explain that he is not so pro-abortion as he seems. Nevertheless, his record is all too clear — as is this most recent statement. There was not one expression of abortion as a national tragedy, even as a report recently indicated that almost 60 percent of all pregnancies among African American women in New York City end in abortion.

How can any President of the United States fail to address his unspeakable tragedy? There was no hope expressed that abortion would be rare, only the expression that he would remain “committed to protecting this constitutional right.” The only words that even insinuate any hypothetical reduction in abortion were addressed to reducing “unintended pregnancies” and promoting adoption. But no goal of reducing abortion was stated, or even obliquely suggested. No reference at all was made of the unborn child. There was no lament — not even a throw-away line that would cost him nothing in terms of his support from abortion rights forces.

These words were not imposed upon this President. This is his own personal statement. It is one of the most revealing — and tragic — statements made by any political figure in our times.

“Obama Recalls Roe v. Wade, Backs Abortion Rights,” USA Today, Saturday, January 22, 2011. Interestingly, though the White House released the President’s statement on Saturday, no posting of it appears at the White House Web site as of early Monday morning.

Obama Administration OKs First Tax-Funded Abortions Under Health Care Law

As predicted by all reasonable people who knew that Obama’s executive order was disingenuous, elective abortion will now be paid for with your tax dollars.  The Obama administration has just approved it.  This is truly a “moral injustice of the first order.”  Here are the details.

By the way, I don’t merely object to abortion because I’m now paying for it.  Abortion is wrong no matter who pays for it.  Tax-payer funding just adds another injustice.

When Feminism Kills — Abortion As ‘The Lesser Evil’

Moral earthquakes, like earthquakes of the geophysical variety, most often occur suddenly and without warning. At one moment the moral argument is framed in conventional and familiar ways. Just an instant later, all is changed. An article that appears in the June 30, 2010 edition of The Times [London] represents a moral earthquake that resets an entire issue — and that issue is abortion. This chilling essay is hard to read, but impossible to ignore. To read it is to feel the moral ground shift under your feet.

In “Yes, Abortion is Killing. But It’s the Lesser Evil,” writer Antonia Senior acknowledges that an unborn child at any stage is a human life. But she then proceeds to assert that feminism is more important than life, and that, when necessary, women must be willing to kill for the feminist cause even as they are willing to die for it.

Visiting the Tower of London, Senior observed an exhibit “that asks visitors to vote on whether they would die for a cause.” Would she die for any cause? She considers a range of issues and then settles on just one: Feminism and its central doctrine of “reproductive rights.”

“Standing where religious martyrs were held and tortured in Britain’s turbulent reformation,” she writes, “I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman’s right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility.”

There is a bracing honesty in Antonia Senior’s argument. She admits that this “absolutist position is under siege,” even in her own mind. “Something strange” happened to this belief, so central to the claims of the feminist movement. That “something strange,” we soon learn, is her experience of becoming a mother.

Once, Senior had argued without reservation or moral qualms that the unborn child is not a baby, but merely a fetus – the standard argument of pro-abortion forces. “Then came a baby, and everything changed,” she relates. “Having a baby paints the world in an entirely different hue,” she explains.

Indeed, the experience of having a child convinced Senior that the inhabitant of the womb is indeed a human life. Responding to a recent British medical report claiming that fetuses feel no pain before 24 weeks of gestation, she correctly observes that this has nothing to do with the fundamental issue at stake. “Either a fetus is life from conception, or it is not,” she rightly asserts, “ability to feel pain is not, in itself, a defining factor.”

Her experience of giving birth to a daughter redefined that issue. “What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a fetus is a life by any subjective measure,” she writes. “My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person — forged in my womb, not by my mothering.”

By any measure, that is a heart-warming expression of moral insight. Antonia Senior now knows and publicly affirms that “a fetus is a life.” With that assertion she breaks ranks with the pro-abortion activists and apologists who argue vociferously that the unborn child is nothing more than “potential” human life. Senior knows better now, and she is bold to say so.

She takes the pro-choice side of the argument to task for the moral evasion and dishonesty of arguing against the fact that the fetus is a human life. “Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life.”

Honesty of that caliber is rare enough. But what follows is nothing less than breathtaking. Just when she seems to be poised to deliver a clear affirmation of the value and dignity of that unborn human life, she veers into an absolutist argument for abortion rights. Yes, that fetus is a human life, she argues, but that life must yield to the in violable feminist principle of abortion rights.

You simply cannot “decouple feminism from abortion rights,” she insists, adding, “you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control.”

Even as she admits that her position on the moral status of the unborn child has been utterly changed, she insists that her absolutist position on abortion rights has not. When it comes down to the right of the fetus to live versus the right of the mother to abort, the abortion right wins.

Abortion, which she acknowledges is the killing of a human life, is defined as “a lesser evil” than the curtailing of abortion rights in the name of liberating women.

“As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil,” she assures. “The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.”

You must be prepared to kill for the sake of defending abortion rights? That is exactly what abortion entails — the killing of an unborn child for the sake of asserting a woman’s so-called “right to choose.”

In this essay, published in one of the world’s most venerable newspapers, Antonia Senior goes public with the argument that feminists should just admit that abortion is the killing of a human life, and then go on to assert that the right to kill an unborn human life is just the price that must be paid if feminism is to be defended.

“If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” That statement, published for all the world to see, perfectly distills the inescapable logic of the abortion right argument. It is based on a willingness to kill — and on the horrifying audacity to call this killing “the lesser evil.”

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I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

Render Unto Caesar? On Paying Taxes After Obamacare

A significant number of Christians are now wondering about the moral implications of the Obama health care overhaul. While any number of moral questions will demand attention, the question of abortion stands at the center of concern. And with the question of abortion comes the question of taxes.

Without the legislative remedy of the Hyde Amendment or similar protections, it is almost certain that the new health care legislation will lead to tax-supported abortions. At the very least, the legislation will lead to either direct or indirect tax-payer supported subsidies for some abortions. At the extreme, it could mean outright coverage of abortion services.

Though President Obama’s Executive Order offers some limitations on tax-payer support for abortion, both sides in the abortion debate recognize that his order cannot take precedence over statute, can easily be removed by a court, and does not cover all arenas in which abortions will be provided or subsidized.

So, should Christians defy the government and refuse to pay taxes if some involvement in abortion is almost certain? The answer to that question reaches far beyond the issue of abortion — and far beyond the question of taxation. The answer to that question must be “no.”

The relationship of the Christian to the secular government is fraught with moral questions. Nevertheless, even though the New Testament does not offer a complete primer for Christian citizens on all matters of politics and policy, it does contain clear affirmations to which all faithful believers are obligated.

The New Testament clearly takes a positive view of government as a divinely-ordained institution. “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities,” Paul wrote the church at Rome. He added: “For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.” [Romans 13:1]

This command was originally issued to the young church that was fighting for the faith in the capital city of the Roman Empire. The New Testament clearly affirms that the presence of a functioning government is one of God’s gifts to his human creatures, leading to peacefulness, rightful order, and human flourishing. The absence of a functioning civil government is a disaster and a curse to humanity. Paul here affirms that Christians are to be found subject to the government — even to the government of Rome.

The background to this is the sovereignty of God over all things. God retains his absolute sovereignty, but he delegates some degree of rightful sovereignty to human rulers, governments, and institutions who are, in return, accountable to him and judged by him. God has ordained government and invested it with rightful authority. One who defies the authority of the government thus runs the risk of defying God’s own authority.

Thus, Paul warns: “Therefore, whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and those who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.” [Romans 13:2]

Clearly, this command has limits. Daniel and the faithful Jewish youths were honored for refusing to bend the knee to a king who set himself up as God. They refused a command that involved the performance of an idolatrous act. They did not launch a tax revolt.

To the Romans, Paul was clear — they should pay their taxes. “Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tas is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.” [Romans 13:7] In the previous verse, Paul had reminded the Roman Christians that they pay their taxes out of the fear of God’s judgment and the operation of the Christian conscience.

As J. C. Doggett rightly explains, “Paul gives no support to Christian citizens who might be minded to hold back part of their tax liability because they disapprove of the way in which the government might spend the money or because they doubt its fairness. In happier times than Paul’s, Christians nowadays are free to pursue their objections by political means.”

A similar message comes from Peter, who wrote: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.” [1 Peter 2:13-14] By such faithful acts, Christians “may silence the ignorance of foolish men” and be found as good citizens.

Without doubt, the payment of taxes to Rome would involve the subsidy of acts and policies the early Christians would have known to be morally repugnant and wrong. Nevertheless, the believers were commanded to pay their taxes as an act of their own accountability and faithfulness to God. They would give an answer for their rightful obedience to the lawful authority of the government to tax. The rulers will eventually answer to God for their use of those funds.

Jesus Christ also commanded the payment of taxes, setting forth the principle that has become the most familiar expression of the Christian obligation to government. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” [Mark 12:17]

Jesus spoke these words even as He had been challenged by a strange coalition of Pharisees and Herodians, who were attempting to lure Jesus into a trap. The payment of taxes was contorted into a question of lawful authority and the rightful determination of that authority. Jesus answered their question in a way that left his opponents speechless and amazed. “Give Caesar what belongs to him,” is the effect of Jesus’ words. Caesar does not own their souls — which bear the image of God — and he has no ultimate claim upon them. But, a quick look at the coin reveals that it is Caesar who has his image on the coin. That is a small thing, Jesus implies. Give Caesar back his coin.

As Pheme Perkins explains, the issue of taxes in the New Testament emerged in “a political and social context in which taxation was a sign of subordination and oppression.” Add to this the graft and corruption almost universally associated with the tax franchise in the ancient world. Even so, Jesus’ instruction is clear — Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

Luis E. Lugo puts this text and command in proper perspective when he writes: “While Jesus clearly intends to affirm his followers’ obligations to the state, even a pagan state, the main trust of his statement is to underscore the fact that these obligations are rooted not in the presumed ultimacy or autonomy of human political institutions but in the absolute sovereignty of God, the creator and sustainer of all things.”

With the power to govern comes the power to tax, and government is a divinely-ordained institution. Christians are commanded to pay taxes, and were commanded by Christ and the apostles to pay taxes even to a pagan government involved in immoral and ungodly policies — including the oppression of the Jews and the nation of Israel. Thus, the question of paying taxes after Obamacare is put in its proper perspective.

We cannot and must not bend the knee to Caesar, accepting the government as our ultimate sovereign. We cannot submit to accept idolatry and idolatrous practices. But paying taxes is a matter of our Christian obligation.

There is no Christian mandate against tax avoidance — which is the use of lawful and legitimate measures to limit tax exposure. In other words, Christians are not mandated to seek to maximize their tax bills. But tax evasion is another matter, as is tax resistance. Those who seek by illegitimate and illegal means to resist or evade taxes run into direct confrontation with the commands of Christ and the teaching of the apostles.

Abortion is a moral catastrophe. The murder of the unborn is one of the greatest sins any society can tolerate, much less subsidize by taxation. The impact of the new “Obamacare” health care legislation is not yet fully clear, but the legislation lacks any adequate protection for the unborn. Immorality is added to immorality when the power of the government to tax and confiscate the funds of citizens is involved in such a catastrophe.

For this reason, Christian citizens should be involved at every level in the political process, seeking to use legitimate means to establish full protection for the unborn and for all other vulnerable persons. Elections have consequences, and this new legislation is a reminder of the power of government to do both good and evil.

But to refuse to pay taxes is to deny the legitimacy of the government itself, and to declare it beyond political remedy. Even to Christians suffering under the repressive, murderous, and dictatorial yoke of Rome, Jesus instructed the payment of taxes. Caesar, Christ knew, will one day face the judgment of Almighty God. Rome would one day be brought under his own feet and made subject to him.

We do not “render unto Caesar” because of our confidence in Caesar. We render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, because we are committed with our lives and confidence and consciences to render unto God that which is God’s.

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I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler

J. C. Doggett, “Taxation,” in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology (InterVarsity Press, 1995), pp. 830-832.

Pheme Perkins, “Taxes in the New Testament,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, 12:182-200 (Fall, 1984).

Luis E. Lugo, “Caesar’s Coin and the Politics of the Kingdom: A Pluralist Perspective,” in Caesar’s Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 1-22.

Like An Electric Current

“Mugged by Ultrasound: Why So Many Abortion Workers Have Turned Pro-Life”,by David Daleiden and Jon Shields, is a gut-wrenching, disturbing, graphic account of the emotional trauma abortion wrecks on those who perform them. For example, in 2008, Dr. Lisa Harris explained what happened while she, 18-weeks pregnant at the time, performed an abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. She felt her own baby kick at the same time she ripped off a fetal leg with her forceps. This prompted a visceral response.

Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.

Tragically, Dr. Harris is still in the abortion business.

Paul Jarret is not. He quit after 23 abortions. “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall, reflecting on aborting a 14-week-old fetus. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.” Judith Fetrow and Kathy Spark, both former abortion workers, converted to the pro-life cause after seeing the disposal of fetal remains as medical waste. Daleiden and Shields explain:

Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.

Many abortion providers have been converted by ultrasound technology. The most famous example is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. By his own reckoning Nathanson performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. But over time he began to fear he was involved in a great evil. Ultrasound images pushed him over the edge. “When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment.”

Sadly, countless abortion workers keep on perpetuating the great evil, even if it means suppressing the truth they literally feel in their bones.

Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights. Ultrasound and D&E [dilation and evacuation] bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”

Read the whole thing and pray for abortion workers.

A Christian Response to America’s New Civil War

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Guest: Robert Knight, author, Fighting for America’s Soul

TRANSCRIPT

We were promised “change” and that is what we have received from the Obama Administration when they came into power in January 2009.  Robert Knight, our guest in Hour 1 of The Christian Worldview this Saturday, writes on the back of his book, Fighting for America’s Soul, “What’s happening is nothing less than a mighty clash of worldviews, with secular collectivist forces now in the driver’s seat and hoping to enact as much of their agenda as possible, before Americans wake up in time to fight for their liberties.”

Knight will frame the raging debates over issues such as the right to life, marriage, health care, judges, military, globalism, and several other hot topics.  Get informed about the battle and what you should think and do as a Christian by tuning into Hour 1 of The Christian Worldview.

The Hidden Reality of Abortion — Empowering Men

America’s long war over abortion has classically been defined as a struggle between competing rights — depicted as the right of a woman to have an abortion versus the right of an unborn child to the protection of life. This long-familiar framing of the issue suggests, at the very least, that the rights of women and their unborn children are, or at least they can be, presented as an irresolvable conflict.

From the very beginning, this has been an unsatisfactory approach to the abortion controversy. Those who contend for the sanctity of human life at every stage of development are, by virtue of moral necessity, also concerned with the health, welfare, and well-being of women. The reduction of the abortion question to a matter of “rights” is itself a symptom of our moral confusion.

One of the most insidious aspects of the abortion controversy has been the success of the feminist movement in presenting abortion on demand as a matter central to the liberation of women. The feminist logic suggests that women can never be seen as equal to men in terms of career so long as the “risk” and reality of pregnancy and motherhood are present. As the feminists argue, abortion becomes a mechanism for leveling the playing field and for liberating women.

As far back as the 1970s, at least some feminists saw through this logic. Catherine MacKinnon, a radical feminist legal scholar, argued that legal abortion would merely facilitate the “heterosexual availability” of women. In other words, abortion would be a benefit to men, who would be liberated to take sexual advantage of women, knowing that the availability of legal abortion would effectively remove their risk of the entanglements that would come with pregnancy and parenthood.

MacKinnon is a radical legal theorist whose arguments on both abortion and pornography have been of considerable interest to conservatives for some time. Even as her ideology puts her on the far left of contemporary feminism, her argument that the availability of abortion and pornography is deeply injurious to women offers something of an awkward common ground with conservatives. At the very least, she is noteworthy for seeing what so many of her fellow feminists simply refuse to see.

Writing in the August/September 2009 issue of First Things, Richard Stith argues that the legalization of abortion “was supposed to grant enormous freedom to women, but it has had the perverse result of freeing men and attracting women.”

Over 30 years after Roe v. Wade, we now know that abortion “has increased the expectation and frequency of sexual intercourse (including unprotected intercourse) among young people,” Stith observes. As he explains, the post-Roe expectation is that a woman now has less justification for refusing the sexual advances of a male. By and large, abortion has liberated men from the fear of parenthood, if not of pregnancy. Beyond this, if the woman with whom they are having sex becomes pregnant, the availability of abortion serves, in the mind of men, to reduce if not to remove their responsibility for fatherhood.

The availability of abortion means, in the thinking of many men, that the entire responsibility for pregnancy and parenthood now falls to women. If a woman refuses to have an abortion, having the baby is simply her “choice.” As Stith realizes, this gives many men even more leverage as they demand an abortion as the cost of continuing the relationship. Stith cites a report from the Medical Science Monitor indicating that 64% of American women who have had abortions felt pressure from others to do so.

As Stith explains:

Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy, and many did so. Though with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they were not responsible for the birth of children and consequently not under any obligation to marry. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage.

The Culture of Death often presents itself in terms of liberation. Yet, at every turn, this liberation is actually an enslavement. The availability of legalized abortion has led to the deaths of over 40 million unborn children in the United States alone. Beyond this, it has produced a social catastrophe evident in patterns of female poverty and the abandonment of both women and children by irresponsible males. Furthermore, it has severely weakened the moral protections and obligations that bound men to women and children, effectively allowing men to demand abortion as a means of escaping their responsibility to marry and to take responsibility for their children.

As Richard Stith rightly summarizes, “Elective abortion changes everything.” As he explains, “A woman’s choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.”

The obvious question is this — how is it that feminists, the abortion industry, and the advocates of abortion rights get away with their claim that abortion liberates women? In truth, the availability of abortion has served to liberate irresponsible men from duty, morality, and responsibility. Of course, the even greater tragedy is the death of unborn children by the millions.  Only the Culture of Death would present the slaughter of the innocents as liberation.

Pondering the Murder of a Murderer

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Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country who performed abortions in the last three months of a woman’s pregnancy, was recently shot and killed in the foyer of ReformationLutheranChurch in Wichita, Kansas, where he served as an usher.

There has been outrage from the political left and abortion supporters that this act of “terrorism” is an indication of a larger problem of violence and hate from the anti-abortion community.

Condemnation of the murder of Dr. Tiller has also come from evangelical leaders and abortion opponents who say that vigilantism hurts the pro-life cause.

In Hour 2 of The Christian Worldview, we’ll “ponder the murder of a murderer” and take phone calls on your reaction to this recent event.

Moral Reasoning in Light of Wichita

[NOTE:   This column ran in The Chicago Tribune in yesterday's edition (read it here). I wrote this editorial column in the aftermath of the murder of Dr. George Tiller. An extended note is found at the end of the column, dealing with the arguments found in the essay.]

The murder of Dr. George Tiller presents America with yet another reminder of the violence that exists within our midst.  This is not the way the pro-life movement wanted Dr. Tiller’s life to end.  Our mission is to convince Americans of the sanctity of every human life—born and unborn.  The murder of Dr. Tiller does not serve that cause.

George Tiller was one of the most recognized abortion doctors in America.  This nation has known few doctors who would perform the late-term abortions for which Dr. Tiller was infamous.  He was known for his willingness to perform almost any abortion—even to abort babies that would safely survive outside the womb.  He saw himself as a champion of women’s rights.  To others, he was an agent of death who was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of unborn human beings.

The murder of Dr. Tiller was a grotesque denial of the sanctity of human life.  This is not a cause that can be served by violence in any form.  The abortion procedures employed by Dr. Tiller are horribly violent.  Proponents of abortion want to keep the nation’s attention diverted from what abortion really means—and especially from what happens in a late-term abortion.

That violence is what we desperately want to see end.  For this reason, the violence that was murderously deployed in Wichita requires us to be first in line to make clear that violence in the womb will never be overcome by means of violence outside the womb.  Dr. Tiller’s murderer has blood on his hands, and he has bloodied the cause of human life and human dignity.

As many press reports have made clear, the pro-life movement is predominantly Christian, mainly led by committed Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.  The Christian tradition claims a rich tradition of moral reasoning.  The sanctity of human life and our duty to defend the innocent comes within a context of respect for the rule of law and the acknowledgment that it is the duty of government to use its own means to protect life and to serve justice.  Nothing in the Christian moral tradition justifies the act of murdering an abortionist.  There is no justification for taking the law into our own hands and arrogating to ourselves the rightful role of government as exercised through its laws, courts, and institutions of state.

In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for his opposition to the Nazi regime.  The Lutheran pastor, a prominent leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, had been involved in espionage and an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  This pastor and theologian sought to defy the regime that was murdering the Jewish people and destroying human life with homicide on an unprecedented scale.  Bonhoeffer acted in defense of human life, and for this he was executed in the Flossenburg prison camp in the final days of World War II.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed abortion with full force.  In his Ethics he explained:  “The simple fact is that God had certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deprived of his life.  And that is nothing but murder.”

When it came to defying Hitler’s regime, Bonhoeffer saw that several excruciating moral questions were on “the borderland” and could not be settled with absolute certainty.  Eventually, he was convinced that the Nazi regime was beyond moral correction and no longer legitimate.  Christians, he then saw, bore a responsibility to oppose the regime at every level and to seek its demise. He acted in defense of life and was finally willing to use violence to that end.

America is not Nazi Germany.  George Tiller, though bearing the blood of thousands of unborn children on his hands, was not Adolf Hitler.  The murderer of Dr. George Tiller is no Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Dr. Tiller’s murderer did not serve the cause of life; he assaulted that cause at its moral core.

There is no justification for this murder, and it is the responsibility of everyone who cherishes life and honors human dignity to declare this without equivocation or hesitation.

For years now, this great nation has been engaged in a great and heart-rending debate over abortion.  For the first time since Roe v Wade, polls now indicate that a majority of Americans are pro-life.  This issue is far from settled, but even as the pro-life movement seeks to work within the political process in defense of life, our greater task is to reach hearts and minds toward the goal that no woman would seek an abortion.  The murder in Wichita makes that challenge more difficult.

The horrible lesson of Wichita is this:  Those who would use violence do not serve the Culture of Life.  They are agents of the Culture of Death.

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NOTE:  I deal with the Bonhoeffer issue in this essay because I have received so many questions about the historical analogy.  So many readers are familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s decision to take action against Hitler.  Fewer are familiar with the moral and theological reasoning that led Bonhoeffer, quite reluctantly, to this conclusion.  Even then, Bonhoeffer was not certain he was acting rightly.  He felt that this decision, made under extreme moral conditions, was the best he could understand.

Other readers have seen the film “Valkyrie,” and jump to some of the same conclusions.  We must realize that Bonhoeffer did not come to his decision to resort to violence against the regime out of a moral vacuum.  He and his brothers and sisters in the Confessing Church had long before come to the conclusion that they must oppose the Nazi regime in totality, risking imprisonment and far worse.  It is nothing less than embarrassing to see American Christians make arguments citing Bonhoeffer while they fail to engage his moral and theological reasoning — and when arguments are based in sloppy analogies from a position of cultural comfort.

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