It’s election season, and you know what that means. There will be a slew of editorials chastising Christians for not showing compassion. You can boil pretty much every one of them down to this: you Christians need to give up your beliefs and go with what we on the left believe, or else you’re not like Jesus. Jesus is with us, not with you fundamentalists. That is the essence of these arguments. It would be nice if it weren’t so, but that tends to be what they are.
The latest candidate appeared as a commentary in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, written by Glenda Payne. It is typical of what comes out every single election cycle: a piece that tries to siphon off just enough of the Christian vote to put the wrong people over the finish line. Scott Klusendorf has written on this before for Desiring God, in “Vote Like No One Else Will”, in response to a piece from an election cycle six years ago. This one was written just this past week, and it is worth reading closely.
A Story Is Not an Argument
She writes that she lives in Tillamook County, a rural dairy farm community where faith runs deep, and that this fall campaign signs are out on her road, including pro-lifers holding signs about abortion. “Abortion is part of the argument those signs are making,” she says. “I am writing, especially to those of you who oppose abortion rights, in hope that my story reminds you of the compassion Jesus taught.”
Stop right there, because she has just put down some ground rules. Notice what she is going to do. She is not going to argue that her position is biblical, or even moral. She is going to tell a story. This is what our culture does all the time: it avoids the formal presentation of an argument and punts to stories instead.
There is nothing wrong, per se, with telling a story. Stories can be powerful. But they are never a substitute for argument. The problem here is that she hopes to persuade Christians that they are not like Jesus by telling her story. She is not going to go to the Bible and say, “Here are some passages that speak against the position you hold, and I hope you’ll reconsider.” She is going to tell her story as the authoritative marker for what Jesus would do.
Is the Unborn a Member of the Human Family?
“I was 14 when I made the hardest decision of my life,” she writes. “Fifty-five years later, with the November 3rd election nearly here, I’m still asking the people who debate abortion to remember there is a person behind that debate.”
Notice the assumption that has been smuggled in. The question of abortion ultimately comes down to this: is the unborn a member of the human family? If not, you don’t need any justification for abortion at all. Have as many as you want. But if the unborn are members of the human family, then the arguments we use to destroy them must be as compelling as those we would use to destroy any other human being.
When she says we need to remember there is a person behind this debate, she means only the woman. She has simply assumed the unborn is not part of the equation. We see this all the time in the abortion debate, and here she is doing it.
Her Story Doesn’t Make the Argument
“I turned 70 four days after Election Day,” she continues. “I have an advanced disease. I no longer care what anybody thinks about me.”
That is an interesting fact about her psychology, but it tells us nothing about whether her argument will be a good one. We can be sorry to hear she has a debilitating disease, and hope she can find some kind of remedy for it. But her condition and her stage of life give us no reason to believe she is going to make a good argument. It is irrelevant. Notice again the attempt to make everything about a story, making it personal rather than objective.
She goes on: “I have made my peace with the only one whose love really matters. I know without a shadow of a doubt where my soul belongs and to whom.”
The fact that you are confident you are going to heaven does not mean your argument will be a good one. Lots of people can be deceived about the validity and soundness of their argument and still think, “I’m going to heaven.” But it is worth reading on to find out where her confidence actually lies that she will be with the Lord one day. And we can hope she is.
Are These Good Reasons to Kill?
“I was a wounded young woman with a deep need to feel loved,” she writes. “I had come to believe that love came only from the value of my body and not my soul. My father nearly disowned me when I chose to terminate the pregnancy rather than place my baby for adoption.”
We can all feel very badly for what this woman went through. Men took advantage of her, and that is a tragedy. Boyfriends treated her as a sexual object rather than as a human being, an image bearer, and that is a tragedy too. It is sad.
But the question becomes this: are those good reasons to say it is okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being? Listen to everything she says and then ask whether any of those reasons would be a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being in any other context. Suppose this woman had a toddler who reminded her of a painful era of her life. Would it be okay to kill that toddler in order to find the relief she needs? You can see the problem with her reasoning.
She says her father had been adopted in Missouri in 1921, when the law treated it as a complete legal break from his birth family, and that he carried a deep hurt of rejection all his life. Her father had this hurt from being separated from his biological parents, and he carried it all his life. Is that a good reason to say it is okay for her to intentionally kill her own offspring? Or ask it more generally: is the fact that her father was hurt a good reason to say it is okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being?
Once we begin looking at the things she says as an expressed justification for intentionally killing an innocent human being, we start to see that everything brought up here would matter if she were simply conveying a story to let us get to know her better. But it is totally irrelevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion.
Is Abortion an Act of Compassion?
“I need you to know that my choice came from deep compassion and concern for the life of my child,” she writes, “the concern for the life my child would lead.”
That’s baloney. She did not make that choice out of concern for her child. The feminist Naomi Wolf is refreshingly honest here. Speaking of her own chemical abortion, she told her readers that there were two categories in her mind, self and baby, and that she chose self for completely selfish reasons. If she had cared about the baby, she would never have swallowed those pills. That is an honest way to look at it.
What we have here instead is an attempt to say, “I was acting out of compassion.” It is not compassion to intentionally kill your own offspring. This is a lot of malarkey. It would be different if she said, “I just want to share my story, the emotional trauma I’ve been through and the emotional pain I’ve worked through.” We could be sympathetic to that. But she is not doing that. She is presenting all of this to lecture Christians on why their pro-life convictions are not like Jesus. She is trying to make an argument, but she is doing it in a way that is fallacious and illegitimate.
“I did not want my child to spend her life hurting because she felt I had rejected her very experience,” she writes. It is almost not an understandable statement. But again, this is not about her child’s well-being. It is about her own. Of course a 14-year-old who is pregnant is going to face some real challenges. But does hardship justify homicide, when it is stated explicitly as a justification for intentionally killing her own offspring? Are these good reasons? It is hard to see how anyone could claim they were.
Do Aborted Children Go to Heaven?
“In heaven my child will not have to know the pain that I was sparing her of,” she goes on. “That was the logic of my 14-year-old brain.”
She alludes here to something a lot of people might read too quickly: the idea that children who are aborted are better off anyway, because they go straight to heaven. Scott has had pastors tell him exactly this. “We don’t preach about abortion. It’s not a big deal to us. We’re going to focus on souls eternally rather than lives here temporarily.” Their argument is that the babies who are aborted go to heaven, while the people sitting in the pews still need to get there. So they focus on the people in the pews and don’t worry about children who, even though they are aborted, go to heaven right away.
There are two things to say about that. First, how do you know they go to heaven? Where in the Bible does it expressly say that all miscarried or aborted children go to heaven? You can make a plausible argument that this is the case, but there is no clear Scripture on the matter. You have to draw inferences from other Scriptures. People will point to David after his affair with Bathsheba, when the child is sick as the Lord told him it would be, and David says, “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.” They read that to mean that although the child can no longer come to David, David can go to him, meaning he will be with him in heaven. A more logical explanation is that David is saying, “I will join the child in dying one day. I too will leave this earth and pass out of existence in this earthly life.” In that sense he will go to where the child is, meaning the grave. You can’t read anything beyond that into it.
Second, there is a deeper problem with the argument that these babies go to heaven anyway. If that is the moral logic in play, we ought to kill all new converts before they have a chance to backslide. After all, if we kill them before they backslide, they will be better off. They will go to heaven. That is a horrible way to reason, and it is troubling that she thought that way at the time.
One Question to Keep Asking
As you read the rest of what she has to say, listen for just one thing: is anything she is conveying a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being? It might help us understand her psychology. It might help us understand the challenges she has had in life, and we can all be sympathetic to those. But she is stating all of this in a piece aimed at convincing Christians that they are not Christlike if they oppose abortion. So we have to read it through that lens, not as someone simply being vulnerable and sharing personal struggles. If that were what was going on, the response would be more pastoral. But she is using her story to convince Christians that it is okay to intentionally kill innocent human beings through abortion. So we want to be critical, not of her personally, but of the reasoning she is offering.
She conveys a lot of tough, heartbreaking things, and every normal human being, Christian and non-Christian alike, can feel empathy for her and feel badly that she went through them. But the question we have to come back to again and again is this: do any of the things she conveys justify intentionally killing an innocent human being? When you get all the abortion sob stories out of the way, they all come down to that question. Are they justifications for intentionally killing another human being? The answer is no.
A Damaged Human Is Not a Non-Human
“The father of my baby was a violent teenager who died young,” she writes. “He once picked me up over his head while I was pregnant and threw me to the ground.” That is terrible. Who doesn’t feel bad about that? It is horrible, and she shouldn’t have had to go through it. She deserved better.
She goes on: “I truly feared that I would give birth to a child who could never be loved, because she would be born malformed and broken, and I grieved for her.”
There are two things to say here. First, a damaged human is not a non-human. The fact that a child has deformities or disabilities does not mean he or she is not one of us. It doesn’t follow that they are not human. It means they have challenges you and I don’t have, and perhaps limitations on their living experience. But they are not non-human.
Second, notice that she assumes the unborn are not human. Would it be okay to justify slitting the throat of a two-year-old with Down syndrome? Of course not. The fact that he has disabilities does not give us a good reason to intentionally kill him. So her entire argument only works if you assume the unborn are not human. She would need to argue for that, not just assume it, and assuming it is exactly what she has done.
The Soul and the Body
“The kindest, most loving thing I could do was let her soul stay where she was and one day come into a loving family,” she writes. “That was and is the power of my faith.”
In other words, she draws a distinction between the soul of her child and the body of her child. She wants to say that she aborted the physical life of her child, but the child’s soul could remain and come back another time, when it was convenient. We see this all the time in stories like this one. People make it sound as if they are being loving, because they are giving the child a chance to come back later, when it will find parents who actually love it. As if the flaw is with the child not being wanted, and not with the parents who ought to do the caring and the wanting.
Go and Sin No More
“My favorite Jesus story is in the Gospel of John, chapter 8,” she continues. “A crowd wanted to stone a woman to death. Jesus told them that anyone without sin should throw the first stone, and no one could. I try to remember that whenever I hear this debate,” meaning the debate over abortion.
Those who are Bible students will know right away that the story she cites is under dispute. The earliest biblical manuscripts do not contain it. It has been included in many versions of the Bible with an asterisk, because there is not much evidence that the story was there in the earliest manuscripts. But go ahead and assume it is legitimately part of the biblical narrative.
Here is what she leaves out. Jesus also told the woman caught in sin, “Go and sin no more.” He said, “I don’t condemn you,” but he also said, “Go and sin no more.” That has been left out of her account. Even on her own telling of the story, Jesus made judgments. Some things are right and some things are wrong. So right away she has undermined her own claim that Christians shouldn’t judge and should simply respect the stories of others. Jesus clearly did judge, even in the passage she puts forward as evidence.
The Power to Kill
“I grew up in the social revolution of the ’60s,” she writes, “when women’s power over their own lives was finally growing. I hate to think of that power shrinking now.”
Put that in plain English rather than doublespeak. What she is saying is that she is glad women had the power to destroy their own unborn offspring. She is conveying something here that woke activists ought to reject: a powerful person taking power over her dependent and weak unborn offspring, killing him, and rejoicing that she had the power to do it. In what world is that a liberal, woke value? It is hard to believe she would say it.
There Is No Woman’s Perspective on Abortion
“So whoever you vote for on November 3rd,” she writes, “I’m asking you to remember the women behind this debate: women who have survived abuse, who have felt denied their own worth, and who deserve a voice in decisions about their own lives. And I’m asking men to stand beside women, not above them.”
We have been over this many times, but notice the fallacy. According to her, arguments stand or fall on the gender of the person making them. That is not how logic works. Arguments stand or fall on their merits, not on the person making them. There is no woman’s perspective on abortion, any more than there is a man’s perspective, a black person’s perspective or a white person’s perspective. There is only one perspective, and it is either objectively true or flawed. You can’t reduce it to the person making the argument.
The Wrong Jesus
“And yes,” she goes on, “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am deeply loved and never condemned by the God who created my soul, even though I made a very painful choice in my youth. I had little supportive guidance.”
We can grieve with her that nobody stood by her, came alongside her and said, “Let’s help you do the right thing.” We can all feel sympathy that she didn’t get that kind of care.
But notice what she says: “I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am deeply loved and never condemned.” This is a version of Jesus the secular left loves. It is the Jesus who is always nice, always kind and never judges anybody. You can see how she used that very way of thinking to leave something out of the biblical example she cited a moment earlier, the woman caught in adultery. She left out the fact that, as the passage says, Jesus told the woman to go and sin no more. It appears Jesus does make judgments.
Jesus Doesn’t Bless Our Sins. He Atones for Them.
Here is the thing. The reason you and I are right with God, and the reason post-abortive women who are believers in Jesus can be right with God, has nothing to do with God just winking at sin. He does not. God has to take sin seriously, and he has to punish it. Otherwise he is not consistent with his holy character.
That is exactly what happened when Jesus came to earth and bore in full the wrath of God against sin that every one of us should have borne. Jesus took it in our place. The gospel is not about a little God up there who looks at sin, winks with a twinkle in his eye and says, “You know what, I’m going to give you a mulligan on that one. I’m going to let that one go.” No. God punishes sin. We see this in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 53, which speaks of how God crushed him, how God punished his own Son by laying on him the iniquity of us all. Jesus was a wrath-bearer, not someone who looks at sin and says, “No big deal. I’m never going to judge anybody. They have their own personal stories. Who am I to make any claim about right or wrong?”
She has the wrong Jesus. We can hope she finds him.
Poisoning the Well
She concludes: “I support a woman’s right to choose either keeping a child or abortion. In today’s more tolerant climate, I encourage adoption. But in certain circumstances, and after much prayer, I believe women and their families can find peaceful healing and solution through abortion.”
When you clothe this entire thing as compassion, as doing what Jesus would do in his loving approach to human beings, you are poisoning the well. And that is what she has done.
So what would Scott say to this woman if he had the chance to meet her? “Listen, I’m really sorry you went through what you went through. Would you be open to talking about what the real question of abortion turns on? Not our experiences, but what kind of thing the child in the womb is.”
Episode Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcement have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.
Welcome, friends. It’s good to have you on the Case for Life program. Well, it’s election season, and you know what that means, right? We are going to have a slew of editorials chastising Christians for not showing compassion, and pretty much you can boil every one of those down to this. You Christians need to give up your beliefs and go with what we on the left believe, Otherwise, you’re not like Jesus. Jesus is with us, not with you fundamentalist bagpipes. That’s the essence of these arguments, and I wish it weren’t so, but that tends to be what they are. And of course, we’ve got the latest candidate, which I’m going to get to in just a minute and go over with you.
But before we dive into that, let me remind you, if you have not yet taken a look at our course Pro-Life 101, I hope you’ll do that. Because in these times we find ourselves today, it’s vitally important Christians know how to state their pro-life case succinctly and with persuasion. And this course will help you do just that. So I hope you’ll take a look at it.
All right, back to what I was mentioning earlier. I’ve got here an op-ed that appeared as a commentary in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, A paper there in Portland, and it’s written by a gal named Glenda Payne, and it is so typical of what we see every single election cycle. A piece that comes out that tries to siphon off just enough of the Christian vote to put the wrong guys over the finish line in elections. And I could go through all the times we’ve seen that. I’ve written a piece at Desiring God on this. I’m trying to think of the exact title of it. But if you go there, I think you’ll see it. And you can take a look at it. That involved an election cycle six years ago. This one was written earlier this week.
And I’m going to read it to you, okay? She writes the following. I live in Tillamook County, a rural dairy farm community where faith runs deep, and this fall, campaign signs are out on our road, and there’s a picture of pro-lifers holding signs about abortion. And she says this, abortion is part of the argument those signs are making. I am writing, especially to those of you who oppose abortion rights, in hope that my story reminds you of the compassion Jesus taught.
Okay, now we need to stop right there because what she’s just done is implicitly put down some ground rules. Notice what she’s going to do. She’s not going to argue that her position is biblical, or even moral. She’s going to tell a story. And this is what our culture does all the time, avoids the formal presentation of an argument, and instead punts to stories. Now there’s nothing wrong, per se, with telling a story. It can be powerful. But they’re never a substitute for argument. And the problem here is she hopes to persuade you, Christians, that you are not like Jesus by telling her story. She’s not going to go to the Bible and say, here’s some passages that speak against the position you hold, and I hope you’ll reconsider. She’s going to tell her story as the authoritative marker for what Jesus would do.
Okay, so let’s keep going. I was 14 when I made the hardest decision of my life. 55 years later, with the November 3rd election nearly here, I’m still asking the people who debate abortion to remember there is a person behind that debate.
Okay, let’s stop right there. Notice the assumption that’s been smuggled in here. The question of abortion ultimately comes down to this. Is the unborn a member of the human family? If not, you don’t need any justification for abortion at all. Have as many as you want. However, if the unborn are members of the human family, then the arguments we use to destroy them must be as compelling as those we would use to destroy any other human being.
But notice what she has done here. She has said we need to remember there is a person behind this debate over abortion, and by that she means only the woman. She has simply assumed the unborn is not part of this equation. This is something we see all the time in the abortion debate, and here she is doing it right here. All right, let’s keep going. I turned 70 four days after Election Day. I have an advanced disease, I no longer care what anybody thinks about me.”
All right, that’s an interesting fact about her psychology, but it really isn’t going to tell us anything about whether her argument will be a good one. Oh, and by the way, yes, I’m sorry to hear she’s got a debilitating disease. I hope she can find some kind of remedy for that. But her condition, her stage of life, does not give us any reason to believe that she’s going to make a good argument. It’s irrelevant. But again, notice the attempt to make everything here about a story, making it personal rather than objective.
So let’s keep going. She says I turned 70 four days after Election Day. I have this disease, this debilitating disease. She says this, I have made my peace with the only one whose love really matters. I know without a shadow of a doubt where my soul belongs and to whom.”
Okay, look, the fact that you’re confident you’re going to heaven, again, does not mean your argument will be a good one. Lots of people can be deceived about the validity and soundness of their argument and think, hey, you know what? I’m going to heaven. But I want to keep reading here because I want to find out where does her confidence actually lie that she is going to be with the Lord one day. And by the way, I hope she is, but let’s see what she says. Let’s keep going here. Forgive me for reading somewhat sporadically here. It’s hard to do that on a phone, but we’ll do the best we can.
She said this, I was a wounded young woman with a deep need to feel loved. I had come to believe that love came only from the value of my body and not my soul. My father nearly disowned me when I chose to terminate the pregnancy rather than place my baby for adoption.
Okay, let’s stop there for a moment. We can all feel very badly for what this woman went through. The fact that she had something where men took advantage of her, that’s a tragedy. The fact that boyfriends treated her as a sexual object rather than as a human being that’s an image-bearer, that’s a tragedy. And it’s sad.
But the question becomes this. Are those good reasons to say it’s okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being? And what I want you to do is listen here for everything she’s going to say, and then ask this, would any of those reasons be a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being in any other context? I mean, suppose this woman had a toddler that reminded her of a painful era of her life. Would it be okay to kill that toddler in order to find the relief she needs?
I think you can see the problem with her reasoning here, but let’s keep going. She says he had been adopted, meaning her father, in Missouri in 1921 when the law treated abortion as a complete legal break from his birth family, and he carried a deep hurt of rejection all his life. Okay, her father had been adopted and he had this hurt that he had been separated from his biological parents, and he carried that all his life. Is that a good reason to say it’s okay for her to intentionally kill her own offspring? Or ask it more generally. Is the fact that her father had hurt a good reason to say it’s okay to intentionally kill an innocent human being? See, once we begin looking at the things that are said here, as an expressed justification for intentionally killing an innocent human being, we start to see that everything that’s being brought up here is important if she’s simply conveying a story to let us get to know her better, but it’s totally irrelevant as to the rightness or wrongness of abortion.
Let’s keep going. She said, I need you to know that my choice came from deep compassion and concern for the life of my child, that the concern for the life my child would lead.
Okay, I just got to stop right there. That’s baloney. She did not make the choice out of concern for her child. I think feminist Naomi Wolf is refreshingly honest here. Speaking of her own chemical abortion, she tells her readers, Look, there were two categories in my mind. Self and baby. And she says, I chose self for completely selfish reasons. If I had cared about the baby, I would have never swallowed those pills. Now that’s an honest way to look at this.
What we have here is an attempt to say, look, I was acting out of compassion. It is not compassion to intentionally kill your own offspring. This is a lot of malarkey. Again, I’d be sympathetic if she said I just want to share my story and the emotional trauma I’ve been through, the emotional pain I’ve worked through, but she’s not doing that. She’s presenting all of this to lecture Christians on why their pro-life support is not like Jesus. Okay, she’s trying to make an argument here, but she’s doing it in a way that is totally fallacious and illegitimate.
Going on, let’s see here. I did not want my child to spend her life hurting because she felt I had rejected her very experience. I don’t even know what that means. It’s almost not an understandable statement. But again, this is not about her child’s well-being. This is about her well-being. Now, do I get it that a 14-year-old who’s pregnant is going to face some real challenges? Of course. But again, does hardship justify homicide when stated explicitly as a justification for intentionally killing her own offspring? Are these good reasons? I don’t see how you could claim they were.
She goes on, in heaven my child will not have to know the pain that I was sparing her of. That was the logic of my 14 year old brain.
Okay, now she alludes to something here I think that a lot of people might read too quickly and that’s this. They think that children who are aborted are better off anyway because after all they go straight to heaven. I’ve actually had pastors tell me this, you know, we don’t preach about abortion. It’s not a big deal to us. We’re going to focus on souls eternally rather than lives here temporarily. And their argument is, look, with these babies that are aborted, they go to heaven. The people that are sitting in our churches, we’re trying to get them to heaven. So we’re going to focus on the people that are here in our pews and not worry about children that even though they get aborted, they do go to heaven right away.
I have two thoughts about that. First, how do you know they go to heaven? Where in the Bible does it expressly say that all miscarried or aborted children go to heaven? Now, I think you can make a plausible argument that’s the case, but there’s no clear scripture on the matter. you have to draw inferences from other scriptures. People, for example, will say, well, that’s not true. Look at David when he and Bathsheba had the affair, and David says, when the child is sick, as the Lord told him it would be, I cannot go to him, or no, he cannot come to me, but I shall go to him. And people read that to mean that David is saying, though the child can no longer come to him given it’s just died, David is saying, but I can go to him, meaning I’ll be with him in heaven.
I think a more logical explanation there is David is saying, look, I will join the child in dying one day. I too will leave this earth, and I too will pass out of existence in this earthly life. In that sense he will go to where child is, meaning the grave. I don’t think you can read into this anything beyond that.
But there’s a deeper problem with this argument of, don’t worry, these babies go to heaven anyway. And here it is. If that’s the moral logic in play, we ought to kill all new converts before they have a chance to backslide. Because after all, if we kill them before they backslide, they’ll be better off. They’ll go to heaven, right? This is a horrible way to reason, and it’s troubling she thought that at the time.
All right, we’re going to take a short break before we get to the rest of what she has to say here, and there’s quite a bit coming up. Again, I want you to listen for just one thing. Is anything she’s conveying here a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being? It might be helpful to understand her psychology. It might be helpful to understand the challenges she’s had in life, and I think we can all be sympathetic to those. But she’s stating this, again, as a piece aimed at convincing you, Christians, that you’re not Christ-like if you oppose abortion. So we want to read it through that lens, not someone just being vulnerable and sharing their personal struggles in life. If that’s what was going on here, we’d have a more pastoral response, but she is using this to convince you that it’s okay to intentionally kill innocent human beings through abortion. So we want to be critical, not in her sense personally, not to her personally, but we do want to be critical of the reasoning she is offering here. We’ll take more of that up after the break. Stay with us.
Good to have you back everybody. We are going through an op-ed piece written by an elderly woman who when she was a teenager had an abortion and she is using this op-ed to lecture Christians on their lack of compassion. Her basic claim is this, you pro-life Christians are not compassionate the way Jesus was. Now again, I want to say something. She conveys here a lot of tough, heartbreaking stuff, which every normal human being, Christians, non-Christians alike, can feel empathy for her that she went through these things, and feel badly that she went through these things. But the question we need to come back to again and again is this. Do any of these things that she conveys justify intentionally killing an innocent human being? In other words, when you get all the abortion sob stories out of the way, they all come down to this. Are they justifications for intentionally killing another human being? And of course my answer is no, but let’s keep reading to see what else she says.
She says the father of my baby was a violent teenager who died young. He once picked me up over his head while I was pregnant and threw me to the ground. That’s terrible, right? I mean, who doesn’t feel bad about that? That’s horrible. I’m very sorry she had to go through that and she shouldn’t have had to. She deserved better.
She goes on, I truly feared that I would give birth to a child who could never be loved because she would be born malformed and broken. And I grieved for her.
Okay, a couple of things there. First of all, a damaged human is not a non-human. The fact that a child has deformities or disabilities does not mean he or she is not one of us. It doesn’t follow, they’re not human. It means they have challenges you and I don’t have. They’re going to have limitations perhaps on their living experience, but they are not non-human.
But there’s a second issue here. Notice she assumes the unborn are not human. Would it be okay to justify slitting the throat of a two year old Down’s child? Of course not. The fact that he has disabilities does not mean we have a good reason to just intentionally kill him. So her entire argument here only works if you assume the unborn are not human. And she would need to argue for that, not just assume it, which is what she’s done here.
She goes on to say the following. The kindest, most loving thing I could do was let her soul stay where she was and one day come into a loving family that was and is the power of my faith.
In other words, she’s going to draw a distinction here between the soul of her child and the body of her child. She wants to make the point that she aborted the physical life of her child, but the child’s soul could remain and come back another time when it’s convenient. By the way, this is something we see all the time in stories like this, people make it sound like they’re being loving because they’re actually giving the child a chance to come back later when it will find parents that actually love the child, as if somehow the flaw is with the child not being wanted, not with the parents who ought to do the care and wanting.
Continuing on, she says, my favorite Jesus story is in the Gospel of John chapter 8. A crowd wanted to stone a woman to death. Jesus told them that anyone without sin should throw the first stone, and no one could. I try to remember that whenever I hear this debate, over abortion that is.
Now a couple of things, those of you that are Bible students know right away, you know that the story she is citing here is under dispute. In other words, the earliest biblical manuscripts do not contain that story. But let’s go ahead and assume that they did. Let’s say that is legitimately part of the biblical narrative. It’s been included in many versions of the Bible with an asterisk. Why? Because, again, there’s not a lot of evidence that the story was there in the earliest manuscripts. But let’s say it were. Here’s something she leaves out. Jesus also told that woman caught in sin, go and sin no more. True, he said, I don’t condemn you, but go and sin no more. That’s been left out of this narrative. In other words, even on her account of the story she’s presenting here, Jesus made judgment. Some things are right, some things are wrong. So right away, she’s kind of undermined her own claim that Christians shouldn’t judge here, and they should respect the stories of others. Jesus clearly did judge, even in the passage she puts forward as evidence.
She goes on here, I grew up in the social revolution of the 60s, when women’s power over their own lives was finally growing. I hate to think of that power shrinking now.
Okay, let’s put this in plain English rather than the doublespeak she’s throwing out here, what she’s talking about is she’s glad women had the power to destroy their own unborn offspring. In other words, she is conveying something here that woke activists ought to reject. Here’s a powerful person, a woman, taking power over her dependent and weak unborn offspring and killing him and rejoicing that she had the power to do that. In what world is that a liberal woke value? Well, I mean, I can’t even believe she would say that.
She goes on to say this, so whoever you vote for on November 3rd, I’m asking you to remember the women behind this debate, women who have survived abuse, who have felt denied their own worth, and who deserve a voice in decisions about their own lives. And I’m asking men to stand beside women, not above them.
Okay, we’ve talked about this a billion times on this show. Notice the fallacy in her thinking. Arguments, according to her, stand or fall on the gender of the person making them. But that’s not how logic works. Logic works this way. Arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the person making them. There is no woman’s perspective on abortion any more than there’s a man’s perspective, or a black person’s perspective, or a white person’s perspective. There is only one perspective that is either objectively true or flawed. You can’t just reduce it to the person making the argument.
Now she goes on to say, and yes, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am deeply loved and never condemned by the God who created my soul, even though I made a very painful choice in my youth. I had little supportive guidance.”
Now again, we can grieve with her that nobody stood by her and came alongside and said, let’s help you do the right thing here. We can all feel sympathy. She didn’t get that kind of treatment.
But notice what she says, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am deeply loved and never condemned. Okay, this is a version of Jesus that the secular left loves. It’s the Jesus who is always nice, always kind, never judges anybody, and you can see that how she used that very way of thinking to leave out of the very biblical example she used a moment ago about Jesus and the woman being stoned for adultery. She left out the fact, the passage says, that Jesus told the woman to go sin no more. It appears Jesus does make judgments, right?
But here’s the thing. The reason why you and I are right with God, the reason why post-abortion women who are believers in Jesus can be right with God, has nothing to do with the fact that God just winks at sin. He does not. God has to take sin seriously and he has to punish it. Otherwise he’s not consistent with his holy character. And that’s exactly what happened when Jesus came to earth and bore in full the wrath of God against sin that every one of us should have borne. Instead, Jesus takes it in our place. The gospel is not about this, you know, little diddy-widdy God up there who looks at sin and kind of winks with a twinkle in his eye and says, you know what, I’m going to give him a mulligan on that one. I’m going to let that one go. No, God punishes sin.
And we see this in the Old Testament in Isaiah 53 when it talks about how God crushed him, how God punished his own son by placing on him the iniquity of us all. Jesus was a wrath-bearer, not someone who just looks at sin and says, ah, no big deal. I’m never going to judge anybody. They have their own personal stories. Who am I to make any kind of claim about being right or wrong? She’s got the wrong Jesus here folks, I hope she finds him.
She concludes by saying, I support a woman’s right to choose either keeping a child or abortion. In today’s more tolerant climate, I encourage adoption. But in certain circumstances and after much prayer, I believe women and their families can find peaceful healing and solution through abortion, she’s going to argue.
Now, again, I need to stop here and just say, when you try to clothe this entire thing as compassion, as doing what Jesus would do in his loving approach to human beings, you’re kind of poisoning the well. And that’s what she’s doing here.
So what would I say to this woman if I had a chance to meet her? I’d say, listen, I’m really sorry you went through what you went through. Would you be open to talking about what the real question of abortion turns on? Not on our experiences, but what kind of thing is the child in the womb?
That’s all for today. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode.