Sermon Tone Analysis

*/The Biblical View on Abortion/*

*Part 2*

We continue tonight where we left off this morning in our discussion of this matter of abortion, and as I did this morning, I want to begin with an introduction that sort of defines the problem as we face it.

I approached it somewhat statistically this morning and tonight I would to approach it somewhat from an ethical viewpoint.

Let me just share with you some thoughts that may help to set this thing in your mind and then we will go to the Word of God for specific answers.

For centuries the Western World has operated on what we could call a "sanctity of life" ethic.

That is to say, a person had a right to life simply because he was human and was considered human because he was alive, but there has been a shift in recent years toward a quality of life ethic, rather than a sanctity of life ethic.

This new ethic basically says, "A person doesn't have a right to live simply because he's human.

A person only has a right to live if he meets certain criteria, certain qualities."

According to that new modern viewpoint, a person has no rights simply because he is alive.

Even if he is physically alive he must meet some additional criteria for being fully human.

If he fails to meet the criteria he doesn't have the rights of a human, including the right to live.

The unborn must meet some kind of a vague standard of genetic worthiness, or they must have a life worth living, or they must be wanted by society, or they must meet the mother's personal criteria to be considered human.

This shift subtly allows for the nightmarish scenarios of utopia's going awry, as well as the kind of genetic purification programs that were pursued by Hitler and the Nazi doctors.

The same kind of ethic allowed the Nazis to weed out unwanted genetic elements in the population.

When one Nazi Death Camp guard was asked how he could exterminate thousands of people his reply was, "They were not regarded as human."

The parallel to our modern situation is uncomfortably close.

According to a number of researchers, Margaret Sanger (sp.) who, by the way, is the founder of Planned Parenthood, the world's largest supporter of abortion—according to the researchers who study her—she essentially agreed with Hitler's approach and sought to weed from the human race blacks, southern Europeans, Hebrews, and other "feeble-minded."

She regarded abortion as part of a genetic improvement program for the human race.

This then moves us from the sanctity of life to a quality of life right to live, and that quality of life is to be determined by the genetic engineers or the philosophers or whoever.

Although shocking, these eugenic proposals are not very different in principles from the present practice of aborting babies for any reason at all.

A baby who has "Down Syndrome," a baby who has some other birth defect, or a baby who would be an inconvenience doesn't have a life worth living; therefore, isn't human; therefore we can dispose of them readily.

Respected scholars have already proposed different criteria for this quality of life and you can read endlessly on this.

One illustration, Nobel Laureate James Watson, proposed that a person not be declared having the quality to live until three days after birth, to be sure he's healthy.

In other words, wait three days and then if the child doesn't meet the criteria—take its life.

Other proposals would require that someone be several years old before he could be considered a human and thus qualify to live.

I heard recently that in some Scandinavian countries they are now saying a person may not be truly considered to be human until they are seven years old.

Of course, if criteria can be imposed near the beginning of life then it can be imposed at anytime in life.

Joseph Fletcher (you associate him with "situation ethics") suggested that to be considered a person one must have a measurable IQ of at least 40.

Infants would not qualify, nor would the aged who are senile, nor would others who had certain types of accidents.

"In such cases," argues Fletcher, "abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are not taking personal life, but merely biological life."

Attempts to justify abortion by claiming that it will eliminate suffering not only forsakes the sanctity of life ethic, but also ignores the facts.

Some people say to do this will eliminate suffering—that's not true.

It's like the argument that the handicap don't have a life worth living; that there is validity to the fact that unwanted children are going to be abused children and, therefore, if they are unwanted abort them so they aren't born and being unwanted become abused.

By the way, studies show that there is very little correlation between how much a child is wanted before birth and how much that child is wanted after birth.

Furthermore, Dr. Lenoski (sp.) Professor of Pediatrics here at USC, showed that 91% of battered children were from planned pregnancies.

Another study demonstrated more deviant behavior in wanted babies then in those who are unwanted.

So any argument that an unwanted child becomes an abused child just doesn't stand up to any kind of test.

On the contrary, there seems to be a correlation between abortion and child abuse.

When abortion was legalized in the United States there were 167,000 child abuse cases per year (it was legalized in 1973).

By 1979 there were 711,000; in 1982 there were 1,000,000!

Britain experienced a tenfold increase in child abuse after liberalizing abortion laws.

Now you ask, "What's the correlation?"

The correlation is: you begin to educate the whole society that a child is a non-person, not worth living and shouldn't be any kind of intrusion into your world, and you begin to treat them that way.

Professor of Psychiatry Philip Nay, concluded in a widely publicized study, that the acceptance of violence against the unborn lowered the parents resistance to violence against the born—that should be obvious.

Abortion is often portrayed as benefiting women; yet ironically when decisions are made on the basis of sex, girls are aborted far more often then boys.

Out of 8,000 amniocenteses, that is abortions, done in Bombay, 7,999 of them were girls—one was a boy.

This is true in China: they are only allowed to have one child and if it is a girl they kill it.

In one study in the United States, 29 out of 46 girls were aborted—only 1 out of 53 boys were aborted.

So the idea that abortion benefits women doesn't seem to fit the facts; it winds up in the slaughter of women around the world.

Some argue that abortion in necessary because of over population, but that ignores principles of production and distribution.

How in the world do abortions in the United States alleviate over population in crowded parts of Africa?

There is no correlation.

Furthermore, the United States and Europe have a different population problem: the numbers being born are not replacing the aging and dying!

I was told this morning by someone who works for the IRS, that one of the formidable problems the IRS and social security is facing now is the fact that there are so many abortions that there is not going to be enough people born to pay your Social Security by the time you retire.

So what they are doing now: in a very few years they are going to raise the Social Security level to 67, and some years after that the plans are to raise it into the mid 70's.

Why?

Because there is no funding because there aren't going to be another wage earners to support us when we get old.

Pro-Abortionists argue that restricting abortions will return us the era of back-alley butchers.

Dr. Bernard Nathenson (sp.) who was one of those abortionist and converted over to a non-abortion position replies that not only were deaths in the pre-Roe vs. Wade days grossly inflated, in fact, he said they lied about how many deaths occurred in illegal abortions because they wanted abortion legalized for business reasons.

So they fabricated all the figures to make people think that more people were dying than actually were in illegal abortions; but he went on to say that developments in medical technology and pharmacology will mean that even illegal abortions will be medically safe.

Not that that is right, but they use that as an argument that if we ever stop legalizing abortion—non-legal abortions done in less than proper medical facilities and with less than proper medically means will result in many deaths; and he says, "That's not the case, because of the technologically we have."

The present toleration of abortion is deeply rooted in this new kind of individualism and personal rights movement.

The Pro-Abortion people always argue that a woman has the right to control her own body and, therefore, she has the right to abort any intrusion into that body.

Yet society recognizes rights must be limited when they conflict with another person's rights; and certainly the person in the womb of the mother has rights.

A Supreme Court Justice Antonio Scalla (sp.) said, "Whether a woman's right over her body extends to abortion depends on whether the fetus is a human life."

We already saw this morning that the fetus is a human life, not a part of the mother's body but with an identity all its own: it has its unique set of genes, its own circulatory system; its own blood type (very often), and its own brain.

It can live and die separately from the mother, and the mother can live or die separately from it—it is a separate life!

But we are reengineering our thinking and the philosophies that are dominant in our culture today are self-serving philosophies: then intend to remove any kind of intrusion into people's freedoms and liberties.

Now what does the Bible say about this matter of abortion?

We go back to where we were this morning.

The first point that I gave you was this: (and we will cover the remaining ones with just a brief review of this one),

*1.

Conception is Act of God.*

We pointed out this morning that God creates personally every life.

Now this morning I said to you that at the very moment of life God does a creative work.

Theologians have debated this issue for centuries I suppose.

Those of you who are familiar with theology might remember something called "Traducianism."

The debate basically is, "Do we have as male and female in the procreative process somehow the element in our procreative power to produce a soul?"

The difficulty with that question is, "Can two dying humans produce an eternal soul?" Well the answer to that probably is no.

On the other hand, the question is if we don't do that, if that is an independent life being passed on [then] how is it that it is born with Adam's sin?

You say, "What is the answer?"

I have no idea.

I find myself hard pressed to land on either side because I know that God will not produce a sinful soul.

I also know that two dying humans cannot produce an eternal soul; and so I would simply say, to leave it as simple as my mind can allow, at some point in the incredible procreative process God injects the eternality into that soul—we stain it with our fallenness.

But every conception is nonetheless an act of God as we saw Scripture indicates—You made me; You formed me; You breathed into me the breath of life; You ordained that I would live; You opened the womb; You made me to be the one You wanted me to be.

This is the testimony of Scripture.

Now let's go to a second point.

*2.

The Person Created is Created in the Image of God.*

The person created is created in the image of God.

In James 3:9, "With it we bless (speaking about our tongues)—with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the likeness of God."

The person created and we know now that creation occurs at the moment of what?

Conception.

And at the moment of conception God puts the reality of life (and I don't know if it's at the exact split second; if it's a few milliseconds after that), at some point (I don't know where), at some point God infuses personhood and that eternal soul that will never die is created by God: that real being that is not just the collection of genetics, but is something eternal.

Exactly at what split-second in the process that happens no one can know, but nonetheless whenever God does it—that creation is made in the likeness of God, or in the image of God.

What we are saying here then is that what is created and what is conceived is not an animal.

It is not just a biological sequence.

It is not just a collection of cells.

It is not fetal matter.

It is not just human tissue.

It is created by God in His image, and everything that is there for acting, and thinking, and feeling, and knowing, and trusting, and hoping everything that is rational, and moral, and emotional is there.