Wretched: Another head-twisting abortion doctor (parental warning).

Abortion Is About God

From Desiring God Ministries:

Every four years politicians and pundits will wax eloquent about the “difficult” and “controversial” issue of abortion. Debates about “a woman’s right to choose” and “a baby’s right to life” will quickly degenerate into shouting matches that obscure rather than clarify the issues.

As Christians, we don’t have the luxury of speaking with vagueness, ambiguity, and cliché. When we open our mouths, we must speak clearly (Ephesians 6:19-20; Colossians 4:3-4).

But if we are to speak clearly, we must first think and feel clearly about difficult and controversial moral issues.

So we need to realize that abortion is not mainly about a woman’s right to choose.

And it isn’t mainly about a baby’s right to life.

Abortion is about God, the Creator of the universe, the Giver and Sustainer of all life, the Judge of the living and the dead, the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the Redeemer and Forgiver of all who trust him. Abortion is about God.

To leave God out of the picture of abortion is to trivialize it. All things are trivial without God. God is the ultimate reality over the universe. All other reality is derivative and dependent and has no ultimate meaning at all without reference to God the ultimate reality. In him we live and move and have our being. If we leave him out of account, we know nothing of any lasting significance about ourselves or the world. (John Piper, “Where Does Child Killing Come From?”)

During this election season, as politicians court the evangelical vote, it is vital that Christians remind themselves why abortion is the transcendent moral issue of our time.

To that end, The Bethlehem Institute has designed a unique, six-week Sunday School curriculum advancing the truth that the deepest evil of abortion is that it defies God’s supremacy over life in the womb.

Entitled Abortion Is About God: Reframing a Moral Issue, the course provides a biblical and theological foundation for the pro-life cause from a God-centered perspective.

At a time when being pro-life is marginalized in some evangelical circles, we want to lift up the cause of the unborn and urge our fellow Christians to not grow weary in doing good.

We will reap a harvest if we do not give up. And the strength to persevere comes from realizing that God’s supremacy over all things includes his work in the womb.

Abortion is an assault on the person-forming work of God. Children are a gift from God. To reject them through abortion is to reject him.

But we do not merely preach against sin. We also preach Christ crucified—crucified for women who have had abortions; for family members who have pushed for abortions; for doctors who have performed abortions; and for Christians who have failed to love both mother and baby as we ought to.

In that spirit, we commend this new curriculum to you. Our prayer is that God would use it in churches around the country to reawaken people to the centrality and supremacy of God in the cause of the unborn so that one day soon abortion will not only be illegal, but unthinkable.

* * *

Discounted Pro-life Resources

• 20% off “Abortion Is About God: Reframing a Moral Issue” and a free copy of Why Pro-life? by Randy Alcorn with each purchase.
• Get additional copies of Why Pro-life? for $.99 each.

Free Online Pro-life Resources

• John Piper Video: Abortion Is About God
• All John Piper’s Sanctity of Life Sermons
• A great website for awareness: Abort73

If One of Obama's Daughters Became Pregnant as a Teen

Senator Obama has shared his perspective if this were to happen: he wouldn't want them to be "punished with a baby":

Continued Depravity

The following excerpt is from yesterday’s edition of the Yale Daily News:

Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

You can read the full article here.

A Voice they Don't Want to Hear

By Albert Mohler @ http://www.albertmohler.com

Just a couple of weeks ago, a new voice was heard in the abortion debate -- the voice of the fathers whose babies have been aborted. As The Los Angeles Times reported, these men have been gathering and telling their stories [read my article here]. And their stories are powerful.

That's clearly what worries abortion rights proponents. These men spoke of their grief, their loss, their guilt, and their shame. Some spoke of the forgiveness they had received through Christ and most spoke of their determination to tell the truth about their abortion experiences.

Look at this:

Jason Baier talks often to the little boy he calls Jamie. He imagines this boy -- his son -- with blond hair and green eyes, chubby cheeks, a sweet smile. But he'll never know for sure. His fiancee's sister told him about the abortion after it was over. Baier remembers that he cried. The next weeks and months go black. He knows he drank far too much. He and his fiancee fought until they broke up. "I hated the world," he said. Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him: "How can I miss something I never even held?"

All this has caught the attention of the hard Left and abortion rights advocates. This attention led to the February 4, 2008 cover story in The Nation -- the flagship masthead of the hard Left. In "Pity the Man," Sarah Blustain takes her measure of the new movement:

Pity the man who conceived four babies with four women and suffered anxiety attacks and nightmares after all four, with his consent, were aborted. Pity the man who saw his soon-to-be-born baby on an ultrasound and instantly came to believe that he "had killed two of my own kids" through abortion. Pity the man who abused alcohol after his girlfriend aborted. Pity the man who suffered a nervous breakdown, depression, psychosis and nearly suicide after his girlfriend had an abortion despite his pleas.

And pity these men who, wittingly or not, are allowing their pain to be co-opted for political gain. Whatever the cause of their suffering, it is real and they deserve support. But they are also the new face of the antiabortion movement: Post-Abortion Syndrome--for men. In conferences and counseling, they're being wrapped in the fuzzy blankets of men's healing, but behind these men and their stories are the same crackpot research, coercive counseling and policy-by-anecdote that have defined the antiabortion movement's tactical emphasis on women's suffering after abortion. It's a maxim among the antichoice crowd these days that there are "two victims of abortion"; the men's PAS movement wants to take that to three.

A casual prochoice activist might dismiss this movement out of hand. After all, politically speaking there's no great constituency for men's PAS. The men's rights movement--which fights to improve men's standing in custody, child support and fatherhood-related issues, on which they say the law favors women--doesn't particularly embrace men's PAS: men's rights advocates are divided on abortion, and besides, some say, the pain of losing a child to abortion simply doesn't measure up to the pain of losing one's born children. Plus, the Supreme Court has definitively told men, including husbands, that they have no rights when it comes to abortion, which leaves antichoice activists no judicial openings to revive, for instance, spousal notification laws.

Still, it's clear that men's PAS is a syndrome whose moment has come. The first conference dealing with men's pain after abortion was held in San Francisco last fall, and the National Right to Life Committee included men's PAS in its annual convention last summer. Many counseling centers dealing with women's postabortion suffering now include resources for men, while activist groups are collecting men's testimonies about their postabortion suffering for use in the courts.

As Blustain sees it, the movement is just a sham -- another political ploy by the pro-life movement. "This isn't all just coincidence, and it's not all about healing," she claims. "Post-Abortion Syndrome has rocked the antiabortion world. It has given new humanity to a movement that even a decade ago seemed locked in violence and lacking in empathy. More important, by blaming abortion for divorce and child abuse, depression and drug use, sex addiction and suicide, it has given conservatives a very distinct culprit in the disintegration of American family values--and another argument for ending the thirty-five-year reign of Roe v. Wade."

Blustain makes the interesting observation that some pro-life arguments have shifted from a focus on the fetus to a focus on the adult parties. She calls this the "softer side" of the movement. In any event, the voices of these fathers are voices she would rather not hear.

Here, in her own words, is what they fear:

Suddenly, using nothing but anecdote framed in scientific forms, a single abortion has not one victim, or even two, but three or four or five. And beyond that, millions of abortions have millions of victims: one in four women, and by extension one in four men, and one in four parents, and countless children, until society itself is a victim, filled with all sorts of personal and interpersonal tragedies of divorce, drug use and suicide from which we--all Americans--need protection.

Amazingly enough, she gets it.

Abortion Creates a Mission Field

By: Abraham Piper @www.desiringgod.org

Sometimes I fall into thinking of abortion as an American issue, or worse, an American political issue. Most of the stats I read, after all, are about abortions in this country. And when I consider voting for a candidate, one of my first questions is "Are they pro-life?"

So I find it helpful to remind myself that abortion is not American and it is most certainly not primarily political. Those stats are kids, not numbers. And the kids are from many colors, cultures, and countries.

Life International is a ministry that actively remembers that abortion is a world-wide scourge. They note,

Abortions in the U.S. and Canada (1.4 million) amount to 3% of abortions worldwide. And while the U.S. and Canada have 2,500 pregnancy centers to counteract 3% of abortions, the rest of the world has 600 centers for 97% of abortions.

So their mission is to "help nationals establish LIFE ministries wherever abortion exists in the world." And they do this ultimately for Jesus, knowing that both physical and eternal life are important.

Like every mission, they need us, the church. With our time, our money, and our prayers, we can be a part of seeing "lives saved physically and transformed spiritually ... in the mission field created by abortion."

Fetal Homicide: Recognizing the Youngest Victims of Crime

From http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/recognising_the_youngest_victims_of_crime/

Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, writes a short piece on the complexities and controversies of using law to protect the fetus.

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Recognizing the Youngest Victims of Crime

In the past three years, in Canada, at least five pregnant women, along with their babies, have been killed in violent attacks. The most recent occurred last month in Toronto. Pregnant women are at increased risk of domestic violence and the abhorrence this elicits, especially when it is lethal, is magnified because of the loss of the foetus. Yet, at present it is not a separate crime to kill or injure the foetus. This should change.

A Environics poll asking if killing or injuring a foetus should be a crime found that 75 per cent of Canadian women and 68 per cent of men would support a foetal protection law (the level of support among all Canadians was 72 per cent). The same poll found that, overall, 62 per cent of Canadians supported legal protection of the unborn child at some point before or at viability. (The Canadian Medical Association guidelines define foetal viability -- the possibility that the foetus can survive outside its mother’s womb -- to be 20 weeks gestation and/or 500 grams in weight.)

In short, many Canadians’ moral intuition is that "there ought to be a law" or laws protecting foetuses from some harms, although we don’t all agree on what those laws should be, especially in the context of abortion. Presently in Canada there is no express law governing abortion which is, therefore, legal until just before birth. Canada is unique among comparable countries in having no such law.

The Supreme Court of Canada has consistently ruled that under our current law the foetus does not exist as a protectable human being, and the Criminal Code legislates that a child becomes a human being for the purposes of a homicide offence only after it is born alive. This means that criminal liability specifically for the wrong of killing the foetus in the course of a criminal act cannot at present be imposed. Only the wrong to the mother is legally cognisable.

Proposals for an Unborn Victims of Crime Act are adamantly opposed by pro-choice abortion advocates, for fear that any legal recognition of the foetus will lead to the re-criminalisation of abortion. They accuse pro-life supporters of promoting such legislation as a backdoor way to prohibit abortion. It’s true that it could cause us to view the foetus and, therefore, abortion differently. But wilful blindness on our part as a society is not an ethical approach to dealing with abortion.

Seeing the foetus as an unborn victim of crime strips away the medical cloak that abortion places on the taking of its life, a cloak that dulls our moral intuitions as to what is involved. It causes us to see the foetus as what it is, an early human life. Those who support abortion must be able to square that fact with their belief that abortion is ethical in all or certain circumstances. Simply arguing for a woman’s right to choose and having no legal prohibitions on abortion does not make it so.

Paradoxically, in one sense, an "unborn victims of violence" law is consistent with a pro-choice stance: it is the other side of the choice coin. It would recognise that women have the "right to choose to bring their child to term in safety", the "right to choose life for their child". Killing or injuring the foetus without the woman’s consent, whether or not there was violence to her, would be an offence.

Pro-choice advocates who don't support this legislation are being inconsistent. If they really are pro-choice they should respect and promote any and all choices for the woman, not just the one to abort. To do otherwise, is not pro-choice, but pro-abortion.

Abortion is always a moral and ethical issue -- or it should always be. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Reverend Rowan Williams, writing recently, in London, England’s The Observer, says however that we have lost our sense that abortion involves a "major moral choice" – it’s been "normalised" – "something has happened to our assumptions about the life of the unborn child, …when one third of pregnancies in Europe end in abortion".

That abortion is a moral and ethical issue does not mean, however, that it should always be a legal issue. But neither should it never be a legal issue.

As the legal void highlighted by the tragic murders of pregnant women show, we need to re-think our overall approach with respect to the law relating to pre-birth human life, including in the context of abortion. And we should do this within a context that includes women’s informed consent and the recognition of foetal pain.

Informed consent law requires that a woman must be given certain information if her consent to abortion is to be legally valid, in particular, information about the mental and physical health risks to her of abortion. These risks continue to be identified.

Whether the information should extend to a description of prenatal development, including ultrasound or other images of the foetus, abortion alternatives, and so on, before a physician may perform an abortion, is controversial.

A "Foetal Pain Awareness Act", similar to those some American states have enacted, could require a physician inform the woman before an abortion that scientific evidence suggests that after 20 weeks gestation the foetus can feel pain. Furthermore, she would have to be offered anaesthesia for the foetus, which it would be her choice to take or decline. This type of law does not prohibit abortion; rather its goal is to try to prevent the foetus from dying in excruciating pain. After all, even jurisdictions that allow capital punishment prohibit certain forms of it on the grounds they constitute cruel punishment, and we have criminal laws that protect animals from brutal treatment.

The foetus is new human life. That matters ethically and should matter legally. An Unborn Victims of Crime law would recognise that. What law should govern abortion is a separate, but important, issue that raises some different considerations, but having no law is not a neutral stance. It contravenes values that form part of the bedrock of Canadian society.

Margaret Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit.

[Source]

God’s Amazing Grace: One Woman’s Journey from the Bondage of Abortion to Freedom in Christ

by Colleen Tronson @ http://www.sharperiron.org

Entering the abortion clinic’s waiting room for the first time, I found it filled with people sitting on colorful plastic chairs and filling out medical forms. As I crossed the room, not one person made eye contact with me.

When it was time for an abortion, a nurse appeared and called the first name of the next patient. As their names were called, women passed through the windowless double doors alone, leaving behind the friend or loved one who waited to drive them home after the abortion.

After many women were called, it was finally my turn. I went through those doors to a small room where I undressed and sat on the examination table. I was afraid of having the abortion but even more afraid of leaving without having the “procedure” done. I lay back on the table and allowed the abortionist to remove the baby from my womb.

The abortionist used a vacuum suction machine attached to a glass collection bottle located under the table. I cried as the nurse told me to relax, that the abortion would be over soon. My baby died that day. A part of me died, too. It went away through the suction tubing that removed the child from my womb.

After the abortion, alcohol and drugs became my good friends. In a few months, I was pregnant again. The baby’s father did not want me to abort our baby, but he went with me to the clinic.

This time a nurse held my hand while they did the abortion. I didn’t cry but kept my eyes tightly closed. I tried to think of something else . . . anything to distract me from the sounds of the vacuum machine . . . anything to avoid feeling the pulling and tugging going on inside my womb. Once again, my “problem” drained away into the collection bottle on the floor beneath the table.

After the second abortion, I continued to “medicate” myself with drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, I became pregnant again.

This time I went alone to the now-familiar abortion clinic. After the procedure was over, while I was still on the table, the doctor showed me the results of my abortion—an unrecognizable mass. My first reaction was shock. How dare he show me that! I got out of there as quickly as I could, fuming at his callousness. In the parking lot, I lit a cigarette and thought about what a jerk he had been to me, a paying customer!

As my life careened out of control, my actions led to a fourth pregnancy. Looking for another abortion, I contacted a friend, hoping she would finance it. But she couldn’t help me. I considered ending my life by simply driving my car over a cliff. I reasoned that if I died, my problems and pain would be gone. However, I quickly abandoned the thought of suicide, worrying that I might not succeed in killing myself.

While searching for a way out of my dilemma, I opened the yellow pages and found the number for a pregnancy help center. The center helped me get an ultrasound, and I was confronted with the fact that I was well into my fourth month of pregnancy. Reluctantly, I began to face the fact that this pregnancy was going to continue.

Then began a painful time of decision making; I knew I wasn’t ready to be a parent. A few months later, when I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, I placed him into the waiting arms of his adoptive mother.

During that pregnancy, I had begun to make outward changes in my life by stopping the chemical use and the promiscuity, but my heart had not changed. Within two months after my son’s birth, I was back to my old ways. At some point, I had contracted gonorrhea, which led to a serious case of pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). I spent a week in the hospital, fighting a raging infection. This problem slowed me down a little, but I was still determined to do what pleased me.

However, God had other plans for me. Soon a regular customer at the restaurant where I worked began to talk to me about God. He played his guitar for me and shared songs he had written while serving time in a state prison. His songs reflected God’s love and His desire to show grace to people when they repent and acknowledge Him as Savior

In the Bible, I found Romans 3:23, which told me that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (KJV).
The promise of John 3:16 gave me hope: “For God so loved the world [even me], that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I soon began to see the truth about my life from God’s perspective. I was a haughty, proud, and selfish woman in desperate need of a Savior. I finally yielded my rebellious and sinful life to Him and received Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.

Mourning over my sin, I was comforted to read Isaiah 1:18. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

There had been plenty of scarlet in my life, but God through His amazing grace had washed me white as snow. God had not given me what I deserved; instead He had showed me incredible mercy.

Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Once I repented, God began to change me from the inside out.

Someone once said, “Life can be the same after losing a trinket but not after losing a treasure.” I lost three treasures when I aborted my children, and I lost even more when I squandered my sexual purity in search of fulfillment.

God granted me mercy, grace, and salvation from my sins through His Son, Jesus Christ. He also granted me the privilege of marrying the man who had led me to Christ. There was, however, another expression of God’s grace yet to come. Over the next five years, God granted me the joy of giving birth to two more beautiful sons. He allowed life to emerge from a place where death had once reigned!

As a woman who has experienced God’s amazing grace and forgiveness from sin in general and from abortion in particular, I want you to know that there is hope and healing available through Jesus Christ.

<sup>Colleen Tronson, executive director of Metro Women’s Center in Minneapolis, has herself experienced the trauma of three abortions.

She and her husband, Steve, make their home in Minneapolis with their two sons, Lewis and Charles. They are active at Fourth Baptist Church (Plymouth, MN).</sup>

Are Christians Complicit in Abortion: Are Christians Murdering Babies?

Jim Rudd writes commentary over at Covenant News. I noticed that one of his columns from 2003 was highlighted recently.

The title is not sensationalism—the author is serious.

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Christians Murdering Babies

Have you ever seen a mother and daughter enter an abortion clinic together? Like all Christian preachers who have spent years preaching in front of abortion clinics, I have seen thousands of mothers and daughters entering abortion clinics together. Have you ever tried to call a maternal grandmother to repentance from murdering her grandchild as she is entering into an abortion clinic, when all along she is there to give her consent?

Most Christians, who call themselves "pro-life," never see what goes on outside of abortion clinics. Most Christians do not realize that hundreds of grandparents everyday give their "consent" to murder their grandchildren in obedience to "parental consent" laws that Christians have supported and passed into law.

As Christian preachers who have seen the murder of children under laws supported by Christians, we find ourselves in the heart-rending situation of having to warn the righteous of their iniquity and call them to repentance (Ezekiel 3:18-21). Just like the pro-abortion people who will render an account in the Day of Judgment because they supported and passed laws to murder children, Christians involved in the process of supporting and passing laws to murder children will also render an account for the innocent blood they have shed.

According to recent news reports, after 30 years of Roe v. Wade, eighteen states request "parental consent" to murder children by abortion, fourteen states make an attempt to issue "parental notification", and eighteen states have some kind of "waiting period". All of these laws were supported and passed by Christians. In 30 years how many innocent babies do you think have been murdered by abortion after someone has given their consent, or after someone has been notified, or after someone waited 24 hours -- 20 million innocent babies, 25 million? God only knows.

Murder is a crying sin. The innocent blood cries out to God from the ground. Blood calls for blood, the blood of the murdered for the blood of the murderers. When innocent people are murdered, God not only hears the innocent blood crying out to Him for Justice, He also takes into account all the people responsible for the shedding of that innocent blood so Justice can be administered in the Day of Judgement. Rest assured, every person will face their accuser and every drop of innocent blood will be avenged. (Revelation 6:10; 20:12-15)

God's judgment will include, but not be limited to, every person responsible for the support and passage of laws that specifically allow for the murder of innocent people. To think otherwise is to suggest for example God will not hold Germans accountable who supported and passed Nazi laws that were used to murder innocent people. The Nazi

Hunters did not find every German responsible for the Nazi holocaust, but God knows who they are. This also applies to abortion laws that are used to murder innocent children. God knows every person responsible for the support and passage of these murderous laws.

How did we ever get to the place where pro-life Christians are just as responsible and just as guilty of murdering children by abortion as the pro-abortion people? God means what He says when He says "Thou shalt not kill." For Christians to support the passage of laws that specifically allow for the killing of innocent people is in direct and open rebellion against the kingdom of God! For Christians to join in the shedding of innocent blood demonstrates a great "falling away" by Christians who have believed lies perpetrated by people who take on the appearance of religion but are in fact murderous wolves in sheep's clothing.

"Beloved, remember" we are foretold, that these things will happen in the Church. The General Epistle of Jude warns us that "certain men crept in unawares" (v.4), who "have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward" (v.11). We see these people everyday within the pro-life movement -- within the Church! Political special interest groups lying to Christians by calling these murderous laws "pro-life" so they can raise financial support -- bringing Christians into murderous bondage! Political partisans, who care more for their political party than they do for the ways of God! The lesson in the Book of Jude is that we are to be watchful against such evil and perverse men springing up in the Church, and when they do, we must contend earnestly for the faith in opposition to those who would corrupt society with such lies.

Now I know that there are many pro-life Christians out there who have never thought about the consequences of supporting the passage of these murderous laws -- because you were mislead into believing that such laws were "pro-life" and you believed the lie. The good news is that God has provided for you a refuge of hope against the Day of Judgment for your personal involvement in murdering children.

In the Old Testament the LORD commanded Moses to appoint cities of refuge where the slayer may flee, "which killeth any person at unawares" or unwittingly. (Numbers 35: 9-15). Today, Jesus Christ is our City of Refuge. The mercies of salvation, through Christ, prefigured by these cities in the Old Testament, are Christ raised up on the cross; exalted at the right hand of the Father, as Lord and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sins. Thus Jesus is The Only Refuge from destruction for His people who unwittingly "killeth any person".

All Christians involved in supporting or passing these murderous abortion laws -- yet at the time you supported them you honestly believed you were doing something good -- God knows who you are. Cry out for repentance! Turn away from being involved with these murderous laws and flee to Christ. For Jesus has compassion upon ignorant people in His Church, and He knows the hearts of men. Give thanks and praise His Holy name for He knows the hearts of men.

[Source]

More of Jim Rudd's commentaries are posted here.

1 in 5 Pregnancies End in Abortion

From http://str.typepad.com

Overall worldwide abortion rates are down, but it is still a staggering number of babies killed every year: 42 million.

One in five pregnancies worldwide ends in an abortion, amounting to a significant fall compared with the mid-nineties, but nearly half these terminations still take place in unsafe conditions, a study says.

In 2003, the latest year for which full figures are available, 42 million abortions were carried out around the world, compared with 46 million in 1995, according to the paper published by The Lancet next Saturday.

John Piper - Rescuing Unborn Children

Actress Ellen Burstyn: Abortion The Worst Thing—A “Dark Thread” Of Her Life

From http://votelifecanada.blogspot.com

LifeSiteNews reports that yesterday

Academy Award winning actress Ellen Burstyn known for her roles in 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' and 'The Exorcist' was interviewed by CFRB radio in Toronto while she was in town promoting her new book - Lessons in Becoming Myself.

The short clip below is the edited portion of her interview where she spoke about her abortion. Like Naomi Kasumi, it certainly wasn’t an “easy, stress relieving” medical procedure, and like Rosa Acuna, Ms. Burstyn didn’t get all the information.

Listen to what this brave woman had to say.

To listen to the entire CFRB interview click here and you’ll find both segments of the interview. The discussion about abortion is in part 2.

A Man, an Abortion, a Gospel

A Commentary by Russell D. Moore

Last night, in the electronic piles of emails that buzz along on my computer, one message stood out, with a glory much older than electronic technology. The message read (edited to remove names and particulars): "Dear Dean Moore, "I just finished listening to a broadcast of a recent Albert Mohler radio show where you served as guest host for Dr. Mohler. The program had to do with the treatment of abortion by Hollywood, and the question you repeatedly raised was how we can stand up for the truth that abortion is a sin, yet have compassion for those who have 'fallen' to this sin. "I was really touched by that because I am a 66 year old man who, 42 years ago before I was saved, helped a girl find an abortionist, paid for the abortion, and traveled with her to and from the abortionist. I thought I was the father, but later learned that I was not. At the time I was a doctoral candidate at an Ivy League school, and had a slew of incredible pressures on me: my father had recently died, cash was tight, and the Vietnam turmoil with its campus repercussions was going on. "I was so ashamed, yet, consciously was in denial about that shame until many years later. I was unable to concentrate as well on my studies, and seemed to be making poor decisions. I alienated a senior professor whose support I needed in order to proceed with my doctorate, I messed up a couple of important research papers, and after six years of graduate study, having completed all my course requirements, I left my program never to return. "I never understood it at the time, but later realized that the difficulties I had were a form of self-punishment and judgment from God for the sin I had committed. I was an accessory before, during, and after the fact of that murder of that innocent baby. In spite of my incredible education, I could not establish myself in any regular, gainful employment for eight or ten years after I left college. I wandered from place to place and from job to job, living in relative isolation and as an 'intellectual' wanderer. "However, as I became aware of myself as a sinner, I repented for the terrible wrong I had committed as well as other sins, and I received and believed in Jesus Christ (Jn 1:11-12), and the promised forgiveness. Today I have finally found peace with God. Your comments on the program were so true, so deep, so truthful, and so kind, I wanted to share my story with you. "If you want to use this testimony anywhere that's o.k. with me, although I'd appreciate it if you would not use my name, say, only referring to me by initials or some other way. And if you do use my story to further encourage other males who neither understood the deep effects that abortion had on them, nor just how sinful it really is, nor the Lord's great forgiveness in the face of admitted guilt and total repentance, I'd appreciate hearing about it."

Population Research Institute: Part I

Steven W. Mosher was the first American social scientist to be allowed to study in China. Discover what he found there in 1979.

Abortion: Unintended consequences

Over at OpinionJournal.com today, Freedomnomics author John R. Lott, Jr. writes about the unintended consequences of legal abortion:

• A sharp increase in unplanned births -- even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.

• A drop in the number of children adopted by two-parent families. "Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion were also the type who wanted to keep the child."

• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant. "Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, 'I never wanted a baby. It's her choice, so let her raise the baby herself,'" Lott writes. "What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades. The evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended 'shotgun' marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the woman."

Click here to read more on the social pathologies of legalized abortion (other than the 40 million+ dead babies, that is.)

The Forgotten Canadian 110,000-Abortion in Canada

By Kirk M. Wellum @ http://redeemingthetime.blogspot.com

Yesterday's Globe and Mail carried a story that was headlined "Teen pregnancies drop to new low, abortions continue decline." It reports on the latest statistical data here in Canada that tells of fewer unwanted pregnancies among teens, not because they are having less sex but because of greater contraceptive use. The same article reports that 33,000 young women under the age of 19 still get pregnant each year and of those 18,000 opt for abortion. In Canada as a whole, there are about 330,000 live births each year and about 110,000 abortions. I could not help but notice that this article is tucked away in the Life Section of the paper right next to the weather forecast and the horoscopes. Although I am sure the paper would say that it is appropriately part of the Health component of the Life Section, there is something foreboding about such a statistic in such a location. It shows that the deaths of 110,000 children by the deliberate actions of their parents and the medical establishment of the country has become routine, hardly worth noting compared to the trial of Conrad Black, or the latest news from the NHL playoffs. Alas, this world is a wicked place and Canada will be called to account for its calloused disregard of human life by the Creator himself.

When 30 or so people died in the Virginia Tech slaughter there was an understandable public outcry. Many are concerned about violence around the world and military conflicts in many places. But we must not forget the slaughter that is going on right in our own country and is condoned by educated sinners who know better. Christians must continue to proclaim the gospel and to call men and women everywhere to repentance. There is a better way to live. Human sexuality can be brought under the gracious Lordship of Christ. We are not merely the highest form of evolutionary development or the victors who sit atop the food chain. We are made in the image of God and we will never be complete until we bow to his authority and worship him alone. May God have mercy upon this generation. May he surprise us by a glorious display of his saving power.

Sliding Fast Down the Slippery Slope: Abortion

By Albert Mohler @ http://www.albertmohler.com

Just days after reporting that 90 percent of all babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are now aborted, Amy Harmon reports in The New York Times that the real reach of the question goes far beyond Down syndrome. Now, some babies are aborted for virtually any trait considered undesirable by the mother or parents -- and ethicists seem unwilling to draw any clear lines.

As Harmon reports:

Abortion rights supporters -- who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body -- have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable. And many are finding that, while they support a woman's right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don't want to have a particular baby.

"How much choice do you really want to give?" asked Arthur Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "That's the challenge of prenatal testing to pro-choicers."

We knew this was coming, and the expanding availability of genetic testing will make the situation ever more complex and the options even more ominous. What about those who would abort a baby of the wrong sex . . . or eye color . . . or likely intelligence?

Here is a frightening section of the paper's report:

But Kirsten Moore, president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line -- even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant. "We all had our own zones of discomfort but still couldn't quite bring ourselves to say, 'Here's the line, firm and clear' because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy," she said. "You can never make that decision for someone else."

There is a brutal honesty in Kirsten Moore's candid admission that her inability to rule out any reason for an abortion is inherent in her pro-choice philosophy.

That same point is made by Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. She provided the paper with a statement that included these lines:

"This issue underscores the importance of families making personal, private decisions without political interference . . . The decision should be with women, their families, and their doctors."

As Amy Harmon reports, there are a good many people who consider themselves pro-choice who cannot go along with this logic. Ann Althouse, a law professor who considers herself a supporter of abortion rights, asked the key question: "Shouldn't they have moral standards about what reasons are acceptable for an abortion?"

The answer coming from groups like NARAL is a simple "no." And they apparently mean it.

Professor Althouse should talk to Dan Neil, whose argument for unrestricted abortion rights sends chills down the spine.

Neil's column, "The Abortion Debate Brought Home," was published in the May 6, 2007 edition of The Los Angeles Times.

Here is how he begins:

My wife and I just had an abortion. Two, actually. We walked into a doctor's office in downtown Los Angeles with four thriving fetuses -- two girls and two boys -- and walked out an hour later with just the girls, whom we will name, if we're lucky enough to keep them, Rosalind and Vivian. Rosalind is my mother's name.

We didn't want to. We didn't mean to. We didn't do anything wrong, which is to say, we did everything right. Four years ago, when Tina and I set out on this journey to have children, such a circumstance was unimaginable. And yet there I was, holding her hand, watching the ultrasound as a needle with potassium chloride found its mark, stopping the heart of one male fetus, then the other, hidden in my wife's suffering belly,

Neil and his wife aborted two boy fetuses in order to increase the chances for two healthy girls. All of this resulted from an IVF procedure and the option of "selective reduction" that is urged upon parents by many doctors.

As Neil explains, "We don't feel guilty. We don't feel ashamed. We're not even really sad, because terminating these fetuses -- at 15 weeks' gestation -- was a medical imperative."

That is a redefinition of "imperative," and the claim completely side-steps the moral responsibility of using a technology that is almost certain to present this awful choice. Furthermore, Neil and his wife used advanced diagnostic testing to determine which fetuses to abort.

Added to all this, Tom Strode of Baptist Press reports that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in Britain has allowed human embryos to be tested for eye squint. As Strode explains, "The news marked an ominous milestone -– supposedly the first embryo screening for a cosmetic flaw."

More:

The director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, which gained the license from the HFEA, told BBC News it was more than a cosmetic condition.

"Whereas we all know somebody who's got a squint, in this particular condition the muscles that control the gaze of direction of the eyes [are] grossly abnormal, so the gaze of the eye might be 90 degrees different from the direction which one might be looking, so to speak, the direction of one's face," Gedis Grudzinskas said.

Grudzinskas is not opposed to using PGD for cosmetic reasons, however.

"We will increasingly see the use of embryo screening for severe cosmetic conditions," he said, according to The Telegraph, a British online newspaper.

The clinic director said he would be willing to try for permission to test for any genetic factor that would produce severe distress in a family.

When asked about hair color, Grudzinskas said, "If there is a cosmetic aspect to an individual case I would assess it on its merits. [Hair color] can be a cause of bullying which can lead to suicide. With the agreement of the HFEA, I would do it.

There is no honest way to deny the slippery slope toward the wholesale denial of human dignity. We are frighteningly far down that slope already.

Death to Downs Babies

Today’s New York Times reports: “About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.”

Denny Burk:

This clash is not about “preventing disability.” That’s a euphemism that every rational person should reject. It’s about whether or not we should execute disabled persons before they can become a “burden” to their parents and society.

On this issue Christians must offer a prophetic word to the culture. All people are created in God’s image (including people with Down Syndrome) and are thereby to be treated with the dignity that God commands towards those who bear His image. To kill innocent humans because they are inconvenient or unwanted is an assault on the image of God.

A just community does not execute people who are financial and emotional burdens to their families or to society. On the contrary, a just community tries to find ways to care for them. Why would we treat people with Down Syndrome any differently?

Religion Isn't Enough

From Melinda@http://str.typepad.com

I listened to Rudy Giuliani explain his public policy position on abortion. Essentially, he's against abortion personally, but thinks it's a Constitutional liberty the government must protect. If I understand him correctly, he is personally against abortion because of his religion but believes he can't take that into public policy. I agree with him, and that's why when it comes to abortion, a religious view isn't enough.

Many people are probably pro-life because of their religious instruction. That's iimportant personally to guide their our consciences. But abortion is also a public policy issue that we, as good citizens, should be prepared to explain and defend on common grounds. It isn't enough that pro-lifers hold their view for religious reasons. It isn't enough that Rudy Giuliani, or any politician, is personally pro-life.

Abortion is wrong because it takes the life of an innocent human being. That's why religion teaches it's wrong. Now when we make the move to public policy, how does that translate? It's not a mere matter of faith that the unborn is a human life; it's a medial fact. It's already a significant legal principle that the government should protect the innocent from injustice, especially taking their lives. Unborn children, then, deserve the same protection any other human being is guaranteed. That's the public policy issue.

It's not enough to be personally pro-life. It's not enough to have a religious position. If the unborn are human beings then they, too, should be protected under the law. If someone believes this religiously, then it should not be that hard to make the public policy step. Unborn human life isn't a matter of faith; it's a matter of fact. If someone is personally pro-life but public pro-choice, then I'm afraid they haven't grasped this core principle of being pro-life.

Death penalty for children

by Vincent @ http://www.worldmagblog.com

Wei Linrong, 34, was seven months pregnant when local officials in the Guangxi Province in southern China dragged her to a hospital, injected her abdomen with chemicals to kill her baby, and lingered to make sure that he died. Her forced abortion was one of at least 60 in the province that took place under the direction of Chinese officials in Baise City during a 24-hour period April 17-18.

One woman rounded up with Wei was nine months pregnant; another resisted as officials shoved her into a private room. WORLD's Priya Abraham reports on the grim enforcement methods behind China's one-child policy.