Guest column –
Some pro-lifers believe that if we could just establish the humanity of the unborn child we could settle the abortion debate. It is true that some are ignorant about the facts of the unborn child. And many women cry that they would not have aborted if they had known their baby was a “real baby and not just a lump of tissue.” Barbara McDougall stood in the House of Commons during the last abortion debate in July 1988, and said, “Let us not mince words – abortion is the killing of unborn children,” but went on to conclude that this was a woman’s right.
The issue is not the humanity of the unborn child. (If it is not human life, what kind of life is it?) The issue is sovereignty. Am I my own god? Do I create my own value system by choosing what is right for me? Am I the only one I will ever answer to?
To God belongs the creation and taking of life. Every tyranny of history in asserting itself as god has recklessly destroyed life. Unable to command life, autonomous man has always enforced his own ‘divinity’ by commanding destruction. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot all built mountains of corpses to their own divinity.
The powerful drive to experiment with unborn children, with cloning, with DNA is part of this same impulse. We would be as God, we would command life, we would assert our divinity by crude manipulations of the beginnings of life.
Who will decide who will live and who will die? Some women have testified to aborting their children “just for the feeling of power.”
There is no middle ground between the sovereignty of man and the sovereignty of God any more than there is middle ground between a dead child and a living one.
When writers of the first and second centuries wrote about the early Church, they noted two basic differences between them and their own culture. The Christians were faithful to one another in marriage and they did not practice abortion or infanticide. Rather they gathered up babies left in the gutters and under the aqueducts and raised them as their own. We do not have that opportunity. Today the children are killed by dismemberment and extracted in pieces from their mothers’ wombs.
“Progressive” modern humanism has brought us back to pagan sexual anarchy and child killing.
It is also interesting to note that the early feminists of this century were opposed to abortion. They correctly saw the practice as another tool of male exploitation and domination. If you freedom to use the woman’s body as a sexual object is going to be infringed upon by an unborn child and if your financial freedom is going to be infringed upon by unwanted responsibilities, then get rid of the child. The man experiences none of the guilt, none of the grieving and takes none of the physical risks associated with abortion. And after the child is killed he is free to continue to use the woman as a sexual object. Abortion expressed male domination of women.
But today’s feminists demand abortion on demand as a right, “as the cornerstone of the emancipation of women” to quote Dawn Black, NDP member for New Westminster speaking in the House of Commons on November 7, 1989.
That the right for women to kill their own unborn children should be seen as emancipation and not utter degradation can only be understood in the black light of a desperate attempt to be my own little god, in my own little world by taking another life – an innocent and helpless life utterly dependent upon its killer.
Rev. Steve Hill is pastor of the Newmarket Christian Fellowship in Newmarket, Ontario
