I was reading this week that our President and Congress still cannot get their heads around the truth about abortion. While the house is thankfully introducing a bill to clearly end federal funding for it, a good step forward, the Senate was opening the way for more foreign aid for it. The position of our Declaration of Independence is crystal clear. We are “entitled by our Creator” to the “right to life..”
When will we figure out that children seldom arrive on the wings of convenience? They are not like weekends at the beach or raises in pay; universally welcomed at the first news of their coming. But they are much more like education or regular workouts; hard work, sometimes not very convenient but more than worth the effort in the long view. How many baby boomers who were quite happy to have taken part in an abortion when they were young to avoid a visible pregnancy, now with the wisdom of age in regard to the value of children, wish they had not done so? How many women’s lives have been scarred by the memories of the death of an unborn in this way?
Personally, I think that abortion is also the worst enemy of economic growth in America over the last four decades. The economic and demographic picture would be so much healthier without it. The Northeast would not be emptying of people nearly as much. Colleges would not be in a cut-throat competition for diminishing students. Social Security would not be going bankrupt. Store-keepers would have younger customers who spend money. Every business person and teacher should be pro-life out of pure economic self-interest, if for no other reason.
The Bible’s position is clear. God’s creative power was at work in our conception and in our formation in the womb. Every child is a unique and valuable creation of God, whatever the circumstances of conception, whatever the accidents of development in a broken world (Rom. 8:18-25).
“You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps 139:13 NIV).
“This is what the Lord says — he who made you, who formed you in the womb, and who will help you” (Isa 44:2).
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart” (Jer 1:5).
It is up to us to learn to value the children that God allows us to conceive as God values them.