Once a week, I host a radio show in the Greater Toronto Area that gives me the opportunity to interview many fascinating guests, and pick their brains and experiences for insight on different areas of the historical and ongoing fight for human rights. Last week, I chatted with Dr. Monica Miller, author of the recent book Abandoned: The Untold Story of the Abortion Wars. As she was relating some anecdotes from the early days of the pro-life movement, she said something that caught my attention: Pro-life activism, she said, is our response to the endangered pre-born child’s right to our defence.
The concept is a powerful one. Pro-lifers generally talk about the pre-born child’s right to life, and extrapolate our corresponding responsibility from the fact that their right to life is being denied, and brutally so, in slaughterhouses claiming to be “clinics” across North America. The pre-born child is a human, and thus entitled to human rights, we say. Thus, we must stand up and seek their protection.
However, as Dr. Miller points out, the “abortion wars” continue unabated because two rights of the pre-born child are being violated—both their right to life, but also their right to our defence. Pro-life leader Gregg Cunningham has often pointed out that if all those who claim the label “Christian” or “pro-life” acted in accordance with the belief they claim to hold, abortion would end. We have the people, we have the money, and we have the resources. We simply don’t have the commitment or the dedication.
In short, abortion continues not only because abortion supporters deny pre-born children their right to life by way of the legalized barbarism they call a “right,” but it also continues because many, many Christians are denying pre-born children the right to their defence. Pre-born children end up stuffed in garbage bags or shoved into crematoriums both because of the actions of abortion activists, and the nonchalance of the churches. We are enablers. The biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, which had the church leaders of the day cross the road and ignore the wounded man lying in peril, apparently rings true in many situations.
There is a reason, I think, that many Christians and churches push back against the educational outreach engaged in by the pro-life movement. First of all, American statistics show us that in many cases, Christians are having abortions at the same rate as the rest of the population. There is guilt there, and guilt results in pushback.
And second of all, pictures of abortion victims attack our consciences. There was a tradition in pre-Christian Ireland known as troscadh, or what would now be referred to as a “hunger strike.” The victim would often prostrate him or herself on the doorstep of the perceived offender, and if justice was not given, the offender could be faced with one of the greatest dishonours imaginable—allowing someone to die on his doorstep. Abortion images show the broken, brutalized and prostrated corpses of the victims on our doorsteps, victims whose demise was purchased with tax dollars taken from our own wallets and permitted by our priorities. Many Christians look briefly down at the dead children on their doorstep, and then immediately with anger at the pro-lifers who are attempting to draw their attention to these poor orphans. How dare you, they ask, expose us and our children to such gruesome behavior?
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Because, we reply, we cannot in good conscience allow you to sleepwalk through the greatest human carnage in all of history. The pre-born have the right to our defence. We may have failed the dead children in the pictures. But we can do our utmost to ensure that those pictures become a historical record, not a depiction of current events.
In the words of Psalm 82, which I think should resonate with both secular and religious readers:
Do justice for the helpless,
The orphan’s cause maintain;
Defend the poor and needy,
Oppressed for wrong and gain.
Reprinted with permission from Unmasking Choice