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CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina (LifeSiteNews) — A Presbyterian pastor recently defended abortion as a “blessing” during a sermon, declaring that she “felt no guilt, no shame, no sin” about her own two abortions.
Dr. Rebecca Todd, author of “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice,” denounced pro-lifers for their humanization of the unborn and brazenly declared abortion to be a “moral good” during a service at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Chapel Hill in North Carolina.
Todd called for a change in the dominant narrative surrounding abortion, lamenting that pro-lifers’ language has successfully shaped a cultural understanding that the unborn are human beings.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, from ‘partial-birth abortions’ to ‘heartbeat bills’ to the language of ‘unborn babies,’ how we talk about abortion has a huge impact on how people think about abortion,” said Todd, although she did not refute the factual basis of such terminology.
Todd accused “primarily Catholics and Evangelical Christians” of “shaping a fictional narrative that frames and controls how we all think and feel about abortion,” which she referred to as the “abortion imaginary.”
“This imaginary has colonized our minds traumatizing many people with its toxic theology and shaping a culture of stigma and shame that has silenced millions of women and people who have had abortions,” Todd said.
While Todd suggested that pro-lifers mischaracterize abortion, such language is rooted in biological fact. For example, ‘Heartbeat bills’ refer to the point at which the unborn’s heart begins pumping blood. Video footage shows the heart of a human embryo is already beating six weeks and six days from fertilization.
Another term Todd took issue with, “partial-birth abortion,” refers to when a baby is partially delivered and then has his or her skull crushed or brains suctioned out before an abortionist completes the delivery of the child.
Furthermore, Todd suggested that babies are only “fully human” once they are born, noting that there are “theological … arguments for recognizing the full humanities of babies only after they are born.
Todd has argued in her book “Trust Women” that the preborn should not have human rights because they aren’t fully developed, without addressing the fact that neither are toddlers or children; and because they are dependent upon their mother for survival, without addressing whether this reasoning should be to refuse care for, say, gravely ill parents who are dependent upon medical assistance and care from their children in old age.
It is irrefutable that the unborn are human beings genetically distinct from their mothers, as double-homicide laws on the murder of pregnant women acknowledge. The absurdity of the argument that babies are persons worthy of human rights only once they pass through the birth canal has been ridiculed by pro-life activists like Laura Klassen.
Moreover, as former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino demonstrates on his website AbortionProcedures.com, abortions are gruesomely brutal. He shows, with animated depictions, how babies with already-formed hearts, fingers, and toes are sucked out of their wombs and torn to pieces in the process, in aspiration abortions, the most common method of abortion.
Levatino also describes and shows how in dismemberment, or D&E abortions — the most common form of abortion during the second trimester — unborn children are torn apart one limb at a time.
Todd not only fails to address the basis for her belief that the unborn aren’t human persons as well as what abortion actually entails, but. remarkably, goes on to recite Psalm 139 in an attempt to claim it should not be a Scriptural condemnation of abortion for Christians.
“For it was you who formed my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother’s womb,” read Todd, using an English Standard Version (ESV) translation of the psalm.
She proceeded to “appreciate the lyrical beauty” of the psalm, going on to declare, “As a woman who has borne two children, I can affirm that I felt something sacred happening in my gestating body during those pregnancies.”
“I can also attest that I felt God’s presence with me as I made the decision to end two pregnancies. And I felt no guilt, no shame, no sin,” she shamelessly confessed.
Todd claimed that one can simultaneously celebrate the “gestation and birth of a child” and deny life to some of the unborn, arguing that this is “theologically consistent with the belief that prenates are not yet human beings … ”
The pastor concluded that pro-abortion activists need to counter pro-life language with their own rosy descriptions of abortion: “The statement ‘abortion is health care’ is right and true … please don’t stop saying this. But we also need to say abortion is a blessing, abortion is an act of love, abortion is a moral good, abortion is an act of grace.”
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