Normalizing the Inconceivable

(While originally planning to write one large article considering the issue addressed here, I think it is most fitting to publish the sections consecutively as a series of posts, all bearing the primary header, “Normalizing the Inconceivable.” You can access the other articles here: Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Philosophical Problem? [part two]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Scientific Problem of Being and Personhood? [part three]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Lack of Biblical Clarity? [part four]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: Abominating Abortion (Living the Implications [part five].) 

My wife and I are just weeks away from the birth of our first child, a daughter. It is an incredible and indescribable joy to know that in just a few weeks we will get to meet our baby girl face-to-face! As we discussed finding out her gender at 20 weeks, we decided that finding out early would give us specific direction in our prayers for her, that she may grow into a little lady who embraces with her life the calling that is embodied in the name we’ve chosen for her:

Avynlea |ˈa-vin-lē| n : [1] a return to childlike faith; [2] simple beauty; [3] noble purity; [4] compassion for the least

Before we knew who our child was, we had a name picked out in case she had ended up being a boy - Titus. This name, associated with the word honor, is also a calling that means, “Biblical honor; defender of the weak and helpless for the sake of Christ.” In the time prior to finding out we were having a daughter, and after the developmental stage where our baby could hear in utero, I laid on my wife’s lap and read through the books of Titus and Ruth; the prior for obvious reasons, and the latter because of Ruth’s devoted example of beautiful, courageous femininity, resulting in the blessing of Christ.

In reading Ruth to our daughter, I was stopped by a small portion of this short book that speaks volumes about a subject that must be of tremendous concern for any of us who call ourselves human, much less for those like me who call themselves Christian:

“So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the LORD gave her conception, and she bore a son.” (Ruth 4.13, ESV)1

Having passed the 38^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January of this year, an issue of critical importance was once again brought to the fore that many people are probably tired of hearing about; that is, the issue of abortion. Not only does the anniversary of this landmark case stir up a gamut of emotion across the nation and the world regarding abortion and women’s rights, but in my state – Washington – legislative bills HB 1366 and SB 5274 were recently filed that would, if I understand the bills correctly, threaten the viable continuation of every life-affirming pregnancy medical clinic in the state through rigorously policing the way they are allowed to advertise and campaign.

Supreme Court cases and legislative bills aside, I believe that America (and the greater world) is in a stupor regarding serious, cohesive meditation and thought when it comes to the “normal” issue of abortion and its debated legitimacy. I am convinced that in large part this is due to the fact that as a society, we have normalized that which, by any objective moral standard, is utterly inconceivable. (I realize that this last sentence carries with it an entirely other debate on the nature of objective moral truth, which I will do my best to address within the context of the abortion issue.)

In writing this article, I hope to briefly look at the philosophical and biblical questions inherent in the matter of abortion (no matter how early in the developmental stage) with clarity, and to plead with abortionists who would call themselves my brothers and sisters in Christ to: (1) repent of their belief that abortion is a morally valid option; and (2) take a definitive stand against abortion, as the only reasonable act of worship to God that may be rendered in response to the current cultural crisis of abortion. (I realize that by stating my goal(s) for the sake of honesty and clarity I run the risk of losing some who will simply write me off as agenda-laden. If you are tempted to do this, I urge you in the strongest possible terms – for the sake of your soul and the good of others – to bear with me.)

image obtained from http://www.hiren.info/

A Chilling Story

On January 23^rd, 2011 President Obama commemorated the anniversary of legalized abortion in America with the following words: “Today marks the 38^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right.”²

Essentially, what President Obama asserted was his personal belief that morality is a matter of private, personal and/or familial prerogative, and that the broader community has no responsibility – much less the right – to interfere in any way. In contemplating this, however, consider the chilling implications of this in an example from professor and apologist Gregory Koukl:

“When morality is reduced to personal tastes, people exchange the moral question, What is good? for the pleasure question, What feels good?… When self-interest rules, it has a profound impact on behavior, especially affecting how we treat other human beings…. What follows is a true story about a newborn child we’ll call Baby Garcia. This event took place in a major hospital in the Los Angeles area. I pass on the exact details as Jennifer, the nurse involved, related them to me:

One night a nurse on my shift came up to me and said, ‘Jennifer, you need to see the Garcia baby.’ There was something suspicious about the way she said it, though. I see babies born every hour, I thought.

She led me to a utility room the nurses used for their breaks. Women were smoking and drinking coffee, their feet up on the stainless steel counter. There, lying on the metal, was the naked body of a newborn baby.

‘What is this baby doing here on this counter?’ I asked timidly.

‘That’s a preemie born at nineteen weeks,’ she said. ‘We don’t do anything to save them unless they’re twenty weeks.’

I noticed that his chest was fluttering rapidly. I picked him up for a closer look. ‘This baby is still alive!’ I exclaimed. I thought they hadn’t noticed.

Then I learned the horrible truth. The nurses knew, and it didn’t matter. They had presented the baby to its mother as a dead, premature child. Then they took him away and tossed him on the cold, steel counter in the lunch room until he died. His skin was blotchy white, and his mouth was gaping open as he tried to breathe.

I did the one thing I could think of. I held him in his last moments so he’d at least have some warmth and love when he died.

Just then one of the nurses – a large, harsh woman – burst into the room. ‘Jennifer, what are you doing with that baby?’ she yelled.

‘He’s still alive…’

‘He’s still alive because you’re holding him,’ she said. Grabbing him by the back with one hand, she snatched him from me, opened one of the stainless steel cabinets, and pulled out a specimen container with formaldehyde in it. She tossed the baby in and snapped the lid on. It was over in an instant.

To them, this child wasn’t human. In seven more days he would have qualified, but at nineteen weeks he was just trash.”³

I realize that the story Koukl recounts varies from what President Obama was talking about in the fact that what happened to Baby Garcia was done by nurses who allegedly had no right to make the decision they did. Yet if morality and the nature of human life is an objective, fixed reality (as I hope to demonstrate that it is), then in abortion clinics the world over, effectively the same thing is being done with the consent of the parents of the babies. Is this a private family matter? Is there a sense in which the intentional snuffing out of the life of millions of babies struggling for breath is universally wrong?

The answers are, No, it most certainly is not a private family matter; it is profoundly public, with far-reaching implications for society! and Yes, there is absolutely a sense in which the intentional snuffing out of life in the womb is objectively wrong (the only sense that makes sense)! However, those who would say that it’s not necessarily fall back on their personal beliefs about truth and morality, an outmoded view of being and personhood, and (if they profess Christian faith) ambiguity of biblical texts dealing with these matters.

In the next posts, I’ll consider abortion from a number of different angles. Is the abortion debate and its subsequent legalization a philosophical problem of truth and morality? Is it a scientific problem of being and personhood? For those who debate the issue on both sides from a biblical perspective (as it surely ought to be debated, for reasons I will not mention here and now), is it a problem of lack of clear biblical evidence? I will consider each of these questions in turn.

Notes

¹Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001).

²Gary Bauer, “Divisive Rhetoric Is Not the Problem,” Human Events, January 31, 2011, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41474 (accessed January 31, 2011).

³Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerBooks, 1998), 20-22.

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