The Future of Abortion
October 15, 2008
Once again Al Mohler has trained his thoughts toward the issue of abortion.
In his latest post he writes:
The shadow of abortion looms large over the American conscience. Over thirty years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion controversy has not gone away. If the U.S. Supreme Court majority really thought that their decision to create a new "right" to abortion would resolve the issue, history has rejected that assumption. The nation is even more divided on this question in 2008 than it was in 1973.
Each new presidential election is greeted by some with hopes that the abortion issue will go away. The controversy resists disappearance. It cannot merely go away, because both sides in the controversy see the issue in ultimate terms.
The worldview clash is never more clearly revealed than on this grave question. One side defines the issue in terms of a woman's right to control her own destiny. Then, as now, abortion advocates argue that access to abortion is necessary in order to level the playing field between men and women. Feminists argued that abortion rights were and are absolutely necessary to a woman's autonomy and privacy. Abortion rights advocates have argued amongst themselves over the question of whether to admit that the killing of an unborn child is even a tragedy. Whatever the admission, the unborn child's intrinsic right to life is denied. In the classic form of this argument, a woman must have the right to an abortion at anywhere, any time, for any reason, whether or not she can pay for it.
The other side of the argument looks to the unborn child as the most significant moral question. This side bases its assumptions on the claim that a human being, at any stage of development, has an intrinsic right to life that must be respected by all humanity. Thus, any pregnancy that ends in the death of the child is a tragedy. The only distinction between the death of that unborn child and the death of a child after its birth is that the unborn child is not yet known by others to the extent the child born alive soon comes to be known. A miscarriage, like any other natural death, is a
tragedy marked by loss and grief. An abortion, like any other taking of innocent human life, is an act of moral treachery.
I know this is an election year and some will see any mention of abortion as an act of mixing faith and politics. But my question is, are there any issues with which Christians ought not to "mix" their faith? Are there any issues to which our Christian faith ought to be agnostic? I have never seen abortion as a political issue. It is a moral issue with political implications. And I do believe abortion ought to be a front burner issue for Christians. It ought to inform the way we vote. It ought to inform the way we interact with our political leaders. Abortion demands an untiring prophetic voice from the church. God help us if we lose our moral clarity by reducing abortion to simply another issue with no more urgency than tax policy, defense spending, and entitlement spending.
