Category Archives: The value of life

This is Obama’s America

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When the abortionist didn’t show up in time, a Florida baby was thrown out with the trash.After all, what can you expect when we have a president who can call a baby a punishment?  This is what he voted for.I can’t even bear to copy this—just go read it.  Other links are here, on R. S. McCain’s blog; and as Jared Wilson rightly says,

If you’re pro-choice or a pro-lifer who’s not all that concerned about a pro-choice culture and this disturbs you, why?The only difference between this incident and what happens in all abortions is that the baby is usually killed inside the womb. They just didn’t do it in a timely fashion this time.Either way, a baby is killed and thrown away like garbage.Stories like this and the advances in pre-natal technology are catching up with the abortion industry. One of these days we will wake up to how barbaric abortion is. We’ll suddenly realize how uncivilized we really are.

Being inconvenient is a capital offense

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Such, at least, is the logic of abortion; such is the logic of euthanasia. Such is the logic of the culture of death, which we might also call the culture of “might makes right.” And don’t let talk of “death with dignity” misdirect you; though there are certainly those who are suicidal because of illness or injury, those who advocate euthanasia have far broader concerns. As Dr. Bob of The Doctor Is In writes,

While invariably promoted as a merciful means of terminating suffering, the suffering relieved is far more that of the enabling society than of its victims. “Death with dignity” is the gleaming white shroud on the rotting corpse of societal fear, self-interest and ruthless self-preservation.

This is where we end up when our only concern is what is reasonable in our own eyes, and our only standard for reasonability is our own self-interest: with

a philosophy where the Useful is the Good, whose victims are the children whom Reason scorned.Euthanasia is the quick fix to man’s ageless struggle with suffering and disease. The Hippocratic Oath—taken in widely varying forms by most physicians at graduation—was originally administered to a minority of physicians in ancient Greece, who swore to prescribe neither euthanasia nor abortion—both common recommendations by healers of the age. The rapid and widespread acceptance of euthanasia in pre-Nazi Germany occurred because it was eminently reasonable and rational. Beaten down by war, economic hardship, and limited resources, logic dictated that those who could not contribute to the betterment of society cease being a drain on its lifeblood. Long before its application to ethnic groups and enemies of the State, it was administered to those who made us most uncomfortable: the mentally ill, the deformed, the retarded, the social misfit.

The immediate material benefits of such a policy are easy to articulate. The hidden long-term costs, material, cultural, and spiritual, are equally easy to overlook through deliberate short-sightedness, yet they are in the end far greater:

The benefits of suffering, subtle though they may be, can be discerned in many instances even by the unskilled eye. What are the chances that Dutch doctors will find a cure for the late stage cancer or early childhood disease, when they now so quickly and “compassionately” dispense of their sufferers with a lethal injection? Who will teach us patience, compassion, unselfish love, endurance, tenderness, and tolerance, if not those who provide us with the opportunity through their suffering, or mental or physical disability? These are character traits not easily learned, though enormously beneficial to society as well as individuals. How will we learn them if we liquidate our teachers?Higher moral principles position roadblocks to our behavior, warning us that grave danger lies beyond. When in our hubris and unenlightened reason we crash through them, we do so at great peril, for we do not know what evil lies beyond.

As Dr. Bob notes, the truth of that is clearly illustrated by the German history with euthanasia. Here’s hoping we will ultimately show ourselves willing to learn from their experience, rather than condemning ourselves to relive it.HT: Gerald Vanderleun, with special thanks to the Anchoress.

Jeremiah half-Wright and the bitter irony of Obama’s win

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Barack Obama’s long-time pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., is correct that there is a white-launched, white-sponsored plot afoot to eradicate the American black population. It’s quite a successful plot, too, having already reduced the size of the black community in this country by a significant percentage; if left unchecked, given the reasonable continuance of other demographic trends (such as Hispanic immigration), the political power of the black community will be gone within a generation or two. One could make an argument that this election was not only the first in which electing a President of African heritage was a real possibility—if Sen. Obama had lost, it might conceivably have been the last. That’s how successful this cunningly-laid, long-established plot has been.What the Rev. Dr. Wright doesn’t say is that he supports this plot, and the organizations which are (perhaps unwittingly, at this point) carrying it out.The name of this plot? Planned Parenthood, founded by enthusiastic racist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger, and the abortion industry, which has become an instrument of a quiet black genocide. Abortion has taken the lives of over twelve million Americans of African descent since 1973, and the abortion rate among black women currently stands at nearly 50%; and while statements like Sanger’s crass assertion that “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated” have now been replaced by academic language, we still have people arguing that this is a good thing.

Given that homicide rates of black youth are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions.

The great irony is that the racial genocide Sanger advocated is now largely self-inflicted, and in fact actively supported by prominent black leaders. Once, Jesse Jackson made the pungent point that

the privacy argument used to justify the Roe decision was—as he put it—”the premise of slavery.” Relating the right to abortion to the right to keep slaves, Jackson noted that “one could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.”

But when his position came into conflict with his presidential ambitions, Jackson abandoned it, and a generation of black leaders with political ambitions followed suit; and so now the first American president of African descent will also be the most pro-abortion president in American history, and thus an enabler of his own ethnic community’s slow political self-destruction.

Time for prayer

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The election is over, and I have no trouble in affirming that the candidates who won are those whom God ordained to their positions, and that God so ordained them for his purposes. I do not, however, believe that those purposes are for what most people would conceive as our blessing as a nation; I do affirm that times of trial and judgment are part of God’s blessing, but that’s hard to see when we’re in them. I feel, at this moment, rather like the prophet Habakkuk: I don’t like what I see coming, but I believe that God is sovereign in it, and I am committed to prayer and praise.Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.—Habakkuk 3:17-19 (TNIV)Therefore, I will be praying for those who will be hurt by the resurgence of the abortion holocaust in this nation. Theologically, I don’t believe in praying for the dead, and in any case I trust in the grace and the love of God for those who will die unborn as a result of the policies of the incoming Democratic government; but I will be praying for the mothers who will bear the guilt, felt or unfelt, of planning and consenting to the deaths of their unborn children, and for those who bear the active responsibility for killing them. I will be praying as well for those whom God has called to particular roles in resisting this holocaust, both that they will stand firm and that they will find ways to do so which will communicate the grace and the love of God and the caring support of his church to those considering abortion, rather than merely warnings of judgment.I will be praying for the media of this country, reporters and editors alike, that they will report on the Democratic administration with the diligence and honesty which they did not show in reporting on the Obama campaign. I’m tempted to pray that they will remember their adversarial role with respect to the incoming administration and pursue it with as much vigor and determination as they did with respect to the Bush 43 administration, but that would be vindictive of me; as it is, I will pray that they will have the intellectual and moral courage never to quash a story for ideological or financial reasons, but that if a story deserves to be reported—in God’s eyes, not necessarily in mine—that they will report it, no matter how much it hurts their own political agendas. I’ll be praying for this for their own sake as much as anything, since if they don’t, they’ll regret it in the long run.I will be praying for the Republican opposition, that they will learn (and learn the right lessons!) from this; I will be praying that they repent of their surrender to business as usual and their accommodation to power and money and the corruption that come with them, and return to a principled conservatism. After all, for at least the next two years, they will be irrelevant regardless; they might as well use the freedom that comes with irrelevance to reclaim the conservative agenda (and, one hopes, find ways to convince people that they actually mean to stick to it this time).And, neither last nor by any means least, I will be praying for Barack Obama, who has won what may well turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. He has won the highest prize of all by putting himself in hock to his party’s machine and creating incredibly high expectations among a majority of the American electorate; he simply cannot keep all the promises he has made, and the ones he can keep—and indeed, will have to keep, will he or nil he, to the party machine—will only accelerate and worsen his breaking of the rest. Disillusionment is inevitable with any politician, and particularly with any new president, but he’s set himself up for a particularly severe response, when it turns out that his election does not in fact mean that “the oceans stop their rise, and the planet begins to heal”; for Barack Obama, there is nowhere left to go but down.This means that he needs the grace of God in an extraordinary way in order to succeed, and I will be praying for him that he will receive that extraordinary grace. I will pray that he will govern with the wisdom of Solomon and the integrity of Nehemiah, and that he will seek the righteousness and justice of God ahead of the best interest of his party or his own political future. In a sense, he too has won a peculiar freedom: the freedom of having no higher aspiration left to him. If he claims and uses it, rather than becoming the slave of his desire for re-election, he might be able to break free of the chains his party believes it has on him, and actually become, to some degree, the figure of change he claimed to be in his campaign. I will pray this for him. I will pray for him that God will give him wisdom, courage, and resolve in dealing with the enemies of the nation he has been called to serve, that he would do so in ways that will be for the blessing of this country and the world, and that he would stick to his guns and not back down in the face of opposition. And most of all, I will pray that the Holy Spirit will convict his heart on the matter of abortion, bring him to repentance for his past actions, and raise him up again as a defender of the most powerless and vulnerable among us: those who, like the slaves of centuries past, are denied the most basic human protections, in this case not because of the color of their skin but because they have not yet been born.I will be praying. May God’s will be done.

Barack Obama: pro-abortion extremist

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Read Robert George on this.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress. . . .Before proving my claims about Obama’s abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as ”pro-abortion” rather than ”pro-choice.” . . .Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people—Thomas Jefferson was one—reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn’t think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as ”pro-choice”? Of course we would not. It wouldn’t matter to us that they were ”personally opposed” to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were ”unnecessary,” or that they wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said ”Against slavery? Don’t own one.” We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being ”pro-abortion” and being ”pro-choice.” Who would qualify for the latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in.

HT: Bill

Barack Obama runs from his record

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It appears that Gianna Jessen’s ad has really rattled the Obama campaign.

They’ve now come up with an ad in response (one which tries to blame John McCain for running the original ad, even though it was produced by a different organization):

There’s just one problem with the Obama campaign’s ad: his record. Here’s what he had to say on the subject when he wasn’t running for office (scroll down to p. 87):

[I]f we’re placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as—as is necessary to try to keep that child alive, then we’re probably crossing the line in terms of unconstitutionality.

Personally, I agree with Yuval Levin on this one:

So a child who has been born and is living and breathing outside the womb can’t get medical care because by some legal definition he or she is “pre-viable”? That doesn’t sound like always supporting medical care to protect infants.

And here’s audio of another statement by Sen. Obama on the issue:

The truth here is that

Barack Obama defended infanticide in the Illinois statehouse. He voted against protecting children who survive abortions—viable children were left to die in a Illinois hospital and he would not take legislative action to make that a clear criminal act.

In other words: Sen. Obama, Gianna Jessen isn’t lying—you are. Which is odd, because doesn’t the Left always tell us that pro-lifers are “extremists” who are “out of touch” and “out of the mainstream”? If that’s so, why wouldn’t you stand by your vote and your record, instead of running from it?

And the 2008 Zirnhelt Award* for Political Honesty goes to . . .

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. . . Dr. André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. Dr. Lalonde’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s emergence as a role model for mothers of Down Syndrome and other special-needs children:“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada.”In other words, he’s worried that that Gov. Palin’s example might “inadvertently influence” women to keep their Down Syndrome babies instead of aborting them, as he obviously feels they ought to do. (Though Dr. Lalonde tried to deny it, “Members of Canada’s Down syndrome community say that many of the country’s medical professionals only give messages of fear to parents who learn their baby will be born with the genetic condition.”) That rather takes the pro-choice mask off the pro-abortion lobby, doesn’t it?And no, before anyone reacts, I’m not saying that everyone who supports legal abortion wants to promote abortion; but a lot of those in the business, either as practitioners or as advocates, absolutely do, and hang anything that gets in the way—even basic public-health concerns.*For those unfamilar with David Zirnhelt, he’s a Canadian politician and former New Democratic Party cabinet minister in British Columbia who was known for his quick temper and uninhibited tongue; Minister Zirnhelt is probably best remembered for telling a group of reporters, “Remember, government can do anything.”HT: The AnchoressUpdate: Andrew Malcolm commented on this as well in his “Top of the Ticket” blog on the Los Angeles Times website; somewhat suspiciously, that post appears to be missing. Hugh Hewitt has a PDF copy of it available here.

Pro-life ministry in an oversexed society

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One of the biggest things I miss about living in Canada is the newspapers. I miss having the Vancouver Sun and the National Post show up on the step every morning; I miss the caliber of the reporting, the vigor and sense of responsibility of the political coverage, the wit and keen eye of the columnists . . . it’s a long list, which absolutely must not omit the consistently superb movie reviews of Katherine Monk. (She writes great good reviews, and even better bad ones.)I was reminded today just how much I miss them when RealClearPolitics tossed up a link to a piece by George Jonas on Sarah Palin. I’d forgotten about George Jonas, which is too bad; it’s a typically good piece on the feminist reaction to the Palin nomination. Still, I was more interested in a link in the sidebar to an article by David Frum. The article is titled “Sarah and Todd Palin and the quiet success of the pro-life movement,” but that’s not really what the article is about; the true subject of the article is, as Frum puts it, “the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex.” It’s about the way in which the evolution of the pro-life movement and the law of unintended consequences have significantly reshaped evangelical attitudes and social conservative politics. To quote Frum’s conclusion,

The experience of the Palin family symbolizes the effect of the pro-life movement on American culture: Abortion has been made more rare; unwed motherhood has been normalized. However you feel about that outcome, it is not well-described as either left-wing or right-wing.

In saying this, Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn’t consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby. We have learned, as Frum puts it earlier in his article, that

So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.

Now, that “even welcoming” bit is wrong; but otherwise, he’s right. We came face to face with the law of unintended consequences and realized that the stigma on unwed motherhood was driving abortions, and so we set it aside for the greater good; what else are crisis pregnancy centers all about?Of course, that has unintended consequences of its own; as conservatives understand, subsidizing behavior encourages that behavior, and supporting unwed mothers certainly qualifies as a subsidy, if a private-sector one, on unwed motherhood. Thus, according to Frum’s statistics, some 37% of all babies born in the US are born out of wedlock. Whether this contributes to the ongoing decline of the institution of marriage in this country, I’m really not sure—I actually tend to think not, judging from my own experience (and here, the example of the Palin family would be a bit of anecdotal support for that as well), but I could easily be wrong—but it certainly contributes to the ongoing weakening of the sense that marriage and children are supposed to go together. Which isn’t a good thing . . . but is clearly a lesser evil than abortion.But still, it isn’t a good thing, and it needs to be resisted, and counterbalanced—but without providing incentives for abortion. What I think the interplay between rates of abortion and unwed motherhood demonstrates is that promoting abstinence by “going negative” doesn’t work (a point also made, from a different angle, by Lauren Winner in her superb book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity). We need to articulate the positive case for chastity—which, you will note, is a positive word, where “abstinence” is a negative one—and we need to do so holistically, weaving together emotional, social scientific, biological, relational, and, yes, theological arguments into a single cohesive and coherent position; we need to respond to the “elemental powers” view of sex with a greater and a higher vision, one which compellingly presents the idea that chastity is not self-deprivation, but is in fact a valuable self-discipline which leads to blessing. As churches, we need to contribute to that by moving away from the simplistic approaches to sexuality which we too often take and toward a fully-developed, fully-considered, fully biblical theology of sexuality and pleasure. “Just say no” doesn’t work, and especially not in our sex-saturated society; if we’re going to tell people they need to say “no” to something, we also have to help them understand what God is calling them to say “yes” to in its place. To do otherwise isn’t just bad theology—it’s bad ministry, and it doesn’t work.Update: Janice Shaw Crouse has an excellent column on reducing teen pregnancies and abortions.

Above his pay grade?

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When Rick Warren asked Barack Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”, here was the Senator’s response:

Yes, he really claimed that having an opinion on that is above his pay grade. But that doesn’t mean he thinks all opinions about abortion are above his pay grade. Listen to the audio from the beginning of this clip, taken from comments he made in the Illinois State Senate as he led the fight against the state’s version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act:

In other words, it’s above his pay grade to say that an unborn baby is in fact a baby, but it’s well within his pay grade to say that efforts to protect babies who are born alive after an attempted abortion constitute an undue burden on the women who birthed them. Sounds like what’s really above Sen. Obama’s pay grade is challenging Democratic Party orthodoxy—not a good sign for someone claiming to offer a “new politics” and a post-partisan way of doing business.But then, this is becoming the pattern. As Michael Reagan wrote,

During the forum, his struggle to please everybody by straddling the issues was plain for all to see. He showed he was willing to say and do what he believed everybody wanted to hear. When you try to find any real depth in his beliefs you quickly discover he is utterly shallow and soulless, a sloganeer instead of a missionary. He’s just a politician on the make, trying to be all things to all people—an empty suit proclaiming empty promises. Being without real depth, his platform merely floats on a surface of promises categorized as “Hope” and “Change,” neither of which is clearly defined. He assures us that he wants to change Washington and sweep away all that this city represents. Yet one has only to look at next week’s Democratic National Convention to understand that it’s not change, but lots more of the same.

For that matter, now that we know Sen. Obama’s VP pick, one need look no farther than Joe Biden. I understand the pick, as a matter of political calculation; it’s the same calculation George W. Bush made when he picked Dick Cheney so that voters could feel sure there was a grownup in the White House. Sen. Obama is hoping Sen. Biden can be his Dick Cheney, a man who has the gravitas and foreign policy experience and solid judgment that he himself lacks. At the same time, though, Sen. Biden is as much a member of the Washington establishment as it’s possible to be; more than all but a handful of people, he is the quintessence of the Democratic Congress. I’ve argued before that an Obama administration will really be a Pelosi administration, as the Democratic congressional powers will run the show and Sen. Obama will have to fall into line to get anything done; bringing one of them right into the inner circle of the administration will only strengthen that.Sen. Obama got where he is on a wave of excitement, partly because of his racial heritage, but also in large part because of the power of his rhetoric in promising us a new politics and a new way forward, a way out of the polarized partisan warfare of the last decade or three. Right now, it looks like the power to follow through on his promise is above his pay grade.

Stem cells: the heart of the matter

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There’s a fair bit to be said about embryonic stem-cell research, which I’m surprised to realize I haven’t written about here hardly at all; there’s the fact that research involving adult stem cells is far more promising and far more productive right now (due to the teratoma problem with embryonic stem cells), the fact that we can now produce embryonic stem cells without creating embryos, and the ways in which the pro-abortion movement is clearly using ESCR as a stalking-horse against the pro-life movement. I haven’t written about any of that, but I think I’ll probably do so at some point in the fairly near future, because it’s an important issue—perhaps the most important moral issue of our time.For the moment, however, I’ll just point you to Tyler Dawn’s recent post on the subject, which approaches it from a different angle, and a far more personal one—and in so doing, puts her finger right on the most important point. Thanks, Tyler Dawn.