Underground Exiles

While Proverbs 24 gives us the general command to intervene on behalf of those who are being killed, Exodus 1 provides us with a very specific example of this command in practice.  A new king has come to power in Egypt, and fearful that Israel’s phenomenal growth will threaten Egypt’s security, he orders every newborn Hebrew boy to be put to death.  To ensure that his command is carried out, he tasks the Hebrew midwives with following through on the decree.  We learn in Exodus 1.17-21 that his plan did not succeed:

But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive.  So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”  And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”  Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.  And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that he provided households for them.”

The implication of this passage is that those who fear God will do what they can to keep mothers from killing their babies.

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While orphans, widows and abortion-vulnerable children are all “in distress” - and generally unwanted by society at large - the circumstances surrounding their distress are very different.  It is one thing to provide food and shelter for people in need, and another thing entirely to intervene on the behalf of people who are about to be killed.  Perhaps you wonder if the Bible actually mandates our involvement in the more extreme circumstances, whre the price of involvement is much higher, and the level of opposition is more, much more, significant.  Here enteres Proverbs 24.11-12:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.  If you say, “Behold we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay each man according to his work?”

Like almost all biblical proverbs, the text gives zero indication what kind of specific injustice, if any, the author has in mind.  It serves as a general guidline for what God’s people are called to do in the face of violent injustice.  If innocent human beings are in danger, God-fearing people are to come to their rescue.

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The book of James is a practical book about meeting practical needs.  It even provides a practical definition of true religion, found in James 1.27:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

This concise definition makes it clear that helping those in desperate circumstances is a primary component of pure and undefiled religion.  Orphans and widows are the examples given, but it’s pretty unlikely that these are the only two groups he has in mind.  In the very next chapter, he warns against neglecting the poor; so we must surmise, then, that the application of James’ admonition goes beyond just widows and orphans alone.  They are simply representative of those in severe distress.  And lest we wrongly assume that James’ emphasis on practical deeds of love is out of step with the rest of Scripture, consider the prophet Jeremiah’s command in Jeremiah 22.3:

Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed.  And  do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

In the patriarchal society in which James and Jeremiah wrote, where there was no safety net of state-funded social services, the prospects for widows and orphans were bleak in the extreme.  With their natural providers gone, orphans and widows would not likely survive apart from the active intervention of God’s people.   As daunting and desperate as their circumstances were, children facing abortion are even worse off.

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If you read the Bible from beginning to end, you will encounter over 14,000 different words, and the word abortion doesn’t even make a single appearance.  To be completely straight forward, Scripture says precisely nothing on the subject, yet you are reading an article called “Fear God, Save Babies”.  Is that a little presumptuous?  Is it even possible to articulate a biblical position on a subject the Bible apparently never mentions?  I would argue that it is possible, and moreover, it’s necessary.  If Scripture did deal with abortion directly, we wouldn’t have to wrestle through what a biblical response would look like.  So we must take everything the Bible does tell us, and apply it to everything it doesn’t.

The most significant question about abortion for those of us dealing with the Bible isn’t whether it is right or wrong, but whether God expects us to do anything about it.  I say that because any honest query into the act of abortion reveals it to be nothing less than the deliberate execution of a living, growing, genetically-distinct human being.¹

Since the Bible expressly condemns the shedding of innocent blood², recognizing the injustice of abortion should be fairly easy.  Figuring out what to do about it is decidedly more difficult.  On the one hand, abortion kills almost 4,000 helpless human beings every single day, and that’s just here in the United States.  On the other hand, abortion is the natural fallout of an increasingly self-serving, self-centered society.  Abortion, in fact, is deserving of God’s wrath, and may well be a manifestation of Gods wrath.³

Some have argued that opposing abortion takes crucial resources away from the primary call of the church.  Others believe that opposing abortion is the primary call of the church.  What is a biblically-minded person supposed to do?!

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1. “[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th ed.
   Keith L. Moore, Ph.D. & T.V.N. Persaud, Md., (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998), 2-18.

   “Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed… “ Human Embryology & Teratology, Ronan R. O’Rahilly, Fabiola Muller, (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996), 5-55. [↩]

2. Exodus 20.13; Deuteronomy 19.13; 1 Kings 2.31; Proverbs 6.16-18; Isaiah 59.7; Jeremiah 19.3-5, 22.3; Joel 3.19 [↩]
3. When Pharaoh refused to let God’s people go, the wrath of God manifested itself in 10 plagues, the most severe of which was the death of all of the first born sons in Egypt.  When David sinned with Bathsheeba, the wrath of God manifested itself in the death of their innocent child.  Children are the hope and future of every society.  When God’s wrath lands on them, for the sins of a parent or the sins of a nation, it is an incalculably severe blow.  When a society starts killing its own children, it engages in nothing less than self-destruction.  Romans1.18-32 makes clear the fact that God’s wrath can simply be the “giving over” of people to bear the natural consequences of their actions.  For a nation that allows its children to be executed in the womb, not only does such behavior deserve punishment, in many ways, it is punishment. [↩]

Applause from hell

Fr. Frank Pavone

National Director, Priests for Life

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If we think of hell, we might imagine screams coming out of the flames, or the sinister laughter of the devil. But the sound I recently heard coming from there was that of applause.

What I heard was an audiotape of Dr. Martin Haskell giving a presentation at the 16th Annual Meeting of the National Abortion Federation Conference in 1992 in San Diego. It was a gathering of abortionists — men and women who make their living by killing babies. Haskell was describing to his audience how to do a partial-birth abortion. Listen to his words about how this procedure takes place:

“The surgeon then introduces large grasping forceps … through the vaginal and cervical canal … He moves the tip of the instrument carefully towards the fetal lower extremities — and pulls the extremity into the vagina …The surgeon then uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders, and the upper extremities. The skull lodges in the internal os. The fetus is oriented … spine up … The surgeon then takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. … the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull–spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. The surgeon–surgeon then introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents.”

Haskell, having described these brutal details, shows his audience a video of himself doing one of these procedures. And at the end of the video, after the sound of the suction machine taking the brains out of the baby’s head, the audience applauds.

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