Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors

    Yesterday a court convicted Dr. Kermit Gosnell on three charges of murder stemming from botched abortions at this clinic in Philadelphia. The babies were born alive and then killed by snipping their spinal cords with scissors. Dr. Gosnell maintained that there were no live births at his clinic, but the jury found otherwise.
    By all accounts the clinic was a chamber of horrors with unsanitary conditions and an underqualified staff. The jury's verdict was welcomed by both sides in the contentious abortion debate.
    The case, we think, raises a pertinent question in that debate. A woman goes to Dr. Gosnell's clinic to obtain an abortion. If the procedure is successful, Dr. Gosnell has done nothing wrong. (Actually, in this particular case there were numerous other charges involving racketeering, drug trafficking, and other violations of Pennsylvania's abortion law, but for purposes of this discussion we will focus only on the abortion procedure itself.) But what if the abortion was not successful? What if the baby was born alive? The woman came to the clinic to have her pregnancy terminated. She did not expect to leave with newborn infant. What should the doctor do then?
    It appears that in some cases he made sure that the baby did not survive. He ordered his staff to cut the baby's spine with a pair of scissors, and the baby died. Hence the murder convictions.
    This raises a profoundly disturbing question about abortion itself. If the fetus is destroyed before birth, the procedure is perfectly legal. But if it is killed minutes after birth, then we are dealing with a case of murder. What makes the difference?
    If the logic advanced by the "pro-choice" movement is correct, the determining factor in an abortion is the woman's "reproductive freedom" – she should have the freedom to decide if and when she will get pregnant, and that freedom presumably includes the right to terminate a pregnancy if she so desires. She should not be made to bear the burden of motherhood if it would disrupt her life or interfere with her career. The women who came to Dr. Gosnell's clinic presumably came for precisely those reasons. Would that not mean that Dr. Gosnell had a responsibility to make sure that the babies did not survive?
    On the other hand, if taking the life of a newborn is murder, why is it any less so "in utero"? Is the dignity and worth of a human life dependent merely on its physical position relative to the womb?
    Dr. Gosnell reportedly saw himself as an advocate for women who were poor and desperate. His attorney, however, noted the difficulty of the case: "There's a lot of emotion. You have the baby factor, which is a big problem. The media have been overwhelmingly against him." (Associated Press). The "baby factor" was a "big problem" indeed.
    What makes a human life sacred at all? The traditional Judaeo-Christian position is that murder is forbidden because human beings bear a special resemblance to God – we were created in His "image." But what if there is no God? What if we are merely the result of a blind, impersonal, natural process? Would human life still be "sacred"? What would make it so?
    In all the sordid and squalid details of the Gosnell case one fact stands out: abortion involves the taking of a human life. If we permit abortion, we cheapen human life and degrade our own dignity and worth. Can a civilized society tolerate such a practice?
    

Forty Years After Roe v. Wade

    Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the controversial Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion throughout the United States. In many ways it was a watershed event, a turning point in our nation's culture and mores. It changed, perhaps forever, what we are as a nation.
    The crusade for access to legal abortion is a cornerstone of the modern feminist movement. Feminists see it as a women's rights issue, a matter of "reproductive freedom." The theory is that if women are to achieve economic equality with men, they must be able to pursue careers without interference from unwanted pregnancies. Thus access to abortion is a necessary part of individual freedom and self-determination.

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle

    There is, however, the nettlesome moral question about the life within the womb. In days gone by this would have been thought of as a "baby," the mother's child, and it was the woman's destiny and privilege to care for that child and raise it to maturity. Might not abortion involve the taking of an innocent human life?
    Feminist writers have a variety of semantic dodges to evade the obvious difficulty. The fetus is not a human being; it is only a "potential" human being. Or, even worse, it is only a clump of cells. And besides, it is inside the woman's body, an imposition on her, disrupting her life against her will. She has a right to control what goes on inside her own body, does she not?
    All of which misses the point. If the woman carries the pregnancy to term, a human being is born. At what point did it become human? What differentiates it five minutes after it was born from what it was five minutes before it was born? The mere change in physical location? Its dependency upon the mother? Isn't the newborn still dependent upon the mother for its care? Isn't this still an imposition? Why not infanticide? The feminist cannot answer these questions, but to her none of it matters. It is the woman's rights that are at issue, her need for "reproductive freedom."
    What this amounts to is nothing less than a massive cultural shift. For centuries the western world believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with taking innocent human life. This belief, in turn, was rooted in something deeper, a belief that we live in a rationally ordered universe that was created and governed by a Supreme Being. That Supreme Being has given us a moral law, and among the precepts of that law is the commandment "Thou shalt not kill." Human life was created in the image of God and is therefore sacred. No one is allowed to take it at will.
    The Supreme Court decision, then, was a repudiation of one of the basic pillars of western civilization. "Enlightened" progressive thinkers now call the older viewpoint an "outdated morality."
    The underlying assumption of modern feminist thought is that we exist in an impersonal universe as autonomous individuals, and that it is up to us to determine our own destinies. Abortion, indeed all of morality, becomes a matter of "personal choice." There are no moral absolutes. Feminism is nothing less than nihilism in a skirt and blouse.
    Martin Luther King, Jr. was the end of an era; Roe v. Wade was the beginning of another. We have entered a starkly different world – an amoral world of radical individualism. Or perhaps we should say, we have reentered the old world, the pre-Christian world, the world that existed for thousands of years before the Advent of Christ. It was a harsh and cruel world, a world of brute force and ruthless tyranny, a world of cruelty, barbarity and oppression.
    "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (Gen. 6:5,6). 

For an analysis of the Supreme Court's decision, click on this link:
Should Abortion be Legal? 
For an example of a Feminist "Pro-Choice" argument, click on this link:
Jill Filipovic on Roe v. Wade 
For a doctor's perspective on abortion, click on this link:
Ron Paul on abortion 

A Christian Argument for Abortion?

    One of the most bizarre arguments for legalized abortion that we have ever seen recently appeared on a blogpost by Greg Rubottom entitled "Death Throes of a Great Deception – The Fall From Grace of the 'Pro-Life' Movement." This, in turn, was copied with a lengthy introduction by Frank Schaeffer
on Mr. Schaeffer's blog at Patheos under the title "A Christian Answer to the Lies of the Evangelical / Catholic Pro-Life Movement." It is an extraordinary piece of sophistry.
    Mr. Rubottom rehashes the usual pragmatic arguments: forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term would cause her harm and doom the child to a miserable existence as an unwanted child. What is peculiar about his argument is that not only does he seek a Christian justification for this, but he actually claims that his argument reflects "the core elements of traditional Christian spirituality" and that the Pro-Life position is "heresy." In support of this dubious contention he gives us one of the most convoluted accounts of Christian doctrine that we have ever witnessed.
    He claims that Jesus taught that "the human body is a 'container' for what God values in human life – the soul – and the creation of a soul is a 'process' and not all conception is necessarily the will of God." Presumably human beings decide, through their own actions, to conceive a child, and then God might decide that it was a bad idea, in which case the pregnancy should be aborted.
    And how does Mr. Rubottom know that this is what God actually thinks? He tells us that "the core teaching of traditional Christianity" is that "God must always be defined as 'good.'" God, then would not wish the pregnancy to continue if it would bring harm to either the mother or the child. In other words, Mr. Rubottom believes that God is guided by the same "common sense" as himself, and that it would be evident, from a kind of cost/benefit analysis, that some pregnancies should be terminated.
    We do not know from what source Mr. Rubottom derives his conception of "traditional Christianity," but it is certainly not from any source with which we are familiar. What God actually said was, "You shall not murder"; and the reason assigned for this is that human beings are created in the image of God. "Whoever sheds man's blood,/ By man his blood shall be shed;/ For in the image of God / He made man" (Gen. 9:6; NKJV). In other words, human life is sacred because man was created in the image of God. Murder is a form of sacrilege.
    This, then, raises the thorny question of just exactly when does life begin. Mr. Rubottom's explanation is purely fanciful – it exists nowhere in the history of "traditional Christianity." It is entirely of his own invention.
    But what is the church's traditional understanding? The fact of the matter is that historically the church has been divided on the question. One line of thought, called "Traducianism," holds that the soul of an infant is derived from those of its parents by way of natural generation. This view was held in ancient times by Tertullian, and more recently by many Lutheran theologians. Obviously in this viewpoint abortion would always be tantamount to the taking of an innocent human life.
    The opposing viewpoint is called "Creationism" (not to be confused with opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution). According to this theory each soul is created individually by God. This viewpoint was held by St. Jerome and later by Calvin and most Reformed theologians. The obvious difficulty with this position in terms of the present discussion is that it is impossible to say when the individual soul is created. What we do know from Scripture is that at some point in the course of the pregnancy the developing child is a conscious human being: John the Baptist, while still in utero, leaped at the approach of Mary (Lu. 1:41).
    What proved decisive in the debate were the advances in modern medical science that showed that the fetus undergoes a continuous process of development from the moment of conception until the moment of birth and beyond. There is no specific point in between at which the fetus suddenly acquires the definitive characteristics of a human being. Genetically the developing child is a unique person at the moment of conception and is just as human then as it is after birth. It was undoubtedly with this realization in mind that most U.S. states in the late 19^th Century outlawed abortion.
    What Mr. Rubottom has done is to palm off a modern version of ethical pragmatism as "traditional Christianity." It is, in fact, no such thing. The historic Christian position has always been that "The sixth commandment forbiddeth the taking away of our own life, or the life of our neighbor unjustly, or whatsoever tendeth thereunto" (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 69). If life begins at conception, we are forbidden from taking it.

For a previous blog on Roe v. Wade see "Should Abortion be Legal?"

Should Abortion be Legal?

Roe v. Wade (1973) will surely go down in history as one of the most infamous decisions ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was marked by a strained, if not to say tortured exegesis of the Constitution, and led to a morally outrageous conclusion.

In Roe the court took up the question of the constitutionality of state anti-abortion laws. The case basically involved two separate questions: 1) Is the life of an unborn child protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and 2) Does the Constitution grant a woman the right of privacy which includes the right to have an abortion? On the surface one might have thought that the case would have been an easy one to decide. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments explicitly forbid the taking of anyone's "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." On the other hand there is no mention of abortion anywhere in the Constitution at all. If it can be demonstrated that an unborn child is a living human being, then surely its life must be protected by the law.                    

Surprisingly, the court arrived at the exact opposite conclusion. What made the decision so bizarre is that the court took two completely different approaches to answer the two questions. On the first question they took a very narrow, legalistic approach: an unborn child is not a legal "person," and therefore is not included in the Fourteenth Amendment protections. On the second question they took the exact opposite approach, interpreting the Constitution in a very broad, expansive manner: the right of privacy, which is not spelled out anywhere in the Constitution, supposedly includes the right to have an abortion. Mr. Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority, admitted that a generalized right of privacy was not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the document, but he thought it might be implied in any one of a number of different provisions. But whatever it was and wherever it was, he was sure that it included the right to have an abortion. One cannot help but wonder if the outcome was dogmatically contrived: the justices found in the Constitution what they wanted to find.    

    In a sense we do hope that the Constitution does at least imply a right to privacy, but the right to privacy does not include the right to commit a crime. You do not have the right to kill your mother-in-law, even if it is done in the privacy of your own home. The right of privacy merely protects you against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    Perhaps the most disturbing feature of Roe v. Wade is the tacit implication that there is no longer any sanctity to human life. Mr. Justice Blackmun asserted that "we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins," and then went on to argue that the State of Texas may not, "by adopting one theory of life," override the rights of a pregnant woman. Thus he tacitly admitted the possibility that life might begin at conception, but argued that it does not matter if it does. The unborn child still does not have a right to life. The sanctity of human life perished on that cold, wintery day in January, 1973.

    Each year almost a million legal abortions are performed in the U.S.*

    What does God think about all of this? One clue is what He thought of the ancient Canaanites. One of the reasons He condemned them was because of a practice connected with the worship of a deity named Molech. The worship of Molech involved human sacrifice, specifically by making children pass through a fire. What God told Israel about this practice was instructive.

    First of all, the practice had the effect of polluting or defiling the land. When Cain slew Abel God said to him: "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand" (Gen. 4:10,11; NKJV). And so it was with regard to the Canaanites. "For the land is defiled; therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants" (Lev. 18:25).

    Secondly, this and other like practices are called "abominations" (vv. 26,27,29,30). An "abomination" is something that God considers loathsome or detestable. Nowadays we might say that it is something that "grosses you out." It is an offense that is particularly flagrant and serious.

    Child sacrifice was a barbaric and inhumane practice, something that runs counter to the natural sympathy that should exist between parent and child. God made it clear that Israel was to live by a different standard. Leviticus 19, which falls right in the middle of God's indictment of the Canaanites, contains exhortations to regard the poor, the deaf, the blind, the elderly and the foreigner. In a word, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (v. 18).

    The fate of the Canaanites raises some disturbing questions about the possible fate of America. If God regards abortion as a moral outrage, and if our destiny is ultimately in His hands, it bodes ill for the future. All around are signs of impending doom: mired in foreign wars, sinking beneath a mountain of debt, a crumbling family structure, even erratic weather patterns and appearance of invasive species, we show every sign of a civilization in decline. Could it be that God is telling us something?

 

*estimated annual average for years 2001-2006=985,685