It’s Time to Stop Pretending Abortion Is Anything Other Than the Ruthless Killing of an Innocent Human Being

I have some similar feelings about the following news story as I did about the abortionist in Washington who received mild discipline (“ethics” training) from the state Health Department.

This article about a Pennsylvania abortion clinic is shocking to the general public, and shocking to most Christians:

Women's medical societyA doctor accused of running a filthy "abortion mill" for decades in an impoverished Philadelphia neighborhood delivered babies alive, killed them with scissors and allowed a woman who had survived 20 years in a refugee camp to be overmedicated and die at his clinic, prosecutors said.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, was charged Wednesday with eight counts of murder for the deaths of seven babies and one patient.

Prosecutors described the clinic as a "house of horrors" where Gosnell kept baby body parts on the shelves, allowed a 15-year-old high school student to perform intravenous anesthesia on patients and had his licensed cosmetologist wife do late-term abortions.

Kermit Gosnell… Gosnell also kept jars of severed feet on his shelves, Williams said. Gosnell also had a taste for macabre jokes, once muttering that a nearly six-pound baby born alive to a 17-year-old who was seven-and-a-half months pregnant could "walk me to the bus stop," the report said.

Gosnell typically worked weeknights, arriving hours after his unskilled staff administered anesthesia and drugs to induce labor. He then "forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

The article is generally correct, but incorrect in one major respect. This abortionist did not kill seven babies; he killed thousands and thousands of babies. Anyone who only counts them as babies once they get big enough is an accomplice to this man’s evil deeds.

I must say that while I agree this is all horrific, in fact I am not shocked about it. Why? Because I already knew what was going on in abortion clinics. I already knew that innocent people are killed there by the hundreds every week. Twenty-two years ago I looked in the dumpster of an abortion clinic and saw pieces of human flesh. This is not news to me. 

I knew that the lives of women are ruined there, and I knew that the “doctors” who spend their lives killing babies in most cases know exactly what they are doing. (Yes, I have talked with them.) The “shocking discovery” that an abortionist who made millions of dollars from child-killing had such a low regard and such a profound disrespect for the lives of babies and women is properly responded to with a “Huh?” As in, didn’t we know that already? And, if we didn’t, what is wrong with us?

I think every congressman and congresswoman who has stood up, wearing their tailored clothes and giving speeches defending late term abortion—or abortion at any stage—should resign from office. I think every physician who quietly sends women to abortionists should lose his license. In fact, in a morally sane culture, far more serious measures would be taken. They would go to jail, because they have assisted in and promoted the killing of children.

I think that every Christian who keeps voting for “prochoice” candidates and who opposes showing the photos of dead babies, while defending what kills the babies in the photos, should question their faith (is it biblical, or does it merely mirror the current drift of our culture?). They should ask whether Jesus would ever defend and vote for the killing of children. (A graphic picture of the results of abortion is included at the end of this blog.)

I think every church member who is against the observance of Sanctity of Human Life Sunday (this weekend in many churches) and thinks the church shouldn’t talk about abortion—and every pastor who refuses to speak about it from the pulpit—needs to be taken on a virtual tour of that Pennsylvania clinic and come to terms with what abortion really is.

And if the pastor still refuses to open God’s Word and talk about defending the rights of the poor and needy and fatherless, and including unborn children in that, then I think he too should resign. (Along with all members of the church board who lobby against dealing with abortion from the pulpit.) If you lack the conviction or the courage to stand up and say to your church, who you are accountable to lead, “It is wrong to kill unborn babies, God hates it and God will judge it,” then you should not be a pastor. If you don’t have the guts to say “These are children—we must stop killing them” then you need to do something that doesn’t even pretend to take on a biblical and prophetic mantle.

Could we please stop pretending? Abortion is in fact the ruthless killing of an innocent human being. That’s what it always has been, and that’s what it always will be. When Planned Parenthood and NOW and politicians deny this, they are simply lying. There is nothing new about this. (See the excerpt below from my book ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments, which speaks of Satan’s role in killing children and lying about the fact that they are being killed.)

Abortion is Satan’s attempt to kill God in effigy by destroying the little ones created in God’s image. We are not dealing here with “one more social issue,” but a unique and focused evil in which Satan has deeply vested interests.

Jesus said of the devil, “He was a murderer from the beginning.... When he lies he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). It is no accident that Jesus speaks about Satan’s murders and his lies in the same breath. Lies are the wheels that turn every holocaust. To pull off his murders, Satan tells us lies. He is so eloquent, so persuasive in his lies, and we are so gullible, that we fall for his schemes (2 Corinthians 2:11). He masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), calling right wrong and wrong right, making us think—as many prochoicers do—that they are taking the moral high ground even as they defend something unspeakably immoral.

If some of the prochoice arguments momentarily cloud and eclipse what you know to be right, realize it is simply because the devil is behind the persuasive rhetoric of the prochoice movement. He is fluent in the language of lies and uses the prevailing assumptions of culture, education, and media to draw us away from God’s thoughts about children and abortion and toward his.

abortion aftermathWe are dealing here with a force of darkness that will bitterly resist every effort to combat it and that requires earnest and sustained prayer and alertness to the spiritual battle (Ephesians 6:10–20). The abortion battle is being fought in the realm of thoughts and ideas. Paul says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

As Christian leaders, we must realize that we will be held accountable, both in this life and in eternity, for how we deal with this issue. We must take deliberate and significant measures to stop the killing, to minister to our hurting women, and to make a difference in our community. The desire to be popular and avoid people’s disapproval is a common reason for church leaders to hold back in pro-life efforts. But for every reason we have, we must be ready to answer a question on the last day: “Was that reason more important than the lives of all those children I created in my image?”

Martin Luther addressed the pastor’s role in facing the greatest evil of his day:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proven, and to be steady on all the battle fronts besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

No matter how uncomfortable it makes you to face the truth, I recommend that you view this simple two minute video about abortion, from a wonderful group called abort73. While the “prochoice” groups lie about it, this video tells the objective truth about abortion. “Seeing is believing”—this is why Pregnancy Resource Centers encourage pregnant women to look at their ultrasounds, and Planned Parenthood and other “abortion providers” (sanitized term for child killers) warn their employees NOT to let pregnant women see ultrasounds. Why? Because when they see them, they know for sure that they are REALLY carrying a child. And therefore that getting the abortion will mean killing the child they have now seen.

If you are surprised to discover, as in the case of this Pennsylvanian abortion clinic, that those who kill babies for a living are really not very good people, my question is…where have you been, and what have you been thinking goes on in these clinics? And if some abortionists are better at sanitizing the walls and disposing of baby body parts, do you really think that makes them any better in the sight of God Almighty, Creator of these children, and Judge of us all?

Randy Alcorn (@randyalcorn) is the author of over sixty books and the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries

Topics