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We’ve all heard these various words strung out in long moral sentences: Planned Parenthood, birth-control, fetus, conception, and teen-pregnancy. They have become part of our everyday vocabulary because they are all used in arguments about abortion. People talk about abortion a lot. Christians have developed a plethora of arguments about this issue alone. In a nutshell, abortion, from a Christian perspective, is not about the rights of women or about health issues. The Christian’s moral dilemma in the face of abortion is that an unborn child is a human life and the world insists the opposite. Unfortunately, the Christian right has chosen to hide under a hat of hypocrisy and preferred to merely argue about instead of act on the obvious and hideous implications of abortion.

 

I’m a strong advocator of our inherent rights and a proclaimer of all things good about limited governmental intervention into any area of our lives. And it is a fundamental truth that the government does not have the right to give the “right” to women to choose to have their unborn babies killed. This should be obvious, but to many who think the government should have a “parenting” role, this is actually inconceivable. One look at the mangled and torn body of a baby that has been aborted should be sufficient to galvanize us all into action. Says Fr. Richard Welch, President of Human Life International: “A realistic estimate of the number of children killed by abortion worldwide is between 150 million and 500 million. That means there are actually between 300 and 1000 abortions per minute globally.” [1] The fact that this is happening all over the world at this inconceivable rate alone should stir our hearts into compassion for them and rebellion against the laws allowing this horrid practice.

 

Maybe we have become inured to “abortion talk” and have stopped really viewing it in its proper, grisly, horrible light. Like the teenager’s extraordinary ability to tune out his parent’s monotonous lecture, we have memorized the facts, perfected the arguments, and can wax eloquently about this whole issue, but we have efficiently tuned out any gut reaction to this atrocity. We are not hurting for the single, would-be “mothers” who are killing their children, many times out of desperation and fear. And we are certainly not doing anything to actually physically reach out to them.

 

Why are we, as a Christian community, so unfazed by this? Yes, we see it as terribly wrong. We condemn it. We vote for politicians who are pro-life. At least we’re on the right side of the fence. But the blatant tragedy and hypocrisy is even as we shed tears in church and witness another story of pain and guilt, just like every other “religious” part of our lives, we divorce any implications of it from our daily lives. I’ll bet most of us do not even know where the closest abortion clinic is in our town or city. We make a big moral deal of abortion while we sit in our comfy pews, but we will not lift a finger, let alone get physically involved to work to prevent it or change the laws that condone it.

 

This is the great beauty of America, that when we do not agree with something we can work with all our might to change it, and if we find we have a majority, often it will change. Have we, as the Christian right, taken advantage of this? No. And that is the great moral tragedy of our time. Christians profess abhorrence to immorality and injustice but are the slowest to actually do something about it.

 

Unwed mothers and pregnant girls need loving guidance and wisdom. They need information about options other than abortion. They need people to care for the children they can’t take care of, if they choose to give birth. Let us actually stand up and do what we keep saying should happen some day before any more of my generation is murdered and their voices silenced forever.

 

1 “HLI President Charges US and Canadian Governments With 'Contraceptive Imperialism,’”  Families Worldwide, April 1999, <http://www.fww.org/famnews/0407j.htm>.

 

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