That’s why I’m excited about the work that we do around the world even while I continue to wrestle with the larger issue of how do we really bring abortion to an end in the same way that slavery was brought to an end? It’s probably worth noting that it took about 6,000 years of human history to really bring slavery to an end. When I say that, I mean slavery as a legitimate institution. Slavery still exists today. We still can talk about people being trafficked and made slaves, but it’s all underground and de-legitimized. No one is advocating in an open way for slavery. It’s been broken as a legitimate practice. And now we’re trying to do the same thing with abortion. We’re trying to help every generation become stronger and stronger in turning abortion, like slavery, into a matter of history.
Why is it so difficult? I think it’s difficult because it’s rooted in the fallenness of mankind itself. C.S. Lewis said in a book called The Problem of Pain that pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress, meaning God uses pain to weaken our natural defense against wanting to yield to the Lord Himself. By definition we are all rebel fortresses and we spend a great deal of time building up our defenses and running our own lives. We want to be the Lord of our own lives. My father was a man that was actually very proud at how rebellious his fortress was. I remember toward the end of his life he said to me: “Everybody that I know says that I’m just a hard-nosed mean son of a gun.” Only he didn’t use the word “gun”. He was basically relishing in his rebel fortress. He lived his own life on his own terms and he didn’t take a lot of advice from anybody else. He suffered and died early as a result of that. In the Bible the word for this is called stiff-necked. And if you remember, God chose Israel out of all the nations of the world in order to make known to them and for them to make known to the rest of the world of God’s own moral beauty, the rightness of His authority as Lord, and the mercy that He gives through His redemptive powers and works. And yet Israel itself was stiff-necked. Last week I was reading through the Chronicles of these generations upon generations in Israel. Some of them would yield to the Lord and follow in His ways and others became stiff-necked. Here’s an example of that in 2 Chronicles chapter 30, verses 6-8: “O people, return to the Lord, that He may return again to you. Do not be like your fathers and brothers who were faithless to the Lord. Do not be stiff-necked as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to the Lord.” This is God’s appeal to Israel to trust in the Lord, have faith in Him by yielding to His moral authority in their lives. Faith becomes obedience in the Scriptures.
At the heart of the problem of abortion is this issue of being stiff-necked and wanting to be the Lord of our own life. The advocates of abortion say that the issue is a matter of who decides and in many ways they’re absolutely right. The battle is who decides. They want to say that they get to decide. They have the moral power and the strength to exercise this power over the unborn child and they don’t want to yield it. Here’s an example of someone who wrote some years ago about their own two abortions and she talked about the guilt and the suffering that she endured as a result of it, but this is her conclusion. She writes: “I was pregnant. I carried two unborn children and I chose for completely selfish reasons to deny them life so that I could better my own.” This was a raw example of honesty that really does not come down to an intellectual decision as to whether they are really human or not, but rather they may be human but I have more power which I don’t want to yield. We see that this is always an ongoing struggle as much as we want to make an apologetic defense for human beings. At the end of the day, what we’re really up against is a rebel fortress. Nonetheless, this is our challenge. The way we’re going to end abortion is speaking the truth in love, defending the humanity of that unborn child and calling for equal rights. If the unborn is human, then they deserve human rights and protections just like every other human. So you can either believe in equal rights or you can believe in abortion, but you can’t believe in both at the same time. Now that’s an intellectual argument, but it has some sharp points to it and it does cut into the consciousness of people. Here’s an example. This woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Williams writes for a very strong, extremely liberal website called Salon: Great Defenders of Legal Abortion. She writes: “Here’s the complicated reality in which we all live. All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about. A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss.” See, there’s the problem once again. She’s the boss. It’s about power. So here you can tell that she’s uncomfortable because she loves the idea of equal rights. But when it comes to abortion, it’s not about equal rights. It’s about power, authority and being the boss of your own life.
So I think our challenge will always be to speak the truth in love, to advocate for women and their well-being and the unborn child, to continue to declare truth using love, intervention services, but recognize at the same time that what we’re up against is nothing less than the conversion and yielding of the heart to the moral beauty of our Lord Jesus. It’s going to take perseverance, endurance, sacrifice, hardships, but along the way we’re going to win one mother and save one baby at a time until God moves at a grander scale. That’s our challenge and that’s our opportunity.