It is difficult to imagine a man like Herod. He was probably one of the cruelest men who ever lived. Because of a pervasive fear someone would take his throne and he would be killed, he was vicious toward any threat, real or imagined. When he heard wise men had come to worship a new Jewish king he called them to his palace to find and destroy the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2:13-23) His plot was foiled when God directed the wise men to go home by another route, but Herod devised another plan so vile we can hardly imagine it. He attempted to destroy Jesus by taking the lives of every baby boy born in that part of the world who was under two years of age!
As horrible as that may seem, Herod's evil scheme was far surpassed in horror and bloodshed when the Supreme Court of the United States made it legal for anyone who chose to do so, to destroy their own unborn children through the practice of legalized abortion.
As we think about the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, now more than 55 million children have had their lives callously snuffed out in hospitals designed to be institutions of healing. In hospital maternity wards and nurseries throughout the world, doctors struggle to save babies younger and smaller than those being destroyed in legalized abortions!
Abortion by choice is a self-inflicted death-blow to the home. If we can so easily destroy our unborn children, our living ones come next. When “pro-choice” groups first advocated legalized abortion as a means of birth control one reason in its favor was that it would diminish the incidence of child abuse since unwanted children would no longer be born. We don't hear this much anymore because we all know that since the legalization of abortion the incidences of child pornography, child abuse and child molestation have literally skyrocketed upward. When we devalue any person or people, we devalue us all.
Any
mother who has ever carried a child to term, any father who eagerly awaits the
birth of a child, or any parents who lost an eagerly awaited child by
miscarriage, will tell you that at eight months the baby is very much a person—a
living being with an already developing personality. Thus life (as an
individual human being) must begin at conception or somewhere between
conception and eight months....or is it seven? Six? Two?
Conception
is the only answer that makes sense.
When we
claim the unborn child is not human, it is only a small step to saying the
helpless child, senior adult, mentally handicapped, or some other less than
“perfect” beings are also less than human and they, too, can be exploited. Even
as I write this, persons come to my mind in all of these categories and I
remind myself they are all perfect just as they are!
When we claim unborn children are somehow less than human and
therefore reasonable targets for abortion, we return to the mentality that
produced slavery, the persecution and near destruction of the Native American
peoples, and the holocaust of Jewish and Gypsy peoples by the Nazis. When we
want to do a really evil thing to another human being we always seem to rationalize
it by pretending they are not human, or, are somehow sub-human.
Someday history will look back on the abortion massacre of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same revulsion with which we
remember these other self-inflicted plagues of humanity.
On this January while we recognize the 40 anniversary of Roe vs.
Wade, I know some of you who read this may have been deluded by the
abortionists and agreed to a procedure for yourself, a loved one, or perhaps
for unknown persons in an abortion mill. That agreement now leaves an ache in
your heart that seemingly cannot be healed. I assure you Jesus Christ can heal
your aching heart. He loves you and will bring grace and peace if you will surrender
the pain to him. The Bible tells us there is “no condemnation for those who are
in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) so I urge you to trust him for complete healing.
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