Abortion, our responsibility and the gospel

This time of year is as good as any – maybe even the best time – to ponder the slaughter of the innocents in our world, considering the events surrounding the conception, birth and infancy of our Lord.

I write more about life issues than any other subject in my job as a news reporter. By life issues, I refer to abortion, euthanasia and the rest of an array of matters in which each human being is either valued as being an image-bearer of God or he is not.

I regularly read pieces about these issues. Two of the more significant I have read this year were written by Timothy Dalrymple, a contributor to the evangelical portal at Patheos.com, and John Ensor, executive director of global initiatives for Heartbeat International, one of the leading pregnancy help networks. I commend both to you.

Dalrymple wrote a piece in April for Patheos that was the first in a series on abortion. His commentary brims with grief over the moral culpability of our society for the annihilation of more than 50 million children since abortion – for effectively any reason throughout pregnancy -- was legalized in 1973.

He writes in the wake of the news about Kermit Gosnell’s horrid abortion clinic in Philadelphia, Pa. That clinic – now shut down -- was a filthy, unsafe place for women because of Gosnell’s lack of care and the state’s lack of regulation. But it also was a lethal place for unborn babies old enough to survive outside the womb. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children six months or older within their mothers were born alive, then put to death by Gosnell and his co-workers.

You may read all of Dalrymple’s commentary here. Below is an excerpt from his piece:

I truly wish I could believe that the human fetus is morally insignificant, no more sacred or valuable than a tumor and thus no worse to remove from a woman's body. Or I wish I could believe that it bore some moral value, perhaps, but not an absolute value, or not enough to outweigh consideration of the mother's needs. I'm not eager to conclude that, in the midst of our extended national sickness, tens of millions of little ones—living human persons in every morally significant sense—have been put to death in this country under protection of law. I'm not eager to conclude that tens of millions of women have taken those lives, and tens of millions of men have encouraged, pressured, and forced them to do so. And selfishly, I'm not eager to conclude that I have done next-to-nothing to prevent all of this.

Yet I do conclude those things because I do not believe the unborn child is of lesser moral worth than the born child. This is written not with a sense of self-righteousness but with a sense of grief. How could we have done this? When did we so profoundly lose our way that we were willing, legally and politically, to sanction the theft of so many millions of innocent lives? And what have I done to protect them?

Ensor’s piece – “Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life” on The Gospel Coalition blog Dec. 3 – is a fitting follow-up to Dalrymple’s. He also writes about corporate responsibility, saying at one point “abortion is the shedding of innocent blood on our own watch.”

It is definitely worth reading Ensor’s commentary in the effort to see life through a gospel prism. You may read all of it here. Among his significant comments are:

The cross is about the shedding of innocent blood! Why not apply it to the sin of shedding innocent blood? Why let the Devil do all the talking! "You killed your baby," he says. "God cannot forgive you." Or to the struggling Christian, "I know your secret! Missions? Not you!" . . .

Abortion needs to be called out by name, confessed with tears, and brought under a gospel that atones, justifies, propitiates, expiates, and brings us peace. And we need to remind our people to hold on to this gospel with all their might when the accuser comes at night.