The claim is made that women in America have a "constitutional right" to kill unborn babies. I thought this was a moral question - since we are talking about killing another human being when discussing aborting the unborn baby's life.
Normally law is against murder. So what is this "constitutional right" to murder? Turns out ... they claim it is in the short little "due process" clause of the constitution ...protecting "life, liberty and property".
"
No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
And the Bible says "thou shalt not kill"
You would "think" that "
not depriving the baby of life" would mean "a law against killing unborn babies".
But maybe the ruling was that "protecting liberty" meant protecting the liberty to "kill other humans".
However the Bible does not "change" just because someone makes a strained argument of the form "the constitution protects life so that means you should be able to kill an unborn baby".
Are churches and church members so mixed up on this point that they think the constitution trumps the Bible command against murder? And what sort of rendering is that for the right to life in that "due process" clause, that can spin it on its head to say "the right to life is the right to kill other humans"??
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In 2016, 27.9% of all abortions were performed by early medical abortion (a nonsurgical abortion at ≤8 weeks’ gestation),
So then 72.1% are done at > 8 weeks.
human gestation 8 weeks old - Bing images
Not "just a bunch of chromosomes" at that point.
God bless you
@BobRyan for posting this thread! This is something every Christian in the world needs to focus on. Recently, abortion has been tragically legalized in countries like Ireland where it was illegal. In the case of the US Constitution, I think it is constitutional and Roe v. Wade was a grave error, and I believe Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia were of like minded opinions.
We also have a duty to put pressure on churches in other countries, particularly mainline Protestant churches, to do more to fight against this evil. And we need to get abortion on the agenda of more political parties as a civil rights issue given the disproportionate number of minorities who are aborted.
Let us not forget Planned Parenthood was founded by proponents of Eugenics, and Eugenics as a racial philosophy also drove Nazi Germany.
Politics aside, there is no possible justification for abortion in the Christian faith. Even in Pagan Rome it was regarded as a great evil that offended the gods (but discarding “defective” infants post-partum or killing children at any time, which was the right of the
paterfamilias). In fact, research on the early Christian church attributes the surge in popularity of our religion, with so many baptisms that it terrified the Roman Empire into trying to exterminate us, to women joining because of the appeal of the Christian prohibition of infanticide, which in turn attracted male converts. And the martyrdoms backfired spectacularly, because early Christians welcomed martyrdom (see the Epistles of St. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, written while traveling to Rome following his arrest, where he would be fed to lions in the coliseum) where he writes of his impending martyrdom, begging the Church of Rome to not try to rescue him, which I will epitomize as “let me follow in the footsteps of my Savior, for birth pangs are upon me...suffer me to become human.”
So, the Christian church values all life from the moment of conception. But if anyone seeks to torture us or put us to death for our faith, or both, we should fear not, because he who confesses Christ before man, Christ will confess before the Father. We must strive to control the passion of anger so as to avoid wrath, and suppress the violent instincts, so as to never to commit murder; the fact that terrorism was practiced by Christians in recent decades in Ireland, Great Britain and the Balkans horrifies me, as do the Wars of Religion and past violence. So under no circumstances can we condone violence against abortion clinics and those doctors who are so deceived by demons as to perform abortions when there is no risk to the mother in carrying the infant to term.
In fact, recently I read a story of a gynecologist who worked for Planned Parenthood who was so moved by the peaceful, lawful demonstrations that she repented of infanticide and converted to Christianity. What a glorious triumph of the Holy Spirit, whose grace causes us to repent of sin and turn towards God. What a glorious triumph for the Christian demonstrators, who, inspired by the Holy Spirit and the example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, did lawfully, peacefully and persistently protest, and continue to do so.
Even though abortion is obviously contrary to the Constitution using an originalist or textualist interpretation, which is to say, a correct interpretation, we may not be able to directly prevail in the political arena. What we have to do is change the culture, as we did in Edessa, Armenia, the Roman Empire, Ethiopia and Georgia, the first states to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and would later do among the Franks, German, Gothic, Nordic, Britons, Picts, Celts and Slavic tribes across Europe, and later, the people of every country on Earth, despite the efforts of fundamentalist Atheist, Buddhist and Muslim governments like China, Bhutan and Saudi Arabia to suppress our faith. In this case, we have to change our own culture as well, with something of a revival, that would render abortion as detested by the media and the general public as it is by us (for sadly, most Christians are nominal Christians, baptized but irreligious; their faith must be reawakened).
