How are you processing the Supreme Court of the United State’s decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the court overruled Roe v Wade?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #32 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
More than 63 million babies have been aborted in the U.S. since Roe v Wade (1973). That’s more than the total population of California and New York combined.
The total dead in all wars in which the United States participated from the American Revolutionary War in 1775 through 2017 is 1,354,664. 63 million abortions : 1.35 million war dead.
In the U.S in year 2020, total abortions came to 930,160, and by the way, Planned Parenthood performs 40% of all abortions in the U.S.
Despite the constant harangue of the Left and of media, a pro-life decision and approach are not a discriminatory disservice to Black Americans. In fact, abortions disproportionately harm Black Americans. “Black babies are aborted at more than three times the rate of white babies and constitute more than one-third of all abortions (38 percent)” in a Black demographic that comprises 13% of the total American population.
63 million and counting. The numbers are simply staggering, and this is true worldwide.
“Every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.” That’s about 87 babies every minute.
Meanwhile, the world’s biggest killer is heart disease, responsible for 16% of the world’s total deaths each year, or about 8.9 million deaths in 2019.
So the most deadly disease in the world, the #1 reason for deaths worldwide, accounts for less than 9 million deaths per year, while abortion accounts for 40-50 million deaths per year globally.
As a moral issue, abortion knows no peer.
Yet in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling June 24, 2022, various Americans are going apoplectic.
Pro-choice advocates keep listing social reasons they consider abortion essential. They talk about the marginalized, about race, poverty, the young, rural women, privilege. They say this is just political, that this push to overrule Roe is a political power grab by the Right. Those who present themselves as Christians like to point out that abortion is not specifically referenced in the Bible.
But very few of these pro-choice proponents answer the question, is the pre-born a human life or not? Most of them do not talk about the baby at all.
They employ scare tactics, like claiming the Court is now going to reverse Obergefell, the same-sex marriage ruling. Or they say the government is “forcing” women to have children. I don’t claim to know everything about the birds and the bees, but I have trouble understanding how a prolife decision like Dobbs is “forcing” women to have children. The decision didn’t even say, No abortions. It only said there is no right to abortion written or embedded in the United States Constitution and that States should decide what to do about abortion. So abortion has not gone away.
Still, pro-choice advocates escalate fear, saying the Dobbs decision threatens “all women.” Really? “All” women?
They use obscurantist phrases like bodily autonomy, women’s health, or reproductive health. Women’s rights has become a synonym for abortion on demand.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning about something she calls “fetal personhood,” saying, “A fetal personhood case could be their vehicle to impose a nationwide ban on abortion, on the order of the United States Supreme Court."
Corporations are now tripping over themselves to virtue signal their support of their vision of women’s health by saying they will pay for pregnant employees to travel out of state to get abortions. But these kneejerk responses may cause legal challenges later.
California wants to promote abortion tourism and be a sanctuary state for those seeking abortions. “Abortion tourism.” Can you imagine a more callous phrase?
California’s political leaders seem to believe the only way women matter is if they have the right to kill their unborn. Is this really the American dream? Even primitive cultures protected their pregnant mothers and children.
We should recognize that the real issue is not political but the different worldviews embraced by abortion supporters, like the woman writer in Manhattan who called the high court a “refuge of conservative religious lunacy.”
She said, “The price religion puts on the idea of children above women's lives has always been infuriating to me. I have been lucky never to have gotten pregnant, but if I had, having an abortion wouldn't be a difficult choice.”
She went on to say, “Because as of now, virtually overnight, all women in the United States, both those living in red or blue states, have become second class citizens. The decision puts every one of us in our place, treated as incubators for babies, our personal choices and freedoms considered secondary to someone’s theoretical conception of 'life.'”
Clearly, this Manhattan woman is bitter, because, oh my, as she noted, her mother hoped she’d one day have children and people sometimes ask her about her decision. Yet unlike previous generations, she has numerous birth control methods available to her. But rather than be content in her own decision not to have children, she demands the universal right for all women to be able to abort children at any or all times. Only this constitutes full womanhood.
She’s a good example of what columnist Michael Brown meant when he said, “Abortion has become a pseudo-religious rite; it was never a moral right.”
But as believing Christians, you and I know differently because God has told us so. We know that each, and every human being, male and female created he them, is made in the image of God. We know they are significant in this life and eternally valuable. They matter.
Science tells anyone willing to listen with an unbiased ear that “an unborn child within a mother has a genetic code that is completely distinct from the mother. The unborn child may also have a different blood type.” The baby is not part of the mother’s body, so the “My body, my choice” mantra makes no scientific sense.
That “birthing tissue” as one abortion advocate described babies is a living human being, loved by God and should be loved by each of us.
It bears repeating. Abortion has not gone away. If anything, the politics of this issue is going to become more intense.
But remember, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9).
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2022
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