Choose Life
I have a good friend, Peter, who recently took up the cause of defending the unborn in the Vancouver pro-life movement. He has been raising awareness about abortion in his community and has committed to approaching every church in the greater Vancouver area in order to challenge the pastor/leadership to give at least one message each year that addresses this issue. He's also mobilized some of his friends to stand up for this cause. I'm wondering if I'm going to be one of them.
I've always been burdened about abortion, but just never made the time to do anything about it. There was always something else that demanded more of my attention (school, work, family, friends etc). But now that I'm almost middle-aged and running out of time and excuses, I'm wondering if I should be doing something about this too. Having become a father of two young children in recent years has only increased this burden for me.
With an aim of highlighting the gravity of the issue, some have compared abortion to the issue of slavery in the 19th century - in that although some of us may believe it's wrong, we still allow ourselves to live with it because of the extreme inconvenience and "collateral damage" that would result otherwise. The abolitionists fought against slavery even though it was clear to everybody that to end slavery would lead the country into economic suicide; and that's exactly what happened for a whole generation of the British empire. To quote Tim Keller:
"When the abolitionists finally had British society poised to abolish slavery in their empire, planters in the colonies foretold that emancipation would cost investors enormous sums and the prices of commodities would skyrocket catastrophically. This did not deter the abolitionists in the House of Commons. they agreed to compensate the planters for all freed slaves, an astounding sum up to half the British government's annual budget. the Act of Emancipation was passed in 1833, and the costs were so high to the British people that one historian called the British abolition of slavery 'voluntary econocide'. Rodney Stark notes how historians have been desperately trying to figure out why the abolitionists were willing to sacrifice so much to end slavery. He quotes the historian Howard Temperley, who says that the history of abolition is puzzling because most historians believe all political behaviour is self-interested. Yet despite the fact that hundreds of scholars over the last fifty years have looked for ways to explain it, Temperley says, 'no one has succeeded in showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade ... stood to gain in any tangible way ... or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country.' slavery was abolished because it was wrong, and Christians were the leaders in saying so."
As such, I wonder what future generations will think of the decisions we make today as a society in regards to abortion. The stats show that over 1.2 million babies are aborted each year in the US. It's a tough and complicated issue with plenty of inconvenience and potential "collateral damage" if we ever succeeded in abolishing abortion. But I can't think of a more clear wrong than to take the life of an innocent unborn child for the sake of convenience or a woman's "right to choose".
