Delivering Those Taken Away To Death

Apologies in advance for the rough draft state of this post. I've spent a considerable amount of time on it but the more I edit the longer it gets, and the more difficult it is to limit myself in what I want to say. It's long. It's not the most gracefully written prose I have ever produced. It's not tidy, nor is it sharp and concise. So it is what it is. Please look beyond my imperfections to the heart of this issue.

Proverbs 24:10-12

10 If thou faint in the day of adversity,
thy strength is small.


11 If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death,
and those that are ready to be slain;


12 if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not;
doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it?
And he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it?
And shall not he render to every man according to his works?


NASB:
10 If you are slack in the day of distress,
Your strength is limited.
11 Deliver those who are being taken away to death,
And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.
12 If you say, “See, we did not know this,”
Does He not consider it who weighs the hearts?
And does He not know it who keeps your soul?
And will He not render to man according to his work?

ASV
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10 If thou faint in the day of adversity, Thy strength is small.
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11 Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back.
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12 If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it? And he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? And shall not he render to every man according to his work?

Bible in Basic English
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10 If you give way in the day of trouble, your strength is small.
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11 Be the saviour of those who are given up to death, and do not keep back help from those who are slipping to destruction.
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12 If you say, See, we had no knowledge of this: does not the tester of hearts give thought to it? and he who keeps your soul, has he no knowledge of it? and will he not give to every man the reward of his work?

World English Bible:
10 If you falter in the time of trouble, your strength is small.
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11 Rescue those who are being led away to death! Indeed, hold back those who are staggering to the slaughter!
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12 If you say, "Behold, we didn't know this;" doesn't he who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, doesn't he know it? Shall he not render to every man according to his work?
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When I was young and Roe V. Wade was made the law of this land and it made open season of the lives of the unborn, most people on the pro-abort side argued, "But it's not a human life. It's just tissue."

If it comes to that, so are you. So am I.

And they asked, "Well, who can say when life really begins,' without ever thinking that they thereby acknowledged they really did not know when life begins and they were snuffing it out anyway.

And the prolife crowd insisted that not only was 'it' truly a baby, but that some day the pro-aborts would have to acknowledge that yes, it was a human being and they would then move the lines of the argument and say it does not matter.

And the people said, nay, that will never happen.

And today the pro-aborts acknowledge that yes, it's a human life, and it does not matter, because a woman must control her own body- even though it isn't her body she's destroying, but another separate person with his own circulatory system, blood type, DNA, and uniquely personal details that cannot ever duplicated again in this world.

I said I remember when abortion was legalized. I remember the arguments. I remember the defenses. I remember the dismissals. Other kids brought reports and posters to school and talked about why abortion was wrong. I wasn't one of them. I remember debates in junior high school where I kept silent (by high school I wasn't such a wallflower). I remember letters to the editor- that others wrote. I remember made for t.v. movies promoting legalized abortion that began and ended with emotional propaganda, with a little bit of emotional manipulation to tie start and finish together.

When I was in the tenth grade I went to the library to answer this question for myself. My parents did not talk to us much about current events, and because of critical remarks I had overheard my father make about a pro-life letter to the editor, I mistakenly believed that my father was pro-choice, which surprised me.

I had been told by Planned Parenthood (invited to speak in both of my high schools, to 'indoctrinate' us, as certainly nobody was ever invited to present the opposing point of view) that the content of the pregnant womb was merely a blob of tissue. I took myself to the public library and pulled out all the medical books I could find and studied up on the development of the fetus. That is when I became staunchly and irreversibly pro-life. The years since then have only added more and more evidence to the now undebatable argument that the 'blob of tissue' in the womb is a separate human being and life really does begin at conception.
Later, years later, I developed some religious reasons, but they were not my first or strongest reasons. Among other things that day in the library I learned that before most women even know they are pregnant the baby is demonstrating all the symptoms of dreaming when it sleeps. Isn't it interesting how the pro-aborts turned this argument on its logical head? Wouldn't you think that before that final act of destruction, you would have to first prove that the baby is not a living being, not the other way around? We afford more protection to corpses before cremation than we do to unborn children.

Some pro-aborts like to argue that conception is an arbitrary point, why not protect all eggs and all sperm as well. That argument, frankly, makes a mockery of any claim to be pro-choice rather than pro-abortion. Before conception, as they are well aware, there's only an egg. Leave it alone, and all that will happen is that the egg will be washed out when ovulation occurs. At conception, the tiny being has _all_ the DNA of a complete human being- leave it alone, and in nine months we'll all get to see what it looks like. But what this child looks like, eye color, fingerprints, retina patterns, the shape of his ears, his blood type- all this and more has already been determined at the moment the sperm and egg combined to make a living, growing, organism. The egg is not growing. It is not capable of change and growth on its own. IT will never be anything but an egg. Likewise for the sperm. It has no future, no separate identity of its own, no matter how much we protect and nurture it- it will never be anything but what it is now unless and until is becomes part of that great dance of life when it meets with the egg and becomes one of us, you, me, one of our children- only the fertilized egg is that unique and precious species, a member of the human race.


I remember that one of the arguments the pro-life side kept making was that once we legalized the killing of unborn children in the womb, we'd lose a sense of awe, respect, and sanctity of life. Once we could kill babies in the womb, they said, we'd accept killing them later and later, long past viability.

Nonsense, said the pro-abortion crowd. That won't happen. But the truth is that abortion has been legal for any reason at any time in the pregnancy since Roe V. Wade.

And then we have people like Gianna Jesson, aborted by saline solution in 1977, delivered alive in the abortion clinic 18 hours later. You can read her testimony before the House in 2000 here. Abortion supporters boycotted her. I've heard her speak on a radio program before. At a confrontation between pro-life and pro-abortion picketers, the pro-choicers were yelling things at this young lady like "Too bad it didn't work. You should have been aborted!" Nice.

These children are also abortion survivors. Here's more about them.

How do pro-choicers reconcile the existence of these human beings with the opinion that the foetus is not a human being? In response to situations like this the pro-aborts have turned to other methods of abortion that make it far more unlikely that a child will survive, making it clearer than before that the goal of abortion is not just to 'end the pregnancy,' as waiting nine months and delivering in the usual fashion will do that. The goal is a dead child. It still doesn't always work. There was a child, I believe in New York, born without an arm because of a botched (legal) abortion. These sorts of mishaps, botched procedures performed by careless and callous doctors, happen more often in abortion clinics than in any other medical facility, and they always will, because the pro-abort crowd is so loudly and firmly in favor of death for the unborn that they resist every attempt to regulate these facilities or the people who work there. They have even attempted to make it legal for this surgery, and only this surgery, to be performed by nonphysicians, making a mockery of their claims that abortion is all about safety and women's health. Of course, those who look beyond what the media tells them, already knew that the stories of back alley abortions and high death rates from back alley butchers before doctors could legally perform abortions are largely mythical. The truth is that before abortion was legal it was largely illegally performed by the same doctors who murdered babies under the full protection of the law after 1973.


And so next, said the pro-lifers, it will be acceptable to kill newborn babies outside the womb if they are disabled.

Ridiculous- said the pro-abortion crowd. It will never happen.

But I also remember the Down's Syndrome baby who also was born with a minor and entirely treatable swallowing problem. It's not an uncommon birth defect, and in a 'normal' child, treatment would be automatic. That baby was starved to death because he was retarded, brain damaged, developmentally disabled- defective.
He wasn't the only one.

Then, said the pro-lifers, we will feel so comfortable with these deaths of convenience, that we will start denying treatment to the elderly, and we'll find other ways of killing them.

The pro-death crowd were angry about this. They scoffed and jeered, and insisted that this was the hysterical over-reaction of the religious right.

But now those things all happen, and have happened, and our country continues as though nothing were wrong. Things that were unthinkable 30 years ago are court orders today- perhaps by the same people who insisted, so many years ago, that these things could not ever happen.

The Exodus 21 argument

Why the Quickening argument doesn't work.

Why it's inconsistent for proaborts to get all upset at being shown pictures of aborted 'blobs of tissue.'
They are so sensitive, they don't even want to see lovely, ungruesome, photographs of the development of babies in the womb.

If they really cared about 'women's health,' why are the proaborts so opposed to letting parents know before their children have this, and only this, surgery?

A hard case story, and why life is still the better choice.

Being Pro-life is about more than having a bumper sticker on your car.

And yes, I am well aware that some consider my use of the term 'pro-abort' inflammatory. If there is nothing wrong with abortion, it shouldn't be seen as inflammatory, should it?
I believe that 'pro-choice' is a deceptively ambiguous term used primarily because people who hold that position are uncomfortable with defending it. You see, there are many choices in life, but there is really one choice that the 'pro-choice' side is referring to- the choice to abort. People already had the right to choose NOT to abort (in this country- not so in China), the right to choose NOT to engage in activities leading to conception, the right to choose to place a child for adoption, as the mother of our Cherub did, in fact, they already have (and had) the right to choose many things, even disreputable, deplorable things.

The only 'choice' truly being argued for in the courts by the 'pro-choice' world is and always has been the choice to abort- because all the other choices already were protected by law.
And since I believe that the human child in the womb is just as deserving of legal protection as a human child outside the womb, I cannot really see this as a pro-'choice' issue. Some choices are not legitimate.
Abortion is legal for any reason, in any circumstances, for the entire nine months of a pregnancy. If she wishes, a woman can go into labor with a fullterm baby and have that baby killed before it leaves the birth canal.

I can't bring myself to call the source of that ugly legal reality the result of anything but a 'pro-abort' position. I understand that this is unpleasant and even seems antagonistic- but I hope very much that even if any of our readers disagree with me, they can at least see how this looks from my point of view. From where I stand it's as though those who want a more 'neutral' term are the sort who prefer 'ethnic cleansing' to genocide.