In a conversation on Sunday, the question was raised (which is not new but certainly pointed),
“We believe that abortion is murder of innocents. We would not stand quietly and non-violently attempt by political action or consciousness raising to stop the Holocaust. Why should we not be bombing abortion centers? When we are called to account before the dread judgment seat of Christ how will we be judged for not
lettingusing violence to stop this?”
I’d like to attempt to answer this question. Before we jump before the fold, I’d like to remark on one thing. Holocaust is a thing which is in the common imaginary, the common symbol for things of this nature. One might ask, why not Holodomor? 4 million died in the Holodomor which number significantly in the 20 million killed by internal purges and famine enacted purposefully just as 12 million were killed by Hitler in the Holocaust (of which just over 6 million were Jewish).
The World went to war to stop Hitler, we in America crossed the Atlantic to voluntarily take part to end his evil. Stalin and Lenin’s evil was occurring en mass prior. If there was a moral imperative to go to war to stop Hitler because of Holocaust, was there not the same need to stop Stalin, Lenin, Mao and so on. Should we put an end to the regime North Korea? Now!? But one thing these things share, which they don’t share with local abortion clinics is that the political process works intra-state, not inter-state.
The early church, which has the advantage over us of being closer in time and witness to the Apostles and Christ, lived in cultures which included those which considered abortion and infanticide not morally questionable. The early church however acted and spoke against these things. They preached against abortion. They snuck in the dead of night and stole exposed infants away and raised them as their own. They did not … resort to violence to stop this killing. I recall no evidence or writings that speak of Christians confronting those who practice abortion. Might we be chastised and tempered by the notion that we are wrong to even confront those who abort if they did not?
One might argue that the reason they did not, was that they were weak. That their movement was fragile, which is debatable, and was being actively persecuted, which is not debatable. Could the early Christians have confronted abortion and those who practiced the same with violence? The example of Islam teaches that this might have been an alternative that would not have meant an ending of the Christian faith. It would however meant that Christianity would be and mean something very different. That difference has a name. That name is heresy.
If the use of violence by Christian history, practice, and tradition to oppose abortion is not right, the question arises. What is right? What should one do? It seems likely we are not to confront young pregnant women accusing them of being wrong to abort. But what should we say. It seems that answer at least is obvious, in part given the lead of those who came before. We can, and likely should, say “Can we help? If you can’t have this child, could we? Could we rear it as our own in your place?” We are failing in this regard, I think and I’ll put myself at the front of this queue in regards to failing at what is needed and what is necessary. If half this nation were Christian and 1 million abortions occur per year, if every Christian family adopted one or two … then even if the number of abortions didn’t change, each of those children could find a home.
One that last thought, my wife and I are going to think and pray over the coming months regarding adoption. What will we say when we come before that dread seat on our response to so many deaths?
You have stumbled across evidence of the Big Lie of the abortion debate, that antiabortionists believe fetuses are babies. If you saw a woman about to kill an infant, you would probably do everything in your power to stop her, possibly including killing her. Regarding abortion, though, most of you are content to (barely) fight within the system.
I think it’s clear that even those who oppose abortion don’t think fetuses are actually equivalent to babies. It’s just a good talking point.
JA,
You realize you’re not making sense. We didn’t fight Hitler because he was killing Jews (and others). There’s an likely an even chance you’d never heard of Holodomor until reading about it here. No Western nation ever even considered going to arms to stop that or the internment of the kulak or the slaughter of millions of Chinese by Mao. Unwillingness to resort to “Bombs”, i.e., violence is not indicative of one’s thinking that the victims are persons.
And this essay was brought about because specifically my friend in conversation does think that fetuses are babies.
Abortion isn’t a “hot topic” with me and I don’t talk about it a lot with different people. But I don’t think I really have had discussions with anyone (except perhaps yourself and jpe) who doesn’t consider a fetus like baby.
Whether we should go to war is a different moral question from what you should do with the murderer standing right in front of you. (Maybe it shouldn’t be, but human nature is what it is.) I may not have suited up to go fight the Hutus in Rwanda, but I’m pretty sure I’d do anything in my power to stop a Hutu right in front of me from killing an innocent Tutsi baby.
Or, to continue the analogy, if it suddenly became legal for doctors to kill three year olds, would you act the same way about that as you do about legal abortion?
JA,
I’ve never had a murderer or an abortionist “standing in front of me”. The decision to bomb an abortion center is to commit to private war. This seems to me that it is the same moral question.
And I considered the question above as to what to do when confronting a woman seeking abortion. Is it your opinion that my decision not to attack her verbally or otherwise mean I’m not honest in my reasoning above?
I have enough difficulty imagining an America in which a majority decides to approve of the slaughter of 3 y/o children that I’m not sure I can answer your question. That is, your question of “what would I really do” in a situation so unreal is hard to answer.
Maybe you have difficulty imagining it because killing three year olds is so fundamentally different than performing abortions! That’s exactly my point.
JA,
We would both have difficulty imagining living in a culture in which that is possible and practiced, but there have been such. It’s hard to imagine growing up in a country with slavery. However, when one decides one’s own culture is off the rails in particular way and egregiously wrong. Failure to bomb does not necessarily convict their beliefs as not heartfelt.