This coming Monday new laws on abortion in Queensland go into effect.
This will allow abortion on demand of any baby up to 22 weeks of pregnancy; and any time beyond this with the approval of two doctors.
She deserves to be loved
She deserves to be wanted
She deserves to be a choice
This is the mantra of the latest ad by Planned Parenthood (PP), the largest abortion provider in the United States:
This is decidedly creepy.
Planned Parenthood claims to be “a trusted health care provider, an informed educator, a passionate advocate, and a global partner helping similar organizations around the world.”
In actual fact, this “trusted health care provider” is an abortion provider, funded through millions of dollars of tax-payers’ money.
It performs nearly 200 times more abortions than referrals for adoption. In 2014 and 2015 they reported carrying out 323,999 abortions – one every 97 seconds.
See here.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness. Isaiah 5:20
“She deserves to be a choice”?
But apparently she doesn’t deserve to get a choice!
It is the killer, not the victim, who gets to choose.
What sort of society gives the right to kill to killers, but no rights to the victim?
Even the morally bankrupt euthanasia lobby ostensibly (though not always effectively in reality) gives the right of choice to the one being killed, not the killer.
Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases!
For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men. Psalm 12:1
Love is a choice
Yes, she deserves to be a choice.
What is overlooked in all this is that love – real love – is a choice.
At the heart of love is choice.
We are not animals, guided only by our (fallen) natural feelings and appetites.
When we are, we become brute beasts. “Whatever they know naturally, like brute beasts, in these things they corrupt themselves.” (Jude 10)
Love is not, first and foremost, a feeling or an appetite.
Feelings and appetites can be fed by love. But the bedrock of love is neither.
The bedrock of love is choice.
God’s love is the pattern.
God loves us because He chose to do so.
Not because we are naturally lovable, or because God cannot help Himself.
But because God chooses to love.
The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you… Deut 7:7-8
It is because God chooses to love, that He commits Himself by way of a covenant…
…and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers Deut 7:8
The Scripture consistently teaches that God loves His own because He chose to do so, not because He couldn’t help Himself, or because we were so different from others. Eg:
The Lord delighted only in your fathers, to love them; and He chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples. Deut 10:15
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Rom 5:8
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world… Eph 1:3-4
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ… Eph 2:4-5
When the kindness and the love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us… Titus 3:4
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4:10
God’s love is to be our pattern.
Though feelings and appetites may be fed by love, they are not the foundation.
Love is founded on choice.
When love is not founded on choice
What happens when society loses sight of this truth?
1) What happens in marriage?
Most marriages (at least, in the West) begin with “being in love”. We don’t usually commit ourselves in marriage to someone we don’t initially feel love for.
So, initially at least, we don’t have to exercise ourselves to love the unlovely, as God does.
And most good marriages will continually look to revive feelings of “being in love”.
But the bedrock of marriage is choice: you choose to be with and commit yourself to this other person.
Like God, you seal that commitment with an oath (cf Deut 7:8). You enter into a binding covenant.
Feelings come and go, wax and wane.
But the bedrock of choice, sealed with covenant, is the foundation that stands firm.
It is this that demonstrates our difference from brute beasts that copulate at will, and stick together only as long as their God-given instincts allow them to do so.
But what happens when humans act like animals?
What happens when a marriage is no longer founded on a deliberate choice and commitment to love another, but simply and solely upon feelings that come and go?
“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3) – or (more to the point) what do the unrighteous do?
What happens when humans give up on choosing to commit to love, and decide instead to copulate at will with whomever they will, and stick together only as long as their God-given instincts allow them to do so?
They become like brute beasts.
The marriage disintegrates.
Then dies.
2) What happens to parenting?
Love is a choice.
Parents are to choose to love their children, yes, even when they are not particularly lovable.
But when parents depend solely upon feelings to govern whether they will love their children, children end up being neglected – emotionally, and sometimes physically.
Sometimes this ends in terrible tragedy.
Last week we were down on the Gold Coast.
While we were there, a nine month old baby girl’s body washed ashore on the beach.
The parent didn’t feel he loved that child any more. So he disposed of her, by throwing her into the river; three days later her body washed ashore.
There was no one who was not sickened by these events.
Universally we recoil in horror at any instance of child abuse.
We all care for little ones. Even where we don’t have all the answers (eg. with children that we hear about on Nauru) we want to see all children be properly cared for.
Yet, among all those that expressed horror at the events on the Gold Coast, and who are appalled at each new case of child abuse, and who castigate the Government for not doing enough for children on Nauru, there are those who have no qualms supporting the killer’s right to choose to dispose of innocent babies in the womb.
3) What happens in pregnancy?
Having seen my wife carry four children (and miscarry another) I can only admire any expectant mother that carries a child through nine months – sometimes under enormous difficulties.
Child-bearing is not for the faint-hearted.
I understand that the Fall has brought its own risks in pregnancy. (Gen 3:16) Also, that the prospect of bringing up a new-born child can be daunting, especially in situations of poverty and abandonment.
Sometimes it is not easy for a mother-to-be to choose to love her burden.
But choosing to love is the only way. It is God’s way.
Where, instead, the pregnancy becomes about just what the parents want, or just what the mother feels she wants, the child is already at risk.
I feel for any couple facing a tough life with a new baby; but that is no justification to abort the child.
But words cannot describe the disgust I feel where a mother and/or her partner, decide to kill off the life in the womb, simply so that the mother and/or her partner can be freer to pursue a career, follow their dream, have more money – or any one of a number of other selfish reasons that I too often hear for getting rid of the baby today.
“She deserves to be a choice”
Yes, she does.
She deserves for her expectant mother to choose to love her, no matter what.
She deserves for her expectant mother to choose to let her live.
Love is a choice.
To choose to let the baby live – that is love.
Anything else is not love.
Who can sound the depths of sorrow
In the Father heart of God
For the children we’ve rejected
For the lives so deeply scarred?
And each light that we’ve extinguished
Has brought darkness to our land
Upon our nation, upon our nation
Have mercy, Lord
We have scorned the truth you gave us
We have bowed to other lords
We have sacrificed the children
On the altars of our gods
O let truth again shine on us
Let your holy fear descend
Upon our nation, upon our nation
Have mercy, Lord
Who can stand before your anger?
Who can face your piercing eyes?
For you love the weak and helpless
And you hear the victims’ cries
Yes, you are a God of justice
And your judgment surely comes
Upon our nation, upon our nation
Have mercy, Lord
Who will stand against the violence?
Who will comfort those who mourn?
In an age of cruel rejection
Who will build for love a home?
Come and shake us into action
Come and melt our hearts of stone
Upon your people, upon your people
Have mercy, Lord
Who can sound the depths of mercy
In the Father heart of God?
For there is a Man of sorrows
Who for sinners shed his blood
He can heal the wounds of nations
He can wash the guilty clean
Because of Jesus, because of Jesus
Have mercy, Lord
. – Graham Kendrick