Fighting for Life
What does Canada have in common with all of New England plus New Jersey and Pennsylvania? The answer is population. New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania house an estimated 36.3 million souls. Canada has an estimated population of 36.4 million. That’s a lot of people. It’s so many that if a tragedy were to wipe out all of Canada, for example, the world would be horrified.
Yet according to the World Health Organization, 40 to 50 million babies are aborted around the world each year. In the United States alone, 59.2 million have been killed since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. But few register horror at these statistics.
In fact, approximately half a million people marched in Washington, DC, recently to show solidarity for women’s rights; and the so-called right that was front and center was the “right to choose.” Signs with slogans like “My body my choice” were toted up and down the streets of Washington and other cities to mark the 44th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.
At the top of the conversation were the latest abortion statistics released by the Guttmacher Institute that show a decrease in the number of abortions performed in the United States between 2011 and 2014. Abortions among women ages 15 to 44 reportedly fell 14 percent since 2011, the lowest level since 1974.
Nobody would argue that a 14 percent drop is a bad thing. But the numbers conceal a darker truth. That is, the abortion industry remains alive and well and still has a firm grip on America.
More than 925,000 abortions were performed in 2014 alone, down from 1.06 million in 2011. So instead of wiping out Canada in a single year, we killed only the equivalent of the entire population of South Dakota (865,454) or everyone in the country of Fiji (915,303). No matter how you spin it, we have an abortion crisis.
Scientists, humanists, atheists, and others have spent years speculating about when life begins. But anyone who reads God’s Word should know the answer. God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5). Could the Lord have made Himself any clearer?
King David wrote, “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret….Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them” (Ps. 139:13, 15–16).
Abortion can also become a tool that a godless society uses to weed out people it deems unfit to live. In the United Kingdom, 90 percent of those “who know their child will be born with Down’s syndrome have an abortion—so there are concerns a new, highly accurate test to identify babies with the condition will lead to even more terminations,” the BBC reported in an article titled “A World Without Down’s Syndrome?” And every unborn baby diagnosed with Down’s in Iceland is aborted: 100 percent.
At one time slavery was the world’s disgrace. Today it is abortion. Ian Tuttle wrote in The National Review, “In the Civil War, we fought to vindicate every man’s right to liberty. What is at stake in the current conflict is the only right more fundamental: that of life.”
The evangelical Christian community in America and Europe helped raise awareness of the evils of slavery. Christians understood all people were created in God’s image and should be valued equally.
Today the global evangelical community belongs on the front lines, raising awareness about the evils of abortion and providing alternatives because, to our heavenly Father, one aborted life is one too many.
