Do We Love Those Who God Loves?

 Over at The Federalist Kaylee Griswold has a piece entitled Abortion Suckes the Life Of Not Only Our Bodies But Our Souls. She points to a NPR radio narration of an actual abortion while it takes place. You can listen if you want..I did not.

The same week that actress Anne Hathaway advocated for mercy killing unborn babies on “The View,” declaring that this is “not a moral conversation about abortion,” but “a practical conversation about women’s rights, and by the way human rights, because women’s rights are human rights,” NPR aired a troubling audio clip of a mother undergoing an abortion.

And not just any abortion, but one at 11 weeks. At that point, babies already have fingerprints and facial expressions and can suck their thumbs. Their sex is evident on an ultrasound, their vocal cords are present, and they begin to yawn.

“Most patients are partially awake during the procedures,” the National Public Radio broadcaster narrates over the sounds of hospital instruments clattering. “They get IV medication for pain and anxiety, the lights are dimmed, there’s soothing music. It actually feels a lot like a childbirth — the medical gown, your bare legs in stirrups, and a person next to you saying, ‘You can do this.’”

Except it’s nothing like childbirth. Human beings know this not only in our minds but in our souls, whether we are willing to acknowledge it outwardly. It’s actually the exact opposite of childbirth. At its brutal core, it is child sacrifice at the altar of human ambition, fear, deception, greed, faux altruism, and selfishness, and no medical gown or stirrups or death-dealing doula can mask that.

One can sympathize with a woman who is so desperate, who feels she has no other choice but to have an abortion. Indeed, one feels tremendous compassion for her. But how can someone "shout" her abortion? How can anyone claim a "right" to kill her own child? Moreover, why the shrill vehemence? The clue is in the pride with which abortion is advocated. Pride, it is the the work of the father of lies.

Americans have been taken by a great many lies about women. They’ve believed that value derives from productivity and that any discrepancy in pay or title denotes gross unfairness. They’ve believed that sex is inconsequential and modesty is unnecessary, giving up their agency in their sexual encounters while purporting to do the opposite. They’ve believed that men can become women, that some women have male reproductive systems, and that in order to be the best kinds of women, they must make themselves the most like men. And, among a slew of other falsehoods, they’ve believed that motherhood is dispensable.

To too many women, who have been endowed with the remarkable and unique ability to create and incubate new human life and the maternal instincts to protect and nurture that life into maturity, pregnancy and birth-giving are burdensome. Like the preborn life inside the NPR subject, motherhood is something to be torn apart, sucked away, and discarded.

But while women have convinced themselves that taking the life of an innocent person can be “mercy,” a “human right,” or a moral positive, they cannot evade their imago Dei. Extinguishing a human life cannot do the same to our created order, to the motherhood-sized chasm in each woman’s life that, once realized, can literally cultivate the next generation. In suctioning out mothers’ wombs, we really hollow out their souls.

Is it any wonder then that people of faith protest at abortion clinics? Is it any wonder that they offer an alternative, that they try to get women to carry their children to term? Because they know what this does to the souls of the women. God, of course will recieve these children to himself, for he loves them. But do we love those who God loves?