(5 March 2012)
When I read the headlines this past week, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”, my heart stopped. I said aloud, “O God in wrath, remember mercy.” Instant tears came down my cheeks. I was aghast. By “God” I mean the one and only Triune God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as revealed in Holy Scripture. What has our culture come to?
Two people (persons?) argue that if it is morally acceptable to take a baby’s life before birth, why not after birth? The only difference is the geography. They have taken a pro-life argument and turned it around: if it is wrong to kill a baby after birth why should it be ok before birth since the only difference is geography.
Alberto Giubilini,[1] along with Francesca Minerva,[2] both have some connection to Australia (see the footnotes).
Another person (what is a person?) is Peter Singer, also from Australia, who teaches ethics at Princeton in the USA (originally founded by Presbyterians who loved the Lord!). All three “intellectuals” are calling for killing babies before and after birth, and even for adults who have lost their personhood, such as Terri Schiavo who was in a coma and starved to death several years ago by removing her tubes.
What we are experiencing is a clash of worldviews that are quite the opposite of one another. If creation is true, we humans are made in God’s image, and our life is precious so that capital punishment must be for those who would unjustly attack that image and take the human life (Gen. 9:6). But if evolution is true, then we came from molecules in motion and nothing―absolutely nothing―matters. We came from nothing and are returning to nothing so let us kill everyone who gets in our way.
Moreover, an impersonal universe would lead to man as a machine with no will to choose; there would be no morality. Mankind would just be chemistry. If the universe is impersonal with molecules in motion, man is inescapably reduced to a carbon-base machine, forced to eke out an absurd existence in a chaotic world of random events. Moreover, finding meaning in an impersonal, random universe is impossible, and the task of agreeing on a universal standard of morality is hopeless. In this view, might makes right. This is the modern evolutionary perspective, which maintains that everything has come from an impersonal beginning, from random molecules.
If there is only material, matter, how can these two “ethicists” (I use the term lightly) even argue for any kind of morality, for they are using the laws of logic. But in a material universe, where did the immaterial laws of logic come from? The laws of logic (and of grammar and language) are universal, invariant, and immaterial, but they assume the Christian worldview in order to argue against it, for they assume a transcendent standard and transcendent persons to give meaning to our personhood. Notice all through their article that once we give up the idea that at conception each child is made in the image of God, and therefore has intrinsic and everlasting worth, anything goes. Evolution = just molecules and humans only have whatever worth we decide at the moment; image of God = each individual has infinite worth, so much so that the Lord God says, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11). Even the deformed are God’s image and precious in His sight. He expects us to be holy enough to take care of them, not to pursue happiness at their expense.
The article by these two people has been taken down, as I thought it would be, but I downloaded the pdf file. Here are their ideas as given in the article:
- “. . . having a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological health of the woman or for her already existing children, regardless of the condition of the fetus. This could happen in the case of a woman who loses her partner [my emphasis] after she finds out that she is pregnant and therefore feels she will not be able to take care of the possible child by herself.”
The “partner” could be anyone, but the word is carefully chosen not to indicate a heterosexual spouse by marriage. They could just be living together, so that now killing the child is a cover-up for fornication. As I’ve repeatedly said, one cannot violate one of God’s Ten Commandments without breaking the others also. So fornication (“thou shalt not commit adultery”) leads to death (“thou shalt not murder”).
- “. . . the same arguments that apply to killing a human fetus can also be consistently applied to killing a newborn human.”
Is this not exactly what the pro-life movement said would happen when Roe v. Wade was passed in January 1973? Though this is said in context as an idea to be evaluated, the remainder of the article argues to kill babies after birth if deemed in the best “interests” of mother and child. If one wonders how it could ever be in the best interest of the child, we must understand that though the child is human it may not be a moral person yet:
- “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential [my emphasis] persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject or a moral right to life.’ We take person to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her [sic] own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.”
The “potential to become a person” is purely a legal fiction and has nothing to do with the development, health, pain of the child who would be killed, or its biology. One child who would be declared not a person would be identical to another child in physiology, only one was wanted and the other one not wanted. It is arbitrary murder, pure and simple.
We have in this article what I described in my book and what I’ve been saying for many years: the pro-death people do not care if it is a child that came into existence at conception, receiving 23 chromosomes from each parent. They are pro-death, not only for children at any stage of life, but also for adults who are terminally ill or the elderly. Their god is death, and they must offer the appropriate sacrifice to appease it. Death has become the sacred sacrament, which indicates that mankind is “master of his fate and captain of his soul,” as Henley put it in his horrible poem Invictus. They refuse to believe that they cannot choose any ethic and make it work, believing, essentially, the lie of the devil to Eve that she could disobey God and not die (Genesis 3). It is this assumed autonomy, I’m convinced, that sets them off like a school of piranha whenever we invoke God’s moral law. They absolutely refuse to believe they will be judged, both now with the consequence of their choices, and especially at the Last Day.
We rightly shrink in horror at the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court that Negroes were not legal persons, and now we want to define anyone as not a legal person so we can take its life!
And why would we want to put a perfectly good human being to death who is not guilty of a capital crime? One reason is money:
- “Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care [my emphasis]. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion. Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth [their emphasis] such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion [their emphasis] should be permissible.”
Look at the picture of the baby again at the beginning of this article, and tell yourself it is moral to slaughter this image of God. Welcome to infanticide.
Have not we been saying, “Those who provide the healthcare will decide the healthcare”? Those who decide who is a person will decide who lives and how the money is spent, not the free market and loving parents. This makes governments the arbitrary murderers of their citizens, and we would no longer by our Creator with “life, liberty” though we might still have happiness, as these “ethicists” say several times in the article. Happiness might be killing your child so you won’t have the responsibility to take care of him. What we should be concerned about is not happiness but holiness, obedience to God’s commandments.
Since Darwin, the whole world, and now especially the West, has become oriented to death, which is what we would expect. If one turns from God, who is life, there is only one alternative, death, so says the Bible (Prov. 8:36).
Richard Weikart has an excellent historical treatment of the genetic movement in his revealing book, From Darwin to Hitler. This demonstrates that the worldview of Darwin very much influenced Hitler. Moreover, Margaret Sanger in the USA founded Planned Parenthood with the idea of eliminating minorities through abortion. She said: “More children from the fit; less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.”[1]
Nietzsche also taught that we could improve the race by genetics. Nietzsche wanted to take evolution very seriously so he said we should be able to kill with no conscience, just as nature does. There is nothing transcendent to nature; death is a large part of what nature is about, improving species by death and reproduction through the survival of the fittest; thus we should understand the implications of these things. There is no Christian God; He is now dead. There is no morality, just interpretations. Now that God is gone, there is no truth, so we must have “the revaluation of all values.” We must eliminate all Christian vestiges from our societies, and stop fooling ourselves that there is something when there is nothing. Each individual is his own god, his own morality, and whatever promotes this is good, and whatever challenges this is bad. Nietzsche wanted to rid us of the idea of morality as submission or obedience, for there is nothing above us. We should embrace our animal instincts to survive, such as aggression, which is what we see the animals doing. Hitler tried to kill without conscience, and so did Margaret Sanger. Hitler killed six million Jews and millions of Christians. In the USA alone we have killed 50 million pre-born babies, and counting. Now these two “ethicists” want to begin killing post-born babies, which is raw infanticide that should be capital punishment itself.
But what about those who want to adopt these babies? Would it not be in the best interests of the child, the mother, and the adopting parents to do so? Not necessarily, these two “ethicists” say:
- “However weak the interests of actual people can be [mother], they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people [babies] to become actual ones [people] . . . “
Incredible. This is not a non-Christian view, but an anti-Christian view, the pure hatred of God as seen by the hatred of His image. Think how evolution and death go together. Evolution speaks of the survival of the “fittest,” which means the weak must be eliminated. Thus abortion has always been aimed at the “inferior” minorities to eliminate them. Nietzsche drew the conclusion from evolution that the weak should be eliminated, and especially that they should not be pitied, for pity is weakness. [2] Christianity supports the weak and has mercy and pity on them, which Nietzsche despised and found contemptible.
In fact, the law of the survival of the fittest demands that we do not have pity or exercise compassion on the weak, such as those with handicaps. Evolution eliminates these in nature, and so allegedly should we. If we did not spend so much time and money on helping the weak but in promoting the strong, mankind could advance much faster, and who knows what kind of super-race that we would become. Nietzsche saw hope in evolution to bring about a Superman, a superhuman who could advance mankind to another level.
It is well known that Hitler revered Nietzsche, and several times visited Nietzsche’s home where he died. How much Hitler read Nietzsche is debated, but he absorbed some of his ideas. Hitler especially adopted ideas of eugenics from various sources, and when he instituted the “final solution” for the Jews, his idea was that they were “unfit,” not good for breeding, in fact that they were allegedly very poor specimens. The best thing was to eliminate them, Hitler said, as animals, without conscience, as Nietzsche taught. Now these two “ethicists” of Australia want to extend the same to post-born babies, those who cannot help themselves, such as the terminally ill and elderly, because they would be a burden to the state who pays for such.
The death movement continues to march over the earth. The Soviet Union killed an estimated 62 million of its citizens under communism, with the world looking the other way. China has slaughtered approximately 34 million, and counting, and Hitler killed 21 million total counting the war itself,[1] though others have estimated 50 million, and the other Communist nations (Cambodia, Vietnam, etc), in the name of evolution and atheism, have added many more millions. If we count abortions in all these countries, we could easily double the numbers. In the USA, we are up to 50 million babies and still going strong. In all, since Darwin, estimates run as high as 250 to 300 million people slaughtered, counting wars begun by evolutionists and all the babies killed, based on their theory that we are just animals, nothing more—and the slaughter of the unborn worldwide is ongoing. A tree is known by its fruit, and atheistic evolution the last 100 years has produced little more than death and destruction.
When we turn from the Triune God who is life, we turn to death, destruction, and breaking all the commandments. Abortion has lead to euthanasia and to infanticide. Death has led to bearing false witness about the consequences. That in turn has led to the idea that each of us has no allegiance to anyone but ourselves, so children are being taught to dishonor mother and father. Of course, the need for abortions is often because of sexual immorality, sex outside marriage, violation of the Seventh Commandment. All of these are products of idolatry, violations of the first four commandments.
The Church must stand for the helpless; if we don’t, no one else will. The Church must lead the way to repentance. Preachers and pastors must stand. God’s judgment has already begun. See my book on this. AMEN.
Alberto Giubilini Francesca Minerva
Here are the two “ethicists” who wrote the article.
[1] These numbers (62 million, 34 million, and 21 million) were reported (October 19, 2009) on Bill O’Reilly Fox News from a study done.
[1] Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 135. For an excellent work on Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, you must read George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood.
[2] Alistar Kee, Nietzsche Against the Crucified, ch. 7, “The Will to Power.”
[1] Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, and Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
[2] Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
