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Reactions to the anti-abortion message

By Scott Tibbs, July 9, 2008

On Monday, I highlighted a post by an abortion rights advocate who dropped the F-Bomb in response to an anti-abortion article on another blog. First, I apologize if I offended anyone's sensibilities by not "bleeping" the quote. I thought it was instructive to paste it unaltered, in its original raw form.

While it may seem counterintuitive, responses made in anger using vulgar language are often encouraging to me as I protest the legal killing of unborn children in this country. If someone reacts in anger, you know they are being affected on some level by the argument made. In some cases, I suspect that the person reacting in reflexive anger has a guilty conscience: that she has had an abortion or that he has paid for one. If someone is reacting in anger, it is likely that the Holy Spirit is convicting him/her of sin and the pushing of the Spirit may lead to repentance.

What I find most discouraging is when people are stone-faced in response to the message. A heart that has grown cold is unresponsive, not even rebelling against those who point out that killing children is terribly wicked. When I volunteered for the Genocide Awareness Project in 2001, it was sad to see the number of people who could look at the results of abortion and not be moved. In the years since when I have held graphic signs, I have seen similar stone-faced reactions. If there is no reaction at all, the hope for repentance is dim.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I am sure some abortion-rights supporters would respond that the fetus is not a human being. But that is the entire argument, isn't it? If the fetus is a human being, then there is no justification for killing him or her, even if he/she is abused, neglected or "just plan ****ing unwanted." If the fetus is not a human being, then there is no need to come up with a justification for allowing women to do as they will with their bodies, is there? The excuses for murder lack logical merit because murder is always wrong.

This is what makes Barack Obama's position on the "health of the mother" exception for abortion so interesting. Pro-lifers have argued for years that including a "health of the mother" exception (as opposed to an exception where the pregnancy presents an imminent risk of death) is a huge loophole that essentially invalidates a prohibition on abortion. In an interview with the Christian magazine Relevant, Obama said:

I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.

And yet, Obama has consistently opposed not only a ban on the late-term abortion procedure commonly known as "partial birth abortion" (where the baby is delivered feet first until the "doctor" rips the baby's brain out and crushes his/her skull) but is so radical that he even opposed a bill that would make it illegal to kill a baby that survived an abortion and was born. The federal "Born Alive Infants Protection Act" was supported even by many who otherwise support abortion rights. Simply put, killing a baby after he or she is born is not abortion. It is infanticide, and Barack Obama thinks infanticide should be legal.

We hear a lot about changing the tone in Washington and about bipartisan compromise. We hear a lot from the Obama campaign that he is the man who will reach across party lines and seek unity. But Obama's words mean little when his actions indicate an extremist ideological stance that even most advocates of "abortion rights" disagree with. On abortion, Obama is anything but a centrist, and his views on infanticide will harm him in November. No wonder his supporters try to distract from his support of killing newborns by blathering about gas prices.