Thoughts on the Abortion Controversy

Over the last few days, the abortion controversy has raised its head once more.

An article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, studying the question of whether an unborn child feels pain during an abortion. Their conclusion was that before the 29th week of gestation, an unborn child is incapable of feeling pain. Predictably, reactions were loud from both sides of the debate...

And, initially, I couldn't understand why this article touched off a controversy in the first place! The issue of abortion isn't whether it's a painful procedure or not. The issue is whether it's murder or not!

Whether or not the baby (and that's what it is, people!) feels pain during an abortion is absolutely irrelevant to the debate. If, in fact, a fetus is a human being, as Christians believe, then the painfulness of the procedure is irrelevant. If I were to pump carbon monoxide into a sleeping man's bedroom, knowing that carbon monoxide poisoning is painless, I would still be committing murder. The issue is the intrinsic nature and worth of human life.

Now, I've learned that it's an issue in the US, where pro-life legislators wish to make it mandatory for abortion providers to ask the mother whether she wants her baby to receive an anaesthetic prior to the procedure. The pro-life side wants this to be law in hopes of encouraging mothers to realize that they are cruelly killing another human being. In that light, I can understand the controversy...

Interestingly, I read an article on Albert Mohler's site that two of the article's researchers are active in the abortion-rights movement! It seems that one researcher directs an abortion clinic, while another is an attorney for the National Abortion Rights Action League.

The funny thing is, that attorney apparently isn't a very good one. No one involved with the article thought to make note of the conflict of interest. Apparently, they don't think this situation qualifies. In my opinion, I hardly think that they'd hold the same view, if a JAMA article proved that a fetus could feel pain, and if two of the researchers worked for Focus on the Family or another pro-life outfit. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

But, of course, NARAL and the rest of the infanticide movement has a major problem with consistency anyway.

In another related, and sad, note, Mohler ran an article about the abortion rate in Russia. I thought the Canadian rate was awful (it was 22% of all pregnancies in 1995). It appears that in the former Marxist paradise, there's about 1.7 abortions for every live birth there, and that rate's been consistent for decades. Funny how so many university professors and left-wingers still dearly love Marxism - if their parents had lived in that place of "collective freedom," the odds of them actually being born would have been only a little more than one in two...

A final thought: It's horrifying, but Russian kids probably would have had a better chance of survival, had they been born in ancient Canaan to a family of Molech worshipers. They only slaughtered their firstborn.

Pray that the Gospel becomes known in that country, and in our own....

(EDIT, 14 September: I changed CO2 to carbon monoxide, which is what I meant, after my brother Mike pointed out my error. I'm an artsman - what can I say? My face is red, especially since chemistry was one of my best high school classes. Thanks, Mike. I'm really not that bad a scientist.... really.... )