Burning Ones

Posts tagged with ‘abortion’

• Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortion?

  From June 24, 2009 @ 6:00 am

  What you’re really asking is if Christians should take the pill. It was my question a couple of years ago and all I wanted was a web-page or pamphlet that put it in layman’s terms for me: yes or no. I was (and still am) avidly pro-life and I did not want to accidentally participate in something I believed was wrong.

  Short answer: the pill can cause abortion.

  Long answer: the pill was created with one objective and that was to stop the woman from ovulating. There were two side effects to these hormones:

  • The cervical mucus would thicken, making it harder for sperm to get to the egg
  • The lining of the uterus would thin, making it difficult for a fertilized egg to attach (which is why people on the pill have lighter periods)
  So what’s the big deal? Doesn’t sound like an abortion to me. There is a 1% chance (according to the pill, but 10% according to some gynecologists) that you could get pregnant. Which means that the hormones that were supposed to stop you from ovulating failed. The sperm made it through the cervical mucus, and the lining of the uterus was thick enough to support life. But what if only one or two of these effects failed? What if the pill failed in its ability to stop you from ovulating but still thinned the uterus lining? We know that you can still ovulate, even while taking the pill perfectly. What we don’t know is how many times women on the pill have ovulated by accident, the egg was fertilized, but the lining of the uterus was too thin to support life? Maybe it’s none, maybe it’s 100%. No research has been done. Unfortunately because the thinning of the uterus lining is a side effect you cannot have a pill that simply stops the woman from ovulating. I’ve looked. But the important part is that if you ovulate and the uterus lining is thinned, then the fertilized egg, which I’m going to assume you believe is a tiny life, has died.

  So what’s this mean?

  I know it’s not as black and white as we would like but if you are pro-life the phrase “can cause abortion” should be enough. “Well,” you say, “I’ll just believe that God wouldn’t allow that to happen. God could prevent that.” Yes, He could, but why are you so sure to test your faith on death rather than life? If you have enough faith to believe that God would stop the egg from being fertilized when the uterus lining couldn’t support it, then you have enough faith to believe that God wouldn’t allow you to get pregnant if it wasn’t His timing. He’s the author of life! We somehow bought into this idea that God throws life around like it’s nothing. “Oh, she got pregnant AGAIN? Oh, geez. Here, let me give it a spirit and soul real quic- oh, no! Another one?! They’re acting like rabbits!” I’m not against birth control, but I just feel that in an effort to feel more in control we’ve compromised for the sake of convenience. It is easier to take a pill, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

  I leave it up to your conscience- you now know the facts and are therefore without excuse.

  “So what kind of birth control can I use?”

  Any kind of barrier (male condoms, female condoms, etc.) will not cause an abortion. Anything that works by wiping the uterus (and therefore killing any life that was attached) is an abortifacet. Many people who are against this method are o.k. with the pill but in reality they do the same thing. The difference is that the pill’s main goal is stop you from ovulating while something like the Nuva Ring’s main goal is to wipe the uterus clean. But they both inhibit the uterus from supporting life if they succeed.

  My preferred method is the Natural Family Planning method in which a woman learns how to identify when she is ovulating (3-4 days out of the month) and then can either refrain from having intercourse or using a barrier method during those days.

  For more information Mark Driscoll did a great sermon on the different types of birth control here.

• Oh, that’s just bitter…

  From January 25, 2009 @ 12:08 pm

  I have directed my staff to reach out to those on all sides of this issue to achieve the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies. They will also work to promote safe motherhood, reduce maternal and infant mortality rates and increase educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

  - President Barack Obama – Statement after rescinding the Mexico City Policy

  2 parts of this quote should be viewed side by side:

  1. “reducing unintended pregnancies”
  2. “reduce maternal and infant mortality rates”

  I wish people who find abortion to be acceptable would take their convictions to their logical conclusions and just come out and say that human life is only worth protecting when it’s convenient and safe. Why the double speak? Why are infants worth protecting but the unborn baby not? Please… We’re all more intelligent than this…

  I pray that wisdom and steel would be placed in the hearts of those on every side of this debate. Let every one of us have courage to speak our convictions to the full that all would not have to wonder at these vague ambiguities that we introduce through frivolous attempts at being ‘nice’ or ‘politically correct’.

• Is God or the President Sovereign?

  From November 08, 2008 @ 2:30 pm

  [Edit] – To be clear, I wrote this in response to Dutch Sheets’s recent open letter responding to the elections published on 6-11-08. I would recommend reading that, as I feel it is a good example of what I think might be the wrong paradigmn towards God’s sovereignity.

  ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

  ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us… [Behind Bilbo finding the Ring] there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by it’s maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’ – The Fellowship of the Ring: The Shadow of the Past.

  I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of God’s sovereignty in the context of these elections.

  Some background: For a long time I was what I will refer to as ‘pure predestination’. This means that, for lack of a better way to describe it, we are all essentially puppets under the hand of God and he is playing out a play with us, even though the puppet is not directly consciously aware of the puppeteer’s actions. This attributes absolute sovereignty to God and zero free will to us. Of course, the problem with that is that it flies in the face of experience completely and it also doesn’t seem to jive with several passages of scripture. That being said, I definitely believe that it does jive with several other passages and it is a very comforting thought. After all, the idea that ultimately you don’t have any real responsibility for anything that’s happening around you and in you (including your sin) is comforting if you attribute perfect goodness to the one who is controlling you. Ultimately, even if he were to send you to Hell, it would be OK, because the one who had made that decision is perfectly good. That’s ‘pure predestination’. Verses in support of this would be Romans 9-11, or Ephesians 1:3-10, etc.

  Then, I listened to a few things and met a few people that shook that belief (and ultimately gave the Bible more of a right to speak to me about who God is and how he works) and I became what I’ll refer to as a deterministic free will (that’s an awful word). This means that, if I take into account all of the scripture that I know of, I have to account for the fact that God clearly predestines people to either be in his family (saved and having their end to be with God for eternity, ascribing him glory and majesty and beauty and power, and dwelling in his everlasting love) or out of his family (unsaved and having their end in Hell and everlasting torment and separation from God, the end we all deserve but do not all receive because of the free gift of mercy). Another way to put this would be that some people are sheep and others are goats. A sheep cannot be made into a goat, and a goat cannot be made into a sheep. It’s just a non-issue. I can’t become a monkey. I can want to be a monkey, I could in theory probably even take some weird hormones developed by our intrepid scientific community and make some inroads towards becoming one. But ultimately I am a human, and that’s really all I’ll ever be.

  However, then on our side of things and from God’s perspective, things are somewhat up in the air. God has a plan, which is perfect and meant to bring about the greatest vision of his glory and the greatest good for the greatest number of people through the least amount of pain and judgement possible. How he accomplishes this is by partnering with us, who he has elevated to a level of dignity in our relationship with him that is really beyond comprehension. If we do not partner with him, his plans are delayed until he can find a person to partner with him to accomplish his purposes on the earth. Verses such as Ephesians 4:1 and Hebrews 12:1-3 and Romans 12:1-2 all seem to point to this willing in our lives to do what God has called us to do and partner with him. Of course, one of the most famous verses that proves this theory is Ezekiel 22:23-31, where God seems to lament the fact that he could find no man to stand in the gap between him and his people which caused him to have to pour out his wrath on them. Also, James 5:13-18 where we learn that Elijah was the cause (in partnership with God) of the drought and the ending of the drought that occurred during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel.

  Thus, deterministic free will.

  Lately, I would say that I’ve begun to swing back towards pure predestination. The reason is that I find it to be a fairly weak argument that is constantly thrown around that the reason a promise from the Lord didn’t come true is because ‘our faith failed’. In the prosperity movement, this concept rears its head in a particularly ugly way. The faith healer will pray and tell people that they’re seeing cancer, or osteoporosis, or blood clots, or heart conditions, and then they’ll tell the people that healing is available for those conditions and that if the person will only have faith, they will be healed. If it doesn’t happen, they don’t tell the person to go grapple with the fact that a sovereign god does not have to heal them nor does he promise in all circumstances to heal them nor is it the fault of Satan that they are sick in the first place but in fact the will of God nor that it may be that God wills for them to suffer that they might learn righteousness (as Jesus did) but instead that God wanted to but they were unwilling.

  It’s the convenience of it that bothers me. Instead of grappling with a God who for his own reasons and glory is willing to choose to send people to hell (I find no theological route around this, no matter what God has chosen to send people to hell. He made the rules in the beginning, he didn’t have to create a hell, so even if we chose in the end to violate laws that would ‘force’ God to put is in hell, it was still him in the beginning who gave us the ability to make that choice, so it’s still his choice ultimately that has us there) and yet is still perfectly good, we feel guilty and confused that our God who really wants us to be happy and healthy and all the rest has to partner with weak little us to get anything done. The blame and power are shifted to us irreversibly. We don’t deal with a God who, like Romans 9 says, created some vessels for honorable use and some for dishonorable; instead we implore those around us to ‘let God use them for honorable use instead of ‘forcing’ his hand to use us for dishonorable use’. That is a much harder challenge to wrap our hearts around.

  So, back to the elections. The issue I see is that I believe God is shouting to this nation that Abortion must come down. As his heart was set against slavery before the civil war, so now his heart is set against abortion. This is not to say that we couldn’t theorize that there are many other evils in the world. The way we (the church) treats the poor and needy in our world is appalling, and there will be judgement and answering for that behaviour. However, as God is sovereign, he has the right to focus on any given issue at any given time (as he could just as well choose to focus on all issues).

  As an aside, I believe the reason God focuses on an issue at a time is his mercy. If God were to confront me with all of the darkness in my life right now in one fell swoop, I would be killed. I simply cannot know how dark I really am. Instead, he deals with me in little steps on the progressive road to sanctification and unity with Christ. I believe the same holds true for a nation. If God were to come to America or Mexico or Russia or Africa and say, ‘This is everything I have against you’, the nation would be destroyed. OK, aside over.

  So, God is choosing right now to focus on the moral and social issue of the sanctity of pre-natal life. We condemn murder (the killing of a human being) in every circumstance (although even that has begun to be questioned in the case of euthanasia, which I have found a surprising amount of support for, and many people support capital punishment, and I believe to the conservatives everlasting shame many people who are ‘pro-life’ in the case of abortion are also pro-war, which couldn’t be much more pro-death) except the life that is still mostly in the womb (OK, maybe that’s a bit of barb against people who are OK with partial birth, but whatever. It’s a heinous act so I don’t mind vilifying it). We approach the definition of a human in all sorts of wonky ways so that we can justify aborting a ‘fetus’ while still not feeling foolish when we congratulate and expecting mother on her ‘new baby’ and ‘little life’. Who among us would look at a mother, flushed with joy at the prospect of her little baby coming, and straight faced tell her, ‘well you don’t actually have a baby yet, it’s just animated tissue without any real substance. Don’t get excited till it’s all the way out of you because, you know, then it’s an actual baby.’ That is the issue on God’s heart. 50 million babies, killed in the name of convenience, health, and freedom.

  Now, we had two candidates for this election, as you all know. Barack Obama is pro-choice to an extreme. He has been very candid about this (a fact for which I thank him. If politicians could just be honest about their beliefs and stop with the theatre of neutrality I think our country would be in a vastly healthier state.) and his voting record backs up his claims. John McCain couldn’t really be classified as pro-life, but he certainly would not have done anything to strengthen the pro-choice agenda. On most other issues, I think I actually agree with Obama. I am for reform in the government, I am probably more socialist leaning than is actually good for me, and I like the idea of the rich giving back to the country that made them rich in a meaningful way. Of course, I understand that this is a gross simplification of his policies and probably a gross misunderstanding of what his ideas would do to our country, but honestly, after Wall Street, irresponsible and unsustainable lifestyles on the part of the American people, and the Economic Crisis that has hit our nation, I’m for a shaking up of our systems, no matter how painful it might be. I hate most of John McCain’s policies, he’s pro-war, he’s pro-big government (well, same goes for Obama, I suppose, and probably in a greater way, but he’s pro-big government that the rich will pay for), and honestly he ran his campaign in such a sleazy way that I no longer believe (as I did in 2000), that he is a principled man.

  But what do you do when you believe God is dealing with the nation on one issue? Well, for me and my house that was voting based on the one issue. I wanted a pro-life candidate in office, especially given the fact that they are projected to install 3 new justices on the Supreme Court (allowing it be stacked obscenely in either direction). I believed that having a pro-choice president in office would mean that those seats would be filled in the wrong direction. But there-in lies the rub.

  Daniel 2:21 (ESV):

  He changes times and seasons;
  he removes kings and sets up kings;
  he gives wisdom to the wise
  and knowledge to those who have understanding;

  Well, what the heck? I mean, if God was so dependent on who sits in the Oval Office in a little over 70 days, then what does that state about his sovereignty? I read an article this morning published by Dutch Sheets (probably the single greatest influence in my life regarding the shifting of my understanding from pure predestination to deterministic free will) in which he basically states that the reason Barack Obama is president is because the Church failed to pray enough and that this indicates that we are headed towards judgement. But, wait a second. I thought that God removes and sets up kings? Doesn’t that mean that it was God’s will that Obama be president? Doesn’t that mean that, even if this is a signal that judgement is coming, that the judgement was in God’s plan all along? But more importantly, doesn’t the idea that just because Obama is president we will have pro-choice judges in the Supreme Court which will call down unwilling judgement on our nation fly in the face of God’s sovereignty. I just can’t accept that God is ever forced, against his will, to do something he would rather not do. Yes, this flies in the face of the free will verses, especially Ezekiel 22, and at the same time, I don’t know, I just can’t believe that God could allow himself to be thwarted like that simply because we didn’t reach some sort of critical mass of prayer.

  It’s the system that seems so wonky to me. I picture God on his thrown looking at a one of those applause meters going, ‘OK, I put the bulletin out to my people that they are to pray for this issue. Oh, darn it! The prayer meters only 30% full. Come on, pray more and louder people! 50%… Almost there! Shoot, only 15 more days till times up. 75%! Come on! No!! Times up. Shoot!.’ The picture is almost pathetic. I can’t reconcile it with the verses that ascribe sovereignty to God. And I can’t reconcile the image that God does not need us at all and simply allows to play in a theatre of partnership with the verses that ascribe free will and co-ruler-ship to us.

  Anyway, I have no conclusion here, except for the fact that I still believe we should be trembling as a nation about the issue of abortion and praying that God would end it sovereignly. It’s the sovereignly that is important. Obama doesn’t pick Judges, I don’t think. God does. I guess that is actually a conclusion of sorts, just not a concluded one. I still can’t imagine how this all actually works, nor do I have any real confidence that I’ll ever get to that point.

• Obama’s stance on life.

  From January 08, 2008 @ 12:24 pm

  Commentary: Obama changes the game – CNN.com

  After reading this little editorial on Obama, I got to thinking that I don’t know what Obama’s stance on life is.  Anyone out there know?

• Godlessness

  From December 03, 2007 @ 6:18 pm

  Tim and I saw “Amazing Grace” the other night and I’m still completely wrecked by it. And so I’ve kinda been mopping around the house, aimlessly wandering, for the past couple of days simply because I’m depressed and I don’t know what else to do.

  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie it’s the story of Wilberforce: a man who almost single-handedly ended slavery in Europe. I remember thinking to myself while watching the movie, “wow, what an exciting time to be alive.” There was such a clear injustice going on. God created all men equal and here you have men possessing other men because of skin.

  I began to think about what I would be doing if I lived in that time period. Who cares that I would be a woman! I would have rallied up every woman I knew (and maybe earned some respect amongst the men) and held meetings and meetings where we would try and figure out what to do about this lie that has been embedded into our society. I would start saving and saving. And then I would purchase a slave and set them free. And then I would start saving again, living poor. And even if I only could save one slave in my entire life I would feel fulfilled.

  I would allow the issue to consume my life.

  And what am I doing about abortion!? What? The issue of abortion isn’t clear enough for me as slavery is? Is it not a greater and far bigger injustice? I have fifty million dead brothers and sisters and what do I do? I wear a little red bracelet around my right wrist and every time I look at it and I mutter a nice prayer, “Jesus I plead your blood over my sins and the sin of my nation. Please end abortion and send revival to America,” and continue with what I was doing.

  Do my brother and sisters not deserve more? Oh, where is my compassion? I can’t even weep over such a monstrosity! And ugh, I feel powerless to do anything. I could preach someone’s ear off about their lack of awareness about the subject and I’m not doing anything about it. And I have such a giant list of excuses: I can’t offer to adopt someone’s baby, I’m living with my parents. I can’t go to the abortion clinics and befriend someone, that’s cheap. I can’t start trying to make people aware, that’s offensive. Oh, and how the church has cowered in the face of the world because of that word!

  This hit me like maybe half way through the movie and at some point in the movie Wilberforce is in immense pain because of this illness that he has and his wife is pregnant. And after tearing apart his bedroom because of the pain, his wife comes up to him and he grabs her protruding stomach and says, (this is totally paraphrased) “my son! I can hear him now! Tell me about my son!” As he collapses with pain his wife begins to tell him about his unborn child, “he will have a voice. He will have a strong voice!” I can’t express to you with words what that scene did to me, or how brutal, wonderful and weighty of a scene it was.. I just recommend you seeing it.

  But the director probably had no idea! There is just a powerful injustice going on and we stuff cotton in our ears because it’s too big. It’s just too big. Every woman is encouraged to take birth control, the church especially, and no one is willing to do the research that it can certainly be an abortifacient! And I refuse to tell anyone because I don’t want to be offensive. God save me.