Between Two Worlds

Frank Beckwith, in the course of an interview largely about his conversion to Roman Catholicism, talks about his upcoming book on abortion. Having read and been significantly helped by his earlier book, Politically Correct Death, I'm looking forward to this one as well:

IgnatiusInsight.com: This fall Cambridge University Press will be publishing your book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice, which is described as "the most comprehensive defense of the prolife position on abortion ever published." Would you like to give it a shameless plug and tell readers what is unique about the book and what you hope to accomplish with it?

Dr. Beckwith: You gotta love publishers! Now to the shameless plug. Some of your readers may know of my 1993 book, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Argument for Abortion Rights (Baker Book House). Defending Life was originally going to be a revised edition of that book. But since so much has been written over the past decade on abortion, and because Politically Correct Death did not cover some issues and was a bit outdated, I decided to just write a whole new book. Defending Life covers not only the popular arguments for abortion, but also some of the most sophisticated cases offered by abortion-choice advocates in the academy. I deal extensively with the arguments of thinkers like David Boonin (author of A Defense of Abortion [Cambridge University Press, 2002]) and Judith Jarvis Thomson on issues of fetal personhood and the mother's obligation to her unborn child. But I also deal with the paucity of the legal case for Roe v. Wade, the cloning and stem-cell research debate, and whether prolife religious citizens have the right to shape laws in a liberal democracy, none of which I addressed in Politically Correct Death. Although Defending Life covers sophisticated arguments offered by professional philosophers and bioethicists, the publisher believes that because it is clearly written and includes sections on popular arguments, it will be marketing the book to an audience broader than academics and scholars. In fact, the publisher asked me to place the book's footnotes as endnotes in order to make the text attractive to non-scholars. I, of course, said yes.

What I hope to accomplish with the book is this: I want to offer my colleagues as well as the general public an intelligent, clearly articulated, and non-polemical defense of the prolife position on abortion that does not rely on theological or religious arguments. I also want to help college students and my friends in the prolife movement so that they are better equipped to deal with the best arguments offered by our fellow citizens who do not share our point of view.

Today’s New York Times reports: “About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.”

Denny Burk:

This clash is not about “preventing disability.” That’s a euphemism that every rational person should reject. It’s about whether or not we should execute disabled persons before they can become a “burden” to their parents and society.

On this issue Christians must offer a prophetic word to the culture. All people are created in God’s image (including people with Down Syndrome) and are thereby to be treated with the dignity that God commands towards those who bear His image. To kill innocent humans because they are inconvenient or unwanted is an assault on the image of God.

A just community does not execute people who are financial and emotional burdens to their families or to society. On the contrary, a just community tries to find ways to care for them. Why would we treat people with Down Syndrome any differently?

From my reading, I would say that Slate.com's Will Saletan is one of the most fairminded, thoughtful writers who favors abortion and seeks to understand the arguments of his opponents.

His latest article is on the recent SCOTUS decision on partial-birth abortion and the impact of the ultrasound machine on the future of the debate. Here's an excerpt:

Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Read the whole thing.

(HT: Al Mohler)

Hadley Arkes, the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College, and one of the authors of the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, is one of the great moral-legal philosophers of our time. In this article he speculates about the next small steps that may result from the recent Supreme Court decision on partial-birth abortion. Here's an excerpt:

In India, the use of sonograms has penetrated even poor areas, and brought the beginnings of a demographic crisis: Families anxious for sons have been altogether too willing to abort female babies. And given the sensibility of the time, the disposition of the government in India has not been to ban the killing of babies based on their gender, but rather to forbid clinics to make the information available. Of all things, we are hearing denunciations of these multinational capitalist firms, like General Electric, which do such underhanded things as to produce the equipment that gives people such information about their unborn children.

The next plausible move, then, is to bring back the scheme of banning any abortion performed on the basis of the sex of the child. My hunch is that that position, too, would command a large level of support in the public, comparable to the level of support for banning partial-birth abortion, and it too would recruit people who call themselves “pro-choice.”

But if legislators could take that modest move of banning abortions on the basis of sex, the public mind could be prepared for reasoning about the next step: barring abortions based on the disability of the child. In surveys in the past, more than half of the public were opposed to aborting a child if the child was likely to be born deaf. The opposition seemed to be invariant by the period of gestation. My own reading was that, if people thought it was wrong to kill someone because of his deafness, they did not think that the wrong varied with the age of the victim.

Here the legislatures could invoke the body of their laws dealing with discriminations against the disabled. And then perhaps they could get to the point of banning abortions after the onset of a beating heart. One survey recently found that about 62 percent of the public would support that kind of restriction. It is worth noticing, too, that in none of these cases except that of the beating heart would the legislation start offering protections based on trimesters or the age of the child. There would be no need to play along, and confirm, the perverse fiction that the child becomes more human somewhere in this scale of age, or that it is legitimate to kill smaller people with reasons less compelling than the reasons we would need in killing larger people.

In the most curious way, then, a decision so narrow, so begrudging and limited, may invite a series of measures simple and unthreatening, but the kinds of measures that gather force with each move. We need to remind ourselves that we have seen such things before. We may recall, in that vein, the Emancipation Proclamation. It was limited, as a war measure. For Lincoln did not have the authority to strip people of what was then their lawful property in slaves. The Proclamation freed only those slaves held in areas that were in rebellion against the government. It did not cover the slaves held in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri. And yet ... it was understood instantly and widely in the country that this measure had an “anti-slavery impulse.”

(HT: STR)

The decision on Wednesday, in Gonzales v. Carhart, was severely limited and diminished in its practical effects. But rightly or wrongly, there may be a sense that the decision opens the doors now; that it invites legislators and political men and women to deliver themselves from the reign of judges, and set their hands to this task once again.

“This is about a procedure that any parent would want her daughter to have access to if she needed it. And to frame it as an abortion issue is doing a disservice to medicine and to our young women and our country. So I hope we can get the focus back on the fact that this Supreme Court is deciding what medical procedures are necessary for child-bearing women.”
--Quoted in San Francisco Chronicle.

(HT: Denny Burk)

Here is an interview I recently conducted with John Ensor, Director of Urban Initiatives for Heartbeat International, an organization for Christian communities establishing pregnancy help centers worldwide.

John, tell us a little bit about yourself--your background, family, writing, ministry, etc.

I grew up in a small town (DeKalb, IL), came to faith as a senior in High School during the Jesus Movement days of the early 70’s, and had the joy of seeing my mother and all my siblings come to Christ in the following year. Today my mother is on a short-term missions trip to Guatemala. She is 76. So my family carries a profound awareness of God’s life-changing grace.

My first date with my future wife was a study date for John Piper’s Greek class at Bethel College in Minnesota in 1977. We have been married for 28 years. We lived in Boston’s inner-city for 20 years and raised our three children there. I served as pastor of a small church and then led in the development of six pregnancy help centers.

Our youngest son is currently deployed on the Ronald Regan aircraft carrier, assigned to electronics on a squad of F/A 18 fighter jets. My daughter just graduated Wheaton College and is working in Securities as she prepares for a career in missions. My oldest son and his wife live in Atlanta, where they are preparing for our first grandchild in May. Last month, my wife and I moved from Boston to Miami to take up an urban initiative called Heartbeat of Miami. So we are among those thankful for email and cell phones.

I am, at heart, a pastor. But I do not lead a local church. Rather I speak, preach, write, and labor mostly to instruct and inspire the Christian community about the biblical mandate and practical opportunity we have to defend the weak and the innocent through the establishment of pregnancy-help medical clinics, otherwise known as pregnancy centers.

What exactly is a "pregnancy center"?

Pregnancy Centers are the Christian community’s most visible expression of their rejection of the shedding of innocent blood in their midst. They are commercial spaces set up at our own expense to provide life-affirming, practical assistance to women and couples vulnerable to abortion due to their difficult circumstances. Many of them are now equipped with ultrasound, offer parenting classes, abstinence education, and more. They rescue babies from a violet death by helping one woman at a time find the faith and resources she needs to parent or place for adoption.

There are about 2,200 pregnancy centers now in the U.S. and more developing internationally. Nearly all of them are the efforts of local churches working together. They reflect a gathering repentance of the Christian church over abortion; some turning their direct guilt regarding abortion into something life-affirming for others now in similar circumstances. Others, like myself, found it necessary to repent from passively accepting abortion. Both bring us into blood-guilt (Deut. 21:1-10). We find in the pregnancy center movement a practical and winsome way to faithfully answer the biblical call to “rescue those being dragged off to death” (Prov. 24:10-12). I think history will show them to be the dynamic equivalent of the “safe houses” on the underground railway. They provide direct help, at our own expense, to save lives, one woman at a time.

Tell me about Heartbeat of Miami. When and why did it start? What are its goals?

Heartbeat of Miami is a pilot project for a slowly emerging national strategic plan for steering the pregnancy help center movement into the major cities of America; and more specifically, into urban neighborhoods. It reflects the horrific reality that abortion is now firmly consolidated into our cities and disproportionately aimed at minorities. 94% of abortion facilities are now in urban neighborhoods. This is “de facto” racism. Nationally, Black women make up 12% of the female population but account for 36% of abortions. Latino women make up 13%, but account for another 20% of all abortions. Yet to date, the pregnancy centers are mostly set up in suburbs and small towns across the country where the “sanctity of life” has been addressed the most.

My prayer and future labor is going to go toward mainstreaming the pregnancy-help center into the urban Christian community. Since abortion is profiting most off the minority community, they hold the economic key to closing them down. When the Black and Latino pastors of our nation stigmatize abortion for what it is, the diminution of human dignity and a direct assault against the integrity of God as Creator, the abolition of abortion is in sight.

Miami is a city plagued with 37 abortion facilities. It has only one pregnancy-help center. In Boston, the Christian community, working together, started six pregnancy help centers over the last 15 years. We have seen hundreds of women and couples reject abortion on a yearly basis. We now have only six abortion facilities, and the abortion rate dropped 25% from the early 90’s.

Last year I turned 50. To celebrate my midlife crises I thought I should either buy a motorcycle or venture a new work in Miami. My wife agreed that Miami might be the better way. We are now working full-time to open 3-5 ultrasound-equipped, medically licensed, fully staffed, Christian-based pregnancy centers in the neediest neighborhoods of Miami. Our first effort is in Hialeah, a neighborhood with seven abortion facilities. We hope to open around Mother’s Day.

What happens when a pregnant woman considering abortion sees an ultrasound of her baby?

The data suggests that about 75% of women who receive an ultrasound exam and a consultation with a medical professional during the critical weeks that they are considering abortion, will never have one. The ultrasound allows a woman to see her baby and hear the heartbeat. She finds new reserves of strength and faith that she did not know she had. Or the ultrasound scan reveals that a miscarriage is pending and she needs to do nothing. I have seen women come in to our pregnancy center determined to have an abortion and start weeping when they see their baby is dying from natural causes. The ultrasound is truth. When backed up by the love--the direct, neighbor-loving, problem-solving kind--women choose life. And by the time it all works out, many times, the baby ends up saving the mother’s life. In the outworking providence of God’s life-changing grace, this crisis is the pivotal point in coming to trust in Christ for the forgiveness of sins and for daily bread.

You've written about "abortion hot zones"--what does that mean, and where are they?

Abortion as a business, as a practice, is consolidating into our major cities and feeding off the minority populations which live there. And in particular, the highest concentrations appear to be in New York, L.A., Las Vegas, D.C., and Miami. That is why our defense of the innocents must go urban. The racial, theological, and political barriers between the Black and White Christian Church is significant and daunting. I tremble at the obstacles. Nonetheless, I have burned my ship on the shoreline of the city and am committed to learning my way forward.

Is it true that abortion providers are targeting minorities? If so, why?

One of the horrible effects of racism is targeted child-killing. As the Egyptians increased their oppression of the Israelites (Exodus 1:8) they not only instituted forced labor (1:14), they promoted child-killing (1:19) and eventually turned it into public policy (1:22). Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist and aimed her “birth control” squarely at the non-European races. Today, the overt racism of Planned Parenthood is gone, but the “de facto” element is very real. Just ask yourself where the push is on to open contracepting, abortion-referral offices in schools. Disproportionately they are set up for the “poor” as if there is a condom for the heart and child-killing is a God-honoring solution to poverty.

What is the biblical basis for evangelical action to end abortion?

My full answer is written in my book, Answering the Call (Focus on the Family, 2003). There I provide both the biblical foundation and bits of the inspiring history, from the first generation of the church onward, of the Church faithfully and ardently defending innocent human life.

But three Scriptures have formed the foundation of my thinking and action. First, Deuteronomy 21:1-9 teaches us how to respond to the shedding of innocent blood. The point is that we are to respond. We are not to have business as usual (which would mean we have made peace with death). God calls the leaders to lead (shocker!) in insuring that the whole town feels the loss; by shutting down business, gathering the community together on a prime piece of commercial property and with expensive stock and going through a ritual that re-gilds the human heart with a godly responsibility to protect human life. Their leaders prayed, “We did not shed this blood nor see it done” (1:7). Too many leaders are silent, leaving the church vulnerable to abortion and acting as if they are helpless to stop it. I see the expense and time and teaching involved in opening pregnancy centers as one clear testimony of God’s people feeling the loss of the innocents and responding according to the law of love.

That law is succinctly stated in Proverbs 24:10-12. “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter; If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?” I particularly love the fact that this calling has no context other than our rationalization to say, “I didn’t know.” This is the signal that not wanting to get involved is the sure sign that we should. God sees our intentional ignorance and avoidance and reminds us that faith, which boasts, “God is safeguarding my life” can risk and act courageously to defend the innocent when it is dangerous or unpopular to do so. If not, it is a puny faith.

One example of what faithfulness to Proverbs 24 looks like is in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which calls us to be a death-defying, life-saving people. In the context of abortion, that means drawing near to pregnant woman in turmoil, and making their problems, our problems. That is what compassion means. Just today I was on the phone with a Christian woman who is working with a 15-year-old girl in foster care, who is nearly 15 weeks pregnant. This teen is being pressed to abort by people who want her problem to go away in the simplest way. But loving this teen means intervening, looking at what this abortion will do to her young body and her psyche. If she aborts, she becomes vulnerable to further sexual exploitation and the lifestyle that will eventually destroying her. Loving her means helping her think and change and consider this event as the pivotal opportunity to change her life, trust in God, and prepare to parent or place for adoption. It is work! But it is the labor that neighborly love calls us to do!

Pro-life critics sometimes say that we only care about babies in the womb, but our concern ends when babies are born. Is there any truth to that? How do you respond?

It is the same charge made against the church that we care only for people’s soul’s and care little for their physical well-being. Since the hospital is an invention of the church (Basil of Caesarea), that alone should be enough to dismiss the charge. But it is made by those who actually dismiss the value of preborn children. Saving them is legitimate, even if that is all we did. After all, we don’t say to those who work with prisoners, “You only care about them when they are in prison, but not when they get out.” We don’t say to those engaged in feeding the starving, “You only care about their bellies. What about their housing needs!” Stopping babies from being violently killed is a legitimate work, by itself. But it never ends up being “by itself” any more than those who work with prisoners confine themselves to the prison. They often end up working with transitional ministries as well. And those ministries responding to starvation, do what they can to provide shelter and eventually education and micro-finance, etc. Every pregnancy center in the country, given the resources that it has, is seeking to help young mothers find the long-term help they need to parent well, or place for adoption. Most also work at prevention (abstinence education) and restoration (post-abortion ministries).

You've written an excellent exposition on The Great Work of the Gospel (Crossway, 2006). Another criticism of the pro-life movement is that it's "social gospel," and that instead we should just preach Christ and him crucified. In your mind, what's the connection between the gospel and working to end abortion?

It is no small lesson that that the great missionary, William Carey, who labored to bring the Gospel to India, who translated the Bible into three languages over 40 furlough-less years, and portions of the Bible into some 30 dialects, also labored to end child-killing in India. The prolife legislation that finally outlawed the practice of throwing babies into the Ganges River to be eaten by alligators is called Carey’s Edict. The Gospel saves the innocent and proclaims good news to the guilty. They are not at odds with each other or Christ would not have pointed to the Samaritan and said, “Go and do likewise.” When we preach Christ and him crucified, we are proclaiming the extreme end to which God proves his love of human life; body and soul. That is why when Amy Carmichael (again in India) rescued an innocent young girl from a cult temple of prostitution, her ministry was transformed. She soon was rescuing dozens of young girls, opening orphanages and schools, and her gospel message rang with authority to the glory of God. But prior to this, she was one fruitless missionary.

So if I am sitting in a café sharing the Gospel with a lost friend (soul), and a car accident outside leaves a baby and a mother pinned in a car (body), and I stay seated doing my evangelism (soul), my message is distorted and unconvincing. But if while rescuing the young mother and baby (body), the car blows up and I am killed by shrapnel (body), my guess is my lost friend will weigh my gospel (soul) with great care. It is sophistry to make it more complicated than that.

What can readers of this interview, who care about the cause of life, do to help?

Repent for navigating around death and pretending it is not happening in our homes and churches and neighborhoods. Then resolve to do something where you feel the pain and loss of the innocents in our midst. I think for most of us, and our churches, that means doing something sacrificially to support a pregnancy center. And if you don’t know of one, help me start them in Miami, then L.A., then D.C., etc.

What books do you have in the works?

My latest effort is coming out this spring from Crossway Books entitled, Doing Things Right In Matters of the Heart. I am really jazzed about it. It is my contribution to those looking for guidance in establishing an healthy, tender, long-term, mutually satisfying relationship.

Thank you for your time, John.

If the Lord is leading you to help support this ministry, you can visit this page.

Time Magazine: "Two companies—Care Net and Heartbeat International—serve three-fourths of the crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. Unknown and unaffiliated a few decades ago, such centers now outnumber abortion providers in the U.S."



Along with this graph, Time has produced a substantial, informative article about crisis pregnancy centers, entitled 1 Woman at a Time.

A couple of quotes:

"Hers is the new face of an old movement: kind, calm, nonjudgmental, a special-forces soldier in the abortion wars who is fighting her battles one conscience at a time."

"Much of the antiabortion movement remains focused on changing laws, tightening restrictions one by one, state by state. But Wood and her team talk of changing hearts. They are part of a whole other strategy that is more personal and more pastoral, although to some people it's every bit as controversial."

There is also some good material about the need for pro-life groups to use accurate information and righteous means in seeking to accomplish their goals. Jeff Hutchinson, senior pastor Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA), comes off very well in the article. Quote:

"I never would have said that the ends justify the means," he says. "But I know that was in my heart--if lying helps save a baby's life, that glorifies God." He has read some pregnancy-center brochures that he suspects are maybe shading the truth in the name of a larger good. "This whole process has reminded me that Jesus is not a Machiavellian," he says. "It really helps me trust the sovereignty of God. He's in control of who lives and dies. My effort is to serve folks, and the means I use matter. I have to glorify Jesus. The results are in God's hands."

Read the whole thing. And consider supporting organizations like CareNet and Heartbeat International.

Jonah Goldberg argues that after 9/11, conservatives now seem willing to do something once thought impossible: vote for a pro-choice candidate for president:

The war on terror . . . changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It's not that pro-lifers are less pro-life or that social conservatives are suddenly OK with homosexuality, gun control and other issues where Giuliani's dissent from mainstream conservative opinion would normally disqualify him. It's that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real. At conservative conferences, on blogs and on talk radio, pro-life issues have faded in their passion and intensity compared with the war on terror. Taken together, terrorism, Iraq and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue for conservative base of the party.

Note: I didn't say it's become the No. 1 foreign-policy or national-security issue for social conservatives. It's become the No. 1 social issue, at least for many of them.

Update: John Piper and Joe Carter have both explained why they are "single-issue voters."

Russell Moore writes that

Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, delivered the Norton Lectures at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary yesterday and today. The lectures dealt with issues ranging from embryo ethics to marriage to judicial usurpation of American democracy. The question and answer sessions were valuable as well with Professor George fielding and answering questions from Southern Seminary students on issues ranging from sexual morality to pastoral response to infertility.

You can access Professor George's three lectures online here.

I look forward to listening to these lectures. I've never heard Professor George lecture, but I have read some of his writings. He is among the most thoughtful and articulate public philosophers working today.