Abortion and Christians

 

Isn’t it amazing how the world can change in just a couple months? Conservative politicians found ways to pass laws that seemed to contradict the Roe V. Wade doctrine. They used their political power to put biased judges into what was previously seen as a bastion of apolitical neutrality, the Supreme Court. The Court overturned Roe V. Wade. Hundreds of thousands of voters began protesting the loss of their ‘rights’ and began threatening to vote those politicians out of office. So now many of those same politicians, who claimed they were only doing the 'Christian' thing, are back-pedaling, changing their stance on abortion, and trying to distance themselves from the Roe V. Wade fallout they instigated.

This is not a discussion of the pro-life/pro-choice debate. That discussion is purely political, not biblical. I want no part of it, no matter how loudly politicians try to attach ‘Christianity’ to it.

The word ‘abortion’ is in the Bible, but not in its 21^st century meaning. In English Bibles that translate the Hebrew word shakhal as abortion, the context makes clear it would more accurately be translated ‘miscarriage’: that is, an accidental, unwanted loss of a pregnancy, not a purposeful termination of one.

The Bible does not say, ‘Thou shalt not commit abortion.’ But neither does it say that until childbirth a pregnant woman has complete autonomy over her body, including the fetus she’s carrying.

So does that mean the Bible is silent on the subject of terminating pregnancies? Not at all. Let’s take a look at what the Bible does say about pregnancy and childbirth and see what principles it contains.  

The very first childbirth mentioned in the Bible is that of Cain. On that occasion Eve remarked, “I have acquired a man with the help of Jehovah.” (Genesis 4:1) The statement is misleading: Eve no longer had a relationship with Jehovah. It’s not impossible that she was crediting the miracle of birth to Jehovah even though she was no longer in His favor. Or, it being probably the most pain she or Adam had ever experienced, she may have been crediting Jehovah with keeping her alive through the ordeal. Far more likely, however, is that she believed (based on Genesis 3:15) that this man-child would be the savior who would get them out of this mess they’d gotten themselves into. She was (not surprisingly) wrong about that. But that attitude – that somehow the next child born would be the one to fix Adam and Eve’s colossal mistake – persisted throughout the Bible.

Among Israelite mothers bearing a child was a sacred experience; being barren was viewed as a curse. Pregnancies were a blessing. Harming a pregnancy was a crime, potentially a capital crime. (Exodus 21:22-25)

Children are consistently described as ‘an inheritance’, ‘a gift’, ‘a favor’, from God - by those in an approved relationship with the God of the Bible. However, we also read in the Bible about those with a different view.

People who abandoned Jehovah and turned to worshiping pagan gods such as Molech would voluntarily toss their infants into the burning lap of a huge metal image of that cow-headed monstrosity. (Jeremiah 32:35) I cannot imagine how parents who loved their children did so. I suspect that most of those pagans who practiced this secretly viewed those babies as an inconvenience.

If the Bible contained a “Thou Shalt Not...” for every possible scenario it be would useless. It would be so long that it wouldn’t fit on any library shelf in the world. More than that, would a list of thou-shalt-nots really draw you closer to God? There’s a story that as his death was approaching, comedian W. C. Fields was seen reading the Bible. When asked what he was looking for so late in his life, his reply was, “Loopholes.”

If you approach the Bible with an open mind and the intent to find out how to be acceptable to God, you’ll find principles that you can apply in every situation. The principles make clear that God views life as a gift and children as an inheritance. 

I hesitate to think what He views politicians as.

For Part One of this column, click here. Feel free to leave a polite comment. Comments are monitored, so don't waste your time posting spam or other detritus. 

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.

Does a fetus have human rights?

 

Today I learned something new: A human being is not the same thing as a human person. Seriously.

This column is not intended to be a political statement. I’m neither Republican nor Democrat. I am assiduously neutral as to politics. 

The Supreme Court, I’ve discovered, is not. Their decision to end Roe v. Wade had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with their respect for life.  If they respected life they would not have ruled, in the same week, that state laws restricting guns are unconstitutional.

But the Roe v. Wade decision created such a furor in the news I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Surely, in this scientific age, the legal status of a fetus has been well established?’

Apparently not.

Scientifically, a human being is an individual of any size or age with 46 chromosomes. When 23 male chromosomes in a human sperm cell unite with 23 female chromosomes in a human ovum, within 24 hours a human being comes into existence. It is unique, different from both its mother and its father. It will remain a unique, individual human being until the day it dies, and neither scientists nor lawyers debate that.

It is first dubbed a zygote, then a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus. But all its genetic details, from hair color to eye color to male or female gender – even some thought processes – are written down in its DNA from Day One. While it draws nutrients from its mother, Science acknowledges that its growth is governed and controlled, not by its mother’s body, but by its own DNA. It is a unique human being.

The loud chant that is heard at every women’s rights protest, “MY body, MY choice!” is just not scientifically accurate. After Day One, that blastocyst is its own body, living within hers. It is more separate from her body than if she had a conjoined twin.

This is a medical opinion, not a religious one. Dr. Herbert Ratner wrote that "It is now of unquestionable certainty that a human being comes into existence precisely at the moment when the sperm combines with the egg." Dr. Bradley M. Patten from the University of Michigan wrote in Human Embryology that the union of the sperm and the ovum "initiates the life of a new individual." And John L. Merritt, MD and his son J. Lawrence Meritt II, MD, present the idea that if "the breath of life [referenced at Genesis 2:7] is oxygen, then a blastocyst starts taking in the breath of life from the mother's blood the moment it successfully implants in her womb.”

When a fertility clinic fertilizes several eggs they are all, scientifically, human beings. The one that gets implanted into a womb may well grow. At some point in its growth it will obtain the status of human person. The legal and medical status of the other fertilized eggs? Human beings, but not human persons.

Many human beings die before their mothers even know they exist. About 1/3 of all zygotes don’t last more than a few days; of those that reach blastocyst stage roughly half fail to implant on the uterine wall. But if one does implant it become an embryo, and by week 11, a fetus.

Some are lost for no reason. Some are lost because of something in the mother’s diet or water or air or activities, or some complete mystery that happens to her, without any knowledge on her part. Others are lost because the mother suspects or knows she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be, and she takes some action that results in the death of the human being growing inside her.

If a fetus had human rights, at some point her intentional actions would become no different than those of a criminal whose assault of a pregnant woman results in the termination of her pregnancy – the criminal can be charged under the federal “Unborn Victims of Violence act” (H.R. 503, 2001). If the fetus has no human rights, how can a criminal be charged with harming it?

At what point does a human being become a human person?

Some argue that taking the first breath makes a being a person; others say No, personhood starts with brain activity; still others create philosophical lines between ‘potential human’ and ‘human person’.

The doctors cited above made clear that breathing isn’t the start: a blastocyst is taking in the breath of life from its mother’s bloodstream.

The brain activity camp doesn’t have a decent argument, either: If a fetus doesn’t become a person until it has “rational attributes” as they contend – a sense of self, the ability to interact intelligently with the external world – then  there are an enormous number of already-born folks – from brain damaged to severely autistic to Alzheimer’s victims, and others – who could be labeled non-persons, having no life rights, because of having lost their rational attributes. Most infants, for that matter, don’t have a ‘sense of self’ separate from their mothers prior to two years of age. That’s what the ‘terrible twos’ is all about... a baby’s discovery of itself as an individual. If that definition were correct, no one could be charged with a crime for throwing a teething baby in the garbage!

Feminist professor Mary Anne Warren asserts that a fetus has no rights. “There is only room for one person with rights within a single human skin,” she says. Hmmm.. I have to come back to the "conjoined twins" argument again.

Militant abortion rights activist Peter Singer, director of the grossly misnamed Center for Human Values at Princeton University, goes beyond even Ms. Warren. He says that dogs, pigs, apes, monkeys and other creatures may be persons; but that some human beings, including fetuses, disabled human adults, and even normal human babies who haven’t yet demonstrated a sense of self, should not automatically  be considered persons. An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012 quoted several other medical authorities holding the same opinion, some suggesting that defective babies could be used for medical experimentation or organ harvesting.

Speaking on the subject of babies born as they were about to be aborted, (something, again, I hadn’t thought about before sitting down to write this but that is apparently quite common) Singer defended infanticide. "We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. If… the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either."

Medical science has reached the point where 60-70% of preemies born at 24 weeks survive. According to Singer, nothing should be done to keep those kids alive.

Regular readers of this column know my beliefs are not based on which way the wind of human thought is blowing, but on what the Bible says about a subject. Does the Bible have anything to say about abortion? Are Christians anti-abortion? Are anti-abortionists Christian?

It’s going to require a Part Two to deal with all that.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com

Are we witnessing the beginning of World War Three?

 

My whole life, World War 3 was an expression, like “finer than frog hair” or “scarcer than hen’s teeth’. It wasn’t a reality. It didn’t have any actual meaning.

Albert Einstein famously said, “I don’t know what weapons will be used in World War 3, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.”

But what if Einstein was wrong?

Honestly, “WWIII” always meant some awful future that no one wanted to believe would happen: an exchange of nuclear missiles between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. It was believed that, once one nuclear missile was launched, all of them, in every country that had them, would be launched, leading to total global annihilation. We learned expressions like “nuclear winter,” and “mutually assured destruction.” Surely no one would actually do that.

The way we dealt with that unimaginable threat was to move it, in our minds, to the level of a nightmare, a fantasy, and finally to several Hollywood storylines, which only went to show that it was unthinkable. There surely would never be a World War 3. And when the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves, ‘See? Nothing to worry about.’

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it minimizes the millions of lives lost and the massive destruction that has happened over and over again since the end of WWII in places like Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Grenada, the Falkland Islands, Kenya, Cyprus, Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Congo... ‘At least it wasn’t World War 3, right?’

Winston Churchill and other notables have said, ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’ Putin and I are the same age, so I know he remembers Winston Churchill. But neither of us was alive when Hitler was more than ink on the pages of a history book.

World War I wasn’t called that while it was going on. Initially, it was it was simply called “the July Crisis.” But then other players joined; Russia threw its weight behind Serbia, prompting Germany to back Austria-Hungary, which caused Britain and France to join the Serbs and Russians against the Germans. By the end of 1914, it was being called the World War.You can read a column I wrote about the Church's involvement in WWI here.

When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, no one immediately announced WWII. A week later, when Time magazine used the term ‘World War II’, it was in a speculative sense, similar to the way I used the term WWIII in my headline. But it caught on.

So far in the current crisis, Putin has thrown a significant military attack at Ukraine, killing thousands, similar to how Hitler threw his “blitzkrieg” (lightning attack) at Poland. Ukraine’s president Zelensky has warned that if Ukraine falls, Putin will push into Poland, Moldova, Finland, Sweden and Norway, as well as points south. Turkey must know it is a desirable target as well because of its control of access into and out of the Black Sea. Talking heads have opined that Putin won’t resort to nukes unless he feels that an enemy invasion onto Russian soil threatens Russia’s “soul”, its identity as a nation. And it’s not World War 3 unless it goes nuclear, right? I mean, right?

The majority of the world’s governments have strongly condemned the attack on Ukraine. They are sending money and weapons to Ukraine, freezing Russian assets, squeezing off shipments of goods into Russia, and refusing to buy good from Russia. As I noted in my previous column, Russia was voted out of the Human Rights council at the U.N., and some nations have called for Russia's removal from the Security Council. On the other hand, Russia does have some allies in Belarus, Armenia, Iran and Syria, who might back Putin's push into other countries.

At what point would we start calling in World War Three?

If you’ve read this column before, you know the focus is, not simply world events, but how those world events fulfill Bible prophecy. Does the current situation have anything to do with Bible prophecy?

Jesus foretold as part of his sign of “the last days” that people would see wars. ‘So what,’ you may say. ‘There have always been wars.’ True. But notice how he worded it in Matthew 24:6. “You will continually hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end of the age.” (Amplified Bible)

There were wars in Jesus’ day. He knew there would continue to be wars until the ‘end of the age.’ That’s why he gave a multi-part sign. He continued in verse 7: “For nation shall be roused up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.” (Haweis NT) These have been dubbed ‘the Big Four’ features of the sign of the last days: war, famine, pestilences (like the pandemic) and earthquakes. 

The huge war between England and France in the early 1800s had many believing they were seeing the Big Four. It drew in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and America. Accompanying the war was famine as farmers became soldiers and fields were left uncultivated, and soldiers stripped the foodstuffs from the countries they ravaged. Pestilence rose in the form of widespread diseases among the soldiers in the camps on both sides and quickly spread to nearby civilians. There was even an earthquake in Crete that killed 2,000 people. But Bible scholars knew something was still missing.

In Matthew 24:14 Jesus added one more detail to watch for: “This good news of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end of the age will come.” John Calvin who lived in a turbulent time in the 1500s wrote that “to this day not even the slightest report concerning Christ has reached the Antipodes [what came to be called Australia] and other very distant nations.” Matthew Poole, a Bible commentator who wrote in the late 1600’s, recognized that ‘all nations’ meant the entire earth.  “Though the Holy Scriptures, and ecclesiastical historians, give us a somewhat large account of the gospel being preached in Europe, Asia, and in Africa, yet we have little account from any of them of its being preached in America.” In 1706, Matthew Henry wrote, “The gospel shall be preached, and that work carried on ...so that all nations, first or last, shall have either the enjoyment, or the refusal, of the gospel.” In the mid-1850s commentator Campbell Morgan wrote: “Some claim that this has already been done, and that therefore the end of the age is necessarily close at hand. This conclusion is open to grave doubt.”

Is there still ‘grave doubt’? In the century-and-a-half since Morgan’s time, the good news has literally reached every nation. The Bible is the most widely translated book in the world by a huge margin. The most widely translated website on the internet is jw.org, whose entire mission is the preaching of the good news.  

Another reason to give thought to World War 3: serious students of the Bible are watching for the fulfillment of Paul’s words at 1 Thessalonians 5:3. “For when they shall say: Peace and tranquility; then sudden destruction will come upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”

The greatest cry of peace in recent history was the end of World War 2. And that wasn’t the fulfillment of 1 Thessalonians 5:3, since the end didn't happen afterward. Perhaps because Matthew 24:14 had yet to be fulfilled. But that is no longer the case.

If this war in Ukraine becomes anything like World War 3, would the announcement of its end be the expected cry of peace?

Time will tell.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com

Is the United Nations about to make history?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are no doubt aware that Russia declared war on and began a military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The Ukraine ambassador to the U.N. was speaking as news of the assault began coming in. In his comments, which were overruled by the current president of the Security Council, (the ambassador from Russia) he raised a simple question:

Is Russia a legitimate member of the Security Council? Could someone please show him the legal paperwork establishing them in that seat?

Some background is in order. The United Nations consists of two main bodies. The General Assembly has a delegate from each member nation, currently comprising 193. It has been dubbed ‘the world’s greatest debating society’, since none of their words are binding on anyone. They can’t send an army anywhere. Even if they all agree that one of their fellow members has done something horrible, all they can do is wag their finger at them.

The other body of the U.N. is the Security Council, made up of just 15 members. The Security Council can take action. Its stated mission is to establish international peace and security. It can enact sanctions, admit or remove members, and initiate military action. It has access to armies.

Over the years the Security Council has initiated peacekeeping (military) actions in Korea, Congo, Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, and the Sinai Peninsula. 

Far more actions were proposed, but one key feature of the Security Council has most frequently resulted in inactivity: Each permanent member has veto power. So actions or sanctions proposed, for example, by the United States, were usually vetoed by the U.S.S.R., and vice versa.

10 of the seats on the Security Council are filled by members serving 2-year terms, after which they are replaced by other members. The current non-permanent members include Mexico, Kenya, Ireland, and others. But 5 of the seats are filled by permanent members, established as such in the initial U.N. charter in 1945: The United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the U.S.S.R. No, I do not mean Russia – I mean the U.S.S.R, which ceased to exist in 1991.

This is not just semantics. Notice that ‘China’ is also one of the permanent members, yet the China that is on the Security Council today is not the same China that was given the seat in 1945. That Republic of China now resides on the island of Taiwan, where they fled after the communist uprising in China led to a civil war. Their seat was given, after a lot of legal maneuvering, voting, and paperwork, to the People’s Republic of China – the communist government of mainland China – in 1971.  

There was no legal maneuvering or paperwork filed when Yeltsin’s Russian government sat down in the Security Council seat vacated by the Soviet Union. And that oversight has been ignored for 30 years.

So what? Well, what if the member countries of the U.N. were to decide it is in their best interests to remove Russia from the Security Council? For the first time in its existence, the United Nations might find that it has “teeth”. It could take action, especially military action, without its every potential move being vetoed.

That would be significant to Christians. Serious Bible students see the U.N. as the fulfillment of the scarlet-colored beast described in Revelation chapter 17. Verse 13 of that chapter foretells that the member nations will “give their power and authority to the wild beast” for a short time right before the end of this system.

Taking away veto power from one of the belligerent countries, thus making the U.N. more effective, would certainly give the beast more power and authority.

It could even result in people worldwide finally proclaiming “Peace and Security!” (1 Thessalonians 5:3)

Please feel free to leave a polite comment. To read my earlier columns about the U.N. click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com