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THREE CASE STUDIES ON THE 28TH ANNIVERSARY OF ROE VS. WADE
WITH AN APPENDIX ON EXODUS 21:22-25
Based on a sermon given 7 January 2001 at Liberty Presbyterian Church, Sylvania, Georgia
The Christmas carols about Jesus' birth remind us that Mary was poor, pregnant, unwed, and that Joseph was getting ready to break off the engagement because her baby was not his. Many in our day and age would have encouraged Mary to get an abortion. The reason is that this month is the 28th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's ruling legalizing abortion. Over these 28 years, about 37 million babies have been killed - compare that with the 1.1 million killed in all American wars. And the idea that abortion is right is becoming ingrained in our society. Nevertheless this topic has remained a "hot button" issue because the fetus is a human person from both a scientific viewpoint and a Biblical one. Let me explain:
In a court in Tennessee concerning a husband-and -wife dispute over their frozen embryos, one of the foremost DNA scientists in the world testified that the embryos each became unique human beings as soon as the man's DNA joined with the woman's DNA. Imagine that - a bunch of fertilized eggs,all from the same parents, and yet each one would grow to be a different human being. That establishes the scientific viewpoint that the fetus is human. (For more on this click here).
The Biblical viewpoint is given in Psalm 139:13-16:
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Thus the fetus is human, both scientifically and Biblically, and therefore abortion is wrong. In spite of this, we hear all manner of hypothetical arguments for abortion. One is that the fetus is part of the woman - but roughly half of them are males, so that cannot be. I will address some of the arguments for abortion that hit closer to home, such as rape situations or where the life of the mother is in danger.
In the rape situation, the number of abortions is actually very small because often there is no offspring. Nevertheless, there are some babies conceived from this violent act. The child is innocent, and the father is the criminal, so why punish the baby? Here is a true-life case study that addresses the rape question:
A Rape Case: The story of Melanie and Grace
Melaine, a beautiful 18-year old, devoutly Christian girl, was brutally assaulted and raped. Her faith was shaken. She had kept herself pure for God - why would He allow something like that to happen to one of His children? She had been raised believing God was loving and sovereign. Then she discovered she was pregnant as a result of the assault - she became mad at God. Why had He let the rape happen, and then the pregnancy on top of it? She had Christian friends and family members who were pro-life, but they all advised her to have an abortion in her situation.
However, she also sought counsel from Andy Merritt, the Assistant Pastor at Edgewood Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia. He had no answers for her, except that God did allow it to happen, and that abortion was not the answer. She told him that she had decided to have the abortion anyway. He pleaded with her not to do anything immediately, but to come back a few days later to talk with him again. She agreed to delay the abortion.
When the day approached, Andy still had no answers for Melanie. In his office, he fell on his face before God. The Lord spoke to him and said to tell her about Joseph. "The story of Joseph!? That can't be right," he blurted out. The Lord replied "Do you have a better idea?" Of course Andy had no idea at all what to say to her. So he agreed to tell her about Joseph, and how God took gross injustice and turned it to good. As he spoke to her, God poured out His grace in abundance upon Melanie. She listened to the story of Joseph's suffering, his being sold into slavery by his brothers, being imprisoned on a false rape charge, and yet God used that to save many lives. Her attitude changed and she agreed not to have the abortion.
As her pregnancy progressed, God continued to pour out His grace and love on her. It was visible to all who knew her. She carried her baby to term, and delivered a gorgeous healthy little girl, whom she named Grace.
Melanie is now married to a fine, Christian young man. She and Grace remain a testimony to God's amazing grace. Not long ago the two of them were on the cover of a Christian magazine, Missions, USA, a lovely mother-daughter photograph that was the direct result of the amazing grace of God sustaining a very young, very devastated girl.
We also have a true-life story for the situation in which the mother's life was in danger:
From the ninth book in the Christmas in My Heart series:(1)
This remarkable true story is told by a respected physician, Joseph McDougall, who practiced in the Canadian Maritime Provinces in the last half of the 20th century. Here is his story:
"Finally, one day that December, I had to tell her. Medically, we were beaten. The decision lay with God. She took it quietly, lying there, wasting away, only 23, and the mother of a year-old child. Eleanor Munro (the name has been changed) was a devout and courageous woman. She had red hair and had probably been rather pretty, but it was hard to tell anymore, she was that near to death from tuberculosis. She knew it now, she accepted it, and just asked for one thing.
"If I'm still alive on Christmas Eve," she said slowly, "I would like your promise that I can go home for Christmas."
It disturbed me. I knew she shouldn't go. The lower lobe of her right lung had a growing tubercular cavity in it, roughly one inch in diameter. She had what the doctors call open TB, and could spread the germs by coughing. But I made the promise and, frankly, I did so because I was sure she'd be dead before Christmas Eve. In the circumstances, it seemed little enough to do. And if I hadn't made it, I wouldn't be telling this story now.
Eleanor's husband had the disease when he returned to Nova Scotia from overseas service in World War II. It was a mild case and he didn't know he had it. Before it was detected and checked, they married. She caught the disease and had little immunity against it. It came on so fast and lodged in such a difficult place that it confounded every doctor who tried to help her.
To have a tubercular cavity in the lower lobe is rare. When they took her to the provincial sanitarium in Kentville, it quickly became obvious that the main problem was how to get at it. If it had been in the upper lobe, they could have performed an operation called thoracoplasty, which involves taking out some of the upper ribs to collapse the lobe, and put that area of the lung at rest. Unfortunately, this operation couldn't be used for the lower lobe because it would have meant removing some of the lower ribs, which her body needed for support, and in any case probably would not collapse the cavity. With thoracoplasty ruled out, they tried a process called artificial pneumothorax, which employs needles to pump in air to force collapse of the lung through pressure. Although several attempts were made, this process didn't work because previous bouts of pleurisy had stuck the lung to the chest wall, and the air couldn't circulate.
Finally they considered a then-rare surgical procedure called pneumonectomy - taking out the entire lung - but rejected it because she was too sick to withstand surgery, and steadily getting worse. Their alternatives exhausted, they reluctantly listed her as a hopeless case and sent her back to her home hospital in Antigonish.
I was 31 then and I hadn't been there very long when she arrived. I graduated from Dalhousie University's medical school in 1942, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, and then completed my training as an anesthetist in Montreal once the war was over. A native of Sydney, Nova Scotia, I accepted a position with St. Martha's Hospital in Antigonish. I was to provide an anesthesia service and take care of the medical needs of the students at two local colleges. I was also asked to look after a small TB annex at the hospital, a place for about 40 patients, most of them chronics with little or no hope of being cured. That's how Eleanor Munro came to be my patient in 1947.
She had weighed 125 pounds. She was down to 87 the first time I saw her. Her fever was high, fluctuating between 101 and 103 degrees. She was, and looked, very toxic. But she could still smile. That, I'll always remember. If you did her the slightest kindness, she'd smile.
Maybe that encouraged me. I don't know. But I did now then that I had to try to help her.
I first called Dr. I Rabinovitch in Montreal because he was a top expert on the use of the then-new drug streptomycin. Early information was that, in certain circumstances, it might help cure TB. Dr. Rabinovitch told me the drug wasn't available. When I described the case, he said he would advise against its use anyway. I then phoned a doctor in New York who was experimenting with a procedure called pneumoperitoneum.
Pneumoperitoneum consists of injecting needles into the peritoneal cavity to force in air and push the diaphragm up against the lung. If we could get pressure against that lower lobe, we could hope to force the TB cavity shut. If we could do that, nature would have a chance to close and heal the cavity by letting the sides grow together.
At the hospital, we considered the risks and decided we had to face them. The operation took place the day after my phone call. We pumped air into the peritoneal cavity, but it nearly killed her. It was obvious that the amount of air she could tolerate could in no way help. Every doctor in the room agreed we shouldn't try a second time. We were licked.
It was then that I told her medical science had gone as far as it could go. I explained why in detail and she appreciated it. She listened with a quiet dignity and an amazing resignation. I told her that her Creator now had the final verdict and that it would not necessarily be what either of us wanted, but would be the best for her under the circumstances. She nodded, and then exacted from me that promise.
Amazingly, she was still alive on Christmas Eve, but just barely. The cavity was still growing, and her condition was still worsening. But she held me to my promise and, with renewed doubts, I kept it. I told her not to hold her child and to wear a surgical mask if she was talking to anyone but her husband. His own case had given him immunity.
She promised and off she went by ambulance, wearing that smile I can't forget.
She came back to St. Martha's late Christmas Day, and she kept ebbing. No one could have watched her struggle without being deeply moved. Every day her condition grew just a bit worse, yet every day she clung to life. It went on, to our continued amazement, for weeks.
Toward the end of February she was down to or below 80 pounds; she couldn't eat - and new complications developed. She became nauseous, began to retch and vomit even without food in her stomach. I was stumped. I called in a senior medical consultant and when he examined her he was stumped too. But with a grin, almost facetiously, he asked me if I thought she could be pregnant.
I can still remember exactly how I felt: the suggestion was utterly ridiculous. Everything I knew about medicine added up to one conclusion: she was so ill, so weak that she couldn't possibly have conceived. Her body just wasn't up to it. Nevertheless I did take a pregnancy test - and to my astonishment it was positive. On the very outer frontier of life itself she now bore a second life within her. It was about as close to the impossible as you're ever likely to get, but it was true.
When I told her she smiled and sort of blushed.
Legally, medically, we could have aborted that child because it imperiled a life that was already in jeopardy. At that time TB was the No. 1 medical reason for aborting. But we didn't do it. The patient and her husband were against it. We doctors at St. Martha's were against it, not only on religious grounds, but because we were certain the operation would kill her. Besides, she was so far gone, we were sure her body would reject the child anyway.
So we fed her intravenously, and watched her fight to sustain two lives in a body in which only some remarkable strength of character or divine intervention had allowed her to sustain even one.
The struggle went on for weeks, and never once did we alter our conviction that she was dying. And she kept her child. And then an incredible thing began to happen. By late March 1948, I was confounded to find her temperature beginning to go down. For the first time we noted some improvement in her condition, and the improvement continued. She began to eat, and to gain weight. A chest x-ray showed that the growth of the TB cavity had stopped. Not long after, another x-ray showed that the diaphragm was pushing up against the lower lobe of her diseased lung to make room for the child she bore. Nature was doing exactly what we'd failed to do with pneumoperitoneum: it was pressing the sides of that deadly hole together. The child was saving the mother! The child did save her. By the time it was born, a normal healthy baby, the TB cavity was closed. The mother was markedly better, so much better that we let her go home for good within a few months. Her smile had never been brighter.
I still find it hard to believe, . . .. The child didn't destroy its mother. It saved her."
Finally, we have a case study that shows us one thing that this small church can do, and that is to pray:
Miracle in Buffalo(2)
It was a typical freezing January day in Buffalo, New York, where the average temperature during that month is 31 degrees and the average snow fall is 23 inches. About 100 people had gathered outside an abortion clinic to pray, picket and distribute literature. God had led Pastor Johnny Hunter to head up this effort.
The question to Hunter was, what would please God? A sermon on the wise men visiting Jesus, a Christmas cantata, or picketing an abortion clinic? Pastor Hunter knew what the answer was because his wife had just been arrested at the clinic. "As we began to pray," Hunter recalls, "God spoke to my spirit. He said, `Just pray.'" Hunter instructed the crowd that there would be no signs, no picketing, no slowing down cars to distribute literature, only praying.
The pastor said the Christians fell on their faces in the snow praying, "Oh, God, please don't let anyone come get an abortion." But women came anyway. Then they prayed that at least one woman would come out of the clinic without an abortion. But no one came out, except clinic workers who mocked the praying Christians.
"Then we prayed, `Oh, God please don't let the abortionist show up today,'" he said. But the doctor arrived. "I felt a little defeated that day, but I knew we had done what God said," Hunter confessed.
A year later he would learn the impact of their prayers: "We were at that same clinic when a lady brought her little baby by. She told me the child had been saved from an abortion at the clinic a year earlier." The lady recalled the cold January day a year earlier when Hunter and his friends had been praying outside in the snow. But on the inside of the clinic 24 women waited for an abortion. Then somebody's baby began to move in the womb. Then another lady's baby kicked. Then another and another. "Many grabbed our bellies and cried, `O child, we promise not to hurt you,'" the mother told Hunter. Although clinic workers asked the women to stay in the waiting room for three more hours until the protesters were gone, no babies were killed that day.
Because of this last case study, I ask that this church pray and remain in prayer that God will continue to stir babies in mothers' wombs, and to use other means to stop abortions. Also, pray that President Bush will appoint pro-life judges to the Supreme Court and that we can begin reversing Roe vs. Wade.
References
1. From James Dobson's Focus on the Family Newsletter, December, 2000.
2. From The American Family Association Journal, January 2000, p. 5.
APPENDIX
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL BIBLE PASSAGE PERTAINING TO ABORTION:
A COMMENT ON EXODUS 21:22-25
The Misleading Translations
At the time of Roe vs. Wade (1973) many Christians were confused on the subject of abortion because of the way some versions at that time translated Exodus 21:22-25. The Living Bible and Good News for Modern Man were similar to The New American Standard (NAS):
"And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that she has a miscarriage, and yet no harm follow: he shall surely be fined, according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges (determine) . And if harm follows, then you shall give life for life."
The King James Version is not clear, but gets closer to the true meaning:
"If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart (from her), and yet no mischief follow: he shall surely be punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges (deter mine). And if (any) mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life."
These translations imply that abortion is not murder, because the person causing the miscarriage is only fined and not put to death. This is not correct, but even if it were, the application to abortion is still difficult, because the fine, which apparently could be large, is foraccidentally causing the miscarriage. The parallel here is manslaughter. What would be the penalty if this action were deliberate, as it is in an abortion? The penalty could be life for life. The parallel here is premeditated murder. In this case, abortion would still be horribly wrong and the people involved in it are murders.
The Correct Translation
The correct translation of the "controversial" Exodus passage can be found in the New International Version:
"If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender
must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court (allows). But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life."
In this translation it is clear that the fine is only for causing premature birth and that if the baby is killed in the womb, it is murder. So abortion is very wrong.
The Exegesis
The italics in the above quotations are the key parts of the confusion in translations. The italics correspond to the Hebrew in the text which is based on the words "yasa" and "yeled." This section could also be translated her offspring goes out/comes forth,(1)
and definitely refers to premature birth. This passage is not referring to a miscarriage since that word is "sakal" and is used and translated that way in Genesis 31:38, Exodus 23:26, Job 21:10, and Hosea 9:14.
The above exegesis is supported historically by several different commentators. In the sixteenth century, John Calvin, commenting on this passage, wrote that: "The foetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being." He further commented that abortion
is a terrible murder: "If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus in the womb. . . .(2)
The nineteenth century commentators Keil and Delitzsch, say, concerning this passage, that "A fine is imposed, because even if no injury had been done to the woman and the fruit of her womb, such a blow might have endangered life." But if there is injury to the mother or child, then the law of retribution applies.(3)
Many other commentators could be quoted. I will just present one more, this from the twentieth century. John Hannah states that "the unborn fetus is viewed in this passage as just as much a human being as its mother; the abortion of a fetus was considered murder."(4)
References
1. 1.This translation is according to Rev. Jim Hope, pastor of Liberty Presbyterian Church, Sylvania, Georgia, in a 28 January 2001 sermon. This topic was similarly addressed by Chris Hutchinson in a 21 January 2001 sermon at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Statesboro, Georgia.
2. 2.John Calvin, Comentaries on the Last Four Books of Moses, vol. 3, trans. C.W. Bingham (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, reprinted 1979) pp. 41-2. As reported in P. Baines, Open Your Mouth for the Dumb (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1984) pp. 17, 30.
3. 3.C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996; reprinted from 1866-91) p. 409.
4. 4.John B. Hannah of the Dallas Seminary Faculty, "Exodus," The Bible Knowledge Commentary, Old Testament, J.F. Walvoord and R.B. Zuck, eds. (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1978/1985) p. 141.
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