Introduction
John Pavlovitz, a blogger and alleged “pastor”, recently published a post criticizing his “white, conservative, Christian friends” for not being truly pro-life. I only label him an alleged “pastor” because I read a few more of his posts and found each one to be a heretical argument for removing whole parts of the Bible from Christian theology. This one is no exception, but that’s not really the issue with it.
This post, which I saw because it was shared on Facebook, interestingly takes a thousand words to say nothing more than what I see in a twenty-five word Facebook meme or this meme or this meme or this meme. If you don’t care about people post-birth, then you’re not really pro-life, and if you disagree with what progressives say about societal wrongs and their solutions, then you don’t actually care. There, I just wrote his entire post in thirty words.
Now, you may notice a lack of anything related to abortions in a post about pro-lifers. Alas, the only half-hearted mention comes in layers of cowardly euphemism to make the sentence, “I don’t celebrate when a woman terminates a pregnancy (I honestly don’t know anyone who does).” Great, so Pavlovitz doesn’t celebrate the murder of children. So? What’s that even supposed to mean? After being pressed in a short Twitter exchange we had, as seen in Figure 1, he declared that he is “personally against” abortion, but that doesn’t mean he believes that it falls within his “or anyone else’s jurisdiction.”
Figure 1: Twitter Exchange
This is such a cowardly position, but I realize it sadly isn’t fringe. As seen in Figure 2, Pew Research shows there is a wide denominational range of Christians, from 75% to 25% believing abortion to be morally wrong. According to the she same survey, the morally wrong to morally right ratio is 49%:15% for the US population as a whole; so it’s a reasonable assumption to say the overall ratio among Christians is likely much closer to the 75% than it is to the 25%.
Figure 2: Pew Research
With so many Christians morally opposed to abortions, why is the percent of Christians who say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases a whopping 51% compared to the 45% who say it should be legal in all or most cases? In short, because Christians are cowards.
The Position is, Itself, Cowardly
If you’re a Christian and if you’re opposed to abortion, there can be only one reason why: because you believe abortion is the murder of an innocent human being (not that that statement is, in any way, dependent upon your belief in it). So, if you are “personally opposed” to abortion, you are literally saying, “I’m not in favor of child murder, but I don’t think we should stop anyone from doing it.” I don’t think there can legitimately be a more cowardly position than that on any issue ever.
Too Cowardly to be Intellectually Consistent
Ah, you might say, but we should do what we can to stop abortion; it’s just that controlling women’s bodies doesn’t fall within the role of government. Interestingly, this is a position taken primarily by people who think we should have a bigger government and are in favor of the government doing more on behalf of the poor. Much of Pavlovitz’s article is about bigger government. I feel like this shouldn’t need to be said, but if your position on everything but abortion is that the government should be bigger, then you can’t proclaim yourself to be a champion on liberty for stating that “there’s simply no way to legislate individual’s bodies no matter how we feel.” By definition, bigger government equals less freedom. If you’re in favor of a bigger government, then you don’t get to use freedom in any way as your defense of the legalization of child murder.
Let’s pretend you skipped the latter part of that paragraph. You don’t see any contradiction between your support of bigger government and your opposition to abortion on the personal freedom grounds. Why do you believe the government should be bigger and do more? Obviously, the answer is because you see hurt in the nation, and you see the government as the most capable entity to alleviate that hurt. The most common argument I see in favor of the Food Stamp program is that 40% of the recipients are young children, with the implication that they would starve otherwise. So, to a person who believes that a mother’s body is outside the jurisdiction to save a child from murder, another person’s wallet is apparently not outside the jurisdiction to save a child from a potential starvation.
Additionally, why should a woman’s womb be outside governmental jurisdiction in stopping murder, but nothing else ever is? No one accepts murder when it occurs inside a private home, and the privacy of a home actually is constitutionally protected. The dependency on human care doesn’t decrease once a child is born, which is why some have started to argue that a parent should be free to kill their children up until the second birthday. If you truly believe abortion should be legal because it’s not your body, then you have to also believe that infanticide should be legal because it’s not your house.
Too Cowardly to be Challenged
Christians who defend the legality of abortion never seem to be brave enough to accept challenges to their viewpoint. Pavlovitz’s response to my questions was that we have different perspectives. That’s not valid. If you are arguing for the legality of child murder, and if you dismiss challenges to your argument as simply being a different belief, then you are a coward. And, when I say you are a coward, that is only because you are one of the slimiest weaklings ever to crawl the earth. Again, you are literally arguing for what you acknowledge is the legality of child massacre. I could understand that position if you were looking for ways around it, eager to be challenged and hoping to be convinced that your position is wrong because you reaaaaaally do not want to be on the side of murder. That would make sense. But, instead, you cop-out, not even trying in the slightest to reconcile your political views with stopping child murder and responding with annoyance at the hint that you should.
Conclusion
John Pavlovitz isn’t wrong when he says it takes more than being anti-abortion to be labeled pro-life. But, if you weasel your way out of your defense of the unborn and, instead, ignore their fate so you can focus on other causes, you miss the entire point of being pro-life. Pravlovitz ends his post declaring he defends all life equally. I really wish that were true. But he doesn’t because that would require courage. See, it takes no courage to write or share a thousand-word blog post saying literally what a half dozen liberal Facebook memes say. What courage is there in conforming to the standards set by the secular American progressives (otherwise known as the world)? No, the real courage would be to fight for the “least of these” despite whatever people say about or to you, to not cower when pressed on the issue. There are worse things than being labeled a hateful conservative—and, in any way defending the heinous action of child murder is far worse.
Engineering Thoughts 