Toronto March for LifeFor every person who truly believes that North America’s status quo of abortion on demand is the systematic decapitating, dismembering, and disembowelling of thousands of pre-born children every single day, I challenge you to ask yourself two questions that should change your life. First: What am I doing to fight this injustice? And second: What response does this injustice demand of me?
I ask these questions for a very simple reason: Abortion is happening with the widespread permission of Christian churches and all those who take upon themselves the moniker “pro-life.” A recent challenge by pro-life activist Rolley Haggard to evangelical churches entitled “Louder than the ‘Silent Scream’: The Deafening Silence of Our Pulpits” met with crickets and a few awkward coughs. One Catholic pro-life activist told me that, “St. Ignatius of Loyola said ‘A discerning person has to be a contemplative-in-action.’ It seems to me like many Catholics these days are all contemplation and no action. This is what is filling our streets with blood of pre-born children.”
When recruiting activists to the pro-life cause, this is one of the immensely frustrating things that can happen. People will see the reality of abortion, become convicted of their responsibility to do something about it, and immediately lapse into an interminable period of “finding their calling,” “discerning,” or a variety of other costly delays. And when I say costly, I mean that the pro-life movement needs people to confront the culture and save babies, and they need them now. The hourglass is dripping drops of blood. Think I’m being a bit extreme? Click here.
We know how to end abortion, and we know it’s not easy. However, what makes it more difficult is when Christian churches that have traditionally stood up against injustice and have an imminent duty to do so now are more likely to tell someone how they can be forgiven for aborting their children than they are to warn them against killing babies in the first place. Many echo the sentiment of evangelical leader Rick Warren, who has said that he’s pro-life, but not “rabid” about the issue (in other words, “lukewarm.”) As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.” Or as P.C. Hodgell noted, “That which can be destroyed by Truth, should be.”
I could belabour the point. But instead, I ask you to mentally sift through your dreams, ambitions, and goals. Then I ask you to consider carefully the millions of tiny lives snuffed out before they had the chance to even conceptualize those things. The combined weight of their fragile, shattered corpses should press down upon your conscience unbearably. We can do nothing for those who have already been suctioned into eternity. However, the killing centres are open today, and they will open tomorrow. The abortion business will continue to go an as usual, until you decide to do something unfortunately unusual: Fight it. And fight it effectively.
Joseph Lapsely Foreman wrote in his book Shattering the Darkness that, “We will never transform our culture by politicking for a surface change in the law. Change will only come from the example of Christians who are not afraid to live what they believe—who would rather lose every church, house, and job they have than to go down in history as the Christians who presided over the greatest human carnage in the history of the world. Such Christians will never prefer to rescue their things instead of their neighbors.”
I repeat: What response does this injustice demand of you? And as Foreman wrote, what do you prefer? Your things or your neighbors?
