Abortion and the modern people we are

It is not often that people both across the country and in the media are shocked and sickened by the practices of a liberal darling organization like Planned Parenthood. Nonetheless, its national president, Cecile Richards, was defiant and many of its prominent supporters stood up for the nation’s largest abortion provider, including the White House and the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner. Harvesting the intact body parts of aborted babies and selling them is not an unfortunate departure from the modern world’s march of progress; it’s what happens when scientific civilization divorces Christian civilization and becomes a technologically empowered cult of selfish autonomy.

Modern people expect to control the world—it’s what modern means. The world is chaotic and dangerous and needs taming to make it predictable and safe, and modern science provides that. Through a disciplined method of discovery based on a new way of looking at the world, modern inventions have flowed like a river with an ever-wider and stronger current. But the blessings have been mixed. The internet’s information revolution and rapid email communication also brought a deluge of pornography and shattered spans of attention. Breathtaking medical advances arrived hand-in-hand with germ warfare and “safe,” clinical abortion.

This modern project to make us masters of the universe looks a lot like taking “dominion over the earth” in obedience to God’s command in Genesis 1:26. But that requires seeing ourselves as God’s image-bearers in God’s world under God’s authority for God’s purposes. Without that, we are left with tyrannical domination with no moral guidance but our selfish desires.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that man’s control of nature necessarily becomes the power of some people over most people. And as reason is no longer understood to be for hearing and understanding God but only for conquering nature and calculating our personal advantage in using it, nature paradoxically reassumes control since only the passions are left, most often the selfish ones, to guide our use of that power.

The abortion gospel is all about empowering those passions. In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama defended abortion rights as being necessary to “ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities [control] as our sons to fulfill their dreams [selfish desires].” For women to share equally with men in modern personal autonomy—unconstrained by God, morality, or nature—they must have free access to abortion, even, if necessary, as the baby is being born.

Agents of Planned Parenthood who haggle over a baby-part price list like they’re selling old housewares at a yard sale are simply acting as modern people who believe the world is stuff to be subdued and transformed for servicing their desires. The sobering truth is that modern Christians share in this morally and spiritually unrestrained drive to conquer the world technologically for our comfort and convenience. The prophet Daniel confessed that the sins of his people were his own sins too (Daniel 9:4-11). Where are we guilty of pursuing our selfish autonomy with implicit indifference to God’s authority and purposes?