Making haste to shed innocent blood

Imagine having a career devoted to making sure unwanted unborn babies end up dead, to have your name associated with this act, a legal right conveniently discovered in the U.S. Constitution by the Supreme Court a mere 42 years ago?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t separate the image of a chubby-cheeked smiling baby from the developing life growing in the womb. I assume being pro-abortion means you can, despite all we know about fetal development. We now know that these babies aren’t indistinct clumps of cells or blobs of issue.

David A. Grimes, the former head of abortion surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calls himself an “abortion scholar.” Some distinction. He opposes a ban on dismemberment abortions and he’s in the news after writing a column for the Huffington Post titled “How Legal Abortion Helps American Families.”

Most people are probably aware that during a first-trimester abortion, the baby is suctioned from the womb and rinsed down a sink. When the pregnancy is farther along, the abortionist uses instruments to rip the baby limb from limb to remove them from the womb.

Look at the stock photo accompanying Grimes’ column—a presumably married mother and father with two healthy sons. We’re to believe that killing “unwanted” children, voiceless and vulnerable, leads to such families. A woman killing her child—the brother or sister of her present and/or future children—is just a step toward having the healthy, happy children she does want.

To abortion advocates, this juxtaposition is normal. Ordinary. To pro-lifers, it’s jarring. An unwanted baby is reduced to a piece of lint you flick off your shirt. Grimes suggests that a child is better off dead than born to an unwed mother or into female-headed households or prematurely. It doesn’t matter that the child deserves to live, regardless of the circumstances he’s born into. And we can’t overlook the race of the stock photo family. Coincidental or intentional? Black women account for 30 percent of abortions. So-called shotgun marriages, all the problems associated with illegitimacy and fatherlessness, and the rest don’t render the unborn baby’s life worthless.

It’s a bizarre, twisted way to think. Even if I replace the chubby-cheeked baby image in my mind with a “glob of tissue,” the developing life is still human. He’s weak and defenseless—the womb designed to protect him can do so only if he’s allowed to remain.

Why do people make haste to shed innocent blood? The thoughts of those separated from God are of iniquity, the prophet Isaiah wrote:

“Wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they have not known, and there is no justice in their ways; They have made themselves crooked paths; whoever takes that way shall not know peace” (NKJV).

I pray that unwanted unborn babies don’t feel the pain of their deaths. Though they might have entered the world under terrible circumstances, they had a right to live.