Could Acceptance of Abortion Be a Matter of Ignorance?

[Garland-Green]

I was reading Eric Metaxas’s Amazing Grace (a book about William Wilberforce), and I came across this passage:

The popular attitude toward abolition was another story [i.e., in contrast to the political setbacks]. Among the nonpolitical classes, abolition was more and more accepted…. The change in popular sentiment toward abolition had been rapid. Just a few years before, there had been widespread and genuine ignorance of the horrors of the slave trade, but now suddenly the trade and all of its varied horrors were on everyone’s lips. Posters of the Brookes [a diagram showing how people were transported on the slave ship] were everywhere, as were images of Josiah Wedgwood’s imploring African in chains. Cowper’s poem “The Negro’s Complaint” was not only well known as a poem, but had been set to music and was sung in the streets; also that year, a nineteen-year-old poet named Samuel Taylor Coleridge won a gold medal at Cambridge for his “Ode Against the Slave Trade.” [Links added.]

The abolitionists worked hard to reveal to people the truth about what slavery was, and public sentiment turned against it as ignorance dwindled. But hearing about their success actually depressed me because I couldn’t help but compare it to our situation today. Never before have we had a more public revelation of what abortion is than this past year’s Planned Parenthood videos (see also here and here), yet we saw no “rapid change in popular sentiment” toward abortion. We saw all of its ugliness laid bare, and we remained frighteningly unmoved. The hardness of our nation’s soul was impenetrable.

Or so I thought. But then I saw this video. Could it be that our acceptance of abortion, like acceptance of the slave trade, is still mainly a matter of ignorance?

Read more: Could Acceptance of Abortion Be a Matter of Ignorance?  

[Lady Vizsla]

I think it's both a matter of ignorance and the value of human life. There are people who are generally ignorant of how grotesque abortion procedures can be and what actually occurs. I had to study a bit of it in one of my secondary school courses and it made me want to cry. But I think more people accept it now than ever before because the world's society is slowly diminishing the worth of the human soul. In a world where less and less people follow God as their authority, anything goes, and if a baby is a problem, even another human soul, we just get rid of the inconvenience.  

[Garland-Green]

Lady Kariel

I think it's both a matter of ignorance and the value of human life. There are people who are generally ignorant of how grotesque abortion procedures can be and what actually occurs. I had to study a bit of it in one of my secondary school courses and it made me want to cry. But I think more people accept it now than ever before because the world's society is slowly diminishing the worth of the human soul. In a world where less and less people follow God as their authority, anything goes, and if a baby is a problem, even another human soul, we just get rid of the inconvenience.

2 Timothy 3:1-3
But understand this: In the last days terrible times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, without love of good

I think we are seeing people being lovers of themselves. We are seeing people do what they think is right in their own eyes. They are making convenience a guide to morality. "This is not convenient for me. My situation at present is not such that I can have a baby. This puts a lot of stress on me emotionally..." No situation is permanent. It seems rash to end someones existence because of a impermanent situation. Even if it was permanent I don't think a situation could be more heavy weighing than the value of a human life. I have heard people say that even if the fetus was a baby (a person), that it is more important to take care of those that are already born, than those who are not born yet (implying that we can't do both). Or the argument that is is not human (a person) since it can't live outside the womb independently of its mother. But these are simply ways of defining something to make you think that this is right to do. That the mother should get to decide because it it her body and the baby is just an extension of this. Being part of her body he has no individual rights, because he is not to be consider an individual. But because we define something a certain way - that doesn't make it necessarily true. As human beings we have an amazing capacity to come up with arguments that appear rational (and are hard to argue against using only secular arguments) to make us feel better about our decisions and validate the choices we make to ourselves. Science can't say that someone is a person when they start breathing independently, or that it is a person now because his/hers lungs are now fully developed, or when the brain has the receptors necessary to feel pain. We make that call. "I belive it is now a person because [insert reason]. It [science] doesn't make any such calls. Science is observation. We give what is being observed meaning, often based on our pre-existing worldview.

Quote:

In a world where less and less people follow God as their authority, anything goes

I think you nailed it.

It is sad, when the most dangerous place to be on this planet not a city or a country, but inside your mothers womb. Where the only argument someone need to take someone's future away is that "I don't want to". Where if anything you should be safer than anywhere else. According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day. Worldwide, there are slightly more than 131 million births each year. Source.

Proverbs 6:16-19
There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.  

[Lady Vizsla]

Garland-Green

Lady Kariel

I think it's both a matter of ignorance and the value of human life. There are people who are generally ignorant of how grotesque abortion procedures can be and what actually occurs. I had to study a bit of it in one of my secondary school courses and it made me want to cry. But I think more people accept it now than ever before because the world's society is slowly diminishing the worth of the human soul. In a world where less and less people follow God as their authority, anything goes, and if a baby is a problem, even another human soul, we just get rid of the inconvenience.

2 Timothy 3:1-3
But understand this: In the last days terrible times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, without love of good

I think we are seeing people being lovers of themselves. We are seeing people do what they think is right in their own eyes. They are making convenience a guide to morality. "This is not convenient for me. My situation at present is not such that I can have a baby. This puts a lot of stress on me emotionally..." No situation is permanent. It seems rash to end someones existence because of a impermanent situation. Even if it was permanent I don't think a situation could be more heavy weighing than the value of a human life. I have heard people say that even if the fetus was a baby (a person), that it is more important to take care of those that are already born, than those who are not born yet (implying that we can't do both). Or the argument that is is not human (a person) since it can't live outside the womb independently of its mother. But these are simply ways of defining something to make you think that this is right to do. That the mother should get to decide because it it her body and the baby is just an extension of this. Being part of her body he has no individual rights, because he is not to be consider an individual. But because we define something a certain way - that doesn't make it necessarily true. As human beings we have an amazing capacity to come up with arguments that appear rational (and are hard to argue against using only secular arguments) to make us feel better about our decisions and validate the choices we make to ourselves. Science can't say that someone is a person when they start breathing independently, or that it is a person now because his/hers lungs are now fully developed, or when the brain has the receptors necessary to feel pain. We make that call. "I belive it is now a person because [insert reason]. It [science] doesn't make any such calls. Science is observation. We give what is being observed meaning, often based on our pre-existing worldview.

Quote:

In a world where less and less people follow God as their authority, anything goes

I think you nailed it.

It is sad, when the most dangerous place to be on this planet not a city or a country, but inside your mothers womb. Where the only argument someone need to take someone's future away is that "I don't want to". Where if anything you should be safer than anywhere else. According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day. Worldwide, there are slightly more than 131 million births each year. Source.

Proverbs 6:16-19
There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.

Quote:

But because we define something a certain way - that doesn't make it necessarily true.

This. I think that we should stop coming up with our own abstract definitions and arguing over semantics and instead look to what God thinks. People, especially people who believe in God, should step back and ask themselves if God would be ok with them prematurely ending a human's life. Not fiddle over definitions.

125,000 abortions per day is tragedy and global homicide. It reminds me of this movie 'The Giver' where they were killing babies that didn't suit certain standards and didn't even realize what they were doing was the crime of murder.  

[cristobela]

edited

As far as it relates to the [Dilation and Evacuation] method they're reacting to, clearly, it is a crime to dash babies to pieces, thus why God pays retribution for it in Scripture.

• Psalm 137:8-9 (NIV)
  
  8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
  happy is the one who repays you
  according to what you have done to us.
  9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
  and dashes them against the rocks.

If the USA is killing babies in this way—its own and/or someone else's—thinking there will be no consequences, then they have something else coming to them. Their same behavior will be brought back onto their own heads. And now that I mention it, perhaps the D&E abortion method that the nation is suffering from is a manifestation of that judgment? I recently compiled some verses illustrating that concept happening in Scripture: [Do Good: A Man Reaps What He Sows]. It could be. Especially if they're taking planned parenthood to other countries (and they are).

Quote:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), or Planned Parenthood, is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health services in the United States and internationally. A member association of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), PPFA has its roots in Brooklyn, New York, where Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in 1916. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League,[4] which changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. Planned Parenthood is made up of 159 medical and non-medical affiliates, which operate more than 650 health clinics in the United States, and it also partners with organizations in 12 countries globally.[2][3] The organization directly provides a variety of reproductive health services and sexual education, contributes to research in reproductive technology, and does advocacy work aimed at protecting and expanding reproductive rights.[3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood

Whether D&E is originally what they did or not, they're all suffering for it now. But if that method started here, then they're doing it to themselves and just passing the evil around.

The general idea behind the [Abortion Pill] method, however, is similar to the [Numbers 5 passage] where YHWH commanded an induced miscarriage. However, what makes one sinful and the other not, is not the loss of the babies' life, but the Lawful or Lawless reasons for inducing the miscarriage and the guilt of sexual immorality afoot. Unlike the Abortion pill, God's point is to punish the sexually immoral wife according to His curse; if she had cheated, then she would miscarry, if she had not cheated, then she would not miscarry, and the ingredients He commands are fairly benign, unlike the 100% fatal, chemical cocktail that is mentioned in that Abortion Pill video. YHWH does it to punish sin. He does not command to purposely induce miscarriages because one or the other has a greater chance of surviving. Nor does He command us to abort a blameless one to save the mother's life in a difficult pregnancy (Benjamin wasn't aborted to save his mother's life), save one's social life, or ability to have fun and be stress free.

If anyone else reading this is interested in the details, I went over Numbers 5, and other examples in Scripture, where death to the fetus would occur—the righteous scenarios of abortion/miscarriages happening in obedience to God's Commands and unrighteous examples of miscarriages condemned by God—in this thread: [Abortion]

In response to the question, I would say ignorance is to blame for the acceptance of the forms of abortion that God hates. And the other half is the callousness of the unrepentant heart. The unregenerate person I use to be would've recoiled at the human fetus more than the thought of abortion. Just to illustrate how numb I was: I use to play the Sims 2 (illegally, though I repented of that piracy), but when I did, I had downloaded the BBQ baby modification (user made alteration to the game) that allowed you to eat your newborn infants. Video footage of the mod in game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG2EQEsGFCc Looking back at it now, it is disturbing. But not when I was blinded to spiritual things and lacked a feeling heart. I can't imagine what the girl had to go through cutting into a live fetus' face just to harvest its brain. I question whether people should be using infant organs, let alone taking it out of someone who is still using it. (I'm not sure which video it was that interviewed her; I started clicking around the blog and watched several videos.)