Thirty-five years ago, as I was pastoring a small church in Boston and seeing the temptations and struggles facing my people, I felt an urgent need to gather the church and openly address the topic of abortion. What is it? What in the Bible ought to inform our views? How should we respond? By God’s grace, the gathering proved exceedingly helpful.

Yet now, in this post-Roe era, addressing abortion in the context of the church seems more urgent than ever before. Indeed, I’m convinced pastoral leadership is one of the greatest needs in today’s pro-life movement. Let me explain why — and along the way, let me also commend a book that models such leadership remarkably well.

Back to the States

Instead of ending the battle decisively by affirming the equal rights of all people, born and unborn, the Dobbs decision turned the moral question of abortion back to the people for each state to decide. The Supreme Court could have — and in my view, should have — abolished abortion with the same logic and under the same amendment that abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” If the unborn are human, then they are persons, with God-given rights that cannot be justly denied or passively accepted when denied. It falls to us to “defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:9).

In our nation, however, the just powers of the government derive from the consent of the governed. The court most likely believed that by defining abortion as a moral question and turning it back to the states, they had gone as far as they could to maintain the “consent” of the governed.

Urgent Times

Of the seven states that have voted on the question already, all seven decided to expand abortion rights. Last fall, the citizens of Ohio voted overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to secure abortion rights. In our form of government, that decision represents as permanent a loss for the cause of life as is possible.

Pro-life advocates like myself feel a sense of urgency — but abortion advocates do too. They have put unlimited abortion on the 2024 ballot in eleven more states. True, they have a few thousand pesky pro-life voices to contend with.

If there is one data point that highlights the urgent need for church leaders to address abortion, it is this: exit polls in Ohio showed that, among those who identified as believing that “life begins at conception,” 30 percent voted for the abortion-rights amendment. That kind of moral befuddlement exists when Christians are not clear on what they believe and how to live it out. Which brings me to the online book Abortion and the Church.

Exposing Works of Darkness

This book was written by a committee of pastors and elders of the Evangel Presbytery. I commend it to those looking to lead well on abortion for two main reasons.

First, the book’s explanation of medical issues (based on published research), along with the historical developments surrounding them, is exceptional. Second, the fact that the book was written not by pro-life activists like me, but by trusted and authorized pastors, makes it especially commendable as an example for Christian leaders. The result is a serious book about the assault on the sanctity of human life in our time, all communicated in the voice of local-church overseers. The book calls for repentance at times and forbearance at other times; it warns and summons, condemns and offers grace.

I admit that some parts of the book give me pause. But the confusion of some pastors on the great bioethical abominations of our times alarms me far more. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness,” the apostle Paul says, “but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). If you are looking for an example of what such exposing looks like, I recommend Abortion and the Church. These pastors expose the multifaceted war against the intrinsic, equal, exceptional, and eternal value of human life today, and strive to help the church to do bioethics — to weigh right and wrong (ethics) in matters of human life (bio). They call us to know the will of God and to take no part in the works of darkness, no matter how hidden.

Pastoral Bioethics

More broadly, this generation faces extraordinary choices regarding birth control, chemical and surgical abortion, and infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). We need accurate explanations as to the treatment processes and associated risks. Often, the ethical issues involved are not only avoided by the abortion and infertility industry; they are also hidden. Moreover, people willing to pay large sums to get rid of a baby or to obtain a baby usually do not ask many ethical questions. The result is a conspiracy of silence in the destruction of the unborn.

Consider a few of the many questions needing thoughtful pastoral answers. Is abortion really just one issue among many in our day, or is it a preeminent moral crisis? Do intrauterine devices (IUD) and hormonal contraception ever work to prevent an embryo (a human being in the first few days of life) from implanting safely in the womb? What in the Bible should inform my desire to avoid children?

Is IVF a God-pleasing response to the pain of my infertility, or is it morally wrong? What happens to all those human embryos that are created in the IVF process and left frozen in the fridge? If vaccines are produced from unborn babies’ body parts, do I share in the guilt by getting the vaccine? Should a church split over differences of opinion here? In these self-expressive times, when feelings often replace moral truth, and when so many in society say yes, when does God say no?

Pastors and other church leaders who address such questions serve their people well.

What Normal Christians Need

Fifty years of legal and accessible abortion have led to hundreds of books and thousands of articles on the injustice of abortion and on natural rights, pro-life apologetics, crisis intervention, law, and more. I have written four books myself. So, what could another book possibly say to add to our understanding of these matters? After reading Abortion and the Church, I realized that this is the wrong question.

What these pastors understand is that their people, those under their care as overseers, need to hear from them far more than from someone like me. It matters who says what! For most Christians, the most influential voices are still the known and trusted leaders appointed to oversee the body of Christ. If the average Christian were to speak, I suspect he would sound like this: “You are the leader I have chosen to submit my soul to week after week. I trust your judgment more than others’. What do you think? What are the deeds of darkness in these times that we ought to take no part in?”

Unsettling Assumptions

Right before I started seminary in 1978, I got married. Almost as if it were required for newlyweds, my wife and I decided she would start using “the pill.” A few weeks into married life and biblical studies, however, my wife started asking questions. “Why are we doing this? What does God think about contraception? And by the way, I feel different. What are the side effects of the pill?”

I was shocked. In my young Christian life, I earnestly desired to bring Christ into every part of my life. I was training myself to ask of every topic, “What in the Bible ought to shape my views and actions on the matter?” But when it came to contraception, we started using the pill without asking a single question. I was conformed to this world’s expectations for newlyweds without a contrarian consideration. My wife’s troubled conscience and health questions stirred me. What did I do? I turned to the pastors in my church, whom I trusted for advice. “What do you say? Can you help me think this through from God’s perspective?”

Pastor, you may not feel all that influential. Your platform may be small. But you are a trusted authority to those under your care. Find solid texts. Prepare your thoughts prayerfully. Muster some courage. And rise up in these urgent times to teach on abortion and the church.

I sometimes feel that I am living just as long as I have something great to work for.

My mother-in-law, Joni, lives with my wife and me. She’s in relatively good health for being 100 years old. She laughs. She cries. She jokes a bit. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren love to visit. They’re intrigued by her stories from her youth.

Last week, she casually told me she had just completed a monthlong study of the book of Daniel. “Daniel!” I burst out in surprise. I’m not sure if, at 100, tackling that prophetic and apocalyptic book would be on my bucket list. But now, I see, perhaps it should be.

Yet Joni struggles with one particular question. It haunts her, especially on days when her outlook is low or her blood pressure is high. Why am I still here?

What Are You Living For?

Joni’s husband is gone. Her firstborn has passed. Her sister lived to 108 but left us last December. Her joints ache. She grieves over the dramatic moral collapse of our society. She’s ready to go home. So the question returns: “Why am I still here?”

Perhaps quiet sympathy under a sovereign God who always has his hidden reasons would be the best response. Yet in my mind, we have at least a partial answer.

In 1975, as a 20-year-old college student, I found one precious part of the answer. I read Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a biography of his life by his friend Eberhard Bethge. After a year in prison, and about a year before his execution by the Nazis, he confided to Eberhard, “I sometimes feel that I am living just as long as I have something great to work for” (136).

This I believe is as true for Joni today as it was for Bonhoeffer. I believe it for myself. I was so awestruck by this statement of faith that, 47 years after first reading it, the words still inspire and push me. “What are you living for, John? You only have so much time to contribute to the unfolding, ever-advancing Great Work of the gospel. Make the most of the opportunity!”

Best Use of Evil Days

Bonhoeffer was not arrested for plotting to kill Hitler. The plot and his role in it were unknown at the time. When the plot failed, the key instigator, Claus von Stauffenberg, was executed the next day. Others committed suicide so as not to reveal more names under torture.

Up to this time, Bonhoeffer’s work in the resistance effort was concealed by his pretense of being a rather naive pastor who loved his country and supported the government. He feigned ignorance of political matters and argued that he was improperly arrested. His calculation was that with the end of Hitler, he would be released — his role in the plot never investigated, let alone discovered. But the moment he heard that Hitler survived, he knew his ruse was played out and his life forfeited. His name was discovered in a diary of one of the chief plotters. As Russians stormed into Berlin, Bonhoeffer was hanged beside his brother and five other co-conspirators.

When Bonhoeffer spoke of living “just as long as I have something great to work for,” the context shows he was reflecting on Ephesians 5:15–16: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” That the times were evil was self-evident to him. The opportunity he saw was to use his time in prison to finish his book Ethics.

Works Reserved for You

Why has Bonhoeffer’s statement of faith made such an impact on me? For at least two great reasons. First, Bonhoeffer’s declaration captures what it looks like to believe and live out Ephesians 2:10, that we were all “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

We each have some good works that God has reserved for us, that allow us to contribute to and advance his Great Work. His plan unfolds from creation to consummation. Bonhoeffer, Joni, you, and me — we all get to contribute our part to his global, unassailable work.

Bonhoeffer saw his book on ethics as something that, through many experiences and years of biblical meditation, God had prepared for him to write. With evil and death all around him, and restrained to a cell block, writing the book was the one thing he felt he had been spared to accomplish. And given the evil of the times, he felt — as we all should feel — an urgency to make the most of his opportunities while he could.

To Live Is Christ

Bonhoeffer was executed before he could finish what he thought God wanted him to accomplish. In Joni’s case, she’s outlived the time when active practical good works of service are possible. This leads me to my second reason for loving this particular line. To live for Christ himself — openly, daily, enduringly — is something great to work and live for. As the Bible says, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Bonhoeffer did live long enough to do this. Joni also has something great to work for, even at 100: to show us what it is to live for Christ even as we grow so weak in body and very tired of this world.

Honestly, I am no great fan of Bonhoeffer’s books. I struggled through his unfinished Ethics. I also read The Cost of Discipleship, and while I appreciate it, I wonder if it would be in print today without one remarkably quality: Bonhoeffer himself really lived for Christ — openly, daily, enduringly — and showed us, by his life and death, “the cost of discipleship.”

It’s the man behind the book that makes a book like his worth reading. Living for Christ in such evil times and circumstances, and dying even as Nazism was being put to death — this was something great to live and work for.

Running with a Walker

Joni is still here because living for Christ at 100 is itself a great thing that glorifies God and advances his kingdom. She’s mostly blind to how merely living day to day for Christ up in her room, praying and reading her Bible, means anything to anyone else. She will accuse me of making much ado about nothing.

But I say that finishing a study on the book of Daniel at 100 years old is an attractive picture of what it means to seek the kingdom of God and long for the day of Christ’s appearing.

While she cannot travel these days, her testimony can. I’ve told her stories in China, Uganda, Cuba, and elsewhere. She needs a walker. But her story can still run. I sometimes feel she is living just so long as she is needed to woo the next generation to live for Christ. That is something great to work for.

In Colombia, they have a saying that goes, “If it’s raining in the US, prepare for rain.” Pastor Anderson Ocampo in Medellín explains, “Practically everybody assumes that whatever happens in the United States will happen here. Since the United States is the most powerful country in the world, the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe will encourage our pro-life work in Colombia.”

I agree. The end of Roe is strengthening the ongoing effort around the world to end abortion and secure equal rights for all people, born and unborn. Abortion advocates also agree. As South African writer and journalist Matthew Blackman posted, “The US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has set off a tsunami of concern around the world among public health experts and women’s rights groups.”

Ripple Effects of Roe

Prior to this, Roe had brought the hard rain of legal abortion to country after country.

“The end of Roe will strengthen the ongoing effort around the world to end abortion and secure equal rights for all.”

Abortion advocate Nina Sun explains, “Roe has . . . been influential in court decisions in other countries that have achieved significant gains in reproductive freedoms. For example, in Kenya, the High Court of Malindi, in affirming that abortion care is a fundamental right under the Kenyan constitution, specifically references and considers key points from Roe.”

In contrast, Nigerian writer Obianuju Ekeocha sees the influence of Roe in Africa as the “ideological neocolonialism of the twenty-first century.” She explains, “The recognition of human life from the womb to the tomb is a common thread that runs through many tribes and towns of Africa.” Yet the West’s unrelenting ideological deconstruction of traditional values — the hyper-sexualization of youth, the normalization of homosexuality, the mainstreaming of gender dysphoria, and of course, the legalization of abortion — rains down on African countries. Are these the new values that must be adopted to be considered part of the modern world?

Leading Countries for Life

Let’s look at this from the reverse angle. A map from Our World in Data shows birthrates by country. The highest rates closely align with countries where the human rights of unborn children are still respected in law to various degrees — mostly in Africa and Central America.

Organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization look at this map as their mission field — the unreached peoples still to be persuaded that legal abortion equates to personal freedom. I look at this map and see these countries as our best examples for recovering the inherent, equal, exceptional, and eternal value of human life rooted in the Bible.

As Ekeocha says, “The most precious gift that Africans can give to the world right now is our inherent culture of life. Most Africans understand, by faith and tradition, the inestimable value of human life, the beauty of womanhood, the grace of motherhood, the blessing of married life, and the gift of children.”

The end of Roe fundamentally helps leaders like Ekeocha in Nigeria. It emboldens the church throughout Africa to petition their governments to reject the billions of dollars in aid offered on condition that they liberalize their abortion laws. It shows people like Pastor Anderson in Colombia that mobilizing the church to defend the value of life in their culture and law can work. “In the most advanced and powerful nation in the world,” they can say, “abortion is now being rejected.” That sentiment may overstate the Dobbs decision, but that is the ripple effect felt in many countries.

Retaliation

In my view, the end of Roe impacts abortion worldwide in one particularly positive way; though in the short term, it invites retaliation. For example, Roe has unleashed waves of vandalism against pregnancy help organizations (PHO) and a resurgence of the slanderous “fake clinic” charges designed to shut them down. The PHO I helped start in Miami was heavily vandalized right after Roe. Then last fall, while I was speaking at their fundraising gala, angry activists stormed in and ran through the crowd, shouting, “Fake clinic! Fake clinic!”

The next day, I got a note from a PHO in Romania. “After the decision that overturned Roe, the media in Romania started an attack against Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Their ‘concern’ was that we are pushing Romania back into the communist era by speaking against abortion and by providing care for women with unwanted pregnancies.”

The Christians who have started PHOs in Bogotá, Santiago, Cuba, and elsewhere know that storms are coming, if they haven’t already. They will be targeted in due time. It is a cross-bearing work.

Message Heard Round the World

Yet long term, the end of Roe sends out a powerful and welcome message to the world. In turning the legality of abortion back to the states, the highest court in the most powerful country has declared that there is something about abortion that is legitimately debatable as a matter of morality and justice. That might appear as a small stone thrown into the pond. But I think it is the one stone that makes all the difference.

The opening sentence of the Dobbs decision reads, “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” These words have the effect of saying, “There is something about abortion that might be wrong.” In a government that derives its “just powers” from the “consent of the governed,” the people must consider abortion openly and then decide.

“The end of Roe has framed the legitimacy of abortion worldwide as a preeminently moral question.”

The morality or immorality of abortion is precisely what abortion advocates seek to avoid. The decision belongs, they argue, to the category of chocolate or vanilla — a matter of personal choice void of morality. By contrast, the pro-life position is always a moral argument. It is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Since abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being, abortion is wrong.

Slavery too was defended throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by sidestepping the morality of it. But over time, the moral question, as crafted by Josiah Wedgwood in 1784, pierced the darkness: “Am I not a man and a brother?” So today, the Supreme Court has returned the question to the nation as a moral question: “Are the unborn human?” If the answer, biologically, is yes, then you can believe in abortion rights or you can believe in equal rights, but you cannot believe in both at the same time.

More Equal Than Others?

Mary Elizabeth Williams writes, “Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about. . . . A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss.” That is a position hard for fair-minded people to hold. To try is to sound Orwellian, like saying, “All humans are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

The end of Roe has framed the legitimacy of abortion worldwide as a preeminently moral question. That, in turn, exposes the injustice of abortion and cripples the unrelenting push for legalized abortion worldwide. If it is coupled with a rising church answering the call to rescue the innocent from slaughter (Proverbs 24:11), that would be righteousness at work, and “righteousness exalts a nation” (Proverbs 14:34). Let’s pray earnestly for more victories to come.

If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.

In the 1979 book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie writes, “During the four years of the German occupation of France, the village of Le Chambon, with a population of about three thousand impoverished people, saved the lives of about five thousand [Jewish] refugees (most of them children)” (xiii).

“This village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent.”

Hallie’s book is more than a historical retelling of a rescue effort. I would describe it as an ethical forensic analysis, looking for the root causes that explain why this village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent. What amazes me most is how three thousand people together agreed to give themselves to the rescue.

Rescue the Perishing

It’s inspiring, to be sure, to read of individuals who answered the call to “rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). German Christian Fritz Graebe, for example, delivered hundreds of Jews to safety during the same time period. He came to be known as “the Moses of Rovno.” The work broke him physically, depleted his resources, and forced him to cut himself off from his family lest they be endangered by his actions. He said it was the Golden Rule that guided him. Graebe’s life testifies to the truth of Isaiah 32:8: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.”

It’s a further wonder to me, beyond the heroics of individuals, how families risked their lives during this time. Exposure multiplies as the number of people involved increases — and the blow falls not just on any group, but on their family.

My admiration for Casper (Papa) Ten Boom and his family starts here. Proverbs 24:10 says, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.” The day of adversity in view in this passage is not the day you lose your job, or even the day you find out your loved one has cancer, painful as those experiences are. No, the day of adversity is when you witness the intentional killing of innocent human beings. On that day, if you shrink back in fearful self-preservation, your faith is weak and God-belittling. The opposite is expected. “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11).

Casper was in his eighties when the Germans seized the Netherlands. His daughter Betsy was exceedingly frail her whole life. Corrie, the youngest, was in her fifties and was a watchmaker. Yet they ran to the point of the spear and rescued over five hundred Jews from death before being betrayed and imprisoned. Only Corrie survived.

Wonder of Le Chambon

The stories of individuals and families risking their lives are truly remarkable. How much more wondrous, then, that a whole village — with its spectrum of personalities and beliefs and its wide range of maturity, spiritual and otherwise — should agree to risk their lives and coordinate their efforts to rescue five thousand Jewish refugees.

Le Chambon’s residents were descendants of Huguenots (French Protestants of the Reformed tradition). “During hundreds of years of persecution, her pastors and her people were arrested by the dragoons of the king and then hanged or burned either in Le Chambon itself or in Montpellier to the south” (25). When the Jews were marked for slaughter, the village, led by the biblically reflective pastor André Trocmé and his pragmatic, action-oriented wife, Magda, held a proud identity and template for resistance.

I came across Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed around 1987. I was a pastor of a small inner-city church in Boston. Five years later, I was leading a citywide effort to organize churches in setting up the first of six ultrasound-equipped medical clinics dedicated to rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time. My wife, Kristen, and several other women provided the original workforce. They met with women and couples in a pregnancy-related crisis and labored to help each one discover God’s provision as a parent or through adoption.

“Rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn.”

By 2002, I was writing a brief book for my fellow pastors on leading well in this sensitive but preeminent moral crisis. I wanted to examine from Scripture how defending the innocent is an outworking of the gospel itself. I also wanted to provide historical examples to show that rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn. After I went back to the midwives in Egypt and gathered examples through the ages, I suddenly remembered Le Chambon.

I pulled Hallie’s book from my shelf and was stunned. It was full of scribbled side comments and observations on André Trocmé. His motives, methods, setbacks, and sufferings were heavily underlined. I read several invocations from my past self: “Do this to respond to the SOIB!” (shorthand for “shedding of innocent blood”). Though I had forgotten the source, here were the prompts that explained my own efforts to rescue the perishing. Thirty-five years later, they still do.

Move Toward Rescue

Hallie summarizes a theme in Trocmé’s sermons like this: “If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you” (92). Was this not the case with the Samaritan? He drew near to an innocent man about to die, and then figured out how to save him. Fritz Graebe did not look for a book on how to rescue the innocent from slaughter. He resolved to do for others what he would want others to do for him if he was marked for death. He figured it out from there.

Nor did Corrie Ten Boom take a class in crisis-intervention strategies. She and her family felt compelled by the law of love to resist a preeminent injustice whatever the cost. Once resolved, opportunities presented themselves. Similarly, villagers in Le Chambon were mostly poor shopkeepers and farmers. Yet their resolve catalyzed an organizational effort worthy of scholarly analysis.

In God’s kindness, he has given me my own story of moving toward rescue. In 2006, after discovering that Miami had over thirty abortion businesses, almost all of which targeted minority neighborhoods, I felt burdened to go to Miami. I did not know a single person in that city. I sat in a local Panera, mapping out the plague by neighborhoods, and prayed, “Lord, I am here. Now what?” Soon after, a friend from Boston called me. He said, “Call my friend, Pastor Al Pino, in Miami Springs.” A year later, we stood together as we dedicated Heartbeat of Miami, a minority-led, ultrasound-equipped, church-supported pregnancy help clinic. It later expanded into four clinics, and since then, they’ve rescued over 55,000 mothers and babies from abortion.

In 2010, God brought me to China, where abortion, infanticide, and gendercide (the killing of baby girls mostly) is especially concentrated. The infamous one-child policy was in full force. I was able to meet with 75 house church pastors in the unregistered (underground) church in Beijing and present them with the four questions that have proved most helpful to me in “answering the crisis of abortion with the gospel of life.”

Now, after 29 trips to China, I can testify that the Christian leaders there used those four questions to train up an army of good Samaritans (over three million to date) committed to treasuring human life, rejecting abortion, experiencing God’s forgiveness, and rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time.

God Meets Us to Save

We often experience those “it just so happened” moments, when our obedience meets God’s providence. Trocmé was saying, “Count on this happening!”

Let me offer a final example of the wisdom of his advice. Last September, in Bogota, Colombia, I handed out fetal models to 160 Christian leaders who were determined to lead well in resisting abortion.

After lunch, one pastor said that on his way to the restaurant, he met a woman who was clearly pregnant and in distress. He learned that her father was an acquaintance of his and was coercing his daughter into abortion by kicking her out of his home. He went to see her father straightaway and handed him the fetal model just received. The father choked up at the sight. The two then pledged to find God’s provision for his daughter and grandchild. And they did. Baby Violet was born December 15, 2021.

“If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.”

Several months into a new executive administration, how might we describe the state of affairs when it comes to abortion in America?

Grievous would not be too strong a word. Distressing and outrageous also describe my response to the renewed efforts to enshrine abortion as health care, turn it into a super-spreader event worldwide, and purge dissenters working within the U.S. government who think it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. But though God can, without sin, “let loose . . . his burning anger, wrath, indignation, and distress” (Psalm 78:49), I cannot. So, what follows is a brief state of the union for abortion that should fuel our first and best response: prayer.

For thirty years, from Boston to Beijing, I’ve done my best to respond to the shedding of innocent blood with prayerful actions. I’ve now worked in seventeen countries where abortion is most concentrated, prayerfully training pastors in pro-life ethics and their churches in pregnancy crisis intervention. But I also set aside time every week to pray with others for the end of abortion.

Why? Because some evils are so profoundly demonic in their power structure that they will not be cast out without prayer. Child-killing is one of those evils. It’s not merely a failure to maintain the human rights of the defenseless (Psalm 82:3–4). Nor is it simply an exercise in personal autonomy. It’s unrealized demonic servitude. The psalmist says, “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters . . . and the land was polluted with blood” (Psalm 106:37–38). Certainly we must do more than pray. But let us not delude ourselves about what we are truly up against.

Affordable ‘Health Care’

According to the White House Fact Sheet of June 30, 2021, “The Biden Administration is committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the U.S. and around the world. Everyone should have access to quality, affordable health care.”

“Affordable health care” is government-speak for “easy abortion.” Through executive memorandums and policy directives, Biden is removing the restrictions on U.S. and globalist organizations promoting abortion worldwide.

Biden has committed to “remove, as part of the President’s first budget, the Hyde Amendment restriction from government spending bills, reflecting the President’s support for expanding access to health care, including reproductive health care, through Medicaid and other federally-funded programs.”

The Hyde Amendment, implemented in 1980, has for forty years been the one point of conciliation between abortion advocates and pro-life taxpayers — that which is justified as a private choice, let’s agree, ought not to be paid for with public dollars.

Ending the Hyde Amendment forces all of us to pay for anyone’s abortion. It will not only lead to more abortion; it will further delegitimize dissent, religious liberty, and conscience clauses, along with emboldening the de-platforming and de-monetizing of those who dare to disagree.

Abortion by Mail

Besides removing abortion restrictions, this administration is increasing abortion funding. Domestically, its budget calls for a massive infusion of tax dollars into the Title X family planning, providing $340 million for Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Internationally, he proposes a 72 percent increase in funding, or $583.7 million for the United Nations Population Fund.

“‘Affordable health care’ is government-speak for ‘easy abortion.’”

The United Nations Population Fund euphemistically calls itself a “sexual and reproductive health agency.” What they are is a missions organization. Within their worldview, population is the sin problem. Poor countries like Uganda, Ghana, El Salvador, and Guatemala, which still legally protect their unborn children, are the mission field. Abortion, contraception, and sterilization is the plan of salvation.

Relaxing enforcement of safety protocols is the opposite of “health care for women.” Yet this spring, the Food and Drug Administration officially suspended enforcement of the in-person requirement for chemical abortion pills. Abortion by mail is now permitted. Multiple studies, including that of Dr. Donna Harrison, covering a twenty-year-long period, report that complications are four times more frequent in chemical abortions compared to surgical abortions. Adverse events include hemorrhage, infections, and trauma from a woman’s seeing her own unborn child expelled.

In April, the National Institutes of Health removed the restrictions imposed on research using fetal stem cells under the previous administration. In May, the International Society for Stem Cell Research ended its long-standing rule that limited experimentation on human embryos to the first fourteen days of creation. This makes human embryos akin to lab rats. As the Lozier Institute writes, “The removal of the 14-day limit shows their real goal: unlimited human experimentation, making human embryos into disposable laboratory supplies.” In June, Democratic lawmakers introduced the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which, if passed and signed by the president, would nullify all state abortion regulations.

Some Light in the Darkness

At the same time, American citizens at the state level are rushing to the defense of the unborn. In the first five months of 2021, 48 U.S. state legislatures advanced approximately 489 pro-life bills. As of the end of May, 89 new pro-life bills from 26 states had been enacted. Some, like the Arkansas bill signed this spring, ban almost all abortions. Other states have banned abortion after twelve weeks gestation, sex-selective abortion, and abortion due to prenatal disability diagnosis.

At the local level, Lubbock, Texas, is now one of 36 cities that have outlawed abortion within their city limits and declared themselves a Sanctuary City for the Unborn. Their local Planned Parenthood was forced to stop aborting babies on June 1 when this local law went into effect.

Hanging over all of this, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) agreed this spring to take up the biggest abortion case in thirty years. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court will answer “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

Judicial analyst Bruce Hausknecht writes,

The 1973 Roe decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, created artificial “trimester” rules for regulating abortion based on the concept of “viability,” the time at which a preborn baby was generally thought to be able to survive, with medical help, outside the womb. . . . Advances in medical technology have lowered the age of viability. By the time of the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, for example, the age of viability had decreased from 28 weeks to around 23 to 24 weeks. Recently, a Wisconsin child celebrated his first birthday after a premature birth at 21 weeks, 2 days gestation.

What Can We Do?

How then should we respond to the new administration unleashing its power to promote mass child-killing at home and abroad? We pray that God would grant our president a spirit of repentance, as he did to us. And we pray God would restrain him and frustrate his plans.

“Some evils are so profoundly demonic in their power structure that they will not be cast out without prayer.”

I pray for our nation as a grieving patriot. I don’t put much stock in SCOTUS having the moral courage to follow the Constitution as written. As Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch wrote to the Court last month, “Nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion.” The stronghold of abortion is not in the text. It’s in the human heart and in the fear of man. That’s what drives me to pray.

In 1896, SCOTUS ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial discrimination laws were constitutional. It was a cowardly decision that played to the powerful forces within the culture of the time, not to the text of the constitution. It took 58 years for SCOTUS to find the courage in Brown v. Board of Education to say, “No more! The 14th amendment calls for equal protection of all persons.” I pray we can witness such a declaration in our time.

As the church, we must not be afraid to suffer the hostility that would come if we lived out our faith like the midwives of Egypt. To those dear sisters, suffering many injustices themselves, child-killing was the hill to die on. They “feared God” (Exodus 1:17) and so protected their babies from slaughter. When pressured by Pharoah himself, they still refused to conform (Exodus 1:18–19).

In return, God favored them (Exodus 1:20). Why? For rescuing the babies from slaughter? Not exactly. Rather, “because the midwives feared God, he gave them families” (Exodus 1:21). In other words, God rewarded their faith in him, which was expressed in their bold, pro-life actions.