Issues are rarely straightforward or isolated. Our choices in life are almost never between good and evil or even between good and best. We want life to be simple and it is not.
Take the cause of the unborn. Those of us who oppose abortion say we do so because we believe the unborn is a human being and as such has value. As Christians we believe human beings were created in the image of God, therefore all human life has inherent value. So therefore, we are compelled to protect the unborn.
But what happens after that child is born? Does he or she still have value? What happens when that child grows up? What happens when that child gets old and nears death? Almost all Christians would agree that every stage of that person’s life has value, even the elderly person who has dementia or a young adult who has some severe birth defect or brain damage.
What if that child smells or behaves differently than our own? What if that child is black or brown? Or poor? Or comes from a really messed up family situation? What if that child never accomplishes much in life by our standards? What if that child grows up and does something really, really bad and winds up in prison or on death row? What if that child happens to be standing in the way of our guns being fired to keep us safe? What if that child grows up and is taught to fire a gun at our grown-up child who has been taught to fire a gun at him?
Ah, the questions start to get awkward. We continue to agree that the answer is that all human beings have value, but we struggle with where this line of reasoning is headed. Why? Because we have other values as well and those are starting to clash with the inherent value of human life and we are uneasy with the tension all this clashing creates.
So, for the moment, let’s keep it simple. How can we preach that the unborn child has such great value that we will go to whatever length to preserve that life only to deny that child access to life after that child is born? You cannot preach for decades on end that some lives are more valuable than others and expect people to suddenly turn around and say all unborn human lives should be protected. You cannot treat some humans constitutionally as only three-fifths human and then expect that a couple centuries later everyone will have changed and start to treat the pre-born as one-hundred percent human.
You can’t fight for the life of an in-womb child and then abandon him or her when he or she is born into a highly dysfunctional family. You can’t say we should do all we can for that pre-natal infant and then not give them our all when they are going to school and growing into adulthood. You can’t tell me not to call that child a fetus and then call it names when it is full-grown.
We reap what we sow. Sow countless generations of disdain for certain forms of human life and you will harvest countless generations of disdain for certain forms of human life.
One organization has set as its goal to wipe out child abuse in five generations. Seems like a long time. People who study such things say it will take that many generations to completely undo the affects of abuse in society – three generations in a given family.
It’s only been a few terms since the U.S. Congress officially forbid lynchings. It’s only been a couple of generations since a black man with a Ph.D. could earn the right to vote only if he correctly named the exact number of marbles in a jar. It’s only been a handful of seasons since Evangelical whites started apologizing for pushing their black brothers and sisters away or turning a deaf ear on their pain.
We have a long way to go and a rough road to hoe to help our world stop disvaluing human life. And we have to start with ourselves. If we want others to value the unborn, we also must learn to value the born.
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