Next Tuesday's election will mark major fork in road on this issue
Next Tuesday Americans will make a fateful decision about the future direction of our country as we cast our ballots for president, 435 congressmen, and approximately a third of the U.S. Senate. Every indication is that it will be a close election reflecting the evenly divided electorate at the national level.
We, as a country, are deeply divided at this moment in our history on many issues. However, I want to focus on the one issue I believe is paramount in this election—the sanctity of human life. Few issues so deeply divide our society. Next Tuesday will mark a major fork in the road on this issue.
If Vice President Harris wins, she is committed to what she and her supporters call “reproductive freedom,” which is a euphemism for unrestricted abortion in all 50 states for all nine months of pregnancy “with no restrictions based on gestational age” on the unborn baby. In other words, abortion up to full-term birth. Currently, nine American states and the District of Columbia already have such laws in place (Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont).
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A Harris Administration will pursue such radical policies on a national level and Vice President Harris has said she would even oppose exemptions for religious conscience for doctors and nurses who had religious convictions that would prevent them from performing abortions.
A Trump Administration has indicated that they would leave the issue of abortion largely up to the voters and legislators of each state—inadequate but better than the alternative. At least Trump will generally nominate judges and justices more in sync with the pro-life cause, not to mention more pro-life Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare officials.
As has often been observed, politics is downstream from culture and culture is downstream from religion. The pro-life cause must not weary in welldoing. The pro-abortion movement has been the great threat to our culture since slavery. Just as the pro-slavery movement denied the humanity of the slaves, the pro-abortion movement denies the humanity of our unborn citizens.
In addition to the deaths of tens of millions of our unborn babies, the pro-abortion movement has spawned a culture or cult of death expanding like a deadly virus from the delivery room to the intensive care unit to assisted living facilities.
Just as the anti-slavery movement engaged in a titanic struggle for the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen, we must do everything we can to dramatize the humanity of our unborn countrymen.
Before the Civil War, Harriett Beecher Stowe wrote the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became a runaway bestseller dramatizing the plight of slaves. Later when President Lincoln met Ms. Stowe, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who started the great war.”
We in the pro-life movement are engaged in a life-and-death struggle to save unborn babies and to rescue our nation from becoming a country given over to child sacrifice. Make no mistake about it—America will not remain where she is on the issue of abortion. We will either get much worse or much better, depending on who wins the struggle for hearts and souls.
Right now we are one of the most pro-abortive countries in the world, with several of our states (as noted earlier) as pro-abortion as any country on earth.
As a Christian, I am aware that God forbade child sacrifice in the Old Testament (Lev. 13:21; 20:2-5; Deut. 12:31; 18:10; 2 Kings 16:3, 17:17, 31; 21:6; Jer. 7:31; 19:5) and severely judged and punished His chosen people whenever they followed their pagan, idolatrous neighbors in engaging in this heinous practice.
Do not think that God will not punish us as a nation ever more severely if we allow this abomination of abortion on demand to continue and expand.
Do we not realize how far we have already fallen? In the providence of God, I had the great blessing of being raised in a devout Christian home. Both of my parents were Sunday School teachers. Every Sunday after church, we went home for our Sunday meal. As we ate dinner, my parents would ask my younger brother and me about the Sunday School lesson that day. Whether we received our portion of dessert depended on whether we answered their questions correctly.
I will never forget one particular Sunday (it must have been about 1958, judging by how old my younger brother, who was born in 1950, appears in this memory). I would have been twelve. I didn’t even wait to be asked this particular Sunday. I said, “Daddy, today we learned about how God’s chosen people, the Israelites, were taking their babies down into the Valley of Gehenna and sacrificing them in burnt sacrifice to the pagan God Molech!”
“How could they do that?” I asked.
My dad responded, “I don’t know, son. That’s awful, isn’t it?”
As we sat around our dining room table in Houston, Texas in 1958 none of us could have imagined that my brother and I would live to see approximately 70 million American babies sacrificed to the pagan gods of social convention, economic cost, or mere inconvenience since 1973. Can we not see from whence we have fallen?
Next Tuesday’s election will not decide this issue. But let us not fool ourselves. The president we elect will either make the struggle more difficult or less so. And God will hold each of us responsible individually and our nation responsible collectively for how we respond.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
