Abortion: Are Women Victims?

Apologia Studios

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The pro -life movement has a lot of women who are active in it who have had abortions, and they very much argue that the mother who got the abortion is also a victim.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of This Is Why, a mini -series on reforming the pro -life movement with the biblical worldview.

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I'm Zach Conover, the Director of Communications for End Abortion Now, an interview recently conducted with National Right to Life President Carol Tobias at the 2017

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Right to Life Convention demonstrated one of the long -held staples of the pro -life movement, and that is their insistence on labeling women who have abortions as victims.

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In addressing this, Mrs. Tobias was presented with the scenario of a woman who takes the life of her young child and how that would differ from the woman who murders her unborn child.

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She then proceeds with the response that women involved in the pro -life movement who have had abortions are, like the child, victims, largely of coercion.

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In doing so, she assumes the long -standing portrait of the helpless woman whose emotional state needs to be considered, whose circumstances need to be considered, or life history, or socioeconomic status, or whether people are forcing her into this horrible act—things we wouldn't be asked to consider if a parent murdered their child by any other means besides abortion.

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But the question remains—are women who procure abortions unwitting victims of circumstance?

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Have they just been misinformed and lied to? Are they unaware that they are caring human beings? Do they really have no idea that going through with an abortion is a violation of God's law?

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Here's where a biblical approach to ending abortion delineates the stark contrast with the humanistic starting point of the pro -life movement.

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They build their argument from the same starting point as secularists do. They claim that the woman is at the mercy of her circumstances rather than being a violator of her own conscience.

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And this is critical. The Bible says that all of us inescapably know the true God and that we suppress this truth.

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Romans chapter 2, verses 14 and 15 speaks about those who don't have the explicit commands of God's law, like, thou shalt not murder, but still by nature do what his law requires.

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It says, they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

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The Word of God tells us that those who intentionally premeditate the murder of another human being have violated their

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God -given moral instrument that distinguishes between right and wrong and are actively fighting to stifle it.

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This is something vitally important for Christians to grasp. In labeling a vast majority of women who have abortions as victims, the pro -life movement has framed the act of abortion as a horrible thing, but not a crime that should be legislated against to protect the victim that is the unborn child.

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As to the issue of coercion, the Guttmacher Institute may help to shed some light on this claim.

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According to their study on the reasons why women obtain abortions, they say, quote, some advocates have used highly selective samples to claim that the majority of women having abortions are coerced into the decision.

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Such claims suggest that women lack control over their own lives, but our findings attest that women independently make the decision to have an abortion.

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The proportion of women citing influence from partners or parents is small, and fewer than one percent of respondents indicated that this influence was their most important reason, end quote.

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They also report that, quote, in light of the public debate over the morality of abortion, it is notable that the women in our survey emphasize their conscious examination of the moral aspects of their decisions.

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Although some described abortion as sinful and wrong, many of those same women and others describe the indiscriminate bearing of children as a sin and their abortion as the right thing to do and a responsible choice, end quote.

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Now, are there instances of women who have aborted under duress and threat of force? Yes, that's what the small percentage of data is for us to tell us that.

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And as the Church of Jesus Christ, it is imperative that we should be loving these moms, coming alongside them, laying ourselves down for them, caring for them, and restoring them with the healing power of God's word in the hope that they come to know him.

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But what we don't do is use an exceptionally low amount of cases as a basis to treat abortion as anything other than what it truly is, murder.

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So three things quickly. Number one, that baby is the image of God, knit together in the womb by his hand.

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Number two, it's a human being with all of the biological components present from the moment of conception that's scientifically irrefutable.

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And then number three, from a legal definition of law, the premeditated killing of any other human being with malice of forethought is criminally classified as murder under our judicial system.

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So with these three things, we get a distinctively Christian position, which means that we also get the science and the biological basis for human life, and we get to be philosophically consistent with legislation that affords the unborn child the same protection under the law as everyone else, criminalizing abortion and refuting the claim made by Mrs.

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Tobias and the National Right to Life. Unfortunately, the National Right to Life and the pro -life movement set aside scripture and play neutral on one hand, and then fail to be consistent in their application of justice on the other.

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And thus they are left with no place to stand, propagating an idea of the victimized mother.

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And this is why abortion still takes the lives of thousands of babies every day in our nation, and why we ask you to visit endabortionnow .com

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and help us. Partner with us financially so that we can continue to equip local churches across the country to bring the gospel to these places of death and the message of repentance and faith in Jesus, and continue to save precious babies.

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We need you. We have more churches to equip and we rely on the hand of God through your generosity to help us.