The MountainSky Journal

We can all see that our political struggle against the abortionists is not going well. At the federal level, even a weak law like the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act could not be passed over the president's veto -- and this was only an effort to minimally restrict the violent work of the abortionists, not to end it completely. Do Americans really have a warm, indulgent feeling toward professional child killers?

No, it's not that. There's something else to be reckoned with and frankly, I don't think the political processes of this land can deal with it. If the Christian churches do not rise to the challenge which is before them, politics and law will continue to favor the abortionists over children. The "something else" is guilt.

If you take the number of children killed by abortionists since Roe v. Wade (and that was not really the beginning of unleashed child killing in this land) and make a guess at the number of people involved in these killings, you will have a very big number... 40 million children, two parents for each child means 80 million, but some fathers and mothers are guilty of more than one killing so that means it's less than 80 million, but many others have blood on their hands because they gave wicked advice or put pressure on a mother to kill her child, so that means the number is probably more than 80 million... No one but God knows exactly, but we know it's a big number because of the number of the slain.

One thing that is true about these people is that they don't want to talk about abortion and they don't want to hear about abortion. They want to forget abortion and forget what the abortionists are doing and have done. This has nothing to do with a political position on abortion, because truly, they are not capable of dealing with it as a political issue. For these people -- fathers and mothers especially -- the issue is terribly personal. It is a child, a son or a daughter, wantonly slain, and they had a hand in it -- in the death of their own child. They have a very hard time thinking about this. Politicians know, instinctively perhaps, that a very, very large number of Americans -- voters, mind you -- don't want to hear about abortion. It's a subject that has power to unleash in their hearts unbearable regrets, grief and pain. If they don't know how to deal with this, they will avoid it. Really, really avoid it.

The challenge for the Christian churches: Make sure that 80 million or more people in this country, and hundreds of millions throughout the world, hear the Good News, and make sure they hear, specifically, that it is Good News for people who have killed their own children. To many, it will be very Good News that God, the Creator, knows them and knows their sin -- and that He loves them! Our sin does not change the fact that God loves us! It is very good news that Jesus died for the sins of the world, and that we can stand in the presence of the living God, forgiven and free, with a new life bound up in the life of our risen Lord and Savior. People need to hear this, and people whose lives have been destroyed by the sin of abortion will at least listen to the message of forgiveness. They know abortion not as an abstraction, but as the father or mother of a slain child knows it, and they need the kind of help they can find only in the Gospel, only in Jesus.

Peter Barry 12/8/1999

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