Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part U “Do men have a say in the abortion debate?” (includes the film SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS and editorial cartoon)

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline Republican.

On 3-5-13 on the Arkansas Times Blog Vanessa posted:

LOL Saline. Other than Roe, everyone else mentioned in your little rant [is a male].

One can be pro life and still want abortion to be legal. I know that concept confuses you. It’s not about selfishness, either.

[As a woman I can conceive and] you, Saline, cannot conceive.

In other words: You don’t get it. You never will. It’s not that you cannot possible ‘get it’ though you will never have a womb, because dbi gets it and… there is a time for all things. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. Ecclesiastes is still part of the bible, isn’t it, Saline?

Until you and your ilk start working to improve the lives of babies after they are born and even if you’re not gonna promote birth control and it’s use at least get out of the way so that it’s easily available, then it’s not about life with y’all, it’s about control.

Even Texas is coming around. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/texas…

The person going by the username “DeathByInches” noted:

I agree [males] need to keep their lips off abortion discussions. I can attest that all the millions of abortions that occurred since I was 20 didn’t cause me any pain in the slightest. I didn’t feel the slightest of pricks.

Mother T was indeed a woman, but if we’re going to believe all the gobblledygook she was never pronged nor gave birth nor had an abortion, so her word doesn’t really count…

There are some threads we shouldn’t pull at. Abortion is one of them. If you don’t like abortion don’t have one.

The outlier added:

Beautifully said, Vanessa….A fetus is not a human being. Abortion is not a slippery slope to infanticide and euthanasia….SalineSolution/Everette, you refused to answer my question. Figures! It has nothing to do with pregnancy, but the rights of living sperm and eggs. Or are YOU a supporter of genocide?

DeathByInches hit the nail squarely on the head:

1) If you don’t support abortion, don’t get one.

2) If you’re male, quit thinking you have any right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body (actually, that advice applies to women controlling other women too).

I’ll add one more: if you’re a male who thinks you have a right to tell any woman what she can or cannot do with her own body, then that means women also have the right to tell you what you can and cannot do with your body…

Quit being such a slave re controlling other people’s lives, SalineSolution/Everette. We don’t need you playing god (small ‘g’).

I responded:

Vanessa I started out with this quote from a lady:
“It is a great poverty to kill an unborn child so you may live as you wish.” ~ Mother Teresa of Calcutta, India
_________
This issue of abortion is critical. According to Francis Schaeffer, ‘Of all the subjects relating to the erosion of the sanctity of human life, abortion is the keystone. It is the first and crucial issue that has been overwhelming in changing attitudes toward the value on life in general.’
‘If, in this last part of the twentieth century, the Christian community does not take a prolonged and vocal stand for the dignity of the individual each person’s right to life – for the right of each individual to be treated as created in the image of God – we feel that as Christians we have failed the greatest moral test to be put before us in this century.

‘Future generations will look back, and many will either scoff or believe in Christ on the basis of whether we Christians of today took a sacrificial stand in our various walks of life on these overwhelmingly important issues. If we do not take a stand here and now, we certainly cannot lay any claim to being the salt of the earth in our generation. We are neither preserving moral values and the dignity of the individual nor showing compassion for our fellow human beings.’
_________
I am so proud of the Catholics that I see in West Little Rock silently standing there with their pro-life signs for 40 days in a row leading up to March 31st. They are real heroes to me.

_________

Vanessa replied:

You’re right Saline. My bad. You did mention Mother Teresa. But I fail to see how that changes anything else I said. Women don’t get pregnant by themselves. Not even Mary did that. You want to decrease the number of abortions, then get men to accept responsibility for their sperm. There is a [male] behind *every* abortions, Saline. Didja ever stop to contemplate that reality?

_____

I also added:

Vanessa you and DBI want me to stop quoting men so I will give in this time for this next post. Here is the testimony of a nurse who helped on three abortions in one day and it changed her life dramatically.

In September, 1993, Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse with eleven years of experience, was assigned by her nursing agency to an abortion clinic in Ohio. Because of her “strong pro-choice” views, Nurse Shafer did not think this assignment would be a problem. This is her story.

I was present for three of these partial-birth procedures. It is the first one that I will describe to you in detail.

The mother was 6 months pregnant, 26½ weeks. A doctor told her that the baby had Down Syndrome, and she had to have an abortion. She decided to have this abortion. She came in the first 2 days to have the laminaria inserted and changed [to dilate the cervix], and she cried the whole time she was there. On the third day, she came in to have the partial-birth abortion procedure.

The doctor brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. On the ultrasound screen, I could see the heartbeat. As the doctor watched the baby on the ultrasound screen, the baby’s heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen.

The doctor went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms — everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus.

The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor doing these things.

Next, the doctor delivered the baby’s head. He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used. I saw the baby move in the pan. I asked another nurse, and she said it was just reflexes.

I have been a nurse for a long time, and I have seen a lot of death — people maimed in auto accidents, gunshot wounds, you name it. I have seen surgical procedures of every sort. But in all my professional years, I had never witnessed anything like this.

The woman wanted to see her baby, so they cleaned up the baby and put it in a blanket and handed it to her. She cried the whole time. She kept saying, “I am so sorry, please forgive me.” I was crying, too. I couldn’t take it. That baby boy had the most perfect, angelic face I think I have ever seen in my life.

I was present in the room during two more such procedures that day, but I was really in shock. I tried to pretend I was somewhere else, to not think about what was happening. I just couldn’t wait to get out of there. After I left that day, I never went back. The last two procedures, by the way, involved healthy mothers with healthy babies.

I was very much affected by what I saw. For a long time –and sometimes still — I had nightmares about what I saw that day.

I wish I hadn’t seen what I saw. But I did see it, and I will never be able to forget it. That baby boy was only inches, seconds, away from being entirely born, when he was killed. What I saw done to that little boy, and to those other babies, should not be allowed in this country.

As told to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, November 17, 1995, and the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, March 21, 1996.

__________

The discussion of abortion with many abortion advocates many times gets back to them claiming that as women no one can tell them what to do with their body. This editorial cartoon takes a look at this issue:

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith pictured below.

Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Published on Oct 6, 2012 by

Why not engage the intellectuals of our day with the Bible? No one did it better than Francis Schaeffer.

Compassionate Engagement, Part 6: Schaeffer’s Enduring Influence

By Derek Brown on January 13, 2012

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5

Francis Schaeffer’s enduring influence upon evangelicals and evangelicalism cannot be overlooked.  In great measure, Francis Schaeffer taught evangelicals the value of intellectual engagement.  While in Europe, Schaeffer began to see the fault of fundamentalism lying primarily in its strident separatism.  As he would interact with young unbelievers who were persuaded by nihilism, atheism, and existentialism, Schaeffer learned that merely attacking liberalism and other evangelicals was less than profitable.  He needed to provide a positive response to modern philosophies and thoughtfully interact with opposing ideas on the level of world-view so unbelievers could see the incoherence of their positions and subsequently embrace the truth of Christianity.

Schaeffer’s desire to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christianity to unbelievers led him to begin to think more and more about how world-views had played a significant role in the formation of Western thought and culture.  As such, Schaeffer sought to engage with and think critically about past and present culture; not for its own sake, but so he might listen to the voice of those who were drowning in meaninglessness because they had embraced a world-view that erased the existence of a personal God—a world-view that inevitably led to the loss of a sense of humanness and overall purpose.

Schaeffer’s endeavor to wrestle with ancient and contemporary culture, especially in the realm of ideas and world-view, would have a tremendous influence on how Christians thought about and interacted with culture.  Ronald Nash summarizes his impact in this area well when he writes,

Francis Schaeffer was the instrument through whom hundreds of thousands of people became conscious of [the] intellectual dimension of the Christian faith, of the importance of philosophy, of the significance of world views and their presuppositions, of the message that ideas have consequences (Parkhurst, 69).

Among these hundreds of thousands to be profoundly influenced by Schaeffer would belong Christian apologists, philosophers and authors.  Nancy Pearcy, popular editor and author, tells of her trip to L’Abri and how she was immediately intrigued by Christians who were engaged with the intellectual and cultural world.  As she read works by Christian apologists and interacted with Schaeffer and others at L’Abri, Pearcy interacted with many good and sufficient arguments that did much to challenge her unbelief (Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth, 55).  Pearcy would eventually embrace Jesus Christ and a biblical world-view.

Pearcy also notes how Schaeffer provided her and other Christians with the apparatus with which to properly enjoy and accurately evaluate culture.  She writes,

There is no need to avoid the secular world and hide out behind the walls of an evangelical subculture; instead, Christians can appreciate works of art and culture as products of human creativity expressing the image of God.  On the other hand, there is no danger of being naïve or uncritical about false and dangerous messages embedded in secular culture, because a worldview gives the conceptual tools needed to analyze and critique them (Pearcy, 56).

Pearcy here testifies to what Barry Hankins believes was Schaeffer’s “signal achievement and most lasting influence;” namely, the “important task of world-view formation” (Hankins, 227).

On the other hand, we would be remiss if we did not reflect here on what motivated Schaeffer in his whole enterprise.  It was not merely an interest in ideas; it was love for people.  Bryan Follis guards us from turning Francis Schaeffer into a stuffy, intellectually smug apologist when he writes, “To understand Schaeffer, we need to understand the love he had for the individual person” (Follis, Truth with Love, 53).  Love for others appeared to free Schaeffer to engage the surrounding culture for the sake of people’s good and salvation.  As Schaeffer traveled to America and shared his message with young evangelicals, his point was unmistakable in this regard.  Barry Hankins notes,

…[Schaeffer’s] message to American evangelical college students was that to be effective witnesses they would have to move beyond fundamentalist separation from secular ideas and beyond mere denunciation of liberals.  Instead, evangelicals needed to take their ideas seriously and to understand and engage their culture (Hankins, 233).

Schaeffer would not merely seek to understand and exhibit the impotence of unbiblical world-views; he would sympathize with and weep over those who struggled desperately with the essential questions of life—even if their answers came in the form of unbelieving, incoherent philosophy, art, and poetry—and he encouraged following generations of evangelicals to do the same.

___________

Related posts:

Francis Schaeffer’s prayer for us in USA

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