The Drury Sequence: Abortion

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Republican affinity #4: Abortion

"You can get more votes for fetuses in Congress right now than for the pork barrel. Maybe I should change my campaign button from a star to a fetus."

~ Unnamed U.S. House member, quoted in Richard Fenno's Home Style: House Members in their Districts.

Planned abortions kill a living creation of God's right hand. There's not much else to say. Abortion should be apolitical and repugnant to all thinking women and men. It should not be politicized, much less the political football it has become. I agree with Drury, who says, "I want the whole nation to reduce abortions to at or near zero, and neither party helps me there."

American society is sufficiently pleasure-seeking, plastic, and disposable that abortion will never go away through legislative or judicial fiat. The only way that Drury's, and my own, vision will be fulfilled is by persuasion, confession, repentance, and tender woman-to-woman ministries that open the door to women with unplanned pregnancies. Noisy evangelism that averts our gaze from the scarred wombs and scarred lives within the Church suffocates us. Drury calls for the just alternative: a Church that proclaims and lives the message, “We Christians do not kill our fetuses.”

"Why seek ye the living God among the dead?"

Many Democrats carelessly disregard fetal vitality, whereas most Republicans highly value it. That said, it is sheepish and imbecilic for a Christian to vote for Republican candidates on the single issue of abortion. When the living poor, the images of Christ on earth, cry out for their withheld wages, Jesus hears them (James 5:4). Republicans neglect them in their incessant cries for further cuts in a tax system that favors the wealthy as it stands. When prisoners on death row - not all of them guilty - cry to the Crucified one, Jesus hears them (Luke 23:43). Republicans execute them. Neither of our two major political parties consistently respects all phases of human life.

My mother, Kathie, who carried her unplanned teen pregnancy to full term, gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and placed her for adoption, once said to me, "Abortion should not be banned, but it should be discouraged." I can't improve on her words.