ABORTION: MYTHS, DECEPTIONS AND EUPHEMISMS (4th in Series)

NYC photo by pexels- malcolmhill

By Ray Dunkelberg, M.D.,

PPL Board Member

DECEPTION: Abortion protects women’s rights, power and

control over her own body.

FACT: It’s about the mother AND her child, both made in God’s image (Imago Dei). Both with dignity and purpose. Both with the unalienable right to life

as defined in the Declaration of Independence.

Pro-abortion wording (through myths, deception, and euphemisms) is designed to take your eyes off the child and shift it to the mother. Magicians use this trick also, this slight-of-hand, with great skill - they want you to focus on the one hand so that you don't see what they are doing with the other hand. Euphemisms such as "freedom of choice" or "the right to privacy" are terms that purposely draw our attention away from the child and towards the mother. The reality is that abortion is about the destruction of an innocent human being. That of course, is what abortion is all about. It's a life and death issue.

Solomon said, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Proverbs: 18:21a

In American medicine, Obstetrics has always been approached as mother AND child - the physician has two patients. Always the goal was to have a healthy mother and a healthy baby. Two lives were always involved - always.

Generations of physicians in the United States adhered to the Hippocratic Oath, a historical pledge requiring them to uphold ethical standards in their practice of medicine. It stated specifically that we would not do abortions. Abortion was removed in that wording after Roe v. Wade (1973) and political pressure.

Author Gregory Koukl frames the reality in America today, (Street Smarts, Ch. 15, pp. 225-226):

"On the morning of September 11, 2001, two jumbo jets slammed in New York City, World Trade Center towers, another struck the western section of the Pentagon, and the fourth plowed into a field in Pennsylvania when courageous passengers overpowered terrorist pilots.

“To put the toll in perspective, on that other ‘day of infamy’ December 7, 1941, - 2,335 military personnel lost their lives at Pearl Harbor. On 9/11, though, more than that - 2,977 victims were crushed beneath one million tons of concrete and steel at the World Trade North Tower and South Tower, buried beneath the rubble of the Pentagon, or violently entombed in a meadow in Pennsylvania.

”... The number of human lives snuffed out on 9/11 was less, on average, then the number of children who die every single day, day after day, for nearly half a century through abortion on American soil.

“In the United States alone, 63,459,781 abortions 3548 a day have been performed since the Supreme Court legalized abortion on January 22, 1973. That's 21,316 consecutive 9/11 days of death.

“... It took Americans six years after Roe v. Wade to exceed Hitler’s holocaust, killing their own unborn children through abortion. That's 10 holocausts back to back.

“At least 388,000 Africans were shipped to North America over the course of 2 1/2 centuries before abolition. Abortion kills that many children - including a disproportionate number of black babies - in 109 days.

“Abortion in America has killed nearly as many human beings as all the Allied soldiers, all the Axis armies, and all the civilians from both sides put together who perished in World War II.

“No moral issue, no political issue, no human rights issue has greater significance in the 21st-century than abortion. ” (Koukl, Gregory. Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity’s Toughest Challenges. Zondervan, 2023.)

And that IS the reality, without the myths, deception, and euphemisms that are fed to us all through the media, much of common culture and, unfortunately, enforced in much of the Christian culture by the silence of the Church - which has been profound.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out “silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless,” and “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

The Church is the only institution that has the moral authority to speak into this horrific evil. Given that moral authority, it is also, therefore, the only institution that has the obligation to do so.