By Barbara Cohen Hyland
In the Biblical account of creation, after God creates man and woman, the first thing He tells them is be fruitful and multiply. Really? Aren’t we facing a problem with overpopulation and “global warming” and all the problems that come with too many people on our planet? Actually, the birth rates have been declining. In Japan there is such a decline in population that couples are receiving government money to have more children. However, we are facing an even more threatening situation which is abortion on demand!
A look at history tells us that in pagan societies, parents had the right to kill/abandon children. The ancient world believed in both abortion and infanticide. One Roman soldier wrote to his wife….” If it is a boy child, raise it… if it is a female, abandon it.” The Romans in fact advocated killing any deformed child. Ritual child sacrifice was also widely practiced.
Even though the early Jews knew the sanctity of human life, they emulated the practices of the other nations and began sacrificing their own children to please pagan deities. The sin of child sacrifice is understood in the Bible as being one of the major reasons why the northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 750 A.D. and the people taken into exile. “They mutilated their sons and daughters by fire……till the Lord in his great anger against Israel, put them away out of his sight.” (2 Kgs. 17:17-18)
In Ezekiel 16:21 “You slaughtered my children by causing them to pass through the fire. And in the book of Jeremiah: “They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I have not commanded them ………this is an abomination to cause Judah to sin.” (32:35)
The more things change, the more they remain the same. At the root of today’s so-called culture wars, there lies a fundamental disagreement about these same issues. Is natural, procreative, heterosexual sex a good thing as depicted in the Hebrew Bible or something from which men and women need to be “reoriented”? Are children a blessing to be cherished or are they a burden to be avoided and are they disposable? Do women have a right to “control their own bodies” thereby dispensing with the inconvenience of being a care giver?
Planned Parenthood’s dark beginnings.
In the beginning of the early 20th century, anti-family crusaders, such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, began to target Christian churches and Jewish organizations in an effort to “convert” them to the anti-child point of view.
While at times Sanger appealed to women’s health issues, her most powerful arguments were largely social in nature. She wrote quite frankly about the eugenic agenda behind the planned parenthood movement. Eugenics concerns controlling the balance in the birth rate of the “unfit “and the fit”. That is, how use sterilization and abortion to discourage “fertility of the mentally and physically defective and the racially “impure”. For Sanger the most unfit of all were minority populations, particularly African Americans.
The new abortion movement now dismisses the eugenics idea but focuses on “the woman’s right to choose.” However, the majority of abortions are among the minority populations and especially the African American community. Abortions therefore encourage promiscuity among the young and vulnerable. Thus, the problem of having a child becomes just a minor inconvenience that can easily be done away with. This tiny speck of cells really isn’t a human but simply an unwanted obstacle that limits one’s pleasure. There need not be a commitment of either parent or society can be rid of millions of humans which add to overpopulation. This idea also extends to the “global warming” agenda. The fewer humans the less pollution! Society can erase several problems at the same time. Doctors can now take the life of a tiny human up to and slightly before the actual birthing process. They don’t call this murder of course.
The whole idea of humans being expendable stems from “social Darwinism” of the 19th century. If God isn’t involved in the special creation of man, then man himself is expendable and thereby society feels free to rid itself of the unwanted. This idea of course is what led to the anti-humanitarian degradation of the Nazis.
Humans are made in the image of our Creator and the preservation of life is precious. It is God who gave us life and formed mankind. If Yeshua said, “even the hairs on your head are numbered” (Lk. 12:7) then how much more does He value human life?
