Tuesday, September 28, 2010
There Is Ugly, and Then There Is This
I pick on Al Mohler a lot here, but today I want to agree with him.This is a piece he wrote about abortion after IVF treatment. Not "selected harvesting" mind you - pregnancy termination!
As Mohler points out indirectly in his comments about the expenditures, the technology here is not the issue - the decision making is. But I wonder, is regulation and legislation the answer here. Consider the Schiavo case, Terri was treated int e courts as chattel property, much as the unborn are here.
Government of the size we have today is inherently bureaucratic and therefore inherently dehumanizing. It simply lacks the ability to make decisions based on human considerations like we have in these circumstances. I suppose it could be argued that such is the case becasue we, individually have abandoned our humanity so our institutions no longer reflect it - but I think that is circular. We influence our institutions and they influence us.
It will never get better until we find a way to make better people outside the bounds of legalism, whether it be religious or governmental. That was the ministry of Christ. We need to embrace it - not to "build the church," or "grow our ministry" but for the simple sake of human individuals.
The first step is to be transformed ourselves. Have we truly embraced Christ to make enough of a difference?
One of the most respected British newspapers has just revealed that approximately 80 abortions are performed in the UK each year, terminating pregnancies that came about by IVF treatments.Mohler makes three points out of this story:
That’s right — on average, 80 British women each year abort their babies after having conceived them through the ordeal of IVF treatments.
What does this new scandal say about the human condition? In the first place, it tells us that we are turning ourselves into unabashed idolaters of the self.I could not agree more, but I do want to point out that even without the intervention of medical science we have seen these problems in conception and child rearing. In my own life, I have seen children reduced to property in divorce custody hearings. In my own life I have seen women allow themselves to become pregnant to coerce a man into marrying them, only to abandon the child when, unsurprisingly the marriage falls apart. How many couples do you know that "play house" (living together without benefit of marriage), including producing offspring, only to wish they could discard the offspring when the fantasy was no longer fun?
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Second, this scandal reminds us that the real issue here is the killing of innocent human life, and not the waste of expensive fertility treatments.
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Third, we must remember in light of this scandal that human dignity does not rest in any sense upon the circumstances of conception, but on the fact that every human being ever conceived is made in God’s image and is a life that is sacred and to be honored, protected, welcomed, and cherished.
As Mohler points out indirectly in his comments about the expenditures, the technology here is not the issue - the decision making is. But I wonder, is regulation and legislation the answer here. Consider the Schiavo case, Terri was treated int e courts as chattel property, much as the unborn are here.
Government of the size we have today is inherently bureaucratic and therefore inherently dehumanizing. It simply lacks the ability to make decisions based on human considerations like we have in these circumstances. I suppose it could be argued that such is the case becasue we, individually have abandoned our humanity so our institutions no longer reflect it - but I think that is circular. We influence our institutions and they influence us.
It will never get better until we find a way to make better people outside the bounds of legalism, whether it be religious or governmental. That was the ministry of Christ. We need to embrace it - not to "build the church," or "grow our ministry" but for the simple sake of human individuals.
The first step is to be transformed ourselves. Have we truly embraced Christ to make enough of a difference?
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