In a Bible study I’m now involved in, the instructor said there were five reasons for Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit: 1) a desire for something beautiful; 2) a twisting of words by the Serpent; 3) a desire for power (knowledge of good and evil); 4) a suspicion that God was holding out on them; and 5) lack of trust in the loving providence of God.
This really made me think of abortion and how it fits into all of these primeval motivations.
We abort our children because we desire the beauty of a life unencumbered by the burdens of raising a child. We fantasize that our lives will be so much better if only children are not in it, at least at this stage in the game. We may also even fear losing our own beauty as a result of pregnancy.
We are convinced to abort by twisted words. The child is only a “glob of cells”; it’s a just a matter of choice; don’t tell me what to do with my body (forgetting that there’s actually two bodies involved); it’s all about privacy.
We desire power over our bodies and lives and do not want to cede control or influence to the unborn child. We want to be freed of the shackles of our physical reality and exercise complete dominion over our bodies.
Even if we don’t believe in God, we feel that an unwanted pregnancy is going to deny us something greater, that the good we had in store will now be permanently delayed.
And again, even if we don’t believe in God, we can’t trust that our lives will work out well, and even good, with an unwanted child. If we do believe in God, we simply don’t trust in God’s goodness and that all will be well even in the midst of the fear and uncertainty of an unwanted pregnancy.
I guess what I’m saying is that abortion is not a small issue, or one that can simply be relegated to “social issues.” It is a core issue in our society because of how it parallels with the core experience of our spiritual parents, the experience that condemned humanity to a proclivity to sin and to push away God instead of embracing him.
I know this is all quite religious language and I’m going to be re-labeled “Taliban Trey” and told to keep my God out of the public square, but until we realize how abortion undermines our collective good by using violence towards the most innocent and vulnerable persons in our community to solve a “problem,” we’ll continue to struggle to solve every other problem that plagues us.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
