Today's Devotional
September 1st, 2008
Subject: Pro-Choice Or No-Choice
Exodus 1:15-17 - “And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then she shall live, But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.
Exodus 1:20 - “Therefore God dealt well with the midwives: and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty.”
I don’t know why, but I love children. I love working with them, teaching them, playing with them, fathering them and just about anything else you can do to promote their health and life. Therefore the analysis below is based only on those ideas.
The Republican pick for VP candidate illuminates even more starkly the differences between those who would be “pro-life” and those who say they are “pro-choice.” Most Democrats state that they are “pro-choice.” Inspection of the current Democratic Presidential candidate leaves me wondering what that really means. The statements made by Senator Barack Obama are chilling, if nothing else, in their callousness and indifference to not only unborn babies, but even those born.
In 2002, as an Illinois legislator, Senator Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that survived late-term abortions. That same year a similar federal law, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, was signed by President Bush. Only 15 members of the U.S. House opposed it, and it passed the Senate unanimously. Both the Illinois bill and the federal bill, sought equal treatment for babies who survived abortions and those who were simply born prematurely. The bills sought to give both groups life-saving medical attention. In case we are unclear of the gravity here, there are 435 members of the House and only 15 members opposed the federal bill. Senator Obama voted against this bill in Illinois.
At a hearing in which a nurse testified that these babies were simply being left to die, the Senator suggested that the nurse was wrong in implying that the doctors were uncaring “and that may be your assessment, but I don’t see any evidence of that. What we are doing here is to create one more burden on a woman and I can’t support that.” One more burden on the woman? Couple that statement with his statement while campaigning that he wouldn’t want his teenage daughter “punished with a baby” and one immediately gets a sense of where Senator Obama stands on what I think is a monumental issue, the issue of life itself.
As I stated earlier, the contrast is stark when compared with Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the new Republican VP selection. She is the new mother of a 4 month-old Down’s Syndrome child and she knew before the birth that the child would be so-afflicted and chose to have it any way; clearly pro-life.
Senator Obama likes to use the term “the least of these” to refer to a biblical imperative to render aid to the people he wants to help and that it is great to rely on scripture for one’s cause, but perhaps it would do the candidate well to see that there is a precedent (scriptural passage above) for those who thought it right to not kill babies born.
So let me get this right; babies are being killed because we don’t want to burden women or punish the lives of teens who’ve made a mistake and that’s a “pro-choice” viewpoint? I think the babies would call that “NO-CHOICE!”
Carlen
