Abortion,  Consistency,  Population Control

The Coming Consistency

Inconsistency is good. What? Surely I should be stripped of my qualifications, marched down to logic 101 and given a thorough going over! Not so fast. First, one has to ask: consistent with what? For there are two articles I have read this week that demonstrate consistency of the kind I do not want. First, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes on the anniversary of Roe v Wade (see here for the full article):

“I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice… If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.”

One might say that Williams is being inconsistent – she appears to believe that a fetus is a human life yet is also pro-choice. However, that’s not inconsistency. The point is that she is beginning to be consistent with a worldview that has no way to distinguish human life from that of a rat, no way of being sure that any such thing as good or evil are binding on all human beings. She has been “given over to her lustful desires” and is, as such, now able to say that a woman can decide to kill a human life–a defenseless, voiceless life–on her whim for whatever reason she may come up with.

Second, was an announcement from one of Britain’s most respected personalities–David Attenborough–who called human beings a “plague on the earth,” sapping nature of its resources (see here). What we need, argues Attenborough, is population control. I have written on this subject before (see here), but am amazed by how mainstream this idea is becoming, this nihilistic, arrogant, false, totalitarian idea poised, with power in its grip, ready to impose itself, where? Well, where people have lots of babies. Africa.

When I see people being consistent with their presuppositions I pray that God would make them inconsistent, that, by his grace, they might not live what they think to be true, that materialists, for example, would refrain from living as if there really is nothing more than matter. We have seen consistency of this type before. And it ended in blood. It always ends in blood.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and The College at Southeastern.

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