What Respected Christian Leaders Have to Say About Abortion

R.C Sproul, Abortion: a Rational Look at an Emotional Issue, 1990, Colorado Springs, Colo.: Navpress.
The Roe v. Wade decision has provoked the most serious ethical crisis in the history of the United States. This is the nadir in American jurisprudence, the moment of the state's greatest failure to be a state. (pp. 91-2)

Resistance to unjust laws and dehumanizing practices may be costly. Those who resisted Hitler's policy of genocide in Germany often paid with their lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who wrote The Cost of Discipleship, was one who paid such a price. The world still recoils in horror at the reality of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Yet I believe we are in the midst of a new and more evil holocaust, which sees the destruction of 1.5 million unborn babies every year in the United States alone. (pg 150)

John Piper, Sermon at Bethlehem Baptist Church of Minneapolis, MN, "Abortion: You desire and you do not have so you kill", http://www.desiringgod.org/library/sermons/87/011887.html
Use your imagination to see what abortion really is! Fight against the kind of social stupor that gripped Nazi Germany -- the feeling that the problem is so huge and so horrendous and so out of our control that I just can't be wrong to let it be. Use your imagination to see and feel what is really happening behind those sterile clinic doors.

If you could see each little handiwork of God and what it looks like when it is being crushed or poisoned or starved, you would say, this can't be happening. Civilized people do not do this! The children will not be saved and God's work will not be reverenced without an act of sustained sympathetic imagination. Otherwise it is out of sight out of mind -- just like Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. It just couldn't be happening. And so we act as if it isn't. "If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, `Behold, we did not know this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your souls know it, and will he not requite man according to his work?" (Proverbs 24:10-12)

Charles Swindoll, Sanctity of Life: The Inescapable Issue, 1990, Page 2-3
Perhaps the statement most commonly expressed in the heat of the debate comes from those who declare, "I may not choose to have an abortion, but I'd never force my opinion on another," as they back away from the issue altogether, refusing any involvement in the debate. All the while, babies continue to be aborted by the thousands every day.

If the issue of slavery had been handled in that manner, to this day there would be shacks out back, the mistreatment of blacks, and a majority of Americans still looking the other way. It may be more comfortable to adopt a passive stance with regard to the abortion issue. It certainly would be the least offensive response. But who, with a clear conscience, can sit back, say little, and do nothing while babies continue to be killed? If the mistreated blacks needed strong-minded advocates in the mid-nineteenth century, how much more do unborn children need strong-minded advocates today. It has come to the time where the most dangerous place to be in America is not in the inner city where gangs threaten innocent lives or in angry prisons where only the fit survive... but in the womb of a mother who is being told if she doesn't really want the baby, an abortion is the solution. May I ask? How would you life to be that baby inside the womb of a woman who isn't sure she wants you to live any longer?

James Dobson, http://www.family.org/docstudy/solid/a0015094.html
Question: Tell me why you support the "rescue movement" and groups that violate trespassing laws in order to block the entrance to abortion clinics. Isn't this a contradiction of scriptural precepts?
Dr. Dobson Responds:
I don't think so. It is true that we Christians are instructed in Scripture to obey civil laws and those in authority over us. But we are also commanded to "rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter" (Proverbs 24:11). Remember, too, that the apostle Paul and other early Christian leaders disobeyed laws and orders requiring them to remain silent about the teachings of Jesus. There are other biblical examples of godly men and women, including Daniel in ancient Babylon, who refused to obey unjust laws that contradicted their beliefs. Obviously, there are times when we are expected to resist civil authority.

Applying that understanding of Scripture to the abortion movement, we must ask, "Is this such an occasion?" A better question is, Do we believe our own rhetoric about the unborn child? Are the abortionists killing babies or aren't they? If 1.5 million infants are being murdered in the United States every year, how can we stand around debating whether or not it is appropriate to oppose the laws that permit their slaughter?

To illustrate the point, suppose the euthanasia movement catches on in days ahead, making it legal for parents to decide whether or not they wish to continue raising their children. Suppose they could take any child under five years of age to a "Life Clinic," where the boy or girl could be put to sleep. Suppose children were walking in the front door of clinics and going out the back in coffins.

If such a horrible day ever dawned, what do you think the response of Christians would be? Would they thumb carefully through the pages of Scripture to find justification for their civil disobedience? Of course not! The moral issue would be so clear that trespassing to prevent the killing would be of no relevance. The murdering of innocent children would be so abhorrent to what we know of God's nature that many of us would give our lives to rescue the little ones. In a very real sense, we are confronted by that same issue today. We are killing babies, although we can't see them or wrap our arms around them.

I simply do not understand why some Christian leaders, whom I respect, continue to split hairs over subtle scriptural understandings, wondering whether there is a real difference between Daniel's civil disobedience and the insignificant act of trespassing by today's rescuers.

To those Christians who feel prohibited from stepping across a property line to save a baby, I would ask, How would you have responded to the slavery issue in the mid-1800s? Would you have harbored a runaway slave who sought sanctuary from his or her "master"? What would you have done as a citizen of Germany in World War II? The Nazi extermination camps were legal. Would you have broken your country's unjust laws in order to protect millions of people marked for death? Was Corrie ten Boom's father in violation of Scripture for protecting Jews from the murderers in the SS?

Certainly not! Nor are "rescue" participants in violation of any moral law, in my opinion. They seek to prevent violence against a powerless minority, and that is a principle supported throughout Scripture.