On Faith
Garret Hashimoto
March recalls
duty to protect lifeWednesday will mark the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision overturning local abortion laws and requiring abortion to be legal in all 50 states. Since that time, in the United States more than 40 million unborn infants have been "terminated," a toll exceeding all the dead in all the wars of the 20th century.
In Hawaii on Wednesday, hundreds of women and men will join in the Right to Life March at the state Capitol in loving memory of those many dead but also in concern for the living victims of abortion.
They are the women who thought that destroying a tiny life was the easy way out of embarrassment and inconvenience but instead find themselves tormented by "post-abortion syndrome," bouts of depression and even thoughts of suicide.
And just as complicit are irresponsible boyfriends tempted into demanding a "solution" to the sudden appearance of a dependent new life.
Abortion hardens and deadens the conscience of those still living.
It sends a message of parental callousness rather than concern to the survivors of the young generation. How much of the carelessness and indifference to life shown by many of our young people is caused by the low value we give to it through the example of so many deliberate deaths?
Our hypocrisy stills the conscience as well.
A woman aglow with pregnancy pats her stomach and speaks lovingly of the baby within her. When we want the baby we call it a baby, but when we decide we don't want it, we start calling it a fetus. Fetus is just the Latin name for baby! Let's be honest by using English, not Latin, when talking about abortion.
Study after study testifies that caring, committed two-parent families provide a vital advantage for healthy child development. This lets us carry on what sociologists have called society's most important function, bringing up and taking care of the future generation. But how can we possibly be a sincere guide to our younger ones if we keep on focusing on self instead of service, if we continue the habit of killing rather than caring?
In obedience to our Lord, Christians are called to be "salt and light" to the world, not through violence, but through the strength of a consistent example. In a time when everyone "does what is right in his own eyes," we need to hold fast to eternal right and wrong.
When merchants and politicians counseled him to be practical and avoid extremism, English Christian William Wilberforce took an uncompromising stand against the slave trade.
Before the Civil War, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared blacks property and not persons, the New England clergy boldly opposed slave ownership. A Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., witnessed against the entrenched segregation of the American South. And we must be a steadfast witness against the evil sacrifice of infant lives in our own time.
Garret Hashimoto is president of the Hawaii Christian Coalition.
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