You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain– .
Seeking to stop the slaughter of the unborn by merely declaiming abortion is like building a bridge by starting in the middle. James reminds us that we murder because we lust. Statistics tells us that nearly nine of ten women who get an abortion in America are unmarried. That is telling.
Too often we in the evangelical church have taken a binary approach to the problem. Either we separate the sin of abortion from all its related sins and give our time and attention there, or we decide it’s a heart issue, and our only hope is mass conversion. (Forgetting the hard truth that one of six abortions in America is procured by a professing evangelical.)
Abortion, in the end, is a heart issue. And it is a good thing to seek its end. But in between these two poles we have the great evil of feminism. Now please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying we have abortion because the women folk have gotten uppity. Nor that the central claim made by movement feminists, that “reproductive freedom” is the lynchpin of women’s liberation, is at fault, however foolish the idea might be. Rather feminism is the bedrock of our culture of death because it was designed by men to remove obligation, and any barriers to our sexual desires, our lusts.
The sexual revolution more broadly had the same goal. Give men access to multiple sexual partners who would in turn have no claim on the man’s loyalty, provision, responsibility. The lie that sex can be separated from procreation gave birth to the lie that sex can be safely separated from the covenant of marriage. Abortion is nothing more than the backstop to this premise, what you do to keep the machine running even when birth control fails.
The truth is that when a woman begins to sleep with a man not her husband she is already in grave danger. She is giving herself to someone who isn’t giving himself back. She has chosen a man who has already determined that he can and will take from her. Which is why it should not surprise us that he ends up being the kind of man who puts his girlfriend in danger and murders his own child. That’s the kind of man that sleeps with a woman he has not committed to. That’s the kind of man who, after his crime, leaves the scene. Eighty percent of relationships will end within two months of procuring an abortion.
One morning at my local abortion mill a young man brought his girlfriend and child to have the latter murdered. He confessed his uneasiness on his way in the building, but went in anyway. A few hours later he came back out, confessing that he could feel the wickedness, the oppression, the evil in the building. So he drove away, leaving his girlfriend and soon to be butchered baby behind. He turned tail and fled.
We murder babies because our men are boys. We lust and do not have, and murder follows in the wake.