One of the things I have learned as a pastor is that as a church grows and matures, the minister cannot assume that everybody is up to speed on something just because he “preached a sermon series” on that a little while before. It was probably more like five years before, and half the people in the congregation now weren’t attending back then. Shoot, there are kindergartners listening to the sermons today who weren’t alive back then. This kind of thing is particularly true in college towns, where there is a high turnover rate. Just because you know about what you said back in the day doesn’t mean that anybody else does.
I thought of this when reflecting on Sarah Palin’s “no exceptions” convictions about abortion. In the early days of the pro-life movement, a lot of us were checked out when it came to answering these and other standard objections. It was a front and center kind of thing. But time went by, politicians clouded everything, bills in state legislatures got dragged through legalistic goo, statist evangelicals got themselves a little case of Obama-lust, and pretty soon even the staunch pro-lifers started to think this stand felt extraordinarily narrow. To say that abortion should be prohibited, “no exceptions, not even in cases of rape and incest,” seemed to betray an extraordinary narrowness of mind. But the opposite is the case, as I will show in a moment.
One of the reasons I respect Sarah Palin at this point is that her position is bracingly consistent. The “exceptions” concessions, far from acknowledging genuine exceptions to the principle, are actually concessions of the entire debate. Such concessions allow that in difficult circumstances we get to define who is and who is not a person. And once we have that authority, vested in our courts and legislatures, you can bet that the pressure to expand the jurisdiction will be unstoppable.
So here is the answer to the “rape and incest” objection. When a woman conceives as the result of a rape, there are three parties involved. There is the rapist, there is the woman, and there is the child. Two of these parties are innocent, and one of them is guilty. What kind of sense does it make to execute one of the innocent parties for the crime of his father?
If the fetus is created in the image of God, then it is absurd to execute him for the crime of his father. But that is what the “liberals” want to do. If you wanted to provoke them into the slightest concern for the preservation of human life in this tragedy, about the only way to do it would be to suggest that the father be executed for his own crime. But of course, if the fetus is not created in the image of God, then it is not absurd to execute him for the crime of his “father.” But of course, if he is not created in the image of God, then the entire pro-life cause falls to the ground.
The same thing goes for incest, with the only possible difference being the possible complicity of the mother, in which we would have two guilty parties and one innocent one, and this world’s sophisticates suggest to us that the only humane thing to do is kill the innocent one.
One of the reasons that Palin is so refreshing on this whole thing is that she clearly is not occupying some politically safe “middle ground,” which holding to the rape and incest exceptions certainly is. This is the difference between those who are politically pro-life, and those who really are. We must acknowledge that life is given to us from the hand of God. If we remember this, we will keep things simple. Love God, love His image.