A "pastor" tries to defend abortion

Making abortion illegal doesn't mean there won't be any more, by Lisa Jo Bezner.

I'll ignore the foolishness of her title. Of course making abortion illegal won't totally abolish the practice, any more than speed limits have eliminated the practice of driving too fast. We wouldn't have a penal system at all, or judges or courts, if merely banning a practice was enough to totally abolish it. Some people will persist in their wrongdoing regardless of what the law says. The idea is to reduce the offensive activity, to discourage it, to limit it.

But the title of her piece aside, Bezner isn't really arguing about the legal status of abortion. She's arguing that abortion is Scripturally sound. And she does it in an astonishingly illogical way.

Every Scripture that supports the humanity of the unborn, she dismisses as being "a special case", a particular circumstance that just does not apply to everybody else.

She dismisses all those Scriptures, and puts all her eggs into the basket of one Scripture:

However, the second creation story in Genesis 2:7 states, "then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being." Prior to the breath of life, the fetus is biological material but afterwards "a living being" with a soul.

If she can dismiss John the Baptizer, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and presumably Jacob and Essau, as being different, special circumstances, particular fetuses that were different from all other fetuses, how can she take Adam, who alone was never a fetus, and declare his case to be the only one analogous to everybody who followed? Everybody who actually was at some point a fetus?

She ignores the totality of Scripture -- those addressing the unborn, those about justice and coping with crisis -- and latches onto a single image from the Creation Story.

She dismisses Scriptural teaching on justice due to the vulnerable, and on hospitality. She ignores the admonition to "Deliver those who are being taken away to death." And she totally blows off Jesus Himself when he tells us that as we do to the least, we do to Him.

Remember even Satan can quote Scripture and twist it to evil purposes -- just as Ms. Bezner is doing. And, as a pastor, she is accountable to God not only for her own sins, but for those she leads others into. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all recount Christ's words, "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin."

Ms. Bezner has taken a single verse of Scripture, entirely out of context, and used it to justify great evil. God is not mocked. She will be held accountable.