Choose Life Australia

 
Filed on 07 March 2007 in Speeches category. Print This Page

The shedding of innocent blood

Preamble to prayer of repentance at National Solemn Assembly, Canberra 9-11 March 2007 with specific reference to abortion and cloning. The profession of medicine has a long and noble history of skill and compassion.The teachers I had in medical school were honourable and moral and many of them were Christian.

But we are in an ethical and moral crisis with respect to the value of human life – and most are not aware of how serious this is or they feel helpless to do anything about it and are therefore silent. Sadly, most of God’s people are also unaware.

The awful, direct evidence of this devaluing of human life – made in the Image of God – is the number of abortions carried out in Australia, some 90,000 each year, the vast majority being in the name of family planning.

If we view the embryo as “just a clump of cells” then this will not bother us.But if we take the view that all human life matters and tell the truth that this means 90,000 human lives then the figure is appalling – 90,000 lives discarded each year. Dear God, what have we done?

Then in 2002 in our parliaments we crossed another boundary by passing laws allowing destructive research on that smallest and most defenceless of human beings, the human embryo. In December last year we compounded this wrong by crossing further boundaries – lines that must not be crossed – by passing laws permitting the deliberate creation of embryos for the specific purpose of destructive research and to achieve this by cloning.

Why did things go so drastically wrong? Yes, of course there are doctors and scientists who will deliberately go down a track that they know to be wrong but for the majority of the medical profession it was a matter of misplaced compassion – pity if you like, and there is a big difference between pity and love as any parent knows.

Pity is not enough. Real compassion is the mix of love and mercy with justice and truth.

So today there is a need for repentance. Repentance for being silent when it was necessary to shout. Repentance on behalf of doctors – friends of mine – who were good, compassionate doctors with a high view of human life but who sank on the reef of mercy and relative ethics “the health of the mother is worth more than the life of the baby”.

We need to repent on behalf of those with a lesser view of human life, who kidded themselves that the embryo was just a clump of cells and not possibly human – as one of our MPs said very recently “an 8/52 embryo cannot possibly be a human being”.

And we avoided such questions as to when it might become human and what human life actually is.

And we failed to realise the reality of the slippery slope – we didn’t realise we were opening the door to the discarding of human life for any reason at any time and that there was no way of stopping it.

We allowed the definition of mother’s health to drift into “inconvenience” and discomfort. And the good ones of us didn’t shout loud enough that this was wrong. We didn’t want to admit that we blew it from the beginning and that we had no idea that we would be performing 90,000 abortions a year with the vast majority being for reasons of personal choice – with abortion being seen as an extension of contraception.

We failed to realise that all human life is created in the Image of God and therefore has intrinsic value right from fertilisation all the way through to life’s natural end and in all states of disability and dependency.

We failed to give enough importance to the fact that Down’s Syndrome children and others were also created in God’s Image and we have sought to eliminate them. And in England they want to reduce the incidence of autism by aborting male babies where there is a family history as males are more likely to be affected – and if mothers don’t want to kill their baby they are labelled “genetic outlaws”.

And by turning the ultrasound away from mothers we have been a party to the deception that there was not a baby present in the safe-house womb – or at least what should have been a safe-house.

And by pretending that there is not even a possible connection between abortion and breast cancer and that there is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome we have been a party to concealing the truth.

And we didn’t realise the long-term implications. We didn’t realise that once we said the embryo wasn’t human that there would be those who argue that a mature foetus wasn’t either and then that the new-born baby wasn’treally human until it was “self-aware” and that adults who lost that capacity for “self-awareness” weren’t really human either and that it was therefore OK to terminate their useless lives.

And we failed to realise that when we then started to weigh up matters of “usefulness” to society we were on a one-way trip to a man-made purification of the human race – and we have been down that track before.

And having given permission for destructive research on embryos that we would work out other ways of creating embryos using unnatural techniques getting even further away from God’s natural order and using cloning techniques and even wanting to use animal eggs meaning that we were starting to mix animal and human genetic material. In that last legislation the use of animal eggs was stopped because that was “exploitation” of animals but we still allowed harvesting from human females as that wasn’t exploitation.

And we have sucked baby’s brains out in later pregnancy by doing partial-birth abortion without even giving them anaesthetic. The ultimately trashed NHMRC report of 1995 recommended this as procedure of choice in 3^rdtrimester as it had the “advantage of producing a dead baby”. And we are wanting to introduce abortion through to term in Victoria.

And we have injected salt solutions into the safe-house womb to kill the baby but not before it caused agonising burns internally and externally – as Gianna Jessen, a rare survivor of this procedure, testifies.

And why do we do this? Why are the culture-of-death voices so strident?At root the diagnosis is the exercise of personal autonomy with no regard to God or the soul or higher moral values.

And so we have continued the march to be in control of our own destiny – to create human life for our own purposes and to destroy another in the process; to purify the human race by eliminating all that is weak and imperfect and, in our view, useless; and to terminate life at a time of our choosing. And in this ultimate symbol of our revolt against God and what it means to be made in His Image we have been here before too – at the Tower of Babel when God said “nothing they do will be impossible for them”.

Now the truth may cause offence but not to tell becomes an evil in itself.

So what do we need to do?

We need to pray for those who deliberately conceal the truth that they will be convicted of the truth – most of all that they will come to know and serve the living God.

And we need to tell the truth. Tell it loud and clear. Educate, educate, educate.

• To our fellow Christians who, in their sleepy innocence and complacency, do not understand.
• To a new generation of children by changing the culture within our schools and tertiary institutions
• To our leaders, politicians and educators as Jeremiah had to:

This is what the LORD says: “Go down to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim this message there: “Hear the word of the LORD, O king of Judah, you who sit on David’s throne–you, your officials and your people who come through these gates.This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood.”” Jeremiah 22:1-3.

And we must not be silenced by those who say that religious people have no right to speak.

But first we need to repent.

Lachlan Dunjey. March 2007.