“This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.”
– St. John
“For this is the original message we heard: We should love each other.”
– St. John
“So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.”
– St. Paul
“What you got they can’t steal it – no they can’t even feel it. Walk on.” – Bono
“My child would not have learned this empathetic response if I had remained a yeller. Because yelling shuts down the communication; it severs the bond; it causes people to separate — instead of come closer.”
I think it is a pressing political issue. And I am very concerned that we have allowed the Republican party alone to define the pro-life position.
The Democrats have not understood where evangelicals are coming from. They would be able to get a great deal of support from the evangelicals if they would propagate what they know to be true: 72% of all abortions in America are driven by economic forces. That is to say, it is young women who are pregnant, working at a minimum wage, with no health insurance or possibility for daycare, with no pre-natal or post-natal help, and who knows that if she has the baby it’s going to cost her thousands of dollars for hospital care.
So we have to begin to ask, “What’s this woman going to do?†Seventy-two percent of the people who’ve had abortions were driven by economic forces and when asked by the Guttmacher Institute, which is a pro-choice organization, “Would you have an abortion if it wasn’t for these economic choices?†would say, “No, we wouldn’t have had the abortion.â€
My question is: how can we as evangelicals call ourselves pro-life if all we are anxious to do is to make abortion illegal? If we are not dealing with the economic forces that are driving people to have abortions?