Those who are anti-abortion have long known the enemy that inevitably would handicap the pro-life movement would be chemical abortion. It’s one thing to protest ripping babies apart downtown on South College Avenue next to United Way and kitty-corner to Kroger. There on one of Bloomington’s busiest thoroughfares at one of its main intersections, Planned Parenthood couldn’t hide. Sidewalk counseling and picketing were somewhat effective in a place of such high visibility.
Also, it was encouraging how, as we walked the sidewalk with our signs, many cars honked in support, opening their windows and giving us thumbs-up with a smile. That helped us bounce back from the frat dudes who threw the finger and sorority dudettes who threw tampons.
Still, we were aware change was coming. Those days of public witness were numbered and we knew it. Stirrups, vacuums, and knives were being replaced with pills, and where would we protest the pills?
That time has arrived.
Abortuaries are shutting down. Planned Parenthood’s abortuaries kill about forty percent of the babies while independent abortuaries kill sixty percent. Since 2016, 113 of the independent abortuaries have closed their doors. There were 510 independents in 2012, but only 358 remain.
One might think this is cause to rejoice, but no, it’s not good news. Closed abortuaries do not mean fewer abortions. They only mean fewer surgical abortions.
Abortuaries are shutting down because pharmaceuticals are taking over, and their retail presence is already established and mature. They don’t need independent “women’s clinics” or Planned Parenthood’s butcheries.
All they need is the woman’s local supermarket pharmacy or the US Postal Service to deliver their pills, and then the woman’s bathroom back home for privacy.
The past couple of years of Covid have greatly accelerated this transition. Along with masks, social distancing, and quarantines, people have grown used to ordering medical supplies and pills online. In a day or two, the envelope or package shows up at their front door. It’s perfectly convenient and perfectly anonymous.
Women’s clinics and Planned Parenthood butcheries were disgusting to everyone. When you picketed, you could watch people avert their eyes just as they would driving by a strip club. Yet who’s going to avert their eyes as they drive by the CVS? Who’s going to picket their local supermarket or their neighbor’s house or mailbox?
Porn stores and the rack of magazines behind the cashier at the convenience store largely vanished when the internet came home, bearing with it endless images of sexual idolatry delivered in the living room and bedroom, in perfect privacy.
This is what’s happened now with abortion. Copying the success of pornographers, the murderers of little boys and girls have succeeded in removing their crimes from public view. The pills are delivered to the woman’s front door, then in her kitchen she swallows them with a cup of water, and upstairs in her bathroom with the door closed she does the rest.
Of the babies being murdered by abortion each year, what percentage are being killed by their mother privately, at home?
In a report released this past week by Planned Parenthood’s research arm, the Guttmacher Institute, they announced these abortions-by-pill now outnumber abortions-by vacuums and knives (which they refer to, respectively, as “medication” abortion and “procedural” abortion). With numbers only available through 2020, they report that 54% of the abortions they track were now abortion-by-pill.
We expect Covid has accelerated this sea-change. Back in April of 2020 as the Covid shutdown intensified, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Abortion by Telemedicine: A Growing Option as Access to Clinics Wanes.” Guttmacher anticipates the figures for 2021-2 will be even better (as they see it):
Transforming the Landscape of Abortion in the United States
A number of factors have transformed the landscape around medication abortion in recent years. While the use of medication abortion has been steadily increasing since it was first approved, the COVID-19 pandemic likely accelerated that trend.
A separate article on what Guttmacher refers to as “self-managed abortion” demonstrates this is their goal. Self-managed abortion is a cause for celebration among the anti-fruitfulness, pro-baby-slaughter forces, who write:
Medication abortion, in particular, holds great promise for the future of self-managed abortion care in the United States, and understanding the steps and barriers to achieving a fully independent model of self-managed medication abortion is critical to normalizing and advancing this vision.
* * *
With pharmacies available in an increasing variety of settings, the ability to pick up medication abortion pills at a pharmacy or receive them in the mail like most other prescription drugs has the potential to be much more convenient for many people. Filling a prescription at a pharmacy or online could also enhance privacy by allowing people to pursue abortion care without visiting a clinic. At the same time, having medication abortion available alongside other prescription drugs could help reduce stigma and further normalize this method of abortion. (emphases added)
Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy went into effect September 1, 2021. In a February 25, 2022 article titled, “Association of Texas Senate Bill 8 With Requests for Self-managed Medication Abortion,” the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) noted the ease of bypassing such laws by using (for instance) the baby-slaughter business, Aid Access:
Since 2018 …Aid Access has been providing self-managed medication abortion through online telemedicine in the US. The service operates outside the formal health care setting and is accessed through an online consultation form. …Mifepristone and misoprostol are mailed to the requestor for home use, and an online help desk team is available for further information and support.
The Texas law has been a part of the explosion of sales Aid Access has enjoyed the past year or so. Limiting the inquiry to Texas, JAMA records the effect of SB 8 on Aid Access sales:
Overall, Aid Access received 1831 requests from Texas for self-managed abortion in September 2021. To put this figure in perspective, 4511 abortions were conducted in Texas clinics in September 2020…
Aid Access is a foreign company with no ties to North America. It’s an internet business unintimidated by Texas laws. No one’s down at the post office opening envelopes to see if the contents are mifepristone and misoprostol and neighbors aren’t asking the woman next door what’s in her mailbox—nor are they opening her mail to see. It’s a federal offense carrying a fine of $250,000 and five years imprisonment.
So much for the Texas law which many celebrated as a great triumph for the pro-life cause.
Oh yes, one more thing.
All the above only has to do with those murders of little ones the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Planned Parenthood officially recognize as “abortions.” We haven’t mentioned those abortions caused by morning after pills, ECPs, Plan B, and the host of other hormonal methods of what is commonly referred to inside and outside the Church as “contraception” or “birth control.”
Every hormonal method of contraception and birth control used by believers and unbelievers alike has an agency of preventing the little one conceived by the father’s sperm fertilizing the mother’s egg from attaching herself to the wall of her mother’s womb. Unable to nestle securely into this warm and loving temple of life created by God to protect and nurture her life, she dies.
But she doesn’t count and isn’t mentioned in any of the stats or articles or pro-life laws because, back in the mid-twentieth century, American physicians changed the definition of “conception” from fertilization to implantation. They did it to remove people’s moral scruples about abortifacient methods of birth control, and it worked. No one cares about the little ones killed by denying them their mother’s womb in their first days of life.
How many of our little ones have we murdered this way?
Heaven only knows. All the hormonal methods of birth control also have an agency of preventing ovulation as well as the sperm fertilizing the egg, and that is certainly the normal agency. But it’s certainly not the only agency, and many babies are killed by every hormonal form of birth control each day.1
To conclude, the battle against baby-slaughter has now become much more difficult as the tools of murder are sold in a much more decentralized and hidden way. This will only grow as well-intentioned anti-abortion laws drive mothers to be on the alert for pregnancy and to abort their children earlier and earlier in their babies’ lives. As abortions-by-vacuums-and-knives decline and abortions-by-pill increase, it is clear picketing and sidewalk counseling and protesting will not move into Walmart or Kroger, or down by the mailbox at the curb.
So what are we to do?
First, stop refusing to see where and when the real battle for the lives of the little ones of the world is being waged. According to a 2020 article in The Lancet, UK’s most respected medical journal, the number of babies murdered by what they were willing to call “abortions” stood at 73.3 million per year—one percent of the population of the world.
Note The Lancet’s figure does not include the many millions of babies murdered each year by hormones rendering the endometrium inhospitable to their attachment. Do we care about these innocent ones? Does God see their blood? Like the land of Canaan, will the ground of America the Beautiful vomit us out?
We must stop pleading ignorance about the bloodshed drowning our own nation, cities, towns, congregations, and homes.
Second, we must realize once and for all that the problem is not any lack of pro-life laws and protests, but the lack of love for woman-as-lifegiver and marriage as God’s tool for the propagation of His godly seed. If we are going to repent of the slaughter of well over one percent of the world’s population each year, we can no longer tolerate the oppression of womanhood and the denial of fruitfulness at the heart of every Christian church and home in America, including particularly the most conservative churches and homes, Biblically and doctrinally.
We have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind, sexually. The real problem is not them, but us. Our bound and gagged pulpits have produced the rotten fruit of bloodshed on a scale unprecedented across man’s history. We can make all the noise we want about black lives mattering and creation care and sexual abuse and celebrity greed and red pill men and shrews and government tyranny, but the tide of blood is rising and not one person on the face of the earth is able to speak of the pain of being aborted.
These are the real victims who should matter to us. These little ones are the innocent souls every man of God should weep over, calling down the wrath of God against every woman who has ordered the pills and is on her way down to the mailbox to see if they’ve come yet. Calling out to her to repent.
Calling out to the little ones that we are sorry for what we have done to them. Billions of them. Generation after generation.
Night is coming when no man can work. -John 9:4
| ↑1 | Evangel Presbytery is hard at work on a paper on abortion which will deal with this matter, specifically, in much greater detail. Please pray for this work. |
|---|
