He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed. Exodus 22:20

Scripture like this is often used to denounce God as a merciless, murderous deity. Taken out of context, it does sound harsh, but there is a good reason why God made this decree.

This is part of the commandments to the Israelites coming into the land of Canaan. The Canaanites were pagans whose religion included human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of helpless infants. The wrath of God had been stored up against them for centuries while the Israelites lived in Egypt and grew in numbers. Now the time to repent of their murderous religious practices had come to an end, and the wrath of God was about to descend upon the Canaanites through their conquest by the Israelites.

The last thing God wanted was for His chosen people to adopt the same practices of the peoples who were being punished by death for the murders in their midst. He made it quite clear that He never asked for human sacrifice to worship Him. The closest example of it was the command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and God provided a ram to take Isaac's place at the last minute. It foreshadowed the ultimate sacrifice of His Son Jesus, the Lamb of God, who died for us on the Cross.

Unfortunately, the Israelites did eventually adopt the pagan practices of the peoples of the land, including infant sacrifice at several points in their history. This always led to punishment by God, often by conquest by their enemies. God takes premeditated murder so seriously that the penalty for it is death, a life for a life. God commands that murderers are to be shown no pity. A person who accidentally kills would have to stay in a city of refuge for the lifetime of the high priest, but an intentional murderer must die. The Canaanites cultures were so shot through with guilt for the murders committed in their religious rituals that the whole people were condemned to death for their part in supporting the system that demanded these murders to worship their idols.

What then can modern America expect for its practice of allowing abortion? More than 35 million babies have died, and the number grows by thousands daily. We sacrifice our infants to the gods of money and personal convenience. Few of the abortions taking place are actually due to a threat to the life of the mother, or because of rape or incest. They occur because a pregnancy and subsequent child care would be a problem to the mother. Instead of carrying the child to term and delivering it to be adopted by a loving couple, the child is killed in the womb. If even God's chosen people could not escape punishment for such a sin, how much less will we if we don't repent of it and stop this heinous practice?

No one can live as a completely independent individual in any civilized society. While there is a wide range of possible actions that a person can take, some of them are unacceptable to other people who are affected by them. The question arises as to when society has the responsibility to declare an action illegal and punish someone for doing it.

The current battle over partial birth abortions illustrates the problem. Partial birth abortions are done on babies who are so close to birth that it is argued that the procedure is actually legal infanticide. Infanticide after birth is clearly illegal, so should partial birth abortion be legal? What about the infants that are delivered alive in other abortion procedures and are killed or left to die by neglect afterwards? Is this legal or illegal?

So far, if the infant dies before being fully delivered from the mother's body, the procedure is considered a legal abortion. However, in a partial birth abortion, the baby is delivered except for the head, and then killed by sucking its brains out before delivering the head. Just because the lethal assault takes place on the part of the baby still within the mother and not on the part outside her body, does that really make a difference in the legality of the action? What if a partial birth abortion was done by opening a major blood vessel outside the mother so that the baby bled to death? The baby is just as dead either way.

People who support abortion should consider their motives carefully to understand why they consider it acceptable. The reason that America is a republic is because our founding fathers knew that without law being the ruling principle of the land, the majority in power would oppress the weaker minorities among them. The law is supposed to be the defender of the defenseless, and unborn babies are among the most defenseless among us. Those who support abortion are beyond the hazard of dying by abortion. Does that mean that guarantee of life should be denied to those who are not? If we can deny that God-given, Constitutionally guaranteed right to life to anyone, is anyone else really safe?

I've been following the abortion debate with increasing dismay. I was a teenager when the "right" to abortion became the law of the land, and the more this "right" is pursued, the more horrific the situation becomes.

Ironically enough, back then I was pro-choice! Feminism was new and exciting, and the promise of the freedom to make more choices for your life than had been previously available to women was intoxicating. The Sexual Revolution was being presented as part of that new freedom and empowerment for women, and birth control (including abortion) was a key part of the movement. Abortion was carefully described as taking place at so early a stage that the baby was only a blob of tissue that could be removed before it actually became a baby. It was a simple solution if your birth control failed that would allow you to go on with your life as though your period had only been slightly delayed.

The passage of time and the development of the abortion industry has showed what a vicious, clever lie that was. Babies develop so quickly that by the time a woman realizes that she is pregnant and considers an abortion, the baby is clearly a living human being. Abortions are taking place at any stage of gestation, including right up to birth. That is what the partial birth abortion debate is all about.

The fact that it is called "partial birth" ought to settle the question of whether or not it is infanticide right there. Blobs of tissue are not born, babies are! To take an infant so fully developed that you have to arrange a nearly complete breech birth, cut a hole in the back of its skull, suck out its brains, and then finish delivering the corpse is clearly murder!

We got to this stage of thought that enough people still consider this a legal abortion to keep abortion by other procedures legal by the usual "slippery slope" method that Satan uses so successfully. First the argument was put forth that a little sin, removing a "blob of tissue" before it becomes a baby, was okay. Once enough people got used to that to make it legal, then the age at which the baby was still a blob crept up until we are now debating whether a baby being aborted at nine months by a partial birth abortion is still a blob of tissue.

The pro-abortion side actually tries to support its position by citing the medical procedures using fetal tissue that can help the living. They are actually making money selling tissue from murdered infants to doctors and trying to justify this as medical research and treatment. You can hardly do that with a blob of tissue a few days old. Can anyone recognize this as body snatching for profit?

I can see how a liberal in denial about the nature of a first trimester abortion can cling to the erroneous notion that the baby at that stage of development is just a blob of tissue, even though any good book on fetal development would quickly clarify how few weeks it takes before the baby's major organ systems develop. The baby isn't readily detectable in those first few weeks of life by the mother, though an ultrasound will readily show how well developed it actually is. However, by the end of the first trimester a normal baby is well developed and has reached a size where it is unquestionably a human infant.

What I can't comprehend is how they can stay in such firm denial about the nature of a second or third trimester abortion. The methods used then are designed to kill an infant too large and too well developed to dismember easily. Babies have actually survived saline abortions to grow up to healthy adulthood. The partial birth abortion technique kills a baby which could live in a neonatal nursery if the abortionist gave one more tug to remove the child's head from the birth canal, instead of inserting scissors in the back of the head and sucking the baby's brains out. How can anyone not understand that what has just happened is infanticide?

The foolish irony of their cries to save humanity from its woes after their births is overwhelming. Just how much can you really care for someone whose life you could callously snuff out in an abortion clinic, if only you could convince their mother to submit to the procedure?

If we can condone this, why try to stop infanticide after birth? Why keep toddlers and children alive if they interfere with their parents' lives? Of course, then we can do something about those rebellious teenagers, maybe the twenty somethings . . . where does it end? Even the elderly and the handicapped are endangered at this point. It is just called euthanasia or the right to die. It is part of the same devaluation of life.

We're told that it takes a village to raise a child by the same liberal community which also supports abortion, but when does the village assume its responsibility for the children's well-being?

Does our responsibility start only with the birth of the child and not before? Our government has public assistance programs specifically for pre-natal care and food, so there must be some public interest in the child before birth as well as the mother. There are even laws to punish defendants who kill unborn children in the commission of a crime or in an accident.

Why then do we allow the mother alone to make the decision as to whether the child is killed in an abortion or not? We do still have laws against infanticide, but they are applied only to children who have fully left the birth canal. Why don't they apply to the child being killed by abortion?

Consider this example: suppose a mother delivers a child at seven months from conception, premature but healthy. She cares for the child for a month, then decides that it is too much trouble and expense. Should she be able to take the child to an abortion clinic and pay a doctor to plunge a pair of scissors into the infant's head and suck its brains out? After all, if she hadn't delivered prematurely, the child would still be in her womb and that would be perfectly legal.

Why is it infanticide for a child one month past delivery and not infanticide for a child of the same gestational age delivered from the mother's womb except for its head? How can we legally condone killing even younger babies by other techniques when babies of the same gestational age and health are surviving in neonatal nurseries to go home with loving parents? At what age can we legally say that this individual is not human enough to protect? A human life continuously develops from conception to death.

The acceptance of abortion is a serious symptom of the brutalization of human compassion towards one another. Mother Teresa tried to tell us that love for the human race begins with love for the unborn child. How can we ever claim that love for our fellow humans if we don't love the youngest children?

If you don't think we're losing compassion for the children, consider what just happened to Elian Gonzalez and how the media and our country reacted to it. A 6-year-old little boy just went home to Cuba with his father. A story filled with bravery and tragedy just had a happy ending. That's what we're being told about it by the media.

My local paper ran the story on the front page along with a story about the Supreme Court striking down a Nebraska law banning partial birth abortion while upholding a Colorado law that restricts protests outside abortion clinics. I was struck by the irony that the stories would appear together. They speak of the moral decay of a society that puts the well-being of children below that of the adults who should be protecting and nurturing them.

In a sense, we starting saying farewell to Elian when we made abortion legal. That Supreme Court decision made a clear declaration that children would no longer have the special protection of society as one of its most precious and most defenseless groups. No longer would adults go to the extra trouble and expense of caring for the little ones unless they felt like it. If they didn't, they would simply consider them a "blob of tissue" to be eliminated before the infant became too obviously human to consider it infanticide.

Now an unborn infant which would be viable if allowed to be born can be murdered while still in its mother's birth canal as long as it is called a partial birth abortion. After all, it really isn't a child until we say it is. We really don't have any responsibility for it until we say we do. If anyone is so politically incorrect as to point out that this "blob of tissue" is clearly a human being in billions of cases already born, if anyone is so politically insensitive as to suggest that the "blob of tissue" should have the same civil rights as the woman whose body it temporarily inhabits, if anyone should be so politically bigoted as to suggest that the woman should wait and deliver the live infant rather than have an abortion, the feminists and members of the political left rise up in moral outrage that such suggestions of the value of the child compared to that of the woman should even be raised.

We have stopped valuing children in far too many cases.

Our government has stopped valuing children when they are politically inconvenient.

President Clinton upheld a woman's "right to an abortion" even to the point of refusing to support bills to ban partial birth abortion, even though common sense screams that this is infanticide beyond question.

Elian Gonzalez was politically inconvenient to the Clinton administration. This little boy, whose mother valued him so much that she not only gave birth to him but died in an attempt to take him to freedom in America, wasn't important enough in the scheme of world politics to truly consider his well-being compared to the well-being of the adult leaders of two countries at odds with each other.

We knew that he would be going back to an impoverished dictatorship. We knew that he would be going back to a life of virtual slavery that his mother was desperate to escape. We knew that he would have no future anything like the future that every child should have if he went back to Cuba.

The face of the federal agent who took Elian from his relatives at gunpoint was the face of a government and a people which increasingly no longer values either children or their civil rights. Despite all the rhetoric about how valued children are by the liberals, it is altogether too obvious that children are valued only as political pawns in a power struggle to reshape this society in the image of feminism and secular humanism. If it had really valued that brave little boy, he would still be in America in the custody of the relatives who wanted to honor his mother's wishes and give him a decent life and future here.

Farewell to Elian Gonzalez. Farewell to the thousands of children who died from abortion the day your mother's hope of freedom for you died as well. May God have mercy on us all.

The way to stop this sin is to call it what it is and repent of it. We never fail to slide down to the bottom of the slippery slope eventually if we take that first misstep and then think we can slide around the brink at our convenience.

Work for the halt of legal abortion except where the life of the mother is genuinely threatened. Pray that God will forgive us for allowing this slaughter of the innocents to happen. America made a grave mistake when it believed the devil's lies about fetal development and approved of abortion on demand. Now we are allowing viable infants to be killed in partial birth abortions and dismembered so that their body parts can be sold to medical researchers. If our hearts have become so hardened that we can hear evidence of that presented before our Congress and still not act against it, we are ripe for judgment indeed.