The fights we have to fight

HEARTLAND | Meredith Flynn

Having spent the last 39 weeks awaiting the birth of our first child, the news stories about recently released Planned Parenthood videos hit close to home. I haven’t really watched the videos—which detail conversations about the sale of body parts from aborted babies—very closely, mostly because I was scared of what I would hear.

The fallout is plenty frightening, especially how many government leaders and media professionals have defended Planned Parenthood’s practices. The apathetic reaction causes me to ask: Is this how far we’ve come?

In a blog post following the release of the first video, Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler noted the tepid reaction of most mainstream media and abortion supporters wasn’t surprising. One magazine writer said she had watched the video and her response was “to yawn,” Mohler wrote.

Is this where we are now as a nation, as a culture? How on earth did we get this far from a merely human view of the sanctity of life? We are all, after all, people. Surely we can understand that life isn’t to be haggled over during a lunch meeting.

But the videos tell a different story.

How did we get here? A quick first reaction is to decry the videos as one more piece of evidence that society is in a downward spiral. The Planned Parenthood videos show a twisting away from God’s plan and purpose for life, and we can do nothing but throw up our hands—or wash our hands of all of it.

The problem with that reaction is that it takes the responsibility off of the church. And while many Christians have long stood up for the sanctity of human life, there obviously is much left to be done.

“We must pray that this video will mark an important turning point in our nation’s conscience,” Mohler wrote. And in our own. How can we respond when plainly bone-chilling conversations are shrugged off as normal?

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, summed it up in a dozen words: “It is time for the reborn to stand up for the unborn.” In our churches, in our conversations at work, with our families, with people who disagree.

“A nation that will allow this, will allow anything,” Mohler said.

That’s why it’s a fight we have to fight.