A Selfish Reason to Avoid Abortion

If you have any questions, comments or criticisms on this or any other topic, please feel free to let me know. It is easier for me to pick topics if I have your feedback. Thanks again for reading. I hope that you find a blessing here, and may the Lord be with you.

I recently came across a Facebook discussion concerning abortion. A woman, who was pregnant out of wedlock and who claimed to have a medical condition that made childbearing risky for her, posted a video blog as the abortifacient that she took to kill her unborn child was working. In her video blog, which she posted to communicate her experience to other women, she repeatedly said that the abortion was “not that bad” and that she was not feeling any discomfort.

In my sermon, The Biblical Design of Gender, Part 2, which is posted on my website, I discussed the issue of abortion. Let me excerpt my sermon for you in this blog entry.

Now, in Genesis 2:17:
17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Interestingly, God does not say, “in the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil I will kill you”, but rather, “In the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall surely die”. When God designed the world, He placed death in the world as a natural consequence of the knowledge of evil. Let me explain.

I recently listened to a presentation from the “Right to Life” organization, who gave me some interesting facts about breast cancer. Cancer occurs when organ cells grow uncontrollably to form lumps or masses of tissue called tumors, which eventually interfere with bodily functions. But, when a woman becomes pregnant, one of her bodily changes to prepare for carrying the new life that she has conceived is that her breast growth is stimulated. A hormone, estradiol, which stimulates the thickening of tissues and blood vessels, turns breast cell growth on during the first trimester of pregnancy.

In an article entitled, “More on the Adverse Effects of Abortion”, Karen Malec, the President of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, writes:

In a normal pregnancy, elevated estradiol (hormones that stimulate the thickening of tissues and blood vessels) levels stimulate the proliferation of Type 1 and 2 lobules [in the breast]. Estrogen is a mitogen (a hormone that stimulates cell division) and a genotoxin (a substance that causes mutations in DNA molecules). During the last months of a full-term pregnancy, pheromones produced by the fetus – human chorionic gonadotropin and human placental lactogen – help mature most lobules into fully cancer-resistant Type 4 lobules. At the end of full-term pregnancy, 85% of the lobules are cancer resistant Type 4 lobules. An abortion in the first or second trimester of pregnancy leaves the mother with an increased number of Type 1 and 2 lobules.

While a full term birth is analogous to stopping your car using the brakes, an abortion is analogous to stopping your car by running it into a brick wall. God has designed pregnancy so that conception turns on the growth of breast tissue, and birth turns it off. If a woman has an abortion during the first or second trimester of pregnancy while the breast growth functions are turned on, the body will not get the signal from the fetus to turn the breast growth functions off. Increased breast cancer rates are the result.

Karen Malec continues:

Soon after legalization, abortion became a common elective procedure and created a new field of medical research. Thirty-eight epidemiological studies exploring an independent link with breast cancer have been published. Twenty-nine report risk elevations. Seventeen [of the thirty-eight] studies are statistically significant, sixteen of which report increased risk. Thirteen out of fifteen American studies found risk elevations.

Biological evidence provides a plausible mechanism for this statistical association. Most medical organizations were silent about this research, but there was still enough concern about a causal relationship to lead scientists to publish another thirty-six studies after 1973, the year abortion was legalized. In 1973, the incidence of the disease was 82.6 per 100,000, and breast cancer was considered a disease of elderly women. By 1998, female breast cancer incidence increased more than 40 percent to 118.1 per 100,000, and breast cancer became a young woman’s disease.

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries collaborated on a troubling report on cancer status in the years 1973 through 1998, published in 2001.

Significantly, the absolute numbers of reported excess cases agree with a prediction made in a 1996 review and meta-analysis. Its lead author, Joel Brind, Ph.D., professor of biology and endocrinology at City University of New York’s Baruch College, concluded from a review of the 2001 report: “Abortion can explain the entire rise in breast cancer since the mid 1980s, and it’s not just because the rise is in women young enough to have had an abortion. It’s also that the absolute numbers of increased cases fall within the range of the numbers we predicted in our 1996 meta-analysis.”

The evidence of the research is that the rise in breast cancer in the United States of America since the 1970’s is caused by abortion. Death is the natural consequence of evil, and I can hardly think of a more intentionally evil act than murdering one’s own unborn child in one’s own womb. In the book of Exodus, the Bible records that the Pharaoh in Egypt mandated involuntary abortion of the male children of the Jews in his kingdom and, as a result, God intervened directly and destroyed Egypt with ten plagues.

Now, I recognize that my analysis may seem a little harsh. After all, abortion is not presented to women in our society as “murder”, but as “choice”. Abortion is not presented as “evil”, but as a woman’s enlightened method of relieving herself of a mass of cells that will grow into a child that will curtail her opportunity to develop her career. But don’t women actually know better? In our text, Genesis 3:4-5:

4 Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.
5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Did the woman know better? Genesis 3:2-3 records:

2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden;
3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”

The woman affirmed that she was aware of the poisonous nature of the fruit of the tree in question. But, you may ask, why was the tree positioned in the midst of the garden, and why did God allow the serpent to come into the garden to make the tree such a great temptation?

As I have previously mentioned, God has designed man as the cooperative coalition of husband and wife so that man can successfully achieve the objective that God has given us to exercise dominion over the earth, developing wisdom and knowledge in preparation for further responsibility in heaven. Proverbs 9:10 tells us:

10 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

God’s plan for us is that we exercise dominion to develop wisdom and knowledge. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was one of the trees over which the man and woman had dominion. Proverbs 9:10 tells us that in order for the man and woman to develop wisdom and knowledge, they first had to develop a fear of God. God set up a situation in which they could exercise their fear of Him. God used the tree to instill fear in them by telling them that the result of their disobedience would be death.

The temptation itself implies the man and the woman understood the negative effects of death. In Genesis 3:4, the serpent did not try to convince the woman that death wouldn’t be so bad, which implies that the woman knew that death would be a bad thing. The serpent rather tempted the woman to believe that death would not occur from their eating the fruit, so that she could ignore God with impunity.

The woman’s was faced with a simple choice. God told her to fear the results of eating the fruit, and the serpent told her to not fear the results of eating the fruit. She had to choose whether to believe God, whether to fear God or not. The fact of the matter is that throughout our lives, God tells us how to behave. We constantly have the choice to recognize the wisdom in God’s instruction and fear the consequences of disobedience, or to not do so. God’s divine design is that He puts us in situations so that we can develop our wisdom by developing our fear of the consequences of disobedience. It is only by doing so that we can prepare for further responsibility in heaven.

It doesn’t matter how many times those that promote abortion tell women that they are not killing their children. Women know better. When a woman becomes pregnant, with what does she think that she is pregnant if not a child? Women have abortions to avoid having children, so it is intuitively obvious that the child is the one that is killed.

The choice to have an abortion and the potential consequences of abortion are almost a perfect parallel to the choice that the woman had in the Garden. According to statistics, the female population that has the lowest incidence of breast cancer is those women that have carried their first pregnancy to term before their twenty-fourth birthday. The female population that has the highest incidence of breast cancer is those women that have aborted their first pregnancy. But, just as in the Garden, women in our day choose to not fear God, and eat of the forbidden fruit of abortion, and suffer the consequences. In the garden, the woman also gave the fruit to her husband, and as she had not collapsed in death, her husband ate the fruit as well. Men that take women to abortion clinics or try to persuade women to have abortions are culpable, just as was the man in the garden.

The only realistic thing to do is to pray for the souls of those men and women. The ones that repent can be saved and the ones that don’t, well, the Bible says, that which you sow, that shall you also reap.

Design, Out-of-Wedlock Sex, Self-preservation, Sexual Sin