Forgiveness & Life

 

This guest post is from Eric Phillips, Regent Law 3L and Family Law student:

 

When I was around twenty-two, a few years after Roe, I met through friends a young woman who was pregnant.  She was considering an abortion.  I told her of a clinic where she could get very good care. The clinic had suction abortion equipment.  I gave her the clinic number and she called the clinic and scheduled an appointment.  To my surprise (and now great relief) I found out that she had cancelled her appointment.  You see, since the age of fourteen or so I was a non-church going Episcopalian.  I was water immersed before the age of accountability.  I did not have a relationship with God the Father, Jesus the son who is my brother and I his, or the Holy Spirit my friend.  I was ignorant and so was the abortion doctor whom I had previously found out was raised Baptist but was not a practicing Christian since his early teens.  Aborting fetuses was a small part of his general practice. 

 

The reason for the focus on ignorance is that God says, “My people perish for lack of knowledge . . . .”.  This does not necessarily mean that only you perish for lack of your knowledge, but that others can perish due to your lack of knowledge.  The effect that the law had on me and others at that time was that in my ignorance it was ok to have an abortion since it was the law.  In my ignorance another was on the way to perish, but thankfully was spared. It was not that there was a fair choice of death or life for that child in the womb, but that due to the prevalence of the law being pro-abortion, abortion was placed not only above life in specific instances, but the “right” to put to death a child in the womb had a higher status than a child’s life.  There was only a guarantee that a child could be killed in the womb at will.  It was never guaranteed that the child would live.  You could stop life, but you could not stop the killing.

 

A few years later I was in the company of a friend from high school.  We were discussing abortion and I told him that I am not the one to make the decision to abort.  And that I believe the female should have the right to determine what to do with her own body.  He agreed.  I told him that it should be her decision whether to continue to term. He agreed.  That it can interfere with her future so far as jobs and plans.  That the decision should be left to her as it would be emotionally trying and for other physical health reasons.   And for all these reasons he had agreed.  And then I told him that the female I was talking about was not the mother, but the female in the womb.  He was stunned in the same way as King David was when Nathan questioned what David should do with the “person” who had committed the ill acts David himself had committed without letting on to David who that person was.  That story ended in the killing of a husband, Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite.  David condemned his own actions unto death.  I call this pulling a Nathan.

 

The doctor referenced above was my father. He had saved multitudes of people in World War II and in his professional practice.  He came to know Jesus Christ and Father God.  He has been forgiven as I have been forgiven and any other person who has asked forgiveness, including countless women who have had abortions.  By God's grace, God is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins.