If you know me or read Charisma magazine, you know I am strongly pro-life. I believe abortion may be one of the biggest moral issues facing our nation right now. That’s why I’m glad that abortion has been in the news lately with the movie Unplanned coming out a few weeks ago. (Click here to listen to my podcast about that film.) But if Christians are serious about eradicating abortion from our nation, we must do more than simply say it’s wrong.
In a recent interview with my friend Gary McCullough—owner of Christian Newswire and pro-life activist—we discussed how Christians must respond to the abortion crisis in this hour. To listen to the entire interview, click here or scroll down.
“I would say our responsibility as Christians first and foremost is—and I think this is a James Dobson quote—never ever vote for a politician who can legalize in any way taking a human life,” McCullough says. “If a politician can justify voting to take that child’s life, he has disqualified himself from any ability to lead us. It’s not like we’re single-issue voters. It’s simply saying that if you’re on the wrong side of abortion, then … that disqualifies you to be a leader in any level of politics.”
I agree with McCullough. For those who may balk at this extreme position, perhaps an analogy can offer the same truth from a different perspective. Let’s say a politician were foolish enough to be part of the KKK, promote racism from the platform and even burn crosses in people’s yards. Almost every person in the U.S. would unequivocally refuse to vote for that person, no matter how much they agreed with their other policies. That issue would be a big enough deal to disqualify them from leadership in many Christians’ minds.
The same should apply to abortion. Even though our culture views it as a last-resort birth control, biblical principles declare that it is murder and a serious offense in God’s eyes. In fact, McCullough points out that even the left has begun to admit that unborn babies are much more than mere blobs of tissue.
“In my youth, when we first had to talk about abortion, the argument was always that [a fetus] is a blob of tissue,” he says. “I don’t know how many times I heard that. … This new far left—in which is not only [Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam] but the entire candidacy for the Democratic Party—they’re all running so far to the left that anybody who listens to what they’re saying can no longer say we aren’t talking about a baby. They’ve completely abandoned the blob-of-tissue argument. And now we have to decide: Are we allowed to kill this baby?”
McCullough is referring to Gov. Northam’s recent statements in favor of late-term abortion and even killing a baby who was born alive during a botched abortion. Northam, a pediatrician, told Washington radio station WTOP that third-trimester abortions are done in cases where there may be severe deformities or when the unborn child isn’t viable.
The bill Northam was pushing would loosen the restrictions on late-term abortions. And babies who survived an abortion attempt, he said, “would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
What Northam was promoting is, at its base, legal infanticide. McCullough says pro-choice politicians now see children who survive abortion as the ultimate complication.
“They would say we need to stop what would be the ultimate complication in an abortion,” he says. “The ultimate complication in an abortion, in my mind, has always been the death of the mother. But the ultimate complication for these lawmakers is, ‘Oh, we have a live child here that we have to do something about’—that complication being eliminated by suffocation or injection that causes death or breaking its neck. These are all hard ways of saying this is a blob of tissue.”
These are the types of politicians McCullough says Christians must refuse to vote for. But there are other ways believers can take a stand for life. Adoption is, of course, one of the biggest ways Christians can intervene in the abortion issue. But for those who aren’t in a position to do that, there are still many other ways to help.
“You can volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center, and you can obviously donate to pro-life causes,” he says. “But it’s taking the step between ‘Yeah, I’m pro-life, but it’s not that big of a deal to me’ to doing [whatever you can]. If you could just take little baby clothes and toys to the women’s shelter or to a crisis pregnancy center.”
McCullough says little actions like these may not end up getting your name in history books, but before God, these are huge steps of faith.
“In your standing before God, you are doing physically something to be there for a child,” he says. “Most of these mothers don’t have a man—who was part of the pregnancy, obviously—standing up at any level for them. So you are standing in for them as Christ would even in the most basic, simple ways. And it’s in that, in your heart and your mind, it’s going to make a difference.”
I hope you will take McCullough’s words to heart. I believe we can see Roe v. Wade overturned in our nation, but for that to happen, Christians must rise up. Listen to my interview with McCullough below.
