At a recent gathering of le club francais I sat elbow to elbow with a vivacious francophone, new in town and a regular at gatherings, who asked, “So what have you been doing?”“ Well, I have been doing a little pro-life work,” I began.
She leaped at me. “Now tell me, are you one of those people who think the baby should always be born, in all cases? Should the bébé come into the world when it came from a rape?” She skirted ahead of my effort to answer. “If your daughter were raped, what would you tell her? Would you force her to give birth from un viol?”
TO DEDICATED pro-choice Chattanoogans, right-to-life Christians are pious frauds to ho-ho over in dinner conversation.The claim has been offered that Christians are heartless toward the woman, indifferent to the convenience of her life, uncharitable about family needs, dogmatic and ideological in claiming that every fetus should emerge as a baby, harsh in denying liberty and freedom of reproductive choice. To choicers we are anti-choice. We are unforgiving, puritanical, dour and rigid. We are hypocrites for not funding every baby saved from abortion until his 18th birthday, as one friendly critic told me. We’re hateful because we want to put government in the bedroom. Obsessed, we devour and destroy women by consigning them to poverty and child support.
To choicers, claims about the personhood of the unborn verge on misrepresentations recklessly made to induce another person to act to his or her detriment, which is the definition of a fraud.
As a person who once attempted to extricate himself from a fraud in the nature of a Ponzi scheme, I would like to suggest how the wiles of fraud are arrayed in the battle of blood and baby and to suggest a legislative counterstroke.
FRAUD, WHICH IS FORBIDDEN in the eighth commandment against theft and the ninth commandment against bearing false witness, vitiates whatever it touches. Wherever fraud treads is unholy ground, and whatever fraud does in its bearing false witness under the ninth commandment is null and void.
Gibson in his monumental Gibson’s Suits in Chancery recounts how chancery court gained in purpose and prestige over the centuries in a musing that could delight any reader. “All the haunts of fraud were laid bare, all of its paths, however crooked, were sign-boarded, all of its subterfuges pointed out, all of its false coins branded, and all of its allies detected and marked with badges. Fraud has been so crippled and hedged about by the Chancery Court that its power to deceive and do evil has been much weakened, and the remedies for its rascalities much increased, but it has not yet gone out of business.”
Fraud can be understood through quick-study Latin maxims, recorded by Gibson as follows:
— A person who intends to perpetrate a fraud uses general terms
— Fraud and justice never cohabit
— It is a fraud to conceal a truth
— The suppression of the truth is the suggestion of what is false
— Fraud lurks in general expressions
— Fraud poisons all it touches
— The knot that fraud ties, Equity delights to untie
— Fraud strives to cover up its tracks
The abortion industry that destroys more than 300 Hamilton County boys and girls every year operates with the support of government-controlled media to induce women to destroy their heirs. Penetrate for yourself the artful language from a Tennessee clinic that has destroyed hundreds of Chattanooga residents; it is a worthy attempt to play honest in “general terms.”
A woman’s head may be saying one thing and her heart another. Acknowledging the range of feelings will help a woman make the best decision for her life and move forward from a place of peace and power. Women are the gatekeepers of life. We have always decided when to bring life into the world through our bodies. We trust your ability to find your own path. Our focus is the woman who sits in our midst. Our mission is to make the world a better place, one woman, one family at a time.
The uses of “gatekeepers of life” and “one family at a time” help convince women to become patients. Rather than compelling thought, the language anesthetizes thought to obscure the significance of the clinic’s lethal medical outcome. Though obtaining a legal informed consent, the abortionist destroys life in the womb; he produces a lifetime of true moral guilt in his victim.
It brings blood, torn limbs and shredded green or blue eyeballs and bits of skull laid out afterward on a cloth-covered tray as the carcass is reassembled to make sure no part is left in the womb’s death chamber.
These limbs belong to a person who is either male or female. The transaction often brings sterilization. Abortion destroys lineage and contributes to depopulation and a diminished local economy. It empties public schools and leaves churches gasping for breath as memberships decline and faith weakens with anemia. Abortion gives the child in the womb no right to be heard before being alienated and it destroys his or her property rights
ONE FRAUD WORTH noting is called fraud in the inducement. Its scope is suggested by the following from Black’s Law Dictionary:
Fraud occurring when a misrepresentation leads another to enter into a transaction with a false impression of the risks, duties, or obligations involved; an intentional misrepresentation of a material risk or duty reasonably relied on, thereby injuring the other party without vitiating the contract itself, esp. about a fact relating to value.
The abortionist doesn’t tell patients the truth about the baby. His inducement offers a cloud of silky talk to help the victim imagine that the practitioner understands her moral dilemma fully and sympathizes with her. Play along for a moment as he suggests he is “with her” in a crisis.
Religion, spirituality, family, physical conditions, and many more things play an important role in making this choice. It is important to pay attention to your whole self when making this important decision. Making the decision that is best for you is very important. If you allow yourself to be guided or pushed into a decision that is wrong for you, you are likely to experience guilt, anger and regret. If you make your own decision, based on your own beliefs, wants and needs, you will be able to deal with any feelings that arise with a healthy outlook. Even if you are making a good decision, your own decision, you may feel sadness after your abortion. It is sad to lose opportunities, to say no to important life changes. Sadness is normal and an important part of the healing process. It may last for a few days or longer. *** Our purpose is to provide you with truthful information, help you clarify your feelings, and above all support whatever decision you make regarding your pregnancy.
Such tomfoolery gives a woman a false impression of the risks, duties and obligations involved in an abortion. No doubt, even if the abortionist honestly declared before grasping his forceps with his green-gloved hand, “We are here to kill your son by cutting him into pieces,” there would be women so solitary and so spiritually abandoned they would still pay F$650 to slay a baby she’s carried three-and-a-half months. But even these women, despite the callouses on their private souls, need to be protected by law and by equity.
And so do their children.
MY TWO YOUNGER SONS, Josiah and Jacob, worked this Lord’s Day memorizing the verses: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Execute true justice, show mercy and compassion everyone to his brother. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. Let none of you plan evil in your heart against his brother’ ” Zechariah 7:9, 10.
As the ungodly decapitalize themselves by abortion, debt, the grossiertés of fast food and dependence on Uncle Sam, God’s people look to the future in patience and hope. Some bring into the world a wealth of children. The rebuilding of Chattanooga as a righteous city and Tennessee as a righteous state is in the hands of the Holy Spirit, who alone can be expected to bring reformation of thought and practice.
Christians hope a sovereign King and Lord will make use of them and their children to defend the innocent and restore equity, from Lookout Mountain to Ooltewah and from Memphis to Bristol.
Sources: Henry R. Gibson, Gibson’s Suits in Chancery; the Jurisprudence of Equity, fifth edition, Michie, 1955; Black’s Law Dictionary, 8th edition
