I'm not a frequent blogger, but today I felt like I needed a little bit more than 140 characters to discuss what is on my mind. This day, January 22, 2012, marks the 40th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion in the United States. Since that decision four decades ago 55 million children have been aborted.
Think about that for a second. Take a moment and try and wrap your mind around how many babies that number really represents. 55,000,000. To put that in context, since the founding of our nation in 1776, America has had 1.4 million men and women killed in military conflict. The Civil War claimed at the most 800,000 lives. In one year in America, more children are aborted than our total losses in all military conflicts up to the present. It's staggering. It's tragic. It needs to stop.
Having been a youth pastor and pastor for most of my adult life, I understand some of the complexities of this issue and how it affects people on a personal level. I've counseled pregnant teenagers whose Christian families were pressuring them to have an abortion because they couldn't stand the shame of having an out of wedlock child in their home. I've prayed with young men who were devastated by a girlfriends decision to "not have this baby." While I understand that there may be moments when abortion is medically recommended to protect a mother's life, the ugly truth is that the vast majority of the 55 million children aborted in the last forty years were victims of convenience.
It's been 40 years since Roe vs. Wade. One of my professors taught us that 40 is the Bible's way of saying, "a really long time." 40 days and nights of rain during Noah's flood, 40 days of Goliath taunting Israel before David killed him with a sling and a stone, 40 days in the wilderness without food before Jesus launched his ministry. And 40 years for a generation that rejected God to die off in the wilderness. Hasn't it been long enough? Haven't we lived too long with the black mark of abortion searing the conscience of our nation? My prayer is that one day a generation from now my grandchildren will live in a country where they will look at the last forty years in horror and shock and ask, "how in the world did that ever happen here?" It's been long enough.
