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PERSPECTIVE
Something to re-consider in light of the Word: Roe v. Wade
By JARRETTE FELLOWS, JR.
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God endowed us with “free will.” Doesn’t that equate to “choice” for a woman in deciding to abort her unborn child or give birth to it?
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The US Supreme Court thought it did in 1973, when it ruled in the landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
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The High Court struck down many US state and federal abortion laws and prompted an ongoing national debate in the US about whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role of religious and moral views in the political sphere should be.
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The latter has been a roiling debate for nearly 50 years and there appears to be no end in sight.
The premise of my personal view, however, not quite in sync with the Court’s reasoning, underscores a higher authority — the providence of God and free will. There is no question that God is the arbiter of all life and honors all life as sacred. But God gave human beings the option to choose … whether we will choose salvation through Jesus Christ or damnation through courtship with the “world”; or whether a woman will choose to abort her unborn fetus, for whatever reason or choose death.
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A woman will have to live with the consequences of her actions, but it is clear in light of the Word that “Choice” and “Life” are a woman’s options. And in the finality, God will be the judge.
Abortion, loss of Black life by moral turpitude of equal gravity
By JARRETTE FELLOWS, JR.
If the sanctity of life is at the heart of abortion and the principled reason for the vilification of the practice, then it must like so be at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, which also underscores the sanctity of life. It calls out the hypocrisy of the evangelical community to condemn one and say little about the other.
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The sanctity of all life is of equal gravity. An aborted fetus by the saline method should carry no more weight than an aborted human life by villainous policing or a lynching by a hangman’s noose. Both heinous acts are equally morally reprehensible!
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As such, the outcry against the murder of Black lives by brutal, overzealous and racist cops amounts to a whisper by the White evangelical community. Where is the outrage? Unfortunately, and sadly this silence is all too familiar. Between the period shortly following the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965, thousands of freed Blacks were lynched by hate-mongering White racists, to which the White evangelical church remained indifferent.
Whether evangelical leaders were fearful of opposing the Ku Klux Klan and Nightriders of the period or just didn't consider Black lives of equal measure to White lives, the result in the 21st century is scarcely any different. The silence is deafening and condemning.