Reflection on the front lines of the abortion wars
Blessed are those who mourn
In Friedeman classes at Wesley Biblical Seminary there have traditionally been a couple of unusual requirements. One was that (when our campus was full of on-campus students) if you wanted an “A” in the course you had to go with the professor weekly to either prison to preach or to the abortion clinic to try to share hope with the ladies thinking themselves in crisis.
Some days, we would have twenty or so students in front of the clinic singing hymns, praying and trying to talk to the incoming and outgoing ladies. One day, one of our young women students beckoned me over to talk to a client leaving the building thinking I might have some wisdom to share.
I walked over, introduced myself, asked her first name and noticed a blue band on her wrist. It said, “Jehovah Jireh.” I asked her, “Do you know what that means?” She didn’t. I said, “Let me walk you back to your car” and on the way we talked.
“You’re pretty scared?” Yes, she said.
“Your Mom and Dad don’t know about this?” Right.
“Your pastor doesn’t know about this, either?” Mmm-hhhmm.
“You think they’re going to be really upset?” Oh, yeah.
“You don’t know how you’re going to make it, right?” Yep.
“All right,” I said, “this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to pray with me right now and then you’re going to go home and never come back to this place ever again. You’re going to tell your folks, and God is going to provide in that moment. You’re going to tell your church and your pastor, and God is going to provide then, too. You’re going to have this baby and, somehow, God is going to provide and you two are going to be just fine as God provides and you move forward to a Kingdom future.”
She nodded.
“Is there anything you need? Anything at all my church can help you with?” She said no. And we prayed.
And, in my mind, the moment was forgotten.
Until six years later… when I got this Facebook message. It was from Grace. This was her message:
"I just wanted to say thank you for hearing me out and talking with me 6 years ago at the Jackson, MS abortion clinic. Back then I was a frightened Christian girl who thought abortion was the only way to save my life. I had the full examination and even paid the $100.00 to have the procedure done in 1 week….
"When I left the building you talked with me and pointed out a blue bracelet on my wrist which read “Jehovah Jireh.” You told me that He will provide a way for this baby to live if I will trust Him and not listen to fear. I was so frightened and afraid of what my parents and church family would think of me.
"I just want you to know that I am a mother to a very loving and wonderful 6 year old boy named Isaac (get it… Jehovah Jireh – Abraham – Isaac – Mt. Moriah). He just finished kindergarten and loves everything superhero! He hates vegetables and loves chocolate chip cookies. At night he loves to give me the biggest of hugs and in the morning he is pure sunshine.
"To top it off, God made it possible for me to finish college…and led me to a very godly man to whom I am now married, and who loves Isaac as if he were his very own. He is in his 3rd year of medical school and will graduate (soon).
"Six years ago I did not believe any of this could be possible, but you did. You helped me to choose life and trust in God over fear and death."
When I interviewed at WBS over three decades ago someone asked me about abortion. Do I affirm the pro-life position? I said, “Not really.” All eyebrows went up. “If I were really, truly pro-life I suppose I would do something about it. The intellectual position – sure, I’m for that. But actually engaging the issue with some degree of real effort – not very pro-life.”
Four years later I was jogging with the editorial director of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger who was bemoaning, that particular morning, that his new conservative publisher was forcing him to hire a conservative op-ed contributor. He asked the small crowd pounding the pavement with him if we had any ideas. At the end of the run I said “Boy, I wish I had the time and the talent to do something like that.”
Well, he said, you ought to throw us a couple columns. I did, they liked the efforts and I began writing twice a week for the state-wide daily. A year later, a local radio station wanted a new local Rush Limbaugh-esque on-air personality and not long after that a local TV station wanted conservative perspective and eventually a regular presence as a political analyst.
The radio show eventually went national and the other opportunities continued but it gave a small seminary professor the chance to interact with state and national politicians like Govs. Kirk Fordice and Haley Barbour, Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, politicians like Lamar Alexander and a dozen of other presidential candidates making a Deep South run, personalities like Franklin Graham and James Dobson, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute policy experts, hundreds of authors and on it goes.
But by far the issue and personality that captured the most appreciation and unadulterated disdain in these media efforts was that of abortion and the collective persona called “Fetus” or, more appropriately, “Baby in the womb.”
First column I ever wrote for that pro-abortion and ideologically left-of-center newspaper was about a lady named Beverly Smith. She had done her residency in Cook County Hospital in Chicago and had seen what a coat hanger could do to a woman’s genitalia. She thus came to Jackson to start her Ob-Gyn practice and decided as part of her community service to start Mississippi’s first abortion clinic.
In December 1975, the clinic opened its doors. Smith’s work there was obviously a great improvement over standards she remembered from the late 60s. In her time there she removed hundreds of what the clinic called POC’s - products of conception. Once, at a conference on running abortion clinics, she was instructed in the administration of the procedure.
After suction, Smith, according to her training, would go to the sink and pick over the dismembered POC’s to be sure that all parts were indeed there and accounted for - the placenta, spine and skull, the thorax, ribs, arms and legs, and so on. To leave any part in the womb was an invitation to post-abortion complications.
Smith had to begin dealing with intellectual integrity at that point. At the sink, she says, most abortionists have a strong visceral reaction. Certainly she did. And why? “Because,” she said, “in the absence of knowing whether the tissue is a baby or not, you suddenly know. This was a person. A person soon to be a baby, a child, a teenager, and adult – but now extinguished.”
One day, while sorting through an aborted POC, she saw this little perfect bicep of a baby boy. Her mind raced to her own little son who at the time was always running around the house with his arm half-cocked, saying, “Let me show you my muscle, Mama!” At that instant, and in the shadow of one of the last abortions she ever performed, she asked herself, what am I doing? Ten minutes ago, this was all together, and the arm was growing; then I did something, and here it is in pieces. What am I doing?
She decided then and there to quit performing abortions. Since that time, her life has changed dramatically. Part of her spiritual story is how Wesley Biblical Seminary students knocked on her door and invited her to Christ. Now Dr. Beverly McMillan, she’s been arrested for her protest abortion clinics, been featured on many national shows like Oprah and has served on the board of our seminary.
Social conservatives know how little positive media treatment their issues tend to get in secular papers and magazines. The Mississippi crowd was so famished that when I showed up it wasn’t long before they gave me the Jackson Pro-Lifer of the Year for mentioning the issue once every couple of months. I was thrilled for the acknowledgement and for the resume filler, of course, but also a bit unsettled.
You can get an award for simply mentioning the issue every now and again?
I love the story that missionary E. Stanley Jones told of his conversation with a Brahman at one of his famous religious roundtables who said, “As Jesus has saved you, so Krishna has saved me.” Jones didn’t argue for that was the rule of those roundtables, but later, after the meeting was over, he invited the Brahman to come with Jones and the others as they ministered to the outcastes. “Ah,” said the Brahman, “I am saved, but I am not saved that far.”[1] The Brahman had “salvation” of a sort, but not enough to take action central to the Christian faith.
So, even with the Jackson Pro-Lifer of the Year award in tow I think I was like the Brahman – a pro-lifer of sorts, but a pro-lifer of the that far variety? To actually do something about the issue and not just talk about it? I had my excuses, of course; I mean, my spiritual gift was to teach and preach and serve up the red meat in the newspaper and on talk radio. But to actually do something?
We planted a local church a couple of decades ago. After the first service one of those ladies that had voted on a board to give me that Pro-Life award came up to me after the service and said, “Pastor – when are we going to start our abortion clinic ministry?”
Now, nothing can take the joy of a highly successful first service of a brand-new church plant as fast as a question like that. Prior to that moment, I rather enjoyed critiquing pastors and church leaders who didn’t want to talk about the issue to their congregations but, even if they did, they didn’t want to leave the ecclesiastical premises to do anything more than talk. One of the top ten subjects of The Matt Friedeman Show had always been – “If pastors would just lead their congregations with their presence to the abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers we could end this abortion atrocity overnight in this state.”
It was a safe position – I wasn’t a pastor.
But on this day, suddenly, I was. And the sermon wasn’t more than five minutes concluded before one of the leading pro-lifers in the state asked me to put up, or shut up.
My kids and I headed out to the clinic that next week, and we have pretty much been there weekly ever since.
Twenty years later, I very much dislike the abortion clinic service that I render. But we have verbal record of a thousand babies being saved in front of THE clinic while WBS and DaySpring people have been out there. And why do I say THE clinic – because in the recent Supreme Court case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that is the very place we have been standing in front of many of these years.
Why Its Important To Engage This Issue
Culpability
I once participated in a televised, four-person panel discussing our community – Jackson, Mississippi. At the time I wrote a twice-weekly column in the state-wide newspaper and hosted a daily radio talk show. I was invited to provide commentary and, perhaps, a little debate with other panelists. At issue was a local government in disarray as the president of the city council and another councilman were headed to jail. The council president had been convicted of making an under-the-table deal with a strip club for the purposes of a rezoning and had been sentenced to time in a federal correctional facility.
It was quickly obvious that, interesting and relevant issue aside, our discussion was boring. No one was displaying emotion or articulating particularly provocative thoughts. During the first break in taping, the moderator – a newscaster named Katina Rankin from station WAPT – leaned over to me and remarked about how poorly the broadcast was going. I responded that perhaps she could ask better questions. So, when the broadcast resumed, apparently trying to get a rise out of me, Katina looked my direction and asked, “Matt, whose fault is all of this?”
Mission accomplished. I became agitated. My face began to get red and I prepared to tell her in dramatic on-air fashion that the United States is a nation of laws, Mississippi was a state of laws and our dear capitol city was a city of laws and, frankly, the city council president had trampled on them. He had tried to line his pockets at the expense of the public he was elected to serve. If we were looking for culprits, there was only one place to put the blame – smack dab in the council president’s lap, as he sat in his well-deserved jail cell!
That is what I was going to say. But I never got the words out. The panelist seated next to me was a gentleman named John Perkins – author, teacher, community developer, national evangelical leader, Christian statesman and Jackson resident. As I prepared to answer Ms. Rankin with what was undoubtedly going to be a vehement tirade, Dr. Perkins responded before I could get a word of it out.
“It’s my fault,” he answered Rankin. All heads, quizzically, turned his way.
“I have lived in this community for decades as a Bible teacher,” Perkins said. “I should have been able to do something to create an environment where what our council president did would have been unthinkable because of my personal investment in his life.”
“You want someone to blame? I’ll take the blame.”
In that moment, I remember thinking that I was a mere boy sitting next to a great man of God. His was a heart full of sorrow, but also of love. Mine was a heart more than ready to cast blame – hardly compassionate, surely not mournful.
It is our heritage
Christian History published an article by Rodney Stark called “Outliving the Pagans.”[2] Early Christians demonstrated the superiority of their faith, in large measure, because they out-wept, in demonstrably effective fashion, the surrounding culture.
Women outnumbered men among early converts even though men vastly outnumbered women in the society at large. There were an estimated 131 men for every 100 women in Rome. This disparity was even greater in other locales and most dramatic among the elite. There were unfortunate reasons for this. "If you are delivered of a child," wrote a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, "if it is a boy, keep it, if it is a girl, discard it." Frequent abortions "entailing great risk" (in the words of Celsus) killed many women and left even more barren. Christians, however, practiced neither abortion nor infanticide and, quite the contrary, were broken-hearted over the flagrant disregard for life.
Infants – girls and the disabled in particular – were frequently abandoned by the Roman culture to die of exposure. Christians would extend their charity to these abandoned children, traveling through back alleys and to the places designated for desertion to find them, then adopting these children as their own. These acts of compassion made the Church attractive to any who despised such practices. Women in particular found a place of safety with Christians who cared about them when nobody else seemed to.
When John Wesley talked about the Means of Grace in his Sermon on the Scripture Way of Salvation he talked of both works of piety and mercy. Piety included prayer, scripture study and meditation, the Lord’s Supper, fasting, group life. But also important, and to Wesley more important, were works of mercy. These included feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, entertaining the stranger, visiting those that are in prison, or sick, or variously afflicted; instructing the ignorant, awakening the sinner and contributing to the saving of souls from death.[3]
Wesley said that the Methodist should indeed “show his zeal for works of piety; but much more for works of mercy… Whenever, therefore, one interferes with the other, works of mercy are to be preferred. Even reading, hearing, prayer, are to be omitted, or to be postponed, “at charity’s almighty call”; when we are called to relieve the distress of our neighbor, whether in body or soul.”[4]
In his sermon “On Visiting the Sick” Wesley would admonish his believers to engage the works of mercy regularly and overcome the temptations to assume it was someone else’s responsibility, cop-out by just sending money or think that your station in life was a legitimate reason to escape the sound of the pain.
Someone once called my radio program and was effusive in his support. “Matt,” he exclaimed. “I’m ‘in the fight’ with you!” “In the fight” was sort of the theme for the program. On an accompanying website, we had what we dubbed the “In the Fight Club” of those who were engaged in the culture wars – involvement in the local church, involvement in a ministry in the community, regularly calling legislators, voting. So, I was excited about this particular phone call. I effusively asked the caller – “Tell me exactly what you are doing. How are you ‘in the fight?” expecting an energized testimony for involvement in the issues that matter most.
He said, “I listen to you.”
That was a clarifying moment for me. All too many people listen to media programs or church Bible studies or pulpit sermons and are convinced that in their resonance with the message they are somehow committed.
Not involved, yet still “in the fight?”
Wesley said that
Your holiness makes you as conspicuous as the sun in the sky. You cannot hide your Christian character. Love cannot be hidden any more than can light. Least of all, it cannot be hidden when it shines forth in action. When you exercise yourself in a labor of love, in any kind of good work, you are observed. We may as well try to hide a city as to hide a Christian. It is the purpose of God that every Christian should be in open view. We are to give light to all that are in the house.[5]
Abortion, with the death of around a million babies a year, is the issue of issues for the contemporary disciple. We ought to be unabashedly and actively conspicuous concerning this and similar issues.
Activism revives
In The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel interviews Charles Templeton, once an evangelism colleague and dear friend of Billy Graham. Templeton eventually left that close friendship and abandoned God as well. Strobel wondered what had become of the agnostic Templeton, who had subsequently pursued a career in the media and written a book titled Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. Templeton shared with Strobel how he progressed from once ministering with Billy Graham to embracing agnosticism.
It was a photograph in Life magazine. It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa. They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, “Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain[DC1] ?”[6]
It was a grief that drove Templeton away from God. Apparently, in that moment, he felt that his grief was bigger than his God.
A 2004 letter from Duane Litfin, then president of Wheaton College, to that school’s alumni featured the story of photojournalist Kevin Carter. Carter won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography with a photo that depicted a starving Sudanese child crawling toward food, under the gaze of a nearby vulture. It was a haunting image that drew international attention to the terrible suffering in famine-stricken Sudan. Alas, it also brought Carter himself under scrutiny.
The question inevitably occurred wherever Carter traveled. What happened to that starving kid? After the picture was taken, what action did you take to help that pitiful child? Carter was forced to admit that he had…simply…walked…away. With a growing sense of grief over his lack of response and all the other suffering he had witnessed in his career, the 33-year old’s award-winning photojournalist attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of his car. “I’m really, really, sorry,” he said in a note left on the seat by his collapsed body. “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist…”
“Blessed are those that mourn…” Or cursed, if the redemptive love of God is not brought into our grief. For that reason, Litfin proceeded to tell the Wheaton alums of another personality in the Sudan…
The college president noted that life didn’t get easier in that locale after Carter’s untimely demise. Civil war continued, killing more than 2 million people. In the midst of that human suffering, Dr. Warren Cooper served with Samaritan’s Purse as a physician in southern Sudan. He experienced human devastation equal to or worse than Carter observed. Still, after five years in a hospital described as “a living history museum of pathology,” he chose to remain.
How did he cope with the suffering, the pain, the immense anguish of human agony? “For Warren, the field of medicine allows him to live out his Christian faith – not just in word, but in deed. ‘I think it’d be very hard to continue doing this,’ said the doctor, ‘if you didn’t have a sense of ultimate meaning to what you were doing.’”[7][DC2] [DC3] And so it goes, that faith in Christ is not something that helps us escape pain but, to the contrary, helps us to mourn it well and then apply the love of God within that anguish.
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On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 departed from Washington National Airport during one the worst blizzards of that city’s history. It took off at 3:59 p.m., then with ice on its wings that prohibited flight it hit the 14th Street Bridge and plunged into the Potomac River at 4:01 p.m. The inch-thick ice on the river gave way, and seventy-eight passengers died.
Five passengers made it out of the wreckage, as news cameras rolled. A woman named Priscilla Tirado, too weak to grab the line being thrown to her from a hovering helicopter, appeared ready to sink to her death. Then one of the bystanders, a 28-year-old office assistant named Lenny Skutnik, pulled off his boots and dove into the perilously cold waters. Never having taken a lifesaving course in his life, he did his best to grab her and swim to shore.
Skutnick immediately became a national hero and was heralded by President Ronald Reagan thirteen days later during his State of the Union speech.
Just two weeks ago, in the midst of a terrible tragedy on the Potomac, we saw again the spirit of American heroism at its finest the heroism of dedicated rescue workers saving crash victims from icy waters.
And we saw the heroism of one of our young Government employees, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety4.[8]
In one of the later news reports, someone asked Skutnick why he dove in while so many others around him were reticent. He replied, “God looked down on that group of people and said, ‘eenie, meenie, miny, mo…and you’re Mo!’ So I dove in!”
Could God be saying that today to us as we look upon a hurting world today? “I am weeping today, and I need someone who feels as much grief as I do about this situation. And I need someone who is willing to do something about it.”
That is what it means to mourn like Jesus. Weep, then dive in.
[1] E. Stanley Jones, Christ of the Round Table (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), 96.
[2] Rodney Stark, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/1998/issue57/57h028.html.
[3] From John Wesley’s sermon The Scripture Way of Salvation and “The Large Minutes” (lightly updated)
[4] Wesley, “On Zeal.”
[5] John Wesley, Source: Sermon, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount: Discourse IV”
[6] Lee Strobel, A Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, (Zondervan, 2014) 7.
[7] Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, from letter to alumni (12-10-04), featured in PreachingToday.com
[8] http://www.stateoftheunionhistory.com/2021/03/1982-ronald-reagan-lenny-skutnik-rescue.html