This question is the most frequent one I have encountered on the university campuses, and it is viscerally the most potent. The hell of rape and incest is so universally repulsive to all people of good will, that even deeply committed pro-life politicians have been willing to carve out a legal exception for abortion when a woman becomes pregnant in such circumstance. And so has the Republican Party even in spite of its pro-life Platform plank. They do so, not because they believe abortion remedies anything, but because they think they will be perceived as lacking compassion for the woman victimized by rape or incest if they do not concede an exception at this point. And when they do so, abortion-rights partisans are emboldened to accuse them of being inconsistent. They say that if such pro-life politicians believe human life begins at conception, then why allow abortion in this case? So on the one hand, they accuse them of a lack of compassion, and when the pro-abortion partisans win a concession here, they then accuse them of inconsistency on the other hand, and succeed in muting the pro-life witness. They succeed where the Pharisees could not with Jesus in the temple courts, and we need to know how to reverse this reversal and have the pro-abortion partisans silence themselves in their own chosen duplicities. In every case where I have been posed this question, often by college-age people who are not adversarial in their concern, sometimes by those who are adversarial, I have seen either gratitude or silence in response to my answer. In fact, when we are rooted in the word of God, and demonstrate by human experience that compassion upon the raped woman is served, not by abortion but by honoring the integrity of her unborn child equally, then this reversal is reversed.

In the Introduction, as an example of the POSH Ls (peace, order, stability and hope; to live, to love, to laugh and to learn) of the image of God, I spoke of the woman at a debate at Brown University who posed me the question about rape and incest. When I asked her if she resonated with the qualities of the POSH Ls, she did, and I stated how this demonstrated agreement between us in terms of a shared humanity. Then I asked her, in the face of the hell of rape or incest, if an abortion would restore the broken remains of the POSH Ls to the woman, or if it would only add further brokenness and fracture. And I mentioned how I could have left the question at this point, since it was clear that she knew it would only add further fracture, and the audience resonated with the same acknowledgment. But I did not leave it there, for my purpose is not to repel opposition by leaving someone with even a good question. Perhaps with clearly adversarial people this might be done in a given context, as Jesus did with his enemies, but if there is one person present who is open to being ministered to, then I will seek to be as thorough as possible. And this woman was not adversarial per se, and there were four hundred others present.

By addressing the POSH Ls of women facing such an evil, I start where the question needs first to be addressed. Does a raped woman believe she has the power to give to the unborn child, or does she see no alternative but to yield to the abortion decision? Does she see the rape as necessarily positing a war between her and her child?

If the language of the abortion debate is examined, it can be noted that it is abortion-rights advocates who posit a war between mother and child. It is pro-life advocates who seek reconciliation between the two, and admit no war. And the war posited by abortion-rights activists is often due to their own experiences in having been warred against, as the power to take has been exercised upon them as children, instead of having received the blessings of the power to give. In having been violated by the absence of true fatherhood or by some other form of male chauvinism, the downward cycle of reaction to reaction only intensifies.

Once I addressed a debate at Harvard Medical School, with a colleague who is a medical doctor, Dr. Andy White. The abortion-rights side was represented by a physician and a Unitarian sociologist. About 80 medical students were in attendance. During the evening, Andy and I consistently spoke of the woman and her unborn equally. But the abortion-rights advocates kept positing a war between mother and (unwanted) child.

During the Q & A, a medical student stood up and announced that politically he held a “pro-choice” position. Then he addressed Andy and me, saying he noted how we expressed “care for both the woman and her unborn child.” Then he addressed our debate opponents and noted how they only spoke about care for the woman. Then he asked them, “Do you also have any care for the unborn?”

The physician and sociologist looked at each other, were at a loss for words for some embarrassing moments, then the sociologist gestured to us, and she said, “Well, that is their concern, not ours.” The audience, overwhelmingly “pro-choice” in sympathies, then rippled with some laughter and amazed sighs. The contrast could not be clearer: abortion-rights activists defined an inequality of the strong over the weak, and accept a war; pro-life advocates define and accept the hope of true equality and reconciliation.

The raped woman is the one who needs to be empowered to choose life, for she is the one under duress, and who is in need of the Savior’s tangible love. If ever we allow pro-abortion partisans to frame a conflict between the woman and the unborn, in the public imagination, the brokenness of sin will trump. There is no conflict, even when a woman’s life is in jeopardy with a continued pregnancy. In those cases, whether with the need for an abortion of an early pregnancy, or a C-section later on, the humanity of the unborn is never disaffirmed. The biblically rooted Jewish or Christian woman in such a trauma would not view her child as an aggressor against her, but the cancer or other septic condition is the aggressor against both mother and child. The woman and her unborn child are equal, and if we have equal concern for the humanity of the unborn, it cannot be honestly and effectively advanced apart from ministering first to the woman.

So I reviewed the realities of creation, sin and redemption, and diagnosed the power to give and the power to forgive, both in the face of destruction. I defined how human abortion, from its Latin roots of ab  + oriri equals “to cut off from rising” and thus it is an intrinsic act of destruction.

Once, in the debate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) earlier referenced, I asked the abortion-rights panel if there was anything intrinsically good in the act of human abortion. They hesitated even more embarrassingly than did the physician and sociologist at Harvard Medical School, for perhaps ten seconds. Then one woman said, “Well, we are not used to the format yet ...” and proceeded to avoid the question, because they knew that human abortion is intrinsically an act of destruction. And we were already 45 minutes into the format.

With respect for the woman’s well-being already having been established by an appeal to the POSH Ls at Brown, I was now able to appeal to the biological and theological humanity of the unborn, and diagnose the reality of what abortion does. The audience had resonated with my starting point of compassion for the woman, and hatred for rape and incest, so when I asked if the abortion would heal the broken remains of the image of God, or unrape the woman, they agreed with my implicit answer that it would not.

At Brown as I recall, and certainly in many other instances, I took pause to look more closely at the evil of rape. Whereas I cannot fully grasp a woman’s perspective on such violation, I can grasp the perspectives as a married man, as a biological brother to my sisters, as a Christian brother to sisters in the body of Christ, as a Christian man with due respect for all women, and later as the father of a daughter (the Brown debate was after the birth of my three sons, before the birth of my daughter). When I consider the vulnerability and intimacy of sexual union between husband and wife, and the emotional realities as well as the physical realities, I shudder deeply when I consider the hell of rape or incest. And I use the term “hell” in a full theological sense. Such a perspective helps me understand historically why the status of rapists and murderers has accrued the same social opprobrium – and with the rapist being regarded as more evil in many instances. With respect to Jesus’s words on the Sermon on the Mount, the man who looks lustfully on a woman is no different than the actual adulterer, and likewise the man who calls another man a “fool” is no different in his heart than the murderer. The rapist commits both sins in one act, for in his heart he hates the woman and womanhood in most instances, and many rapists also murder their victims.

Thus, the humanity of the woman is embraced, true compassion underscored, and the deepest hatred for the evil of rape and incest is profiled. But since human abortion does not heal the evil and does not unrape the woman, the next question is where healing and justice are to be found. In order to move in this direction, the power to give and the power to forgive must be embraced, and they are rooted in only Genesis. Courage is needed to overcome the adversity, but rarely is courage able to be grasped when someone is alone – especially if facing single motherhood with the painful memories of the pregnancy having occurred in such a violent fashion. The power to give trumps the power to destroy, and the raped woman needs love given to her so as to help her overcome such devastation. We love because God first loved us. Thus the church must be an agent of that love to such a woman, giving her the time, love, counsel, spiritual, psychological and material resources necessary for her to become an overcomer. This is particularly a one-on-one woman-to-woman ministry, though men can be involved in supporting capacities. Here the ministries of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) have done yeoman work. Healing is found in the church where Jesus Christ is Lord, where his people are self-giving to such women, where the necessary resources are made available, and where the raped woman chooses to accept such ministry, with her privacy being simultaneously honored.

We need to profile the nature of courage. It is a choice of whether we rise to the challenge or flee from it. In Revelation 2-3, Jesus addresses seven churches in the province of Asia – churches at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. They were under severe persecution for their faith, from political and cultural opposition orchestrated by the devil, as well as direct assaults from occultic powers. Their lives were threatened, and they suffered many abuses and even death. In history we see the evil of rape in wartime, and for the Christians in these seven cities, it would probably be one of a list of many atrocities they suffered. We all know trials in our lives we need to overcome, whether an actual rape or another evil that strikes at the deepest core of our physical, social, psychological and spiritual well-being.

In the words to each of the seven churches, Jesus specifically calls them to be overcomers. He provides the wherewithal – if only we believe, and that is what he calls us to. The greatest literature in history, and its focus on true heroes and heroines, does not celebrate the cowardly, but the courageous. At the end of Revelation when it diagnoses those who are outside the kingdom of God, it mentions the “cowardly” (21:8). To be courageous is not to summon human strength to overcome, and to be cowardly does not refer to the one who cannot summon such strength. The courageous are those, who in acknowledgment of their weaknesses, nonetheless place their trust in the goodness of God, and the cowardly are those who will not embrace such trust and belief. In fact, those with the greatest worldly strength and resources are oftentimes the biggest moral cowards. And the poor and humble are oftentimes the most courageous. The reversal of the reversal.

When a woman becomes pregnant by rape or incest, she is terribly aware of her weakness and vulnerability. Only a reversal of the reversal can minister to her, and if she embraces it, she is empowered to be an overcomer. Cowardly acts lead to a true loss of humanity, but courageous acts lead to a greater humanity, and it is the courageous whom history fetes. In the face of the destruction and dehumanization of rape and incest, the choice to give life to the unborn is an act of courage, and the church needs to be there to help the woman make this choice. Courage is never easy on the face of it, but it is the right thing to do, and in the long run it produces peace in the soul.

The unborn child is innocent, and if aborted, the child becomes the second victim. It is a question of power – if the child is aborted, the rapist prevails twice. He has succeeded in having one act of destruction lead to another act of destruction. He has succeeded in prostituting motherhood by causing a mother to forsake her child. This prostitution is his prostitution, not hers, but she is the one in whom the agony is deposited alongside his seed. He is the coward to begin with, and he poisons her with that same cowardice if she yields to an abortion. He has succeeded in having the power to take trump the power to give, he has served the reversal, he has advanced the agenda of the ancient serpent.

What about the woman’s emotions? Oftentimes, in pregnancy due to rape, the very thought of giving birth to a rapist’s child is repulsive, and even if she overcomes that initial repulsion, the memory of a rapist father will always be there. She cannot but view the child as the offspring of such a “father,” and cannot imagine loving such a child. This is why the love of God the Father is indispensable – he who has loved us, when through our sins we have become as unlovely as can the appearance of a rapist’s child to the mother, and as obviously hated by the rapist father. Only God’s love can reverse the reversal in this case, and with a grasp of the power of the cross of Jesus Christ. 

Who has more power – the rapist or the woman? In 1 Corinthians 7, as we have looked at earlier, Paul is addressing the question of marriage and divorce, and in this context he says:

Here Paul says that the believer has more power than the unbeliever, especially in terms of influencing the children. Do we encourage victims of rape to believe this? Are they empowered in the face of the hell they are going through, to overcome the temptation to look at the child as a “rape child,” and instead to see him or her as an image-bearer of God in whose life the love of Jesus Christ can triumph? Does a rape victim view the child as her child, the one whom she will influence, or does she buy the devil’s lie that the rapist, and the painful memory of him in absentia, will be the primary influence?

The percentage of abortions due to rape is very small, and women who abort due to rape, abort at about the same rate as all women who abort their pregnancies. So the emotions and the trauma associated with rape do not produce a higher choice for abortion than women who get pregnant out of a chosen relationship. But because of the huge hormone changes in a woman’s body during the first weeks of pregnancy, a woman is emotionally vulnerable to being pressured into an abortion in the 8-12 week range – while her emotions can be reacting to that state of pregnancy, before her hormone shift is complete and she begins to identify with the growing child within her. This is why CPC ministries are crucial in how they stand in the gap, especially in cases of rape and incest.

Whereas pro-abortion ideologues say that an abortion is necessary to rid the evil of rape and incest, in truth, they take the pain of women so victimized, and employ it to their own ends. Abortion-rights proponents have long known that most all abortions are in reality a matter of choice. In the early 1970s, an abortionist in California, Dr. Irvin Cushner, said that 98 percent of women who get an abortion do so simply because they do not wish to be pregnant at that particular time, as he testified before the U.S. Congress. They have college or career plans or other priorities. Now it is my conviction that male abortionists are the most chauvinistic men there are, so we need to be careful with Dr. Cushner’s diagnosis. Medically speaking, he understates the case. But he does not note the 95 percent reality, as we have itemized, of all abortions being outside of marriage – where male chauvinism reigns (not to mention the fact that nearly the rest of abortions happen because the husband is on the way out the door). So the choice is never a planned choice or a satisfactory one – there are mediating factors. Women are often pressured into this “choice” by male chauvinists.

This is why the pro-abortion activists, in their ideological zeal, can actually hate women, despite their protestations to such a diagnosis. In the mid-eighties, I traced the data, as far as it was possible, to arrive at an estimate of the percentage of abortions due to rape and incest, and the figure came out to 1/10 of 1 percent, or about 1600 cases per year (out of 1.6 million total annual abortions at that time). The nature of forcible rape actually lessens the statistical norm for possible pregnancy, but whether the number of instances is small or great, it is nonetheless a real hell for those so victimized. My point here is that upon the backs of these women do the pro-abortion ideologues market an ideology of sexual promiscuity and abortion-on-demand. Whereas some of them do genuinely care for women thus victimized, in large part it is the pain of the raped woman that is used to market the justification for abortion in all instances. The pain of raped women is employed as public rhetoric in service to Planned Parenthood and other abortion marketers. Whenever they have need for political persuasion to keep abortion legal, they prostitute the emotional identification we all have for compassion upon a rape victim, so as to say that pro-life people hate women, and thus the pro-life argument must be rejected in total.

But the pro-abortion ideologues rape these very women all over again, using their pain as chattel. When we grasp this reality, we can see clearly how the abortion-rights language is in service to the reversal, and we as Christians are called to reverse the reversal. We do this by empowering rape victims to choose life equally for themselves and their unborn children, to embrace overcoming courage and to reject the male chauvinistic cowardice that only knows destruction. We do this by reversing the reversal of public language, and say “no” equally to the physical rapist of the women, and “no” to the spiritual and political rape of these same women by those who are the pro-abortion ideologues.

Another way we can look at this issue is pointing out that we are all children of rape, whether physically or metaphorically. In other words, if we were able to trace every act of sexual union that produced us, from our parents back to the Garden of Eden – how many of these acts were in true marital love with the planned embrace of children so conceived? How many of these sexual unions were in various states of turmoil, and how many were adulterous unions, acts of fornication, acts of rape or acts of incest? For all I know, and I do not know, a drunk fifty-year old man in the highlands of Scotland in the ninth century A.D. raped his thirteen-year old niece, apart from which I would not be here today. We do know that William I of Normandy was an illegitimate child, known also as  “William the Bastard.” He shaped history with the crossing of the English Channel in 1066, apart from which not only would I not be here today, but many tens of millions of others as well, including British royalty and most if not all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. This returns us to my earlier observations about Genesis 5:1-3, the image of God and the power to pass it on as given to Adam and Seth, even in spite of their sins. Of course too, we know that such sexual sins have also produced evil people like Adolf Hitler (i.e. the ethics of choice). The point is this – none of us come from a lineage that is sexually pure. Thus, if we judge the child of the raped woman to be less than human, then we judge ourselves and our loved ones likewise. I would not be surprised to learn that the majority of or all of the human race has literal rape or tabooed incest in their lineages at some point.

In 1986, I sponsored a public forum on abortion at a local school in Gloucester, Massachusetts. We distributed flyers citywide and in Rockport as well. I had invited Planned Parenthood to send a representative, but they refused. When I arrived at the school that evening, I was greeted by three women protesters with placards. They were not protesting me per se, but were protesting a pro-life initiative for the 1986 state ballot, which though I supported (it opposed taxpayer funded abortions), I was only marginally involved with the political campaign that was advancing it, and this initiative was not the advertised or actual substance of the forum that evening.

I approached the women, and invited them into the forum, and offered them equal time from the podium to address their concerns. One woman left, and the other two accepted my invitation but demurred to take the podium. So I gave them first shot at asking questions from the audience, and priority in the amount of time they wished for. One woman asked many questions, and we went back and forth for a good period. It made the evening, as most of the audience of 120 people were pro-life in sentiment. In her final statement, she said how she now agreed with me 90 percent on the subject, but still could not accept my opposition to abortion in the cases of rape and incest. (As well, my articulation concerning rape and incest was much less seasoned than it is now). My response was straightforward – if we have 90 percent agreement, let’s build on it and go from there. I stated my belief that if she agreed that much, then a patient examination of the basis for such an agreement would lead her to understand the consistency and compassion involved in saying no to human abortion in such instances. But I was not going to push the issue – I prayed that the seeds of truth she had accepted would bear fruit in due season.

If we can answer the question of rape and incest, the toughest of questions in the abortion debate, we can then win the largest portion of public sentiment possible. The tragedy of pro-life politicians who carve out an exception for the rare reality of pregnancy due to rape and incest, is that by side-stepping the question, they reduce their ability to tackle the real question of human abortion head on – the willful destruction of unborn children, which simultaneously assaults the humanity, psychological and physical health of their mothers. We can only succeed in the overall concerns if first we embrace the power to love hard questions in this regard.

It was this question, in the fall of 1972, that first brought me into the abortion debate. It was just months before the announcement of the Roe v. Wade decision, and thus a time when the topic was first receiving national attention. I was a freshman at Denison University, taking a class in religion that involved social issues. I did not really know what abortion was prior to that time, even though I was nineteen-years old. As I read the assigned texts, much of which was in favor of legalizing abortion, it was an easy decision for me to oppose it, consistent with all my Christian instincts.

The class had about thirty students, and when it came time for discussion, I was the only one who spoke against human abortion. There were a few other students who may have shared my sentiments, but none were willing to speak up. As I did, I was met with overwhelming opposition and even derision from my classmates. The most serious challenge was from a guy who asked me what I would do if my wife were raped – would I “force” her to keep the baby? The classroom was hushed, and I gave answer, never having thought about it before, and for which I have not changed my mind in the meantime.

At that point, I had not yet met my future wife, so the question was only theoretical. But I said that any woman I would marry would share my faith in Jesus Christ, and that I also believe in the power of prayer to protect her from such an evil. I do even more so today, knowing the territory of spiritual warfare to the extent I now do. But, even in spite of this faith, if such an evil were to happen, any woman I would marry would also share my belief in the inviolability of the unborn. I then said it would be easier for me to argue for the abortion, since the child would not be mine, but nonetheless I would support my wife, love her more than ever in the face of such trauma, and raise the child as my own with her. I did not think about the option of adopting the child out at that moment, but still I would choose to serve my wife in the redemptive influence of her innocent baby.

The class broke out in a caustic and mocking laughter. As it did, the professor, Dr. Lee Scott, interjected. Prior to that moment I was not his favorite student. I was one of those “Jesus people,” long-haired and bearded with wire-rimmed glasses, theologically nascent, forever asking questions that challenged so many of his assumptions (in retrospect, I probably asked some good questions, and undoubtedly asked some stupid ones too). When I gave my answer and the class started its derision, Dr. Scott said something pretty close to “Shut up.” He probably did not use those words, as he was a gentle and gracious man, but his emotions carried the same force. He rebuked the class and told them to be quiet unless they were willing to be as consistent as I was, or able to make a better argument. This was my baptism into the abortion debate.

In the mid-1980s, I conducted a series of open forums on abortion with sponsorship from various campus ministry groups. I would go onto a university campus, in conjunction with flyers being passed out, at the lunch hour at a central location, set up a microphone and start speaking on the issues surrounding the debate. People would gather, in modest or substantial numbers, and after a summary presentation, I would invite questions. The forums would last up to two hours, with people stopping by for a short time or a long time. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass), we had perhaps our most successful forum, where up to 250 people stopped for enough time to make it worth noting. At the end of this event, with about 100 people present, a young woman was questioning me passionately. She came to the question of rape and incest, and I sought to give answer.

As I did, she interjected and stated, in the presence of everyone there, that she herself was conceived though an act of rape. I had never before encountered a person with such a testimony, and I was astonished at her forthrightness. I then asked why she of all people would argue for abortion in the case of rape. “Would you rather have been aborted?” She was astonished, for as her reaction then made clear, she had never thought of it from that perspective. She had only thought of it in terms of the woman who had been raped, e.g., her very mother, and now paused as she tried to sort out her thoughts. We brought the forum to a close shortly thereafter, and I walked right over to her. We then went to the Student Union and sat down at a cafeteria table, and she shared with me her story.

She was a freshman or sophomore as best I recall, thus about nineteen-years old. Her mother was raised in a West Virginian coal mining town, although I was not told the specific town. But for any of us who know anything about many of these towns, they are historically “company” towns, where most all the jobs are directly or indirectly linked to the coal mining company. The education levels are generally low, and at least until World War II, most of the children stayed in the given town to work as did their parents. Everyone knows everyone else, and Protestant churches with “fundamental” doctrinal and social concerns are predominant. This is a generalization of the milieu from which this college girl came, and the flavor of her story conveyed this sense as well.

She was thus born in the 1965-68 time frame, and her mother was eleven years old when raped. So there I sat, in my early thirties, looking at a nineteen-year old woman whose mother was younger than me. As well, I gleaned the sense from our conversation that the father was known to everyone in the town, and though she did not say so explicitly, I wondered if he were perhaps a member of the extended family, thus involving the question of incest. When her mother was known to be pregnant, her family exerted severe pressure on her to get an abortion. The sense I also gleaned was that abortion was generally opposed in the family, church and town, where there was a strong commitment to the institution and social glue of marriage. But too, abortion was favored in the case of rape. In a small town like that, and especially if family members and the gossip chain knew who the father was, the carrying to term of the child would serve as a constant reminder to them of the evil of the rape.

Remarkably, the eleven-year old girl in West Virginia resisted the pressure, and chose to give birth to her child. When we speak in terms of courage, and the need for the church to help those facing the evil of rape and incest when it results in pregnancy, we can contrast it with this grade school girl who had no such support. If she could muster the courage in such a hostile environment, anyone can do the same in other rape and incest scenarios by placing their trust in God. She gave birth at age twelve, and some nineteen years later I was talking with her daughter.

The twelve-year old mother was treated as “dirt” by the town for having chosen to have the baby, and her daughter was thus treated as “double dirt.” Because she saw her mother’s pain and wanted to stand up for her, she uncritically accepted the abortion rationale in college – until she happened upon the forum. As I spoke with her, and perceived her own struggle, I looked straight at her and said something like, “It doesn’t matter that you were conceived in rape – you are just as loved by God as anyone else, including those conceived in a loving marriage, or where there is great wealth like British royalty.” As I spoke these words, I witnessed them touch her soul in a fashion that she had never experienced. I do not believe she had ever been affirmed as an equal image-bearer of God, and as I said these words, they were received like water through the parched lips of a severely dehydrated person. So dehydrated that I concluded the conversation at that point, realizing that such a proclamation of the Good News was so radical that she needed time to process it.

In the fall of 1989, I was interviewed on WGAN radio in Portland, Maine, a 50,000 watt super-station. During the course of the show, the issue of rape and incest was brought up by the talk show host, as he did not appear to share my perspective. I gave answer, and then a woman called the show on the air. She began by saying how she had once been raped. She continued and said that I was the first man she had ever heard who understood her pain, and in listening to me, the hatred she had held for so many years against all men drained out of her heart. I was blown away, and had a very difficult time in responding to her, choking on my words, as I tried to encourage her to believe in the Lord and find a biblically healthy church and some godly counsel. She then continued with passion, and without stating that she had actually had an abortion, said how incredible it was for a woman who has been raped and made pregnant by a man, to then allow another man to scrape out her uterus. It was like being raped again, she said. Remarkably, I was called, on several occasions in the subsequent year or two, by people who heard this show replayed, people who picked it up in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. It was honest drama, not fiction, and the radio station must have placed it on their list for replay during otherwise unscheduled late night slots.

In the mid 1990s, I was addressed a group of public high school students in the town where I then lived, and where my second eldest son then attended. The school was sponsoring an “in service” day where outside speakers would come to address various issues for tenth graders. A dialogue was set up with me and a woman representing a “women’s rights” educational and political organization in Hartford. We addressed two separate sessions on the general topic of abortion, one of which my son attended.

Questions were elicited from the students, and in the first session, the issue of rape and incest was raised. Given the brevity of time, I gave a short synopsis of my rationale, but also shared the stories of the women at UMass and on WGAN. The resonance among the students was deep, but even more so, the feminist representing the women’s rights group did not try to dispute me. Instead she gave compliment, stating how hard it was for her to follow up after such an “eloquent and moving” answer. During the second session, her presentation of abortion-rights was muted, and much less confident than her presentation in the first session. And during the Q & A period in the second session, she deferred to me repeatedly. I treated her graciously from the outset, and in the first session before the rape and incest question was brought up, I rigorously challenged some of her assertions, especially the rhetoric of calling pro-life people “anti-choice” and “anti-women,” as well as erroneous data. I noted how none of my language involved such an accusatory nature toward abortion-rights partisans, and she responded well. She herself was a pleasant person, and the fruit of the encounter was the muting of the abortion-rights argument, and in a way where there was no animosity. Love, a sound mind and spiritual power is what we need. We either tackle the tough issues head-on, or we get tackled by them in our evasive maneuvers.

In my second Mars Hill Forum with Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR), I did something I had never done before, as later I also did with Ann Stone of Republicans for Choice in our forum at Dartmouth. I addressed the issue of rape and incest in my opening comments, not waiting to respond to someone’s question. In both cases, neither Ragsdale, Stone nor any of the audience raised the issue in their responses to me. In other words, by taking the intellectual, moral and spiritual offensive on this question, we can see the opposition arguments silenced, and our position is greatly strengthened from which to lobby for the legal protection of the unborn. The risk-taking nature of the power to love hard questions is our gift from God in the order of creation and in reversing the reversal.

Theologically, we have already pointed out the vulnerability of Jesus’s conception, where, had Planned Parenthood been present, they would have recommended a “therapeutic” abortion. Interestingly, retired Episcopal Bishop John Spong, with whom I addressed a forum at Yale, has argued against the virgin birth of Jesus. He claims, as have certain pagan feminist theologians, that in fact Mary was raped (supplying no proof however – he just rejects the possibility of God performing a miracle in concert with biblical ethics in the order of redemption; and he employs a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in a deconstructionist rewriting of history, proposing a hypothesis to conform with his presuppositions, that the “virgin birth” was invented among early church fathers to cover the scandal of a rape). Spong also supports legalized human abortion. Mary was not raped, but Jesus comes from a line that includes prostitution, incest and rape (cf. Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38; Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 – both texts of which we have looked at in detail in Chapter Six). We all come from lineages that have their measure of sexual sin, and Jesus in his humanity shares the same, so that in his divinity he can carry our sins for us. He comes to add life to the rape victim and her child, and not to destroy either as the abortion ethos does.

In summary, human abortion is not an answer to the hell of rape or incest:

1. Human abortion does not unrape the woman – it redeems nothing and thus it is in service only to the reversal.
2. Human abortion does not restore the fractured qualities of the POSH Ls.
3. Human abortion only adds further brokenness, since it equals the intrinsic power to destroy.
4. Human abortion is not compassionate to the woman or to her child.
5. Human abortion mocks the power of the woman to overcome the evil she has suffered, it excludes the power and redemptive effect of courage.
6. Human abortion mocks the nephesh of the unborn by killing the child – the other innocent party.
7. Human abortion allows the rapist to triumph twice – to assault both woman and child – to get away with “double murder.”
8. Human abortion allows the power to take and destroy of the rapist to vitiate the power to give of the woman.
9. Human abortion allows the pro-abortion ideologues to market “abortion-rights” on the backs of rape victims – it rapes the woman all over again.
10. Human abortion is a tool of the ancient serpent, who would abort us all, since all of us are actually or metaphorically “children of rape.”