Abortion
The date October 27 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the wicked Abortion Act of 1967, introduced by David Steel. Legal abortions under the Act started the following April, and since then there have been 8.7 million abortions in Britain. In the ordinary course of events, most of these children would have been alive today, and many would have had children and grandchildren. Currently there are about 190 000 abortions a year in the UK. In the US, there have been over 59 million abortions since 1973, and the estimate for worldwide abortions since 1980 is 1.47 billion.
The original grounds on which abortion was permitted in the 1967 Act were (1) to save the woman’s life; (2) to prevent grave permanent injury to the woman’s physical or mental health; (3) under 28 weeks, to avoid injury to the physical or mental health of the woman; (4) under 28 weeks, to avoid injury to the physical or mental health of the existing child(ren); (5) if the child was likely to be severely physically or mentally handicapped. The time-limits were changed in 1990, but otherwise the grounds remain broadly the same. In practice, unwanted pregnancy has been treated as liable to cause “injury to mental health”, and abortion has been virtually on demand. Under any normal interpretation of the law, most of the abortions since 1967 would have been illegal. In 2015 the Crown Prosecution Service of England said that it was “not in the public interest” to prosecute two doctors who had been caught offering sex-selective abortions. Apart from the intrinsic evil of the 1967 Act, its operation has undermined the integrity of both the medical and the legal professions.
Satan was “a murderer from the beginning” and “a liar and the father of it”, and the history of abortion illustrates the truth of Christ’s declaration to fallen mankind: “Ye are of your father the devil” (Jn 8:44). DWBS
Gender Confusion
Parents of a six-year-old boy on the Isle of Wight have raised concerns with their local Church of England school after hearing that one of his classmates wants to be treated as a boy one day and as a girl the next. The son expressed his anxiety to his father one night, as he was being read a bedtime story: “I’m confused. How can (he) be a boy one day and a girl the next?” The child then became very upset, which resulted in the couple, Nigel and Sally Rowe, deciding to contact the school on the issue. They met with both the head teacher and the class teacher, and followed up the visit with a letter setting out their questions. They also wrote to the Diocese of Portsmouth and to the Church of England’s Chief Education Officer.
The school’s formal response was, however, far from helpful. Defending its approach to pupils “exploring their gender”, it went on to suggest that an “inability to believe a transgender person is actually a ‘real’ female or male” and “the refusal to acknowledge a transgendered person’s true gender: for example, by failing to use their adopted name or using gender inappropriate pronouns,” was “transphobic behaviour”. They appeared to threaten that the Rowe child could be disciplined if he would not recognize the boy as a “girl”. Additionally, it was pointed out: “When a parent or carer raises a concern about the feelings of their child when spending time in the company of a transgender identified pupil, support work is aimed at answering the question: ‘How can we make your child feel better?’ rather than compromising the rights of the transgender child.”
Nigel Rowe says “I am shocked by the suggestion, especially from a church school, that just because we question the notion that a six-year-old boy can really become a girl, we could be ‘transphobic’. I cannot contemplate my six-year-old son being disciplined and stigmatised as a bully simply because he believes that another six-year-old, born as a boy, is actually a boy. As Christians, we . . . believe in the goodness of God’s created pattern of male and female. We certainly don’t have an irrational fear of those who are suffering from Gender Identity Disorder. In fact, we want to see them get the proper help that they need. But the school’s behaviour has created a direct clash between our family’s beliefs, and the imposition of this new ideology. We, and our children, are being bullied into accepting a new moral framework which strongly conflicts with what we really believe.”
Because of their son’s concerns, the Rowes reluctantly decided to remove him from his school – although they had been active supporters, and had even led assemblies there, over the previous four years. Interestingly the headmaster responded to this by saying, “We are not surprised . . . we have done everything we have been told to do. I have no choice. If a child wants to come as whatever, I have to accept it or I could lose my job.”
Nigel and Sally Rowe now plan to take legal action to challenge, as they put it, the “aggressive new gender ideology that is being rolled out across the education system to the detriment of children’s best interests”. They warn, “We cannot have a new ideology imposed on the primary school classroom. It is unfair both to the children in question, and other pupils and their families. In the end, it is immoral and cruel to encourage children at the age of six . . . years of age, to not recognise their birth sex. A child of that age is not able to fully understand these complex social issues. The safeguarding and welfare of many other children is threatened. Our great concern is what will happen to schools across the country if this type of ideology continues. Will we have schools where there are no longer boys and girls? That’s why we believe this new social construct must be challenged – for the safeguarding of our children and the future of society – but people are being frightened into staying silent.”
The Christian Legal Centre is supporting the family, and a spokesperson summed up the biblical position: “God has created humanity in His image, male and female. These are not arbitrary categories. It is not compassionate to encourage children to think that they can change genders. The loving thing to do is to help children embrace who they are as God made them, and especially to help those who experience confusion or anxiety about their identity. Transgender ideology is being aggressively imposed on unsuspecting schools, parents and children. School classrooms, which should be among the safest environments for children, are rapidly becoming dangerous battlefields in a war over gender identity. Vulnerable children are being used as pawns and will be harmed the most. The right response to gender identity confusion is not to fuel ambiguity and anxiety but to give children the tools they need to embrace their birth sex. We need to expose this agenda for what it is – delusional, destructive and abusive.”
We hope and pray that the Christian Legal Centre will bring common sense to prevail in this situation, and further, in God’s kindness, be a means of restoring some moral order in the midst of the prevailing sinful confusion. The need for such common sense is highlighted by a recent Christian Institute report that “an increasing number of people who have had surgery to live as the opposite sex, now want to re-embrace their birth sex, after experiencing severe depression and contemplating suicide”.
KHM
An Evolutionary Problem
Evolutionary scientists have a problem: given their presuppositions, why do so many people live to old age? A member of Edinburgh University’s School of Biological Sciences stated, “Why we live beyond 50 has long puzzled scientists. There are no obvious evolutionary benefits to genes that promote living in infertile individuals.” A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution states, as reported in The Herald, that “the riddle is even more complex than previously thought”.
One wonders what difficulties it will take to convince evolutionists that their system is seriously flawed. The assumption behind the quoted comments seems to be that evolution follows a purposeful course – that a reason can be found on evolutionary principles for, in particular, every aspect of human life. Yet evolutionists claim that evolution proceeds through random changes. Both cannot be true.
Phillip Johnson, who has written extensively on such subjects, points out: “To begin the story of creation with nothing but particles in mindless motion, governed only by chance and the impersonal laws of physics, is to pick a starting point which could never lead to the world we inhabit, with its vast wonderland of living creatures” (Johnson, The Right Questions, IVP (USA), 2002, p 141). Without a doubt, the right starting point is God’s creative work, as recorded in Genesis 1.