Deuteronomy 30:19 “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”
Since my post last week, I was reminded of yet another film, a documentary. I am not necessarily recommending it, however, because the worldview is very different from the three movies I suggested in my previous post. Nevertheless, more of us need to be educated about nonchalant disregard for innocent human life. I’ve recently heard podcasts, one from a highly respected Bible scholar and the other from a pastor of a rapidly growing and influential church, that referred to abortion as a “political issue.” This is a tragic distortion. Killing the unborn is a spiritual and moral issue, at the very core of who we are as human beings.
American politicians who speak against abortion have, as yet, been entirely unsuccessful in reversing Roe v. Wade. It can seem like we’ve made no progress at all. Ten years ago an abortion clinic set up shop in my town (in a sinister irony – located next to a pediatrician’s office). Beginning soon afterward, nearly every day, in rain, snow, heat, and cold, people began gathering at the driveway entrance. During these genuinely peaceful protests, these people did not scream, threaten, or point fingers at the women arriving for abortions; they just prayed and prayed and prayed. And wept, too, at the atrocities happening inside the walls nearby.
Which brings me to the documentary, One Child Nation, about China’s infamous (though much admired) one child policy. The policy was in force from 1979 to 2015. But even today, Chinese parents are permitted no more than two children, ensuring that the horrors will continue. What are those horrors? The movie spares nothing in showing the viewer abandoned babies wrapped in yellow plastic bags labeled “medical waste.” Interviewees tell of encountering live, abandoned baby girls, passing them on their bicycle rides to and from work where they lay in the weeds and gutters dying from dehydration and exposure. This was not a rarity, but visible multiple times per day, every day. Some, called “traffickers,” began collecting these babies out of pity (at least for some). This evolved into selling the babies to orphanages which developed into a highly profitable industry of re-selling these babies to Western families who were fed lies about how the babies came to be orphans.
The movie explores the fate of one set of twin girls. The older twin was taken by village officials and sold. She now lives in America. Neither twin knew she was a twin until this investigative journalist started digging. There are countless separations like this – children stolen from their families and sold. Others sold by their own parents! An uncle of the journalist tells of abandoning his newborn daughter in a market when threatened by his own mother that she would strangle the baby if he didn’t abandon her. He checked on the baby for two days and no one had picked her up. The third day he found her little body cold and still – dead from exposure.
Then there were the abortionists. One was an 84-year-old woman who estimated that she had murdered 50,000 to 60,000 infants inside and outside the womb. She was one of the few who openly confessed that it was wrong. The movie tells of pregnant women being sedated and carried or dragged to makeshift clinics where their babies were cut out of them. The “Family Planning” officials spoke matter-of-factly of mothers trying to run from them, of needing to hunt them down.
My family and I lived in China in the very middle of the 36-year span of the one child policy. I’m amazed we didn’t encounter abandoned babies on our walks. How many of the numerous trash heaps we passed on our taxi rides contained bags of dead and dying innocents? It makes me shudder.
And yet, at the end of the documentary, the director and journalist, Nanfu Wang, spouts her nonsensical cognitive dissonance by stating that she now lives in a country (America) which has certain abortion restrictions, so that whether in China or America, women don’t have control over what they do to their own bodies. By this point, the movie had already made clear that, whether in utero or born, these are human beings, not owned by their mothers or the state. The blindness and darkness is incomprehensible – even in a journalist who seems to want to rise above the sins of her native country and her parents, uncle, and other relatives. It is the same dissonance in the media which rates the movie highly while still celebrating the slaughter of the unborn.
Hours after watching One Child Nation last November, I woke up in the night tormented by what I’d seen, about what is happening in China – and America, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere around the world. Abortion is the defining sin of our age. It is the unbearable evil that soaks the earth with blood. As I prayed semi-coherently in the middle of the night, I felt that this world is a horrible, wicked place and wondered how God still has patience with us.
God wants us to pray and seek him. Twenty-one months ago, my town’s one abortion clinic shut down. The building stands empty now, like a place haunted, the owner unable to lease or sell it. This victory had something to do with politics at the local level because our pro-life mayor made a big difference by pressuring the Ohio Department of Health. But, at root, the victory had everything to do with God answering the pleas of faithful, godly people who cared deeply and prayed visibly for an end to the horror. I pray this becomes the fate of all abortion mills across America … and the whole world.
Father, Your mercy is astonishing. Please awaken all of us to the facts of what is going on. Help us pray, vote, and do all we can to oppose this culture of death. And let us always choose life.
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This week: If you haven’t been praying or volunteering or contributing financially to ministries that serve mothers and children in need, ask God to show you how you can impact innocent little lives this week. Then, in his grace and strength, do what God tells you.
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