I praise the Lord for you! I praise Him for working through you to enlighten a dark world. I am blessed to call you Brother and friend!

This has been a difficult situation for me to come to grips with. The desire to protect what life we can through seemingly achievable means becomes extremely enticing, but when placed in the proper context as you have done, the cracks in my thinking surface. Your opening paragraphs rekindled the headaches that I endured as a Pentecostal (mostly embracing Arminiaism) attending Calvinist LU! Ultimately, I will trust the Holy Spirit to provide the wisdom (through trusted sources such as yourself) to provide the proper direction.

May God continue to richly bless you and use you for His Glory!!

SOLI DEO GLORIA!

Steve

Thank you for your feedback. In answer to your question, we serve a God who was willing die in the place of his own misfit children. We are told to take up our cross and follow Him. There could be no greater an example of what is proper. The poor girl of your story received bad advice, out of sync with biblical principles, and contrary to issues of justice. Something much worse and more evil than the criminal violation of rape is the subsequent murder of the child conceived in it. It is not the child’s fault. Even worse…three children.

My advice to the mother would be to follow the maternal instinct of men and animals…preserve the most innocent life by sacrificing your own, if necessary. Then, once the right decision was made, she would be in position to receive divine protection from the Lord, defying the doctor’s limited medical view. Should they all survive, and the mother be unable to care for them, the children could be given for adoption. Thus, something beautiful could come from something evil. Sometimes love – the most powerful and honorable kind – is willing to let someone else care for their child.

In the very rare situation where a doctor believes only one of the two persons in the scenario can survive, and one must be chosen…the state has no proper jurisdiction. The mother and/or family government should preside in authority. The state should not inter into situations where one life is picked to live and another to die. This would open up a pandora’s box of other dangerous decisions to be made by the state. That is the only exception where I would restrict government interference.

With that said, I recently received the following message from an old high-school friend who read something I wrote on abortion. I thought you would appreciate it: “Unfortunately, this is something that unless you are in the situation you may not be convicted on. Being an adult that dealt with sexual abuse as a child, I had always thought that in cases of rape and incest it should be left up to the woman to decide what to do. That was until as an adult I was raped and subsequently (sp?) ended up pregnant from said rape. Only then did the Holy Spirit convict me that the child, though from a horrible event, was still a blessing from the Lord. I had a LOT of people tell me to abort, and even some well meaning Christians tell me to give the child up for adoption….but through PRAYER the Lord told me loud and clear that this child was meant for me to raise and love…..and be blessed by! She is now 15 years old and though we have many tough times, she is such a blessing to everyone who knows her!”