Would Planned Parenthood Counsel Mary to Abort Jesus?
John C. Rankin
[adapted from First the Gospel, Then Politics …, 1999, Vol. 2, not published]
We read in Matthew 1:18-23:
“This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
“But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.’
“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet, ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ – which means, ‘God with us.’ ”
If there had been a Planned Parenthood clinic in Judea at the time of Mary’s “unplanned” pregnancy, what would they have recommended?
Mary was vulnerable at many turns. She was a teenager, a Jewess in a land occupied by a hostile foreign power, no civil rights to speak of within the Roman occupation, and no economic opportunity apart from marriage in a society that obviously had a “backward” view of women’s independence. Moreover, she could have been told that she was in danger of being stoned to death on the charge of adultery (which Joseph initially assumed must have been the case, only with gracious intents toward her still, before the angel of the Lord told him otherwise), even though there were no eyewitnesses (then again, how could there have been?). And in the face of a “quiet” divorce (understanding the “archaic” betrothal system as it were), a Planned Parenthood counselor could have said that with no real ability to earn a legal income, she would either have to be accepted back into her father’s household in order to escape the “feminization of poverty” of single motherhood, with no future prospect of marriage; or she would have to resort to the streets as a prostitute to survive.
Thus, Mary fit most criteria for a “therapeutic” abortion. The Planned Parenthood counselor could also have said that nobody would ever know about it. The pregnancy would remain a secret, and the abortion would cover over the “indiscretion” (they would not have believed her story as to how the pregnancy came to pass). Thus she could have become married to Joseph in due course, and life would turn out okay after all, given the “limitations” of that “primitive” society. She could always have children later, of course, pace Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood, consistent with the ethics of living in the darkness, which is the abortion ethos, is ethically in allegiance with the occult, as was Adolf Hitler, and together with him they share an allegiance to the ethics of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Huxley, Spencer and Nietzsche. The founder of Planned Parenthood (initially as the American Birth Control League), Margaret Sanger, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s eugenicist ideas in the early 1920s. They are ethically in allegiance with the whole seed of the ancient serpent which has always sought to destroy the Messianic lineage. And in allegiance with the spirit of King Herod, who as the devil’s surrogate, committed mass infanticide in trying to kill the young Jesus (Matthew 2:1-18). Planned Parenthood views vulnerability, nephesh, as a liability, for they do not grasp the strength it plays in a covenant community. Abortion cannot intrinsically be a part of a true covenant community, for abortion breaks covenant between man and woman, between mother and child and between father and child.
When Joseph was informed by the angel of the Lord what the situation was, the identity of Jesus was prescribed at an early stage of his fetal life. His Hebrew name is Yeshua, the same as Joshua, which means, “Yahweh saves.” And when the central Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 is quoted here, Immanuel or “God with us,” the presence of Yahweh again emerges as a central theme in the context of the status of the unborn (per the nature of Psalm 139, elsewhere reviewed). To abort a human being not only seeks to abort the presence of Yahweh, but also it would have been a tool, if culturally available at the time, used by the devil, to abort, if possible, the presence of the incarnate Yahweh, Jesus Christ.
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