It is an honor to be invited to this conference and be in the presense of such distinguished guests. As I was introduced to some of you I found myself asking the question, why am I here?

My first response to that question was, I’m here primarily because I’m in love. I’m in love with Jesus my Lord and Savior and I have decided to follow Him wherever He leads me. In practice that may look like following Bert Dorenbos.

My second response to that question was, I’m committed to doing my best in communicating the Lords heart concerning life issues.The very issues that demand so much of our time, energy and resources. These issues the Lord has already solved. We are simply called to listen well and follow with reckless abandon. He is faithful in showing the way. Do you believe this? The Lord is actively networking the nations for His purposes. For Life because He has said, “I am the way, the truth and the LIFE”. We are all called to do our designated part and our part is revealed on our knees.

On the subject assigned to me today, here are some thoughts.

The character of a Nation is defined by how it provides and protects its most vulnerable innocent. Its character secures the future of the Nation. To some nations, character is of no value, and its innocent are dispensable. The future of such a nation is certain economic, moral and spiritual deprivation and rapid decline. The nation will eventually destroy itself from the inside out, which is a direct reflection of abortion.

Abortion practice in America and select Countries

The abortion practice in America is built upon deception. This is clearly illustrated by the historic case Roe vs Wade. In an interview on 8/10 with WBAP radio in Dallas, Norma McCorvey announced, “I’m pro-life. I think I’ve always been pro-life, I just didn’t know it” (Reaves, Dallas Morning News, 8/11/95). McCorvey, claimed before Roe that she had been raped, was 21 and pregnant when she approached attorney Sarah Weddington about suing for the right to have an abortion. McCorvey never had an abortion, because the decision came too late. She carried the baby to term and gave it up for adoption. McCorvey later admitted that she had not been raped (ibid., 8/11). ABC’s World News Tonight and Nightline featured exclusive interviews with McCorvey, in which she renounced her role in the abortion advocacy movement and declared that abortion is wrong. “I think abortion is wrong. I think what I did with Roe vs. Wade was wrong, and I just have to take a pro-life position on [abortion]” (World News Tonight, 8/10/95).

From Norma McCorvey: “Abortion has been founded on lies and deception from the very beginning. All I did was lie about how I got pregnant. I was having an affair. It all started out as a little lie. I said what I needed to say. But, my little lie grew and grew and became more horrible with each telling. Sarah and Linda’s (the pro-abortion attorneys in Roe) eyes seemed blinded to my obvious inability to tell the same story twice. It was good for the cause. It read well in the newspapers. With the help of willing media the credibility of well-known columnists, the lie became known as the truth these past 25 years.”

One of the most common arguments abortion advocates make in defense of legal abortion is that making abortion illegal will cause women to go to the “back alleys” and obtain unsafe abortions. They cite how thousands of women died as a result of unsafe abortions before abortion was legalized through the Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League (N.A.R.A.L.), admits his group lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972. Dr. Nathanson admits that he and others in the abortion rights movement intentionally fabricated the number of women who allegedly died as a result of illegal abortions.

“How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of the revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics. The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason which had to be done was permissible.”

Today in Trinidad West Indies, abortion laws are being drafted based on the “back alley” argument. They base their argument on the practice of distributing an over dose of medication used for the treatment of ulcers. They hope to pass the abortion rights law in 1999. This is a single example of how abortion is spreading around the Globe.

Abortion Advocate Admits Deception

NEW YORK (AP) - A prominent supporter of abortion rights says he “lied through my teeth” when he said that so-called partial-birth abortions were performed rarely, and only to save the mother’s life or to abort malformed fetuses. Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers in Alexandria, VA., a coalition of 200 independently owned clinics, made the admission in an article to be published March 3 in Medical News, an American Medical Association publication. The article was quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times. Fitzsimmons, who had insisted the procedure was rare in a November 1995 interview on the ABC show Nightline now says abortion opponents are right when they say the procedure, intact dilation and evacuation, is common. He said that in the vast majority of cases, the procedure is formed on a healthy mother who is five months pregnant with a healthy fetus. “The abortion rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else,” he said. He said he had lied because he feared the truth would damage the cause of abortion rights, but now he is convinced that the debate on the issue must be based on the truth.

The procedure involves extracting a fetus through the birth canal, feet first, and then suctioning out the brain. Congress passed a law to ban the procedure, which opponents say borders on infanticide, but President Clinton vetoed the law and Congress failed to override the veto. In explaining his veto, Clinton said the procedure was used on “a few hundred women every year” whose fetuses are “about to be born with terrible deformities.” The deception continues at our own peril!

Deception was required to pave the path for the abortion practice planned for our nation and globe. Legal abortion procedures in America today include, menstrual extraction, dilation and curettage (D&C), suction curettage (vacuum aspiration), dilation and evacuation (D&E), salt poisoning (saline injection), hysterotomy or caesarean section, prosteglandin chemical abortion and partial birth abortion.

Clearly, a war is raging in America, in the Netherlands and around the Globe. It’s a war on compassion. A war fixed on destroying the image of God. Now I want to spend some time on what I believe to be the truth.

War on Compassion

The thoughts I’m bringing to you today come from a long discussion over time with my beloved pastor, John W. Frye. Through many conversations these thoughts have emerged and have galvenized our partnership in “Life” ministries.

First, I want to discuss a basic, yet overlooked, truth from God’s Word. Of course, abortion is a multifaceted issue with political, social and human rights, and Biblical implications. I’m speaking as a pastor, not as a politician or social worker, and I believe that pastors must recover their voices and speak for God into the dark chaos created by the ugly realities of the mission field created by abortion. The church of Jesus Christ must rise up and declare that, above all else, abortion is a spiritual issue. Abortion is a hostile assault on God Himself. And if abortion is supremely about God and human life (in that order), then it is a sin of an unparalleled magnitude for Christian leaders to remain silent or tentative about it.

Abortion is a war on compassion -- the very compassion of God -- and now is the time for the church to rally and engage in the war of compassion. By calling this war, I do not intend to promote angry, finger-pointing speech or violent, illegal action against people or places where abortions occur. The weapons of our warfare are mighty, and they are totally different than the world’s weapons (2 Corinthians 10: 3-5). Our weapons are expressions of truth and compassion energized by prayer and delivered through evangelism.

The following thoughts exploded out of one question: Why the womb? Why is the uterus the battleground for such a hideous war on human life? I was compelled to investigate the spiritual realities bound up in the physical reality of the abortion industry’s attack on the womb and the life it contains.

Why the womb? God used this question to lead me back to a basic Biblical truth. This on truth elevates the abortion issue to the spiritual arena. It shows us that the abortion industry, while a tragic killing field of human lives, is even more a vicious attack on God.

The pivotal truth for understanding the contemporary war waged by the abortion industry against compassion is grounded in the word compassion itself. The Hebrew root word for “compassion” is also the word for “womb.” The term is rehem. The Hebrew word for compassion is rahamim. You do not have to be a scholar to notice that the root for both words “womb” and “compassion” is rhm.

Here we discover the connection between the physical organ (womb) and the concept of compassion in the very character of God. “But you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness,” says Psalm 86: 15. These descriptions of God’s character are repeatedly declared in the Old Testament (see Exodus 34: 6, Psalm 103: 8, 145: 8, Nehemiah 9: 17, Joel 2: 13, Jonah 4: 2). Each time I read the word “compassion” I was jolted by the literal physical reality behind the concept of compassion -- the physical reality of the mother’s womb.

Christians do not wrestle against flesh and blood in their efforts to stop abortion. Behind the tragic human dynamics of the abortion industry is a forceful enemy who not only destroys vulnerable human lives, but also viciously attacks the character of God. To these spiritual dimensions of the abortion industry, Christian leaders and pastors must rediscover their voice and speak with eloquence and conviction.

What an unlikely battlefield is a mother’s womb! Once a most secure place, it has now become a dangerous place. Abortion assaults that territory and the life it contains. The uterus is a highly contested region. Why? Here are at least three answers to the question.

The womb is a metaphor used to describe the grace of God. Every mother’s womb nurturing a child is a vivid declaration to Satan that God exists and exists as a gracious being. One Hebrew scholar writes that, “... rhm and its derivatives belong to the realm of grace and hope ...” Satan, aware that the womb symbolizes grace and hope, has engineered a ghastly and bloody assault upon the womb. The same scholar continues, “... as a place of care and protection, the womb is a metaphor of divine compassion.”

Satan cannot get directly to God to do him any harm. He knows that he is doomed just because God exists. So, he lurks about and finds the place, the symbolic place, of God’s grace and compassion in this world. That place is a mother’s womb. This antagonism is evidence of the curse God put on the serpent when God said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman ...” (Genesis 3: 15). Satan, using unwitting human agents, unleashes a vengeance against not only the tiny human life bearing God’s image, but also the place where that life is nurtured and protected.

Despite the circumstances surrounding conception, whenever a woman in a crisis pregnancy chooses to nurture her baby, not abort it, that woman has chosen to act in a God-like way. God creates life, sustains life, and protects life. God is gracious and offers hope. To decide to nurture her unborn baby is also gracious and offers hope. Satan, the thief comes only to steal, to kill, and to destroy (John 10: 10). God always comes to offer life.

Whenever a pregnancy care center counselor shows a model or medical drawing of the uterus containing the baby to an abortion-vulnerable woman or couple, the counselor is also showing the precise biblical symbol of God as a gracious and hope-giving Being -- a physical expression of God’s love, protection, and nurture. While the woman has a legal right to choose, the choice she makes will reflect God or Satan, life or death, good or evil. This is an undeniable spiritual aspect of the abortion crisis.

The womb speaks of human beings, infants, at their most vulnerable time of need for tender care. Modern medical technology has brought the once dark, silent battlefield of the womb into brilliant light. Some have witnessed video footage of a baby in utero struggling to avoid the needle or the suction tube that invades its safety and attacks with either saline or the power to tear it limb from limb. The Enemy desperately wants the womb to abandon its precious passenger. Abortion is well suited to his destructive plan.

God, on the other hand, is a bodyguard, and we can see His protective hand in the way He created the female body. I talked with an OB/GYN who described in detail the marvelous, God-designed functions of the womb and the birth processes. The interplay between the remarkable systems of the female body is God’s way of guarding the child in its most defenseless state. The doctor went on to explain that once those systems are activated by conception and then are suddenly and violently stopped by abortion the effect is like driving a finely tuned Ferrari at high speed into a brick wall. The damage is inescapable, and irreversible.

Isn’t it ironic that the place where the hideous evil of abortion occurs is the very place designed by God to represent his grace and compassion -- the womb? Yes, God is gracious and slow to anger. God is loving and ready to forgive. The actions of the abortionists that lead to the death of the baby and trauma to the mother are forgivable sins. Abortionists blindly attack a deeply symbolic region of human life that declares that God is compassionate and forgiving! We Christians should have real hope that the killing will stop.

We do not come against the Goliath of abortion with Saul’s armor as David was asked to do. David shed the world’s weapons and told Goliath, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied”(1 Samuel 17: 45). Abortion defies God in two very serious ways: abortion kills an image-bearer of God (the baby). Abortion turns the womb, a symbol of God’s nurturing love and grace, into a tomb.

As God is slow to anger and abounding in love, so we his people must be like him. We are called to be grace and mercy givers. These in addition to intercessory prayer is a holy gift to give to those in the abortion industry who are unwitting agents for the Enemy. Along with prayer, we must proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gospel that is the power of God that will bring about the end of abortion, not just political laws or social reforms. These then, are our weapons of compassion: prayer and spreading the message of Christ’s Love and gift of redemption. They are mighty for demolishing every pretension that sets itself against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10: 5).

Let’s return to the question, Why does Satan want the womb to forget its treasure? The womb carries those capable of defeating God’s enemies and demolishing destructive schemes. A startling truth crashed into my awareness as I wondered about the spiritual dimensions of the abortion crisis. That truth is: Satan hates human beings because Satan is deeply fearful of human beings. Satan hates the womb because the womb protects and then projects into the world those capable of ending Satan’s destructive cause. God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you ...” (Jeremiah 1: 5). Jeremiah rose up as the voice in his generation to speak against the evils of his day. Paul, in Galatians 1: 15, declares, “But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb by his grace ...” Paul became an effective voice in his world to pray and proclaim the gospel. It is Paul who described Jesus’ great defeat of Satan at the cross (Colossians 2: 15).

Isaiah gives us a most telling statement about the power of the womb. In a passage prophesying the coming Messiah, Isaiah reports the future Deliverer’s words, “And now the Lord says -- he who formed me in the womb to be his servant ...” (Isaiah 49: 5). This passage about the servant was fulfilled by Jesus Christ who was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin girl named Mary (Luke 1: 30-31). Jesus fulfills the promise that the ancient enmity between Satan and the woman will end when the One comes who will crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3: 15).

Satan hates the human race because he is afraid of the human race; for it is the human race that will spell his doom. Have we forgotten Paul’s word to the Christians living in Rome? Paul, knowing that Christ shares his victory over Satan with all the redeemed, wrote, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16: 20). Not under God’s feet. Under your feet.

Imagine that every human spared from abortion by the love and truth offered by a faithful pregnancy care worker may become a life that God intends to use to crush Satan. Imagine a generation of people growing up and learning that their lives were spared through prayer and the gospel of Jesus Christ, weapons of compassion that prevented their deaths. Imagine these lives, spared in the wonderful and unpredictable sovereignty of God, being raised up to become agents whom God will use to stop abortion in our lifetime.

Nobody in Israel believed Goliath would fall except an overlooked shepherd boy. His weapon was not a sling and one smooth stone. Let us not make that mistake. No, by his own admission, David declared that his weapon was “the name of the Lord Almighty.” The weapons that will win the abortion war are not pregnancy centers, effective literature, or material goods. No, these are just the equivalents of the five smooth stones. Our winning weapon is the same as David’s: the Name. We use that weapon best as we give ourselves to prayer in that Name and as we give out the gospel in that Name. Only then will the bellowing Goliath called abortion fall before our eyes.

Imagine for a moment, thousands of children spared from abortion -- growing to become God’s army to wage the war of compassion against the forces behind the abortion industry. Not a war of angry protests or violent actions, but a war of compassion energized by prayer and the gospel.

Psalm 22: 30-31 says, “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn for he has done it.”

The wicked one wants to erase from our minds and hearts the work of the Lord Jesus on the Cross, His death, burial and resurrection, and His rising to reign at the Fathers right side. He does not want the next generation to hear of this miraculous story.

Is abortion a spiritual concern? I am convinced more than ever that it is. Abortion is a direct assault on the God we worship and His plan for future generations.

Therefore, we must respond to this issue not only with a desire to save life on this earth but, we must be concerned about the life for eternity.

K.P. Dillinger

Executive Director

Pregnancy Resource Center International

415 Cherry Street, SE

Grand Rapids, MI 49503, U.S.A.

Phone +1 616 456 6873

Fax +1 616 456 7164

E-mail kdill@pregres.org