How Do Rape, Incest, and Threat to the Mother’s Life Affect Your Pro-Life Stance?
00:00:00.000 | Andrew in Naples, Florida asks, "Pastor John, do your pro-life convictions change
00:00:10.200 | when it comes to situations involving rape, incest, or matters of a mother's
00:00:14.340 | life?" These are hard questions. Do your pro-life views change in these
00:00:19.200 | circumstances? Well, they are hard questions, and by hard I don't necessarily
00:00:25.160 | mean hard to answer. I mean hard to live with. In other words, and the women here
00:00:32.280 | are the ones who bear the greatest weight because the baby is in her, not in
00:00:39.880 | the boyfriend or the rapist. And this is why it's so troubling when
00:00:48.000 | abortion is justified for equality's sake, which is what our president says
00:00:53.720 | repeatedly, which just galls me, that he would say in front of his daughters that
00:00:59.160 | for women to have equal rights, they have to have access to abortion, which really
00:01:03.720 | means equal rights to have sex outside marriage without any more consequences
00:01:10.440 | than the boy has. That's what he means, which is horrific to say, but that's
00:01:15.680 | that's another question. The question asked is, when a woman has been
00:01:20.880 | attacked or say, broken at a party or something, and now she's pregnant, didn't
00:01:28.240 | want to be pregnant, it's going to change everything in her life. The guy was
00:01:33.000 | either an ugly brute or a manipulator, and what should she do? And my answer, as hard
00:01:39.560 | as it is, is that the baby didn't do anything wrong. And we're asking that the
00:01:45.880 | baby be penalized here, as well as the mom, if there's an abortion. And so I
00:01:53.040 | would say, no, rape and incest ought not to be a warrant for killing the baby. The
00:02:04.240 | baby's not the criminal here. The guy needs to be criminalized, not the baby.
00:02:09.320 | And here I would add this, as horrific as that is for a woman who is raped, say, and
00:02:17.280 | now a pregnancy totally outside her plan and desire. I read the other day on a
00:02:25.040 | survey, I wish I could remember where I read it, that in a survey of hundreds of
00:02:31.840 | women who had carried a baby to term, who had been conceived in that kind of
00:02:36.920 | situation, virtually none of the women regretted it. Whereas many of the women
00:02:44.960 | who got an abortion felt pangs of regret. Here's the reason, I think. When the
00:02:52.000 | horror begins to die down of what just happened, and that this baby in her was
00:02:57.800 | conceived in that kind of ugly and hostile way, she still says, "It's my baby.
00:03:04.560 | It's my baby." Just as if her husband had conceived the baby. Yes, it was conceived
00:03:11.840 | by a man who she didn't want to have anything to do with, but it's her, just
00:03:17.040 | like it would be her if it was conceived by her husband. And she feels that
00:03:23.400 | deep down, and I would just say there are ways forward, either with her
00:03:30.120 | caring for the baby or giving the baby to a loving family who would raise the
00:03:35.040 | baby, because she's in a situation where she can't, that would be less damaging to
00:03:40.480 | her soul than if the baby were taken. Pastor John, how about in the situation
00:03:47.360 | of a mother whose life is at risk because of the pregnancy, what would you
00:03:51.480 | say to her in that case? Yeah, there are issues there that are
00:03:58.160 | really difficult, and it takes a doctor to be able to point out the nature of
00:04:04.640 | some of these risks. For example, the little bit that I know, there are
00:04:09.160 | pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, where the baby cannot live. The baby is outside
00:04:14.160 | the womb, the baby is alive now, the baby cannot grow in that kind of situation,
00:04:19.680 | and if you leave it, it could imperil the mother's life. Now in that kind of
00:04:24.160 | situation, it seems to me you're forced to ask, with a certain death of the baby
00:04:31.960 | taking the mom with the baby, what would you do and how would you, I would just say
00:04:38.280 | no, we don't want to lose two here, better to lose one than two in that case to take
00:04:45.040 | the baby from a situation where the baby cannot possibly live and could
00:04:52.320 | kill the mother while the baby's dying. With regard to other situations, like the
00:05:01.800 | mother's health is, say she's got cancer or something, and the doctor says, you
00:05:09.680 | know, to carry this pregnancy through could imperil your own life. Many women
00:05:15.120 | have said, and I think rightly, I'll risk it. I don't want to take my baby's
00:05:23.240 | life for the possibility that I will lose my life, and some women have lost
00:05:29.280 | their lives in childbirth and many times they haven't, and so I don't
00:05:35.720 | think it's obvious then that every risk that a mother is put in warrants the
00:05:43.960 | baby's life being taken, and where that line is between this is a certain death
00:05:49.560 | for mom, that's really tough and I'm going to have to lean heavy on the
00:05:56.520 | wise and Christian doctors, I hope, to help me discern, really, is this a death
00:06:02.360 | sentence for mom or is it not? And this gets down to that whole issue of what
00:06:09.200 | risks are appropriate and what aren't, and I'd rather just leave the
00:06:14.600 | principle there that it's a beautiful thing that a mom risk her life for the
00:06:20.320 | sake of her child, but a sure death sentence, I don't think, would be
00:06:25.120 | required of a mom. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this
00:06:29.000 | podcast. Send your questions to us via email at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:06:32.920 | Please include your first name in your hometown. You can find thousands of
00:06:36.080 | other free resources online from John Piper at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host
00:06:40.160 | Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:06:43.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]