Dear Mr. President:
I understand that you’re making 2013 a year to highlight and legislate against gun violence in America. Well, I was thinking that maybe at the same time, you could spotlight and issue some executive orders against scalpel violence. The small scalpels abortion business practitioners use to cut up fragile preborn babies as they are removed from their mothers in tiny pieces could be included in your attempt to reduce BOTH violences: a joint guns and scalpels awareness campaign. And since scalpels kill over a million children a year in the US, curbing scalpel violence would be a huge victory for the kids—and us all!
When you became President, I often heard you being compared to Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of this during your speech last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte when you mentioned that you knew “exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’” Actually, Lincoln/Obama comparisons started me wondering if you, like President Lincoln, might use your influence to abolish another peculiar institution.
You see, although God requires human governments to execute guilty murderers, I applauded when you signed an executive order early in your first term restoring the “no torture or inhumane treatment” policy for terrorists during interrogation or imprisonment. Then the thought came to me that it would be so amazing if another of your legacies turned out to be extending the same civility to millions of pre-born American children. They would definitely “rise up and call you blessed!” However, your January 22, 2013 Barack Obama blog on the 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade reaffirming your support for “reproductive freedom” and for the right of women “to make their own choices about their bodies” and your comments at last year’s DNC Convention, made me wonder what information, if any, would cause you to reconsider your pro-abortion position.
As you youself put it in a 2005 speech at the Lincoln Presidential Library,
“What separates Lincoln from the other great men has to do with something else. It’s an issue of character that speaks to us, of moral resolve . . . when it came time to confront the greatest moral challenge this nation has ever faced, Lincoln did not flinch. He did not equivocate or duck or pass the challenge on to future generations . . . In the midst of slavery’s dark storm and the complexities of governing a house divided, he kept his moral compass pointed firm and true.”
Recalibrate Your Moral Compass
Wouldn’t it be great if one of your successors could say of you one day, “In the midst of abortion’s dark storm, President Barack Obama recalibrated his moral compass”? According to Lincoln, his compass was the Bible, the same one that you both used for your oath of office.
During your first inaugural speech when you talked about how your father might not have been served in a DC restaurant less than 60 years ago, I was glad that so much has changed. Now, your dad’s rights would be protected and celebrated. Hopefully, less than 60 years from now, the dangers and injustice an unborn child faces today in DC will also be just as shameful a memory! But in your Roe v. Wade blog last year you stated: “I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose…” And on July 24, 2012, during a 4 pm campaign speech at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, you said that your opponent wanted “to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that is a bad idea. I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own healthcare choices.”
In a Denver, Colorado speech on August 8, 2012, when you talked about “a woman’s right to make her own healthcare choices,” you didn’t mention the other person affected by an abortion decision. How profoundly sad that made me! Consider this, Mr. President: About 50 million combatants and non-combatants died in the Second World War, while in the Second American Civil War, since Roe v. Wade abortionists have killed about 50 million preborn children who should have had the right to live. Horrific tragedies, but unlike WWII, which ended when the Allied forces overcame concentrated evil, this latest “house-divided” civil war doesn’t have an end in sight. Yet.
President Lincoln and a Pro-Life Speech
Researching the subject of our inalienable rights, not just to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also to life, I was amazed to discover a pro-life speech that President Lincoln delivered. I admit that it sounds remarkably like his great anti-slavery speech of 1854. Just a coincidence!
“The doctrine of self-government is right, absolutely and eternally right, but it has no justification as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a pre-born baby is not – or is – a person. If the pre-born boy or girl is not a person, in that case, a woman may as a matter of self-government do just what she pleases with her pre-born baby. But if her pre-born baby is a person, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that her pre-born baby, too, shall not have the right to life? When the woman chooses for herself and in so doing deprives her pre-born son or daughter of life, that is more than self-government. It is despotism and death and self-destruction. We began by declaring that all are created equal, but now from that beginning we have sunk to the depraved declaration that a woman’s choice to kill her unborn child is a sacred right of self-government. These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Satan.”
I know you said in your State of the Union speech last year “No more bailouts!” but now that you are in your second term do you think you might be able to find a little subsidy or something for abortion doctors? These hired baby killers receive only a few hundred dollars for each tiny victim they do away with! While I understand that hospital abortionists don’t have the extra expense that street-side clinic doctors do – for all those umbrellas to shield their paying customers from human eyes – I still think they deserve a raise; a few hundred bucks doesn’t seem like very much money for a contract killing, especially with the danger involved. After all, pre-born babies have been known to fight back when they’re being “procedured.” Of course we don’t torture terrorists, but babies are an exception.
Mr. President, a healthcare worker I know walked into a laundry room in a certain hospital and saw a tiny baby boy in a glass jar that had been left there momentarily by a busy nurse on her way to another errand; the adjacent abortion consent form with the mother’s name in plain sight made for a sad reminder that one more child would never know a mother’s love; never experience a birthday party or a Christmas holiday; never make small talk while taking a walk with Mommy or Daddy. All the little guy rated was a see-through casket!
It takes a brave man or woman to “take out” a little girl or boy that size, but the bravest thing these adults are doing isn’t killing babies, it’s defying the God who created them, the One whom they will bow before someday and give an account. According to the Bible, Gods unleashes His anger on those who “call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Even Lincoln in his second inaugural address, quoting scripture, warned, “Offenses will come, but woe to the one by whom the offense comes.” Check out what God says about hands that shed innocent blood. One day the pro-choice illusion will be exposed as a procedure from hell.
But there is hope. According to God’s Word, even a hired baby killer can enter into eternity cleansed and forgiven.
It is interesting to note that as early as 1834, when the young Abraham Lincoln, like you, was a member of the Illinois Legislative Assembly, he was repeatedly warned not to get involved in the anti-slavery debate if he valued his political career. Aren’t you glad he didn’t heed that advice? Aren’t you glad Lincoln didn’t equivocate or say that while he was against slavery, of course, and was in favor of abolition, of course, there were a few situations that would merit an exception?
Perhaps just a little slavery might be permitted if the slave-owner believed his life would be in danger without a slave or two, or his health negatively affected, or his mental health reduced, or his wealth diminished, etc. But we can all thank God for a President who said: “No slavery, no way!” Lincoln understood that there would be as many exceptions, if allowed by law, as there were creative slave-owners.
The same logic can be applied to the abortion debate. Just a few exceptions, for the mother’s mental or physical or financial health, or for some undesirable circumstances of conception, and the ban on abortion would be honored, as one historian noted about another subject, “more in the breach than in the observance.” Mr. President, I know a sweet, pretty, well-adjusted schoolgirl who was conceived by rape. She loves life, and her mother adores her. Could you look her in the eye and tell her that she should have been aborted? There have been many similar true stories with equally happy endings in the years since Roe v. Wade entered the national lexicon.
Time for Courage
May we never forget, as the old hymn puts it, “[that] though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet!” Respectfully, Mr. President, if you were to reverse your pro-abortion position and come down on the side of goodness and mercy, who cares what the critics would say? Truman didn’t worry about the armchair quarterbacks when it came to some of the courageous decisions he had to make. Won’t you do the same? Then, when you’re an ex-President, sitting in your rocking chair someday, you can have peace with yourself, knowing that you championed the cause of the innocent!
But you say that Roe v. Wade is settled law! Well, didn’t slavery’s justifiers use that same argument? Why, when you were editor of the Harvard Law Review, you made a video praising lawyer Charles Houston for spending his career fighting to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. He accomplished that goal with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
God bless you, Mr. President — like Lincoln — “with malice toward none, with charity for all, [and] with firmness in the right as God gives [you] to see the right.” Back in 2009 you said, “There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being” when you and Tony Blair spoke at the National Day of Prayer. Perhaps, as the Bible puts it, you are “come to the kingdom for such a time as this.” Won’t you re-examine your support of the culture of death? Like God advised Joshua when Joshua became Israel’s leader, taking the people of The Book into the Promised Land: “Be strong and courageous. Don’t be afraid. I will help you.”
Please, Mr. President, please choose life!
Kind regards,
John Hansen
Greenville, South Carolina