Following yesterday’s podcast, Dr. Mohler offers additional comments concerning Katrina Efferts’ murder of her baby. He writes on his blog today:
The case emerged from the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta, where a judge faced the fact that a woman had been convicted of strangling her newborn son and then throwing the baby’s body over the fence into her neighbor’s yard.
As CBC News reported, the woman was given a three-year suspended sentence and will spend no time in jail for the killing of her baby. Katrina Efferts “will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won’t spend time behind bars for strangling her own son.”
Justice Joanne Veit, whose name should now go down in legal and moral infamy, tied this woman’s act of infanticide to Canada’s lack of legal restrictions on abortion. The judge’s decision stated that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.”
She continued: “Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.” She also stated that the Canadian approach is a “fair compromise of all the interests involved.”
Two juries had found Effert guilty of second-degree murder, but an appeals court had reduced her conviction to infanticide.
More:
The moral dishonesty of the entire tragedy comes down to the fact that, in legalizing abortion, liberal societies claimed to be making a bargain. We will not protect unborn life, but we will defend all those who make it to birth. Of course, the dividing line was always dishonest. Are we seriously to believe that human personhood is a matter of mere location, inside or outside the womb?
The entire article is worth a read.
Dr. Albert Mohler’s latest edition of The Briefing discusses this very issue as he reflects on the case in Canada of the woman who strangled and killed her newborn baby. Listen in to this important conversation.
I had the excellent opportunity to visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati this weekend. If you have not heard of it, it is essentially a museum dedicated to teaching us about slavery and the Underground Railroad in particular. It is with great horror my wife and I looked on upon pictures of whip-scarred backs and walked through an actual slave pen. I could hardly stomach the sales ad for a “stout, healthy, serviceable negro boy.” In one dramatic reading we heard what many slave owners must have thought, “It is my legal right to own a slave. How dare you stand in the way of what the government says is my right!” We read of other justifications such as the “fact” that Africans were less than human and therefore less valuable. And over and over again what went on in my head was “How could anyone think this was okay?”
It was not all horror however; we also heard about and read the numerous accounts of men and women risking their lives to free these slaves. One such hero said, “I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” Why would a free man want to be identified with a slave? Well, for many of those members of the Underground Railroad it was the Bible that motivated them. This is a fact that many of the freed slaves recognized. Escaped slave Sojourner Truth said,
I have borne 13 children, and seen ‘em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me.
When she cried out for freedom, the Lord heard her cry and sent Christians to help her. You see, the Bible teaches that ALL men, women, and children were created in the image of God. And therefore, deserving of honor and respect. That we ought to treat one another as we would want to be treated, no matter what our race, country of origin, creed, or…size.
The third floor of this amazing building was dedicated to modern day slavery. Child labor, forced prostitution, trafficking and other forms of enslavement are present even today. The message was that we have not defeated slavery, just one form. And the call was to fight. Floating over the doorway to this exhibit were the words, “If not you then who? If not now then when?” American chattel slavery was not defeated by passivity. It took battle after battle after battle until the war was one. And the Freedom Center reminds us that modern day slavery will not be defeated by passivity. We must fight!
Though this was an amazing and powerful call for us to act against modern day slavery, there was one glaring omission. There is today a practice, even in our own country, akin to slavery. It is a practice where human beings are called inhuman. A practice where men and women pay money to have these humans killed. And it is legal. And people scream when you try to stop it, “How dare you stand in the way of my legal rights!” And those who fight against it are sometimes arrested, often persecuted, and marginalized by our society. Of course I am talking about abortion. I talk about it here, because they do not have an exhibit in the Freedom Center. We have come a long way in our country, we no longer enslave Africans, but we have really not come that far. We merely ignore a different tragedy.
But we don’t have to. We don’t have to be silent. We can stand up, we can fight. We can defend the rights of the poor and needy. We can be like the Van Wagener family that helped Sojourner Truth. Abortion will never go away if we are passive.
If not you, who?
If not now, when?
*Author’s Note: After attending the Freedom Center I walked away believing that John Brown was a hero in his fight against slavery. That is why this article originally included some references to his work and a quote from him. I have removed them after being encouraged to look into his life more. While I believe that John Brown was a hero in his willingness to die to end slavery, I do not believe that he was a hero in his willingness to kill to end slavery. God has not given John Brown, Scott Roeder, or me the right to take human life for these causes. Speak for the Unborn is committed to fighting abortion (just as the Freedom Center is committed to fighting modern day slavery), but only through legal and godly means.
I just watched this video. I think the song is very well put together and well thought through.
Fight for the Children
“Jeremiah 20:17 it’s right to assume that to kill in the womb means life in the womb” – Encourage you to read chapters 19 and 20 in their entirety for background and context about what is taking place. (Read all of Jeremiah would be best)
“This is the lady’s honor, while an unwed teenage was pregnant but her fiance wasn’t the baby’s father. He could have seized his rights and aborted that fetus, but he would have slaughtered the Lord Jesus Christ”
On the sidewalk outside EMW here in Louisville, we have about 60 seconds to speak with pregnant women concerning the decision they have made to kill their unborn child. This is not a lot of time and it’s often interrupted by the clinic’s escorts who surround the women and speak falsely about us to the women during one of the most emotional walks they’ll ever take. Many times this is frustrating to me as I’m focused on the woman and trying to provide her help and a way out from the terrible decision she believes she has been forced into by her circumstances. Many times, one of the last phrases I’ll say to a woman (or to her friend) is that she’ll regret this decision and can leave the abortion clinic to walk next door for help at A Woman’s Choice. And just about every time, one of the escorts will retort back, how do you know she’ll regret it?
WORLD Magazine highlighted the story of Justine Kyker, as September 1st marked the 23rd anniversary of her abortion and she writes of the experience here. An excerpt:
At the advice of one friend, she decided to call this Planned Parenthood clinic first.
On the phone, a Planned Parenthood staff member asked Kyker how far along she was. She didn’t know, but guessed three months, and said so. Kyker said she was told to come in right away and bring $200 cash. She then disregarded her previous plan to give up her baby for adoption, going against the prior discussions with her family and her doctor. “I didn’t think about the humanity of the baby,” Kyker said. Unwilling to go to a family member for the money she needed, she took back her college textbooks for the upcoming semester to raise the $200.
The next day, although she had been told not to eat, Kyker gave in to her hunger craving and stopped at a nearby corner store for chocolate milk and mozzarella sticks. Once she arrived at Planned Parenthood, “I paid my $200 to the cashier and sat in the waiting room for a long time,” she said. There, she recalls an employee stopped by: “She said, ‘You seem sad,’ and I started to cry,” Kyker said.
She was offered a little white pill “to make you feel better,” accepted it, and became sleepy until she was on the surgical table. The abortion proved unexpectedly painful, and Kyker’s cries caused more people to enter the room. “Physically, I felt they ripped my internal organs out,” she said. “I was screaming.”
Afterward, Kyker was seated in a room with several other young women, with an employee at one end of the room. “I was sick, vomiting, and I was afraid I would get in trouble for eating,” she said. “The only sympathy I got was from the other girls who had just aborted their babies while the employee just sat there.”
She concludes her story with this powerful statement, “You will never regret giving birth to your child. You will always regret an abortion.”
