April 2008 | Last week the US Supreme Court voted by a 5-4 majority to uphold a ban on late-term abortions. On April 18 the Court decided to uphold the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. Also known as D & X abortions, this method of abortion is as close as you can get to actual infanticide.

... Unfortunately most people do not know what takes place during this grizzly procedure. I have written elsewhere about this barbaric act of baby killing, but my words may not count for much. The words of someone who has been there and done that may carry more weight.

Thus I reprint here part of a testimony given on March 21, 1996 by a registered nurse, Brenda Pratt Shafer. She was speaking before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (HR 1833). Her words are so powerful and compelling that they deserve little or no commentary. Here is part of what the nurse said:

I am a registered nurse, licensed in the State of Ohio, with 14 years of experience. In 1993, I was employed by Kimberly Quality Care, a nursing agency in Dayton, Ohio. In September, 1993, Kimberly Quality Care asked me to accept assignment at the Women’s Medical Center, which is operated by Dr. Martin Haskell. I readily accepted the assignment because I was at that time very pro-choice. I had even told my teenage daughters that if one of them ever got pregnant at a young age, I would make them get an abortion. They disagreed with me on this, and one of them even wrote an essay for a high school class that mentioned how we differed on the issue.

So, because of the strong pro-choice views that I held at that time, I thought this assignment would be no problem for me.

But I was wrong. I stood at a doctor’s side as he performed the partial-birth abortion procedure - and what I saw is branded forever on my mind.

March 2008, Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch | Do worldviews matter? You bet they do. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. Bad worldviews lead to some very bad outcomes. Take but one example: infanticide. The ancients practiced it with impunity, but Jews and Christians strongly opposed the practice.

So much so that the practice was made illegal in the fourth century. That was because Christian influence had by then thoroughly permeated the Roman Empire. And yet our secularist buddies keep telling us how terrible it is when religion gets mixed with politics. There are millions of people who were spared infanticide who would very much disagree with this secularist nonsense.

So the old adage about bad trees and bad fruit is worth keeping in mind here. Some of the more consistent atheists such as Nietzsche recognised that Christian morality springs from Christian teaching. He knew that if you kill the beliefs, the ethics will soon give way as well. One commentator writing back in 1996 for First Things put it this way:

“In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the Victorians and ‘little moralistic females a la [George] Eliot’ as ‘English flatheads’ for thinking that they could preserve Christian morality without God. Nietzsche was no proponent of a Christian ethics, but he saw clearly that such ethics relies on the publicly held proposition of God’s existence. Neither Jews nor Christians have always lived up to their ethical systems, but the notion of reverence for individual lives is born (in the West at least) solely from a Judeo-Christian impulse.”

... “As the West loses some of its Biblical moral footing there is a new effort to decriminalize infanticide. In ancient Rome, babies born with disabilities or serious illnesses were often exposed on hills, a barbaric practice that was eventually stopped when (and because) Christianity became the Empire’s official religion.  Alas, killing babies born with birth defects is making a comeback in our Post Christian times.  Indeed, support for infanticide is not only gaining respectability among the bioethics and medical intelligentsia - it is becoming positively trendy.”