No Human Sacrifice: End Abortion

We are all familiar with the Bible story about how Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac to God – an actual human sacrifice that required Abraham to kill his own son and offer him up to God.

Human sacrifice was a fairly common practice among Abraham’s pagan neighbors, and it continued for many centuries in different parts of the world. The Canaanites offered their firstborn to Moloch in a ritual fire. Consider also the Aztecs, the Vikings, and various violent cults into modern times.

With Abraham, though, God was saying, “I am a different god. I do not require, nor do I want human sacrifice.” In fact, when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, He forbade all killing.

Going even further, Christ announced a new commandment: Love one another. He said there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for the benefit of another. Not other-human sacrifice but self-sacrifice is what Christians are supposed to practice. With abortion, however, we lay down someone else’s life for our own benefit.

Abortion is Human Sacrifice

Abortion is often described as the sacrifice women make for themselves. What they mean is, if it’s a choice between the baby and your plans for yourself, then you should be able to choose yourself over the baby. Yeah, it’s heartbreaking (maybe), and we may feel icky about it, but hey, better the kid than me, right?

I was once interviewed at a college radio station about abortion by two young women. They admitted it was an awful sacrifice, but they said that maybe abortion was an interim remedy until women broke through all the glass ceilings; then, once society had accepted women as equals, it wouldn’t be “needed” anymore.

So, they’ll kill the babies just for a while, just until they get what they want, and then they won’t have to do that anymore. The gods will be appeased, or society will say, “Stop the killing, we get the point.”

Except, instead, society has bought into the idea that women have to be childless to succeed, and this “interim” period has lasted over 50 years and is now entrenched in the culture. How naïve to think, “Well, let’s kill just for a little while, then we’ll stop. Honest, we will.”

Love and Self-Sacrifice

Whatever happened to the mother’s attitude of love and self-sacrifice that caused many loving women to say, “If it’s a choice between the baby or me, choose the baby”? Fortunately, in modern obstetrics, that choice rarely, if ever, has to be made.

Parents who find out their child in utero is likely disabled are often told they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their lifestyle to take care of a disabled child. Better to sacrifice the child for the parents’ welfare. Pro-life parents reject this human sacrifice concept in favor of the opportunity to grow in love and meet challenges according to God’s plan. See: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/musingsfromthepew/2021/11/incompatible-with-life-prenatal-diagnoses-and-options/ and https://www.patheos.com/blogs/musingsfromthepew/2021/11/there-is-equal-value-in-everyone/

In a February 13, 2024 essay for The Catholic Thing, H. W. Crocker III takes up this same topic of human sacrifice, of making an offering to an idol. “Today’s idolatry of choice is making idols of ourselves. Christianity abolished child sacrifice and the old idolatry. If we are to abolish child sacrifice again, we will need Christianity to triumph over the new idolatry.”

Crocker added that many still understand the concept that “being a parent – that being a moral person – is about self-sacrifice, even if that means putting yourself at risk to protect your family from harm. “You don’t block [an attacker] with your wheelchair-bound daughter saying, ‘Take her! She’s just a useless mouth to feed!’” (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/02/13/embrace-the-hard-cases/)

Rejecting Barbarism

While I understand Crocker’s view, you don’t need to be a Christian to recognize that human sacrifice is not acceptable among civilized people. Anyone who believes in the inherent dignity of human life realizes that killing is wrong.

Human sacrifice is barbaric and the complete opposite of what a loving God wants from us. It results from our most evil inclinations for power at the cost of others.

Abortion is human sacrifice. We cannot forget that a child dies in every abortion, so our society needs to ask, “Is there any need, situation, or inconvenience worth the sacrifice of a child’s life?” Only a bloodthirsty god of selfishness is appeased by such action. Better to serve the God of Love.