Imagine with me: You are a Georgia lawmaker, a proudly pro-life Christian conservative. You want to protect life at all stages and represent your district well. When you arrive at the Capitol on the first day of session, you find that a river runs in front of the hallowed building.
The river is deep and wide, and the current is strong. Attempting to swim across it would be suicide. Thankfully, you and the other lawmakers have a designated bridge to cross over it each day.
Every morning on your way in and every evening on your way out, you approach the river to cross and see men, women, and children drowning in this river. You — as the moral, strong, caring lawmaker that you are — pull these helpless people out of the river to safety. As time goes on, you begin to ask yourself, "Why do people keep trying to swim across that river? It’s obviously not the best way to cross it. Why don't they use their bridge?”
Eventually, you've had enough. You're sick of seeing people drown. You're frustrated that no one else sees the obvious solution. Your constituents elected you to get things done, so you draft legislation that would criminalize anyone from attempting to cross that river by swimming. If they aren’t in the river, they can’t drown. Problem solved!
You’re proud of this proposed solution to protect and save these lives! But, merely a mile away, there is a clearer view of the problem: a bridge, broken and impassable. Desperate families are on one side, a fire raging behind them, licking at their feet. On the other side is safety. At the river bank, the very arsonist responsible for the fire is selling leaky rafts and encouraging the families to ‘empower’ themselves by crossing via raft.
Seeing no alternative, these desperate people “choose” to buy a raft and cross.
The rafts deflate quickly, and the people drown unless they are pulled from the water before it’s too late.
The bridge is never repaired. An alternative method to cross the river is never even explored. The cause of the bridge’s destruction and the clearly shady raft salesman are never investigated or considered.
And the same unthinkable choice sits before these families, desperate to cross the river. But now, because of your new legislation, the current drags them to the Capitol Steps where police are waiting to arrest them for being in the river at all.
This is what HB441, the “Georgia Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” essentially does.
A woman does not choose abortion the same way she chooses an outfit.
A woman chooses an abortion the same way a bear, caught in a trap, chooses to chew off its own foot.
Women are designed by our Creator with the instinct, the drive, and the desire to protect our children. We are born with a divine calling to protect the lives of our offspring.
Abortion, the intentional destruction of the life growing inside of us, egregiously defies that calling. That instinct. That core principle we are born with. So then, why?
Why would a woman ever choose an abortion?
Why would a woman ever choose to kill her own child?
Because their bridge is broken. The problem is not that they need to cross the river... the problem is that they feel there is no option for them to do so safely.
When the choice is fire or drowning, it is no longer truly a "choice.”
Many women do not "want" abortion. But the abortion industry has burned the fields, collapsed the bridge, and convinced her she doesn't have any other choice.
HB 441’s solution is to charge abortion-minded women with murder, while simultaneously opposing the help they desperately need in crisis circumstances (like expanding TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] services to expectant mothers, broadening the services covered by pregnancy Medicaid and extending the duration of post-partum coverage, providing housing to pregnant and new mothers facing homelessness, help for trafficking victims trying rebuild their lives).
Supporters of the bill claim they are simply speaking the "truth" that abortion is murder, but they speak it without compassion or the love of Jesus towards the woman facing a situation so hopeless and dire that abortion feels like her only choice. This type of behavior is exactly what 1 Corinthians 13:1 is talking about when it says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
When we refuse to hear reason from those who have been upstream and seen the damage firsthand; we turn our back on God's command to us in Proverbs 24:11 to “rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.”
Instead of attempting to criminalize women’s desperation, we should fix the root issue by going after the ones destroying the bridge and profiting from the crisis created in doing so: the abortion industry itself. The "doctors" and predators who deal death and call it “choice”: the enemy that is prowling around like a lion, seeking to steal our security, kill our children, and destroy the family unit. Planned Parenthood and its vast network of profit-hungry vipers are perpetuating crisis and then exploiting the women who fall into their trap.
If we are to truly be “a state that values life,” as Gov. Brian Kemp has regularly declared, we need to stand with these women – and against the abortion industry – to bring an end to this modern-day holocaust once and for all.
That is why, if you're in Georgia, I am urging you to contact your House Member and ask him or her to request that HB 441 not receive a hearing (you can find a letter from National Right to Life in opposition to bills like HB 441 here). Instead, ask them to save abortion-minded women and their children by voting to increase funding for the Positive Alternatives for Pregnancy and Parenting grant program, supporting their local pregnancy center, maternity home, church ministry, or pro-life organization. Let them know you’re praying for them. Encourage them to rebuild the bridge, hold the abortion industry accountable, and work together to keep building a culture of life in Georgia – not victimize post-abortive women a second time.
"Does not He who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, does He not know it?"
—Proverbs 24:12
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