Friday 15 April 2016


Northern Ireland's Moral Dilemma

The above front page appeared in one of our local papers recently and brings before us the very stark moral situation that is to be found in Northern Ireland.

The girl in the picture on the left found puppies that were left to die in a skip. She rescued them, adopted one and is rightly commended for her kind-hearted action.

The headline on the right directs our attention to a recent court case where a young woman was charged with accessing drugs which caused her to abort her child, the remains of which she disposed of in a bin.
Her housemates who found the aborted child, which was able to be identified as a male, were not commended for reporting it to the police but instead were lambasted on social media for interfering.
Why, because they were concerned not about the life of a animal but that of an unborn child. A human life, that is rightly protected by the law of our land.
This was not some unrecognisable collection of cells, the Housemates state "There was a fully-formed baby in our bin with little toes and fingers". It was not just a foetus, or an embryo, it was a baby, a human being that had been residing in what should have the safest place until the time of his birth.

David the Psalmist writes in Psalm 139 "For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:" Every child is a blessing, a gift from God. Sometimes they do not have the perfect health that we would like but that does not diminish their worth. Every child is still precious in the sight of God and deserving of our love and care.

Abortion has become for many the standard means of dealing with unplanned pregnancies, but in reality it is the taking of the life of the unborn child. A transgression of the Sixth Commandment "Thou shalt not kill."
The Lord Jesus Christ said in Mark 12:30-31  "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these."
How can we rightly love our neighbour if we do not care for the defenceless unborn child?
Our soldiers have gone to other lands to protect those under the heel of oppressive dictatorships, but what about the silent voice of the unborn child? Where is their protector?

In an age when there is much talk about love and tolerance, where is the love for the child of the unplanned pregnancy?