The Old Testament recounts how the ancient Ammonites sacrificed children to the pagan god Molech, casting live babies into the flaming maw of their hideous idol. Moses, Jeremiah, and the other Israelite prophets righteously condemned this horrific practice. While we recoil in horror from such an inhuman society that would willingly murder its innocent children, have we really progressed much beyond this barbarism?
Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that partial-birth abortions have tripled in the last four years. In 2000, an estimated 2,200 living babies were killed by partial-birth abortion. The actual figure may be much higher.
What is the moral distinction between partial-birth abortion and the Molech worship of the ancient Ammonites? There is none.
Partial-birth abortion is tantamount to infanticide. As Abraham Lincoln said of slavery, if partial-birth abortion is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of this modern form of human sacrifice and our political institutions appear paralyzed, unable to act with any sense of urgency to banish this medically unnecessary butchery from our land.
Every day, a score of babies are killed in this hideous fashion, yet our elected leaders in Congress dither and dawdle. If a serial killer were stalking the land, murdering seven or eight children a day, we would recoil from the slaughter. The news media would cover the story round-the-clock, the full power of the FBI and local police forces would be mobilized and the American people would rise up in righteous anger to demand that Congress do something to stop the killing.
Yet we delay. Congress ponders priorities, weighs options, debates procedures, quibbles over the calendar.
Meanwhile, day after day, in abortion clinics from Maine to California, children are shoveled into the gaping maw of this modern Molech. This must stop. No society can claim to be "civilized" that tolerates such barbarity.
Family Research Council will not rest until the horror of partial-birth abortion is banished. We will devote whatever resources are required to throw down this Molech and we will hold to account any member of Congress who delays, obstructs or opposes removal of this atrocity.
As the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison declared in 1831 in the first edition of his anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, "I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I will be heard."
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