Pro-abortion incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock has won reelection against his opponent Herschel Walker, allowing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, 51 seats to 49. This will give Democrats the opportunity to pass bills more easily — including pro-abortion bills — and to control committees. Even if one Democrat — such as moderate Sen. Joe Manchin — votes against a pro-abortion bill, the bill could still advance. The newly elected House of Representatives will be under Republican leadership.
One of the key aspects of Warnock’s campaign was that he prides himself on being a pro-abortion pastor. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Democratic party used that to its advantage to help boost Warnock over Walker by less than 3% of the vote. According to data from AdImpact, a firm tracking political ads, since November 8, Democrats and their allies spent more than $5 million on abortion-related advertising during the Georgia runoff race. In comparison, Republicans and their allies spent just $6,500 on one abortion-related ad in that same time frame.
This lopsided spending was a trend seen across the nation during the midterm elections.
A pro-abortion ‘interpretation’ of the Gospels
In a last-minute push to secure the votes of abortion supporters, Warnock appeared on MSNBC’s The Reid Out, on which he voiced his opposition to a federal law banning the use of abortion. He said that his opposition to such a ban had earned him “pushback” from pro-life Christians.
“And I get a lot of pushback from people who seem to think that they own the interpretation of the Gospel. But I have been studying the Scriptures my whole life. I’m committed to the faith. And, as a pastor, I have profound reverence for life. And, as a pastor and a person of faith, I have a deep respect for choice,” he told host Joy Reid.
Though Jesus may not have spoken specifically about abortion, that doesn’t mean that the truth isn’t discernable in the pages of the Gospel, though Warnock seems to miss it. The Jewish people of Jesus’s time opposed abortion as did the first Christians. Children were (and are) blessings from God. Therefore, the Jewish people that Jesus was speaking to already knew that abortion and child sacrifice were morally despicable.
The Gospels are clearly pro-life. Luke 1:15 states, “He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” Luke 1:41-44 says, “When Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, ‘Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.'”
The Greek word “brephos” was used for both “baby” and “infant” and is found elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to a baby both in the womb and out of the womb. The Gospel of Luke clearly shows that preborn children are alive and human — capable of recognizing voices and reacting to stimuli as science has proven. And Elizabeth called Mary “mother of my Lord” while Jesus was still a preborn child.
In addition, the Didache 2.2 (The Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles) is believed to have been written between AD 70 and AD 100 and is said to be the work of Christ’s apostles. It states, “[T]hou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”
Joseph Capizzi, Catholic University of America moral theology professor and executive director for the Institute for Human Ecology, explained in a piece for National Review:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.” The Didache, written by Jewish Christians just decades after Jesus’s death, condemned abortion and infanticide. The communities organizing themselves around Christ shared the conviction that life is sacred at every stage of development. That conviction has remained constant over two millennia.
Though Jesus himself may have never spoken the word ‘abortion,’ that we know of, he did clearly speak out against murder — which is what abortion is at its core. It is the homicide of an undelivered child. In the Gospel of Matthew 15:19-20, He said that murder is an “evil thought” that would “defile a person.” The single goal of induced abortion is to ensure the death of a preborn child.
Abortion is not health care and Jesus does not support it
Warnock went on to say, “And I still think, as I have said time and time again, that a patient’s room is too small and cramped a space for a woman, her doctor and the United States government. But if we care about life, black women are dying three to four times the rate of white women in childbirth, as a result of childbirth. And so, if you care about life, we ought to find a way. That’s a place where government could show up and address the obvious bias in our health care system.”
Reid responded, “It’s what Jesus would do.”
“It — I think it’s exactly what Jesus would do,” said Warnock.
In the United States, in 1971 and 1972 — prior to Roe v. Wade — the maternal mortality rate was 18.8 per 100,000 live births. In 2020, the maternal mortality rate had risen to 23.8, meaning there are more pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. today than before Roe. The maternal mortality rate is 2.5 times higher among Black women than white women and 3.1 times higher than Hispanic women.
Warnock attempted to paint pro-lifers as being in opposition to helping end the U.S.’s high maternal mortality rate and the very real maternal mortality gap that exists between Black women and white women — and he notes that Jesus would want to see an end to bias and discrimination in health care. But that doesn’t mean Jesus supports abortion. Abortion is not health care. It is not medicine. It is direct and intentional killing.
Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst, the former Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), explained that abortion is not the solution for the U.S.’s high maternal mortality rate, which rose 26% between 2003 and 2014 (when Roe v. Wade was still in place).
“Number one, abortion does not address risk factors,” she explained. “If you want to control a public health outcome or control a specific public health outcome, you focus on the risk factors. Abortion does not address any of those risk factors.”
She continued, “Number two, we cannot estimate in any given patient what her risk for mortality is. We can say, ‘based on population-level data,’ [but] we can’t say, ‘Sally, you’re going to die’… If you say, ‘well, if we do an abortion, that’s going to prevent maternal mortality,’ you don’t know whether that woman was going to die or not. And then the solution then becomes, what percentage of pregnancies do we abort?”
An analysis of the maternal mortality rates of countries before and after they legalized abortion revealed that “[F]or many countries, the link between legal abortion and improved maternal mortality… is the reverse of what [abortion] advocates claim.” (emphasis added)
That analysis found that “[c]ountries that have legalized abortion such as South Africa, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Guyana have not seen the predicted maternal health benefits. By contrast, several countries that disallow abortion, such as Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Uganda have seen significant reductions in maternal mortality.”
Abortion advocates like Warnock deny that abortion intentionally kills a human being, allowing them to claim Jesus was never against abortion. But when an act such as dismemberment or induced cardiac arrest is carried out against an innocent living being of the human race — that’s murder. And no amount of political propaganda or manipulation of the Gospels can change that.
