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Ask Pastor John

How Do Rape, Incest, and Threat to the Mother’s Life Affect Your Pro-Life Stance?

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.83.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2013

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Should the difficult circumstances of some pregnancies affect our pro-life position?

Transcript

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0:00.0

Andrew, in Naples, Florida asks, Pastor John, do your pro-life convictions change when

0:10.4

it comes to situations involving rape, incest, or matters of a mother's life?

0:15.4

These are hard questions.

0:16.6

And do your pro-life views change in these circumstances?

0:20.9

Well, they are hard questions, and by heart, I don't necessarily mean hard to answer.

0:27.0

I mean, hard to live with, in other words, and the women here are the ones who bear the

0:34.9

greatest weight, because the baby is in her, not in the boyfriend or the rapist.

0:44.7

And this is why it's a troubling when abortion is justified for a quality sake, which is

0:52.5

what our president says repeatedly, which just gals me, that he would say in front of his

0:57.7

daughters that for women to have equal rights, they have to have access to abortion, which

1:03.2

really means equal rights to have sex outside marriage without any more consequences than

1:10.9

the boy has.

1:11.9

That's what he means, which is horrific to say, but that's another question.

1:16.7

The question asked is, when a woman has been attacked or, say, broken at a party or something,

1:25.4

and now she's pregnant, and want to be pregnant, it's going to change everything in her life.

1:32.5

The guy was either a ugly brute or a manipulator, and what should she do?

1:38.1

And my answer as hard as it is is that the baby didn't do anything wrong.

1:44.8

And we're asking that the baby be penalized here, as well as the mom, if there's an abortion.

1:52.7

And so I would say, no, rape and incest ought not to be a warrant for killing the baby.

2:04.1

The baby's not the criminal here, the guy needs to be criminalized, not the baby.

2:10.0

And here I would add this, as horrific as that is for a woman who is raped, say, and now a pregnancy

2:18.6

totally outside her plan and desire.

...

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