"Jesus Stood Up for Children"
The killing of babies has had a place in our world for centuries. From abandoning newborns with deformities to killing female babies, each culture has had its own reasons for ignoring their personhood and allowing for lives to be discarded. Even today, in nations like India and China, female babies are regularly aborted or killed in favor of males, leaving a drastic gender gap in the population.
In a recent Gospel Coalition article, Rebecca McLaughlin writes about the need for a "love revolution" to counter this trend. McLaughlin quotes Paul Offit, a non-Christian professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who said Christianity was “the single greatest breakthrough against child abuse” in history... At the time of Jesus’ life . . . child abuse, as noted by one historian, was ‘the crying vice of the Roman Empire.’ Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common . . . children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those around him typically didn’t.”
In the fourth century, the teaching of Christ took hold under Constantine’s rule as he made laws to protect women from unwanted divorce and also made provisions for women who gave birth to children in poverty to ensure that they had financial and physical assistance, writes McLaughlin. The early Christians understood that it was not enough to simply voice concern for the unborn and women who were vulnerable, they began to create the societal structures in which the vulnerable could actually survive.
As legalized abortion is being called into question in the Supreme Court this spring, Christians must think and plan wholistically to care and support women and babies who are vulnerable. Christian Union is committed not only to thinking biblically about the issue of abortion, CU also desires to see our culture demonstrating the love of Christ and the physical meeting of needs for the weak and vulnerable in our society.
Read the full article here.
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