By Graham Preston
IT would probably be fair to say most committed Christians believe abortion is something we should be concerned about.
Human life is precious. It is uniquely created in God’s image and Jesus gave his life for us.
Therefore, since abortion is the deliberate taking of young human life, we recognise that it is not a practice that should simply be ignored.
We know we ought to be concerned about it.
But how much concern should we as Christians have about abortion?
What is the appropriate response to about 100,000 young human lives being deliberately ended each year in Australia?
These are challenging questions – questions so challenging that it seems most Christians today would prefer not to address them at all.
That is perhaps understandable. Abortion directly and immediately raises very personal, highly emotional, and deadly serious matters. Nevertheless, we must ask, is it acceptable, is it responsible, is it right, for Christians to relegate it all to the too-hard basket?
Back in 1985 when my wife, Liz, and I were theology students preparing to be involved in overseas missions, someone gave us a few leaflets on abortion.
Up until that time I had given little thought to what abortion was about and those leaflets were an absolutely shocking revelation, to the extent that I couldn’t even read or look at them.
But neither could I forget them.
If abortion was that bad, how could I just try to ignore what was being done?
Eventually I took the leaflets down again and read them and wept.
How could this be allowed to be going on?
Liz and I thought we should at least do something before we headed off to work in Japan.
Well, because of health concerns, we never got to Japan.
But we did do something regarding abortion and have been endeavouring to do so since.
Firstly, we imported thousands of those leaflets and distributed them through the churches in Queensland.
Perhaps, we thought, most people were as poorly informed on this as we had been.
If these leaflets could make such a big impact upon us then surely all that was needed was to educate people and things would surely change for the better.
But, no, we soon found it wasn’t going to be that easy.
We became involved in the wider pro-life movement and organised protests, walks, life chains, speakers, lobbying, educational events, anything we could think of.
In 1996 we opened a crisis pregnancy centre in Brisbane, now known as the Priceless Life Centre, to provide counsel and practical support to women and couples.
As the years went by though, things didn’t seem to be getting better.
When we became involved there were two specialist abortion “clinics” in Queensland – now there are perhaps 10 and the number of abortions just kept increasing.
Perhaps most concerning of all, the tide of public opinion turned against us in significant ways.
There is more open antagonism against those who would continue to dare to speak up and there is also more indifference generally, including it would seem amongst the Christian community, toward the plight of the unborn children.
In 1993 another friend passed on a book to me – and I have to admit that I could not read that document either.
The book, Shattering the Darkness, written by Presbyterian minister Joseph Foreman, was completely unlike any other pro-life book I had seen.
When I did eventually force myself to read it through I passed it on to Liz and then to another couple, Anne and Jim, and we were all profoundly challenged.
The outcome was that, over a few days in December of that year, Anne and I engaged in our first non-violent direct action against abortion, – sit-ins in front of the doors of one of Australia’s most notorious abortion “clinics”.
The abortionist unsurprisingly sought a Supreme Court injunction against us but withdrew his complaint when it became evident that he could be shown in court to be operating illegally.
Sadly at that point, despite this victory of sorts, I lost my nerve.
I did have my reasons-excuses – Liz was about to give birth to our fourth child, I was enrolled to go to university part-time, but primarily I got scared.
So, Shattering the Darkness went back on the shelf and stayed there, for eight years.
Once again though I could not forget what I had read and on the completion of my course, I re-read the book, became re-enthused, and decided to approach things in a more determined manner.
After setting up a small group called Protect Life, the first thing we did was to send out a letter explaining our thinking – in short, can we expect anyone to take us seriously when we say that abortion takes the life of a child if we are not prepared to act like that is true – along with a copy of “the book” to about 30 Christian leaders whose opinion we respected.
We hoped to gain insights they may have had regarding our intended course of action – taking repeated non-violent direct action at the doors of the abortion “clinics”.
It was a mixed result: we heard back from just two people – one who said, don’t do it, not because he thought it was wrong but because he thought it may cause too many problems for the Church, while the other person, a pastor, decided to join us.
We decided to press on.
In 2002 a handful of people commenced the actions with no idea of where things would end up.
In the years since we have had more than 60 sit-ins at Brisbane’s four abortion “clinics”, been arrested, convicted, fined and, for myself, spent a total of 18 months in jail across six occasions.
We have not had crowds of people join us in the sit-ins as we had hoped, but nevertheless we have not lost our convictions.
Is this being too concerned about abortion?
Space precludes being able to address the many questions and concerns that usually arise in people’s minds when they hear of our actions.
I would point out that there are quite a number of short articles on the website www.protect-life.info which endeavour to answer such questions.
