A Method In Which Killing Represents A Solution: The Soul Of The Unborn And The Soul Of America -- By: Harold O. J. Brown

Journal: Trinity Journal
Volume: TRINJ 14:2 (Fall 1993)
Article: A Method In Which Killing Represents A Solution: The Soul Of The Unborn And The Soul Of America
Author: Harold O. J. Brown


A Method In Which Killing Represents A Solution:
The Soul Of The Unborn
And The Soul Of America

Harold O. J. Brown*

Early in the history of unlimited abortion in the United States, the Human Life Review published an essay by Professor Helmut Ehrhardt, M.D., J.D., of the University of Marburg, entitled “Abortion and Euthanasia: Common Elements.”1 He saw a variety of common elements between these two “procedures,” among them the usurpation of an individual’s right to determine for himself or herself whether his or her life possesses sufficient “quality” to make continuing it desirable. The British magazine, The Statesman, stated in an editorial, “The abortion wave of the ’sixties [in Britain abortion on demand started a few years earlier than in the United States] will be the euthanasia wave of the ’eighties.” Professor Hans Millendorfer, Ph.D., Dipl.. Ing., the Austrian “evangelical Catholic” sociologist and statistician (“Ich bin ein evangelischer Christ in der katholischen Kirche”) who founded STUDIA Austria (Study Center for International Analysis), commented, “Abortion, like euthanasia, is a method in which killing represents a solution.”

In February, 1975, at a conference convened by Howard Butt, Jr., in New Orleans, C. Everett Koop, M.D., Sc.D., then Chief of Surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, later United States Surgeon General, predicted that among the consequences of Roe v. Wade—the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy—would be infanticide and euthanasia. A number of others—the present writer among them—made similar predictions. The pro-abortionists (“abortion rights advocates”) reacted with shock and indignation, calling them alarmist and absurd. As time has passed, however, these predictions have become reality. Infanticide of defective newborns has become the “treatment of choice” under many circumstances, and euthanasia, in the form of physician-

* Harold O. J. Brown holds the Franklin Forman Chair of Christian Ethics and Theology and is Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

assisted suicide, is being practiced with apparent impunity by the celebrated Dr. Jack Kevorkian of Michigan—“Doctor Death”—and advocated and rationalized in virtually every issue of the prestigious medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Society.

It is interesting to note that the Hippocratic Oath, which prohibits abortion, specifically forbids ph...

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