It has been
40 years since the Supreme Court of the United States passed Roe vs. Wade, making abortion on demand
the law of the land. Since that infamous day, over 50 million babies have seen
their demise at the hand of a cruel abortionist. There are days like this one
that I ask myself how did this ever happen? How is it possible, in this land
that was founded on principles of liberty and freedom, that the unborn have
lost all their rights? The most dangerous place in America today is the womb.
As the Nazis
were moving into the Netherlands during the Second World War, a Dutch
theologian named Henry Kramer met with a group of Christians. It was a most troubling,
dreadful time. These Dutch Christians knew that their Jewish neighbors were
disappearing from their homes and businesses. They were there one day, and not
the next. “What can we do?” they asked Kramer. Kramer answered, “I cannot tell
you what to do,” he said, “but I can tell you who you are. And I know that when
you know who you are, you will know what to do.”[i]
Only when we
know who we are, can we speak and act according to our beliefs. Only then will
we live in congruence with what we value. According to all the surveys, a
majority of Americans consider abortion to be wrong. If that is true, then why
is Roe vs. Wade still the law, and
why does abortion claim over 4000 babies every day? It is because there is incongruence
between what people believe is right and their corresponding actions. This
became very evident in post-World War II Germany. After the war, there was
remorse in Germany. Bitter expressions of regret came from so many Christians as
afterwards, they realized their failure only too late. It was a failure to try
to stop what they knew was wrong.
One such man
was a university professor and a diplomat named Albrecht Haushoffer. He was a quiet,
gentle man who wrote poetry in his spare time. As he gradually came to
recognize the enormity of the evil of Nazism, he was drawn into the resistance
and arrested in 1944 after the failure of the Stauffenburg plot to assassinate
Hitler. In the final days of the war, as the Russian tanks moved through the
outskirts of the city of Berlin, the dictator hid in his Fuhrer bunker like a
rat trapped in his hole.
The SS
Guards at the Mobed city prison were given a list of those who were not allowed
to survive the downfall of Nazism because they knew too much. Albrecht Haushoffer’s
name was included on the list. A group of seven or eight prisoners were taken
out of their cells that morning. They were told they were about to be released.
Each of the prisoners was assigned an SS Guard and led out to the Tiergarten Park
in the city of Berlin. As they came to the middle of that park, out of sight
from anyone else, each guard stepped up to his assigned prisoner and shot them
in the back of the head. The bodies were abandoned there in the snow and the
mud of the ruined city.
Later, Albrecht’s
brother heard rumors of what had happened, and he hurried into the park to
search for his brother’s body. When he found it, there, clutched in his hand,
was a blood-stained sheet of paper. Written on that piece of paper was a poem
that Haushoffer had composed just a few hours before his execution.
It was
entitled in German, “Schuldig Bin Ich,” “I am Guilty.” “The burden of my
guilt”, the condemned man wrote, “before the law weighs light upon my
shoulders, to plot and conspire was my duty to the people. I would have been a
criminal had I not. I am guilty, although not in the way you think. I should
have done my duty sooner, I was wrong I should have called the evil sooner by
its name. I hesitated to condemn for far too long. I now accuse myself within
my own heart. I have betrayed my conscience for far too long. I have deceived
myself and my fellow man. I knew the course of evil from its start. My warning
was not loud enough or clear enough. Today as I die I know what I am guilty of.”[ii]
We, too, have known the evil from the start.
[ii] Dr. Laurence White, The Sin of Silence, An address delivered September 6, 2000, at Midwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary, Kansas City, MO
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