Ep. 105: Abortion and Christianity

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio.

Isaac Dagneau:
With me today is Stephanie Gray. Stephanie is a speaker and an author primarily on the subject of abortion. She’s spoken at many universities, she’s debated many people who don’t share necessarily her side, and also she just recently spoke at Google this year, so I’m interested to hear about that, but anyways, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us today Stephanie.

Stephanie Gray:
Thank you Isaac for having me on.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah for sure. The first thing, what’s your story? Obviously, we’re talking about the kind of emotional and controversial, and serious subject of abortion, but before we get into that, what is your story on a personal side?

Stephanie Gray:
Well you know, I was raised in a Christian home in the Fraser Valley. I am a Vancouver- ite in that I was one of the people who now lives in Vancouver who was born there, but my parents moved to Chilliwack shortly after I was born, and you know, I was raised in a really faith-filled environment, I was taught to not only love the Lord, but live that love out in service to others, and my parents very much we’re involved in the pro-life movement, my mom volunteered at a pregnancy care center, and so from a very young age, I became familiar with the pro-life message and the pro-life cause, and took that on as something you could say was more my own when I went to university and moved back to Vancouver to go to UBC.

Isaac Dagneau:
Wow, that’s amazing, and from that point on when you dedicated this time and this energy to focus on the pro-life movement, where has that taken you now?

Stephanie Gray:
Well, it’s taken me places I couldn’t have imagined when I was an 18-year-old university student, you know, giving her first pro-life talk, but when I was in my first year of the university, I heard an American pro-life speaker named Scott Klusendorf, and he said there are more people working full time to kill babies than there are working full time to save them. When he said those words, it was like the Holy Spirit grabbed my heart, and it was like the Lord asked me, “Will you be one of these people working full time to save babies?”
To make a long story short, that speaker started mentoring me from a distance, I finished my university education but became very convicted as a result of his presentation, and further formation by him, that I was really meant to do full-time pro-life work as he was doing in the context of being a speaker and an educator, so I began full time pro-life work when I was 21 years old.
I started a non-profit that I ran for about 12 years, and that took me all around the world, which I continue to do now in a slightly different context, but still doing a lot of speaking and educating, and as you mentioned, it took me all the way to Google headquarters in Mountain View California in April of this year, and I could never have thought at the beginning of my career that I would have an opportunity to be in such a secular environment and be able to proclaim the anti-abortion message to the attendees as well as to the broader audience on Google’s YouTube channel.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, it’s just incredible to consider that, because I can only imagine the different views and the kind of antagonistic views and feelings that people would have there. So I guess, you know, doing what you do, like any kind of missions work, because in a sense, you are doing missions work in a kind of indirect and sometimes direct way, but man, you probably get a lot of pushback, especially maybe at someplace like Google.

Stephanie Gray:
You know, there often is pushback, I have to say what was a pleasant surprise was that the environment of Google was very receptive and welcoming. The audience had good questions, but I didn’t experience hostility that I have experienced in other contexts, such as university campuses when, you know, I do debates and there’s been attempts by abortion supporters to shut the event down, so thankfully there wasn’t that degree of hostility. But you do see the spiritual battle that is raging when it comes to this topic because God values human beings.

We are set apart from all other creation in that we are image-bearers, and it’s human beings that Christ died for, and so when human beings are under attack, it’s because Satan doesn’t like human life made in God’s image. And so in the context of abortion, we see image-bearers are under attack, God wants us, he wants to protect us, but Satan doesn’t want us to be protected, he wants to attack us, and therefore that’s why there’s such a spiritual battle that rages when this topic is raised.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, and that’s such a good point. You kind of just jumped headlong in there, but I think you just hit on such a nail piece, just to summarize what you said. The idea that since we are created in the image of God, we are like mirrors reflecting God’s glory, so what abortion does is that it just destroys these mirrors, which disallows God’s glory to be shown in this world, which is terrible.
Anyways, again, this is emotional, it’s controversial, it’s serious, people are listening who maybe have suffered through an abortion. But I just want to ask, can you define abortion? Sometimes when an issue is so heated and kind of large, we can sometimes forget definitions, especially if you’re sort of separated from it, you don’t know someone that is struggling with it. What are we talking about here?

Stephanie Gray:
Well we’re talking about the direct and intentional destruction of the youngest of our kind, of a human being in his or her mother’s womb, and I think the reality is, even though that’s what abortion does, a lot of people can blind themselves to that fact. As you pointed out, there could be people listening who have had abortions or who are contemplating abortion, and often, we will lie to ourselves or be in denial that the baby’s a baby, or be in denial that abortion kills, because we don’t want to admit that that’s what abortion would do, because we don’t want to perceive of ourselves doing something that would be so destructive, but if we look at the facts, one of the questions I’ll often ask people is, when a woman takes a pregnancy test, if the test comes back negative, and this would’ve been an unplanned pregnancy, but if it comes back negative, does she ever go to the abortion clinic?
People always say, well obviously not, so then I ask, okay, what is it then about the positive pregnancy test that the test is telling her as opposed to the negative test? Isn’t it telling her that someone else is there? That there’s the presence of another individual and therefore if there is another individual, then shouldn’t we value that individual as much as we value ourselves?

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah for sure, that’s so good. Now, it’s kind of interesting, for someone recently, I’ll just say this, recently a few months ago, we were talking with Professor Owen Strachan from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We were talking about just sexuality and the different views of sexuality, especially even amongst Christians nowadays, and I asked him to sort of define the progressive/emergent church understanding of sexuality, as if he was a progressive Christian. So, how would someone on the opposite side of your end define abortion, because I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t use the words “The destruction of one of our race at its very first stages.”

Stephanie Gray:
Right, you know, I think someone who supports abortion would just simply call it a termination of a pregnancy, and you know, with that definition I always like to ask lots of questions. So I say, well how would you define termination, and what is a pregnancy? Usually the language used is not well defined, which is therefore, makes it easier to embrace.

Isaac Dagneau:
Right, yeah for sure. This next question might sound really simple, we kind of touched on it, but, I do want to ask it just to see a little bit of the history. Why has abortion been such a contentious issue for years and years and years? and how far back does this even go? and has it always just been between, you know, kind of the secular world and Christians? Can you speak into that a little bit?

Stephanie Gray:
Certainly, the reality of the born killing the pre born has been something that has gone on in various forms throughout human history, of course setting aside the born killing the pre born, just humans killing humans, we have since Cain killed his brother Abel. This destruction of the family bond, unfortunately is a temptation that some of us humans will act out upon. Certainly, it’s been in the 20th century that abortion became much more prominent, and first legally accepted, socially accepted.
In Canada, abortion first became legal in 1969, under select circumstances with the approval of a therapeutic abortion committee, and it was in 1988 where that law was thrown out, and no new law was replaced, so that as a result, abortions can now happen through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason or no reason because of our government funded healthcare, it means abortions are largely covered by our tax dollars in Canada, so it’s become very widespread to the point that we have 100,000 abortions a year in Canada, a million abortions a year in the United States, and over 40 million abortions annually around the world.

Isaac Dagneau:
Wow, that is… it’s a tough subject, it’s tough to hear that. It can be difficult sometimes to consider the widespread effect. To even think about it in this way that, maybe you can speak into this, but the different, I guess, because of technology and scientific advancement, the ability to, you know, have an abortion today would look a lot different than 100 years ago, even, or maybe even more so back, so I think that because we’ve sort of opened up, because culture has opened up this avenue that’s a lot easier and legal, all these different things, it creates a choice for women and men to have, that they might have just not have had a couple hundred years ago.

Stephanie Gray:
Sure, it’s far more accessible now. You have physicians and nurses, the medical profession who have normalized abortion as a legitimate practice, as opposed to, before 1969, where you did have illegal abortions and sometimes they were being done by physicians, but other times they were being done by people who weren’t exactly physicians, so there is that change that has gone on for sure.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah for sure. Why are so many Christians, do you think, apathetic or ignorant of the epidemic that is abortion? A lot of people might say with their lip service, yeah I don’t agree with it, but there doesn’t seem to be this zeal or this realization that oh my goodness, 40 million, like, this crazy.

Stephanie Gray:
You know, there’s a lot of explanations perhaps that could answer that question. You know, what comes to mind is a quote actually from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights leader, and in his letter from Birmingham Jail, a document I had to read in first year English, which I highly, highly recommend, at one point in his essay, he says, “There was a time when the church was very powerful, there was a time,” and he says, “It was in those days when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worth to suffer for what they believed in.”

He said “In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion, it was a thermostat,” he said, “that transformed the morays of society,” and I would say unfortunately, what has happened today is we’ve kind of moved away from the spirit of the early church. Where instead of just recording where things are at, or instead of actually changing, turning up the heat, changing the thermostat, we’re just recording where things are at, we don’t want to rock the boat, we don’t want to communicate a message that might result in some persecution, but Christ taught us “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.”
We’re to take up our cross and we’re to follow Christ, so I think there’s a resistance to persecution, that’s one explanation. And I think the other thing is, our own sin can blind us and cause us to be fearful, and I think the reality is, abortion is something that has touched both Christians and non-Christians alike. I think of the Old Testament story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, that David lusted after Bathsheba, had sex with her, she got pregnant, and because Uriah was away in battle, it would’ve been known that Bathsheba was pregnant by someone other than her husband, so what did David do? He had Uriah killed in order to conceal his sex sin.
I would suggest that in some cases, we’re dealing in Christian circles, where abortion is a modern-day version of that story, where we’re killing in order to conceal sex sin, where we don’t want people to know what we’ve been up to outside of marriage for example, and so whether it’s as a result of a Christian directly having an abortion, perhaps to conceal sex sin, or whether it’s a result of a Christian perhaps driving a friend to an abortion clinic. Our direct or indirect involvement with abortion causes some to say, “Oh well, maybe I can’t speak up” because we don’t want to own up to our sin. Instead, what we want to do as Christians is to say, “Wait, if I’m a Christian, it means I need Christ, which means I’m a sinner who needs a Saviour, which means I need to own up to this sin, and I need to lay this sin at the foot of the cross, and I need to beg God’s mercy and trust in his mercy, and be transformed.”

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s so good, and it kind of does reveal the sin of pride in so many of our lives, the ability to not even want to confess that. You know, it’s so pertinent. Going back to the first point though, I really like that, the idea that you know suffering for righteousness sake, in a sense, and I’m wondering, if you could think something up, if nothing comes to your mind that’s totally fine, but could you explain to us perhaps give us an illustration or story of feeling that joy in the midst of persecution? Because you are on the front lines. Not all of us are going to be able to do what you are doing.

Stephanie Gray:
Well you know, what comes to mind is the ministry that I used to work for, that I co- founded, the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform. Besides the public speaking that I continue to do, when I worked for CCBR, I did a lot of exhibits, pro life exhibits that we would take to university campuses, and as a team we would engage in students who passed by the exhibit, engage them in discussion and debate, and I experienced such profound hostility at those events. There were abortion supporters who would gather in large groups at times, they would chant, they would yell, they would swear, and yet, amidst that persecution, I experienced the power of the Holy Spirit.

Words and messages that would come to my mind when I would have the opportunity either to speak to an individual or a large crowd if I was doing what we call an open microphone, where I was able to amplify answers to people’s questions as they stood at the exhibit, and I would get these divine inspirations and be able to communicate messages that you could see amidst the hostile faces. There were softer, more receptive faces, and I remember one event in particular a woman came up after I had just dealt with a very angry crowd, and she said, “I saw your exhibit a year ago, and I was one of them, I was so angry at you guys, I went home and I Googled abortion and I just couldn’t stand you, but as a result of searching more on the topic, I came to see how wrong abortion is, how right you guys are, and I’m just back a year later to say thank you for what you’re doing.”

To experience that, you know, conversion of someone there amidst the hostility, it’s like “Yes Lord, I’ll be faithful to you and you will work in the hearts of people.”

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s so good, and hearing from that, I kind of want to move this into the next question here. Here you have a woman that goes online, she starts searching abortion, and she sees that, you know, this is wrong, and she comes back and she explains that to you, that’s so cool, and obviously there are so many non-Christians, there’s people with completely different world views that are pro life, and they are you know, with you on all the things that you do say, but I want to ask specifically for you, because obviously you are Christian, how has the gospel-shaped your beliefs on abortion?

Stephanie Gray:
Well, in every way. Two things come to mind. Just in reference to those events, I would just like to say, I believe the Psalms are such a powerful method of prayer that put words to the experiences of our heart, and often before doing those exhibits, when I have very hostile crowds, and even before presentations, I will go to the Psalms and really find that they are powerful, powerful prayers. In terms of you know the heart of the gospel message, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever might believe in him will not perish but have eternal life.

I always like to ask people, and this has had a profound effect on me: When did Christ enter the world? When did he experience the human experience? You know, as Christmas is approaching, we often will say, well Christmas, but the reality is, no, Christ entered the world in human form nine months before Christmas, and I remember reflecting on the first chapter of Luke when the Angel Gabriel visited Mary, and upon telling her that she would conceive and bear a son, she was then informed that her cousin Elizabeth, who had been barren, was also with child.

So Mary makes with haste, visits her cousin Elizabeth, and the Scriptures talk about how when Mary entered Elizabeth’s home, Elizabeth says the child in her womb leapt for joy. And as Christians we often look at that passage, and say okay, there’s John the Baptist, he’s leaping for joy, so I guess life exists before birth, but I take it a step further and I say no, wait a minute, why did John the Baptist leap for joy? He leaped for joy because when Mary entered Elizabeth’s home, she didn’t enter alone, she in a sense was a type of walking tabernacle bearing in her womb God Almighty in the human form of a tiny embryo who had probably not even implanted yet.
It was this late-term fetus, John the Baptist, who recognized the first-trimester embryo of Jesus Christ, and he leapt for joy in the presence of God Almighty in human form. So that to me is the heart of the gospel, that God sent his son, and he sent his son as an embryo, and that’s who came to save me from my sin.

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s so incredible, and if that hasn’t made an effect on listeners that may be sitting on the fence, I do want to ask this to you Stephanie. To the many who do sit on that fence of what necessarily to believe about abortion, you know, what would be an appeal from you to those that are listening who… they don’t really know what they’re thinking about, maybe they are just kind of living in this, you know, plugging their ears, I don’t really want to deal with that, because maybe they’re proud, maybe they just don’t want to put themselves out there against culture like that. What would be your appeal to those?

Stephanie Gray:
A question that comes to mind is for all of us to consider: do I believe in human rights? And as I have asked many people around the world that question, I always get the answer, “Well yes, yes I believe in human rights.” I would ask, “If we believe in human rights, then what about the pre-born human’s rights?” Some might say, “Well that’s not a human yet,” and I would just ask, “Well, what are the pre born child’s parents? Is the pregnant woman human? Is her partner human? If yes, then wouldn’t it follow that the offspring of those two humans must be human as well?”

If at the most basic level we believe in human rights, then that which has been conceived from two humans is the same being as us, and therefore has the same rights as us, and then as believers, if we go a step further and say, “Well beyond believing in human rights, I believe in human value, because the human being is made in God’s image, then we simply need to go back to, okay, well if human beings are made in God’s image, and if science teaches me that beings which reproduce sexually begin their lives at fertilization, and therefore because two human beings reproduce sexually, their offspring will begin its life at fertilization, that means that individual becomes an image bearer at fertilization, and therefore if I value the other because he or she is an image bearer, then I have to value that child at fertilization because that child is an image bearer.”

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good, and you know, it’s exciting to see different organizations doing a good work here. I follow an organization called The Human Coalition on Twitter, and throughout the day I get these updates just saying, baby number, and they’ll just put a number, was saved today from this city, and at the end of the day, they’ll just have the whole total number, and it’s encouraging to see that, but, for me to “like” that Tweet, that’s not necessarily me engaging in combating abortion.
What would be some ways for the sort of average Joe or Jane to participate in that sort of you know, combat against this? Again, like we said, we’re not going to be able to go and maybe necessarily talk at Google or universities about that, so yeah what would you say to that?

Stephanie Gray:
Yeah, I think we all need to realize we are people of influence, in our own networks, and there are people that you are connected to that I am not, that therefore means you are better positioned to engage them on the topic than I am. So I think all of us need to do an inventory, who do I know, what job do I have? Am I a teacher, a social worker, a pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor, or a dad picking their child up from school, and am I talking with parents as we’re waiting for our kids to come out?

And so in the context of the workplace, the social setting, the church setting, what can I do to initiate a conversation on abortion, whether using a news story as an impetus, a Tweet that you saw online…make reference to it, and then say to the person you’re speaking with, “Gosh you know, this came to my mind because I saw this tweet, and it occurred to me, I’ve never asked you what do you think about abortion?” Then have that conversation right there. Then sometimes people say, well I won’t know what to say, and I say, well you know, I’ve written a book on that!

If people go to loveunleasheslife.com, they’ll get my website where not only I regularly blog, but they can click on my book, which is Love Unleashes Life, so loveunleasheslife.com, and in there, that’s a book written to Christians to help them learn how to dialogue with the culture, both with believers and non-believers, to be able to make a non-sectarian argument to the culture based on human rights as to why we ought to reject abortion. To initiate those conversations and then to get involved in community pro-life groups, whether it’s an educational group, a political group, or a pastoral group that’s helping women in crisis or doing post-abortion counseling to start directing one’s energies in a very concrete way to pre-existing organizations that could use more help.

Isaac Dagneau:
So good, thank you so much for those practical ways. Thank you so much Stephanie for your time and your wisdom today, that’s all we can do right now, but if you want to hear more, if you’re listening and you’ve heard our conversation, you’ve heard about Stephanie and the work she’s done, perhaps you’re interested in those books, you can head to that website she just said, loveunleasheslife.com, I’ll also put the links on the episode page as well.
Anyways, I want to say once again, thank you so much Stephanie, and I hope to have you back on the show again soon.

Stephanie Gray:
Thank you Isaac, God bless you.