Resist Not Evil
Why is the forbidden fruit, the most desirable? Right from the Pentateuchal garden of Eden (believing it existed) to our modern day times, we have a considerable instinctual preference to yearn for what is prohibited.
Have you ever sternly instructed a child not to watch a certain movie and later realized that, the first thing they want to do is watch, at whatever cost, that very movie?
Or better still, why do we tend to want to know more about a secret once it is declared so?
I’m aware of the near-irrelevance of the examples I have just given, with regards to abortion, but I am also equally aware that they set a formidable ground to justify why resisting abortion, encourages abortion.
As a believer, I not only take it with utmost reverence but also with bewilderment, when Jesus Christ instructs his followers, in Mathew 5:38-39, to “resist not evil”.
What in the world did Jesus mean? Should we let evil prevail? Definitely not!
Yet, if one closely follows the current paradigm of radical, self-proclaimed, “anti-everything” movements, resisting evil, is what they are arguably doing in most of their endeavors.
May be, I have not followed them in details or maybe I misunderstood what Jesus meant. I’ll be grateful when you teach me what exactly is going on, in that meta-philosophical and counter intuitive Jesus-treatise, in the gospel of Mathew 5:38-39.
Whatever is going on, using the contemporary war against abortion, it looks like we have a glimpse of what Jesus meant.
This brings me to the next part on whether there are such things as safe abortions, unsafe abortions or better still on why we should prevent the need, among women, to have abortions in the first place.
To Ban or Not to Ban? Is There Such thing as “Safe Abortion?”
In his book, The Audacity of Hope, President Barrack Obama’s defense on why his administration would find it comfortable letting abortion prevail, was backed by thought stimulating (at least to me) rhetoric, that, “I feared that a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.”
Does Obama’s fear of “seeking unsafe abortions” implicitly suggest that there ought to be “seeking safe abortions”?
Or should we look at the more uplifting rhetoric that we ought to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place?
How would we then reduce this number of abortion-prone women? Is this where our dear psychologists, theologians, mothers, and communal support comes in?
These are all questions that not only justify why Jesus instructed his followers to “resist not evil” but also significantly debunk the conservative philosophies of anti-abortion.
When you look around the globe, especially in Africa where stigmatization of any kind is prevalent and has the highest potential to arouse suicidal emotions, you will realize that our women and girls are covertly seeking what Obama referred to as “unsafe abortions”.
This unsafe pursuit to end a life is significantly justified, when the girl anticipates the societal stigma associated with “unauthorized marriages and pregnancies” and the rampant, conservative condemnation that comes with the anti-abortion philosophies.
So, I would love to slightly reshape President Obama’s thinking by suggesting that much as it unbearable to envision yourself and or your sweet daughter living with the world chose to call a bastard, for the rest of your lives, we ought to support, with minimal condemnation and maximum psychological therapy, the females who “accidentally” get pregnant.
In so doing, we would have solved the paradox of resisting abortion since we would have less abortions and yet not resisting abortion. Do you think this is an easy thing to enact?