Looking at a less popular 3:16, beginning at first Kings 3:16; two women had a newborn, but one died. They both claimed the living child was theirs, and Solomon had to decide what should be done. When he requested that the child be cut in half, the one Mom immediately protested,"Please, give her the child ...do not kill him!" With Solomon's wisdom, he realized this was the true Mom, and gave the child to her. How absurd it would be if he would have said that it was too much stress for either woman to not have the child, so he will just proceed to have the child cut in half. That's not too far off from what it appears this article is saying, which was in the Journal of Medical Ethics (Law, Ethics, and Medicine)...a study of Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. The article referred to fetuses and newborns as "potential persons" ...and, as for the mother putting her child up for adoption, her emotional state should be considered a trumping right ---if it is determined she may suffer psychological distress from giving her child to someone else, then after-birth abortion should be considered an allowable alternative. The people who wrote this, and those who allowed it to be printed should have a court-ordered psychological evaluation. If this is not insanity ...it is blatant evil, and they dare list it as ethics? Aren't ethics what we've always called moral principals ...and morality, defining right and wrong? What has happened to us? It's clear to some of us, that this all eventually comes about because people feel they can effectively remove God out of the discussion. They believe they can decide right and wrong, not God.

Once we do something that we should have thought through more thoroughly ...some things can be reversed, and others things can't.  But though things often can't be reversed, attitudes can.  It may be too late to change an event, but we can resolve to not repeat a mistake.  A mistake repeated, often makes it easier to repeat again. And things that are ignored, often grow so rapidly, by the time we realize it ...things are hopelessly out-of-control.  Things seemed this way in 1942, within the depths of World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was this same year that Arthur Gordon wrote a short story entitled, "Dialogue in the Dark" ...Which was later reprinted by the title of "The Bargain".  In his book, Through Many Windows, Arthur writes an introduction to this story, which I'm including here:

"The whole culture was different then.  Movies were simplistic, almost naive.  Musical comedies were mostly tuneful nonsense.  Book were nonexplicit.  Even the theatre was fairly restrained.  It all changed drastically ...maybe male-female relationships most of all.  It's hard to say exactly why.  Maybe in the name of honesty and candor and freedom from hypocrisy --good motives all --we opened the door first to casual sex and then to indiscriminate sex and finally to pornography with all its dreary camp followers.  Most of us watched in troubled silence, not knowing what to do about it.  A sense of outrage is a fragile thing; it crumbles under a succession of shocks until finally it vanishes, leaving us accepting almost automatically what once we would have despised."


Yes, once we remove God, we remove any standard ...and we remove conscience.  We have come to accept the promiscuity of our teenagers, and feel we should provide them with contraceptives ...anything to mask the problem, and our schools can teach anything as long as it's not abstinence. So an act that is condoned, leads to what?  We know the problem of promiscuity exists, but we remove it from our mind ...until something happens to the body.  The next thing is to remove it from our mind by removing it from the body.  But it is not an it that is removed ...a living human being, the most innocent and defenseless human being is removed.  But also a bit of the conscience, a bit of our own humanity is also removed.  And it leaves us defenseless in a way, defenseless to further breaches of conscience.  We remove the standard, and we put our image of God into a deceptive chasm of our own guilt, which we refuse to acknowledge.  We invite this guise of fear, but we mostly childishly accept that we've become less than we are, based upon a false rejection which allows our mistakes to define us ...and we say it is who we are.  This compels us to embrace the cause of the pain, distancing ourselves from the available redemptive love that would ultimately free us from the tightening vise (or vice) that eventually squeezes us to the limit, not merely leaving a residue, but a metamorphic change creating a duality within us ---a sentinel, forbidding entry of past emotions; and a warrior bent not only on presenting an angry defense, but an offensive assault bent on the annihilation of conscience. If we get bit by a deadly snake, or let's say, a stonefish --- we may scream in pain, begging to cut off a limb; we can simply take the antivenom; or we can stubbornly allow the poison to take its course ...and die. I contend that the poison has taken its course ...and our dignity, our integrity, and even our sanity has been affected.  But unlike a venomous bite, it has affected others also ...like an contagious infection, it has reached epidemic proportions.  You'd think we'd be willing to give an arm and a leg to stop this senseless killing of babies.  Stubbornly, will we continue to refuse the antivenom?  Will we refuse to acknowledge the slow death to our conscience?  Yes, there appears to be a step-by-step climb, down into the depths of denial.  Missing the first step, we tumble into promiscuity ...and quickly fall down the remaining steps, until we reach bottom.  But if we also take a moment to reach into the depths of our soul, the bottom of our heart ...we can climb back out.  Don't choose abortion as an option!  What so many don't realize, is that choosing abortion is choosing to take life ...but it kills more than one innocent life, it also kills the realization within the hearts of others; those who will also be faced with that same heart choice.  And we see how the heart of some have already traveled ...now not just considering taking a baby's life after the baby is born, but so wickedly trying to justify and defend those evil views.  And we see how verbally vicious the proponents are ...doesn't that prove what I've already presented here?  The contrast presented is Pro-life, or Freedom of Choice.  Yes, we all have the choice to either join the ranks of the angry mob that is quickly gathering much strength, or we can gather every ounce of strength within our heart.  Whatever choices have been made in the past ...are past.   But God's forgiveness is not past.  God is not merely waiting for us at the top of the stairs --He knows we will stumble, and perhaps fall back --but he has sent His Son, and Jesus came to pick us up; and help us walk one step at a time.