What is Going on in Christian Crisis Pregnancy Counselling?

Dr E.S. Williams

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We hear of very many expectant mothers seeking abortion advice, including girls under sixteen. Dr Ted Williams, a medical doctor of long experience, and a noted specialist in the public health field, shows that Christian counselling centres have adopted a deeply compromised approach which provides non-judgemental advice that leaves in place the option of abortion.

Expectant mothers, including so many girls, should always be helped in a spirit of great compassion, but they must be advised according to the Book of God, and its eternal values.

This book will not only inform and warn, but will focus the aims of pastors and all other Christians when they are called upon to extend help to expectant mothers thinking about abortion.

Extract

Crisis Pregnancy Counselling

Mass abortion is one of the greatest moral evils in Great Britain. In the four decades since the Abortion Act received royal assent in October 1967 there have been over six million legal abortions, the number currently running at about 180 thousand per year. This means that on an average weekday around 700 legal abortions are performed in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and private abortion clinics around the country. Such is the cold, calculating approach of the British Government that it has a national standard to increase to fifty percent the percentage of NHS funded abortions undertaken before ten weeks gestation. What is so disturbing about the situation is that, with the exception of a few pro-life organisations, there is hardly any opposition to mass abortion.

The last century saw a sea change in British attitudes to abortion. In the nineteenth century there was a Christian consensus that abortion was wrong. It was widely believed that biblical truth taught that human life is unique, for each person is created in the image of God. All -human life, therefore, should be protected and loved. The Christian view sought to incorporate its belief in the sanctity of human life into the British legal framework. Accordingly the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 made it a criminal offence to procure an abortion in any circumstances. The unborn child had the full protection of the law.

By the 1960s the heart of the Christian church had grown cold and compromise was the order of the day. Abortion was no longer regarded as a sin against Heaven and against the unborn child, but a pragmatic solution to a social problem. The relative morality of situation ethics claimed that abortion, under certain circumstances, was the only ‘loving’ pragmatic solution to an unwanted pregnancy. The abortion lobby was skilled in manipulating language to hide the reality of their campaign; the unborn child became a ‘foetus’ and abortion was referred to as a ‘termination’. The changing sexual mores of the permissive society demanded the right for women to choose whether they wanted a pregnancy to continue or not. At last the ideas of the radicals, liberals, humanists, feminists and socialists, for so long contained by the restraints of biblical truth, had become the new consensus with a new relative morality. ‘Free love’ and ‘pro-choice’ were the slogans of the sexual revolutionaries.

Abortion Act of 1967

During the permissive 1960s there had been four unsuccessful attempts to legalise abortion when in 1966 David Steel, a young Liberal MP, came third in the ballot for a Private Member’s Bill and agreed to sponsor the Abortion Reform Bill. Behind David Steel was the Abortion Law Reform Association which had been set up in the 1930s by a group of socialist feminists. A number of prominent figures in the Labour Party were supporters of abortion reform, including the Minister of Health, Kenneth Robinson, who had put his own Private Member’s Bill to Parliament in the early 1960s.

CARE’s stand on abortion

One of the leading Christian organisations standing against abortion is CARE (Christian Action, Research and Education), a well-established mainstream Christian charity. It believes that Christians, through God’s strength, can change society for the better. Through parliamentary campaigning, CARE is seeking to influence public policy on key moral issues, including abortion. It seeks to use prayer and spiritual strength as it stands in the vanguard of defending Christian values not only in the UK but worldwide. Its mission ‘is to declare Christian truth and demonstrate Christ’s compassion in society’. It believes that its strength ‘lies in the combined use of caring, campaigning and intercessory prayer and its commitment to the practical application of biblical truth’. CARE has established a network of crisis pregnancy counselling centres to help individual Christians and local churches make a positive impact on their communities and on the nation at large. It has also set up CAREconfidential, an on-line counselling service for women with unplanned pregnancies.

All, however, is not what it seems, because the counselling methods employed by CARE have drifted far away from the values of their mission statement as we shall in due course show.

CARE’s Chairman, Lyndon Bowring, in his ‘Dear Friend’ newsletter (November 2004), asks whether a woman’s ‘right’ to choose abortion is to be protected ‘even at the expense of denying that most precious gift from God, life, to the child in her womb? It has been one [of] our strongest passions from CARE’s earliest days, to defend the dignity and sanctity of human life itself. We believe that we have a responsibility as Christians to be a voice for the voiceless, because they are defenceless, and because God alone gave them life. Our 162 Centres, committed to helping women facing pregnancy crises, continually seek to offer understanding and support – and at the same time underlining our belief that all human beings are made in the image of God, and are of supreme value.’

Reading this impassioned plea one is left with the clear impression that CARE, as ‘a voice for the voiceless’, is a pro-life organisation that is opposed to abortion. This is the message that is being presented to those who support CARE as a bastion that stands against the evil of abortion. But how many of those who read this newsletter are aware of the nature of the advice that CARE Centres give to pregnant women? The purpose of this book is to examine CARE’s crisis pregnancy counselling programme in the light of biblical truth.


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