1983 March/April issue Part 1

The taking of human life

In a relentless effort to keep the world from squeezing me into its won mold (see Romans 12:1-2) my mind is always making comparisons and connections and trying to test the world’s reasoning by the straightedge of scripture. Recently, when I read of the execution in Texas of Charles Brook, Jr., by lethal injection, I made one of those connections. I remember another news story a few months ago about an unborn twin who was quietly dispatched, while still in its mother’s womb, by means of a needle in its heart. Medical science has advanced to the stage where it is possible to remove human beings from this world’s scene cleanly and kindly (we tell ourselves) and without too much trauma to the executioners and the consenting public. Of the trauma to the victim we prefer not to let ourselves think too much.

One of the people I refer to, of course, was a full grown man, convicted of murder. The other was far from full-grown. It was not even born. Nobody wanted it to be born cause it happened to be not quite normal. A person, without question, but not quite a normal person. So, since the mother very much wanted the normal twin to be born, she was glad to get rid if the abnormal one in such a handy way.

In a Time (Dec;20, 1982) essay about the Brooks execution, Roger Rosenblatt writes of the publics eagerness for a “gentle killing,” yet its hunger also to know the details of the prisoner’s last dinner and last words, his position on the stretcher, and how the tubes were hooked up which would carry the poison into his blood stream/ Strange that there should be this fascination at a time when there is a strong protest, at least in the media, against the death penalty for criminals. There is no protest in major magazines against the death penalty for unborn children and no corresponding eagerness fro pictures or descriptions of just how it is done. Few people are willing to scrutinize the details of what happens to the tiny bodies who are daily, at the request of their mothers, and with the consent of the supreme court, being disposed of by sophisticated chemicals, pharmaceutical, and mechanical techniques.

The correction facilities in Texas and the abortion facilities in hospitals are equally thorough in their efforts to make sure that the methods works. Imagine the embarrassment of Charles Brooks had managed to slip out of the straps that bound him to the gurney, or of the silent fluid had somehow been obstructed in the tubes! Nobody wants that to happen. It is a major disaster, too, when an abortion produces a living child instead of a dead one. Some awful scenes have taken place in hospital nurseries when a baby has been taken there who had been intended for the garbage can. What is wanted in the cases of both the murder and the undesirable fetus is death, pure death, the ‘spectacle of life removed.’

Do not misunderstand me. I believe that capital punishment is both necessary and just. I believe that abortion is murder. Both are appalling to anyone human, it seems to me. Surely, no matter what my convictions and public declarations may be, we just shrink inside at the hideousness of it all. But one is commanded by God- evil must be dealt with by public justice- and the other is forbidden. We cannot, without His expressed direction, take human life into our hands. Let us not imagine that we can somehow palliate the stark and shocking fact of death by making it private. Only a few people, including four reporters and Brook’s girlfriend, were allowed to witness his death. An abortion is now called a private matter, to be decided solely by a woman and her decision. Let us not by making it quick, easy and clean, evade the truth that somebody is being killed.

Rosenblatt in his essay looks for the day when we may “drive out the barbarians.” It is barbaric then, to meet out judgment in this form to a murderer, but somehow civilized to send a lethal poison into the heart of an as yet sinless child?

Paul wrote to the young minister Timothy to warn him of the sort of evil he must guard against. “Men who love nothing but money and self …men who put pleasure in the place of God, men who preserve the outward form of religion but are a standing denial of its reality. Keep clear of men like these…these men defy the truth, they have lost the power to reason, and they cannot pass the test of faith.” (2 Timothy 3:2, 5-6, 8-9) God helped us not only stand for the truth, but to obey it scrupulously that we may not lose the power to think as Christian.