 Adoption instead of abortion, speakers urge crowd at Presbyterian Pro-Life dinner By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Online Friday, June 16, 2006
Christopher Bolan, an elder serving on the session at First Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Fla., told the crowd attending the Presbyterian Pro-Life dinner that, "I am a product of rape." "In 1958," he said, "my birth mother was 16 and an older man, 35 years old, raped her. She became pregnant." She was kicked out of the abusive home she lived in, Bolan said, and finally wound up in a hospital for unwed mothers in Columbus, Ohio. "I was adopted by a wonderful family in Cincinnati," he said. "If abortion had been available at that time, I wouldn't be here today. I would be a statistic, not a human." Bolan said that, because of his life story, he can't understand people today who talk positively about abortion. If the discussion, he said, is about "a woman who's been raped and there's a baby, and the baby should be aborted, you'd lose me." "The right of life is a gift of our Creator not to be taken lightly," Bolan said, "and the innocent voices of the children that have been killed need to be heard loud and clear. What rights do they have? Our Father in heaven has created beautiful gifts -- not to kill, but to live." The Presbyterian Church (USA), he said, should "stop and take a stand and stop the killing. How long will the PC(USA) not take a stand for life?" Bolan said that most of the women he's spoken with who have aborted "feel the pain and ask God for forgiveness when that date rolls around. We as a church must extend the means of grace to those who have aborted. The PCUSA must take a stand that abortion is wrong and take a stand for life as a gift of God." He said that he and his wife Becky adopted a son, Daniel, from Romania. The possibility of adoption, Bolan said, was the "final stop before abortion" for Daniel's mother. Daniel, called to the microphone, urged the crowd to "end abortion." He was followed by his father, who encouraged the people in the audience to "take a stand and honor God by supporting life. Save the children in the womb." The next speaker, Terry Schlossberg, said that she was in Birmingham attending the General Assembly and missing "the granddaughter I have not yet seen." Schlossberg, who served as the executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life for 18 years before being named executive director of the Presbyterian Coalition last year, said her daughter and son-in-law had traveled to Russia to adopt an 18-month-old girl. She described the lengthy travel by plane, train and automobile they endured to get to a "remote part of Russia" in order to adopt Leera. Adoption, she said, was her chance for life. Schlossberg then gave a brief description of her involvement with the abortion issue, saying that she "caught the women's liberation fever, including the right to abortion, of the '60s. I proudly affirmed every woman's right to abortion, even if I didn't choose that myself. I saw it as a matter of justice." Her Presbyterian pastor at the time, she said, told her that "affirming a women's right to abortion was a thinking woman's position. And I wanted to be a thinking woman. I accepted the new science of the abortion movement that unborn children were globs of tissue that became human after birth. … This was no moral decision for me. Let each woman decide for herself. It was a subtle position for me." Years later, Schlossberg said, she began to realize that her "subtle position had changed. I no longer believed that abortion was good. In puzzlement, I did what my Bible study taught me to do. I searched the Scriptures," citing such verses as I Corinthians 6, Matthew 10, Romans 8, Psalm 139 and Luke 1, as well as the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. She said she also learned that the Presbyterian Church consistently spoke in opposition to abortion "to the middle of the 1960s." "If we do not find truth in what God reveals to us about ourselves as human beings," Schlossberg said, "we are bound to get it all wrong. Turning to the Scriptures is crucial to getting it right on these issues of life and death." This General Assembly, she said, has "an opportunity to restore faithfulness to the witness and ministry of the PCUSA regarding life. It would help restore the truth to our body and a faithful witness and ministry to the world that the Savior sends us into." |
||
Respond to this article |
||
| Home
· Archives
· The
Layman ·
PLC
Publications Presbyterian Lay Committee · Feedback · Links |
||