Attention Word Slingers readers: Beginning December 11, 2019, all posts will be available at BaptistMessenger.com. Thank you for reading Word Slingers!

I know several women who have had an abortion, each of whom have regretted their decision and found forgiveness in Christ Jesus. Without exception, I feel an attitude of sympathy and compassion for women who seek abortion, as many are bullied into the fateful decision by guys, lies and a culture that presents abortion as a way to erase a problem.

Meanwhile, I feel red-hot disdain for abortion doctors and, more so, the very abortion industry, making possible surgical and chemical abortions on demand. This week, the leader among that abortion industry, Planned Parenthood (PP), was exposed for the gruesome practice of harvesting and selling body parts, so-called fetal tissue, from aborted babies.

This practice, which PP contends is legal and defensible, is a moral outrage. The United States Congress can and is investigating them for this grizzly practice, which is only proper, seeing as hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars go to support PP each year.

Now, PP officials will try to make you think taxpayer dollars go to support their more politically-correct services, such as cancer health screens. But don’t let them fool you. Money in any organization is fungible. To say those tax dollars don’t pay for abortion is like saying to someone in a contaminated swimming pool, those dangerous chemicals are only on one end of the pool.

Taxpayer money is what keeps Planned Parenthood propped up, and it’s time for them to lose public funding. For any reported good they do, those services to the public can be handled by more reputable groups, localities and entities. The nation’s largest abortion provider has survived too long on your tax dollars and mine.

Thinking about the largest issue of abortion as a whole, here are three prayer points for Christians and others whose consciences have been shocked by this recent video expose:

  1. We pray that the hearts of people involved in the abortion industry can change (as we saw with Abby Johnson);
  2. We pray that the supply of abortion in America would end, with laws and culture ending abortion-on demand; and
  3. We pray that the demand for abortion would end, as women in a crisis pregnancy would know they can rely on churches and communities to help them financially, spiritually and relationally, to give the child birth.

Planned Parenthood is the flagship of the culture of death in America. The Church, meanwhile, is the flagship of the culture of life. Together we pray this moment of outrange will lead to an awakening moment in which every life—born and unborn—is valued.