Last week, evangelist Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, used his public platform to speak in defense of the preborn. Graham wrote in a statement on Facebook, “An abortion is the killing of a child in the womb, intentionally ending a life.”
Graham’s post was in response to comments by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers comparing abortions to tonsillectomies, and suggesting that the former should be funded by taxpayers through Medicaid. Evers, who is pro-choice, told the Weekly Standard, “We need to have the Medicaid money be available for all people and restricting it because of a certain procedure, whether it’s a tonsillectomy or any other procedure, seems to me a foolhardy thing to do.” Under current Wisconsin law, Medicaid cannot directly fund abortions, as is the case with most states. Under the Hyde Amendment, federal funds are also banned from directly paying for elective abortions.
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Graham called Evers position “unbelievable,” and added, “Taxpayers paying for tonsil removal is not at all the same as paying for an abortion.” Pro-choice advocates have made claims similar to Evers’, suggesting that abortion is just like any form of surgery. Some legislators have even filed grotesque “satirical” bills supposedly to show how “unnecessary” and “invasive” pro-life laws are for women. With these publicity stunts, politicians attempt to argue that abortion should not require any unique regulation because abortion is simply a medical procedure.
In these impassioned defenses of euphemisms—“reproductive rights,” “terminating a pregnancy”—there is never any mention of the preborn baby. The presence of a unique, living human being with a beating heart is what makes abortion unlike any medical procedure. While medical care aims to preserve and restore health, abortion aims to kill a child in the womb, which is never necessary to save the life of the mother.
Graham points to this undeniable reality of preborn life in his Facebook post. In closing he wrote, “Far too many people who want to be governors, legislators, professors, and teachers in this nation have fallen prey to a culture of death philosophy. They are denying the worth of millions of children made in the image of God.” This is not the first time Graham has made a pro-life statement on his social media. Following the U.S. Senate’s failure to pass the 20-week abortion ban earlier this year, Graham wrote that the senators opposing the bill “voted against human rights, the right to be born in the first place.”
