The remarks made by a Presbyterian minister earlier this summer are gaining attention after she spoke about feeling God’s presence as she killed two of her preborn children in abortions.
Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters, a member of the Planned Parenthood’s clergy advocacy board, spoke at The Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist on July 9th, during which she spoke heatedly about abortion and wore a bright pink stole around her shoulders emblazoned with the Planned Parenthood logo. According to the Washington Post, in addition to being an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she is a professor of religious studies at Elon University, where she heads the Abortion and Religion project, and is “known as one of the country’s leading ethicists on abortion rights.”
Peters began her sermon by laughing about a trip to Texas, in which a mother was uncomfortable with Peters openly discussing abortion while children were present. “She turned to her other son, whispering in a stricken tone, ‘They’re talking about abortion! Make them stop!'” she said, laughing. “Talking about abortion makes many people profoundly uncomfortable… at dinner parties, in polite conversation with friends and family, and too often, in church.”
Yet, she complained, pro-life imagery can be more easily found. “Despite many people’s profound discomfort with abortion, images, messaging, and moralizing about abortion are ubiquitous in our culture,” she continued. “Talking fetuses! Aggressive bumper stickers, and saccharine billboards quoting scripture and invoking God’s wrath pave our streets and plaster our highways.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was “our” failure, she said, complaining that pro-life Catholics and evangelicals are the ones who talk most about abortion, therefore defining the terms of the debate. “Anti-choice Christians have so effectively shaped the abortion narrative in the U.S., that it often impacts how people think and feel about abortion, even among people who don’t go to their churches,” she said. “I call this, the ‘abortion imaginary.'”
Abortion, Peters argued, should not be seen as tragic, evil, or unjustifiable; the narrative has “colonized our minds, traumatizing many people with its toxic theology and shaping a culture of stigma and shame” surrounding child killing. She also bemoaned how many people have “internalized” the idea that abortion is a sin, and claimed that the Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion at all.
Proverbs 6 notes that “hands that shed innocent blood” are some of the “things the Lord hates.” Exodus 23:7 and Matthew 5:21 both condemn murder — the intentional taking of a human life. Numerous verses note the humanity of the preborn — one cited by Peters herself: Psalm 139:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
In Luke 1, the preborn John the Baptist “leaped” in his mother Elizabeth’s womb upon hearing Mary’s voice; in the book of Job, Job’s life is traced from the point of conception. Jeremiah 20:17 specifically states:
For he did not kill me in the womb,
with my mother as my grave,
her womb enlarged forever.
Still, instead of looking to abortion as something God sees as a sin, Peters used her own abortions as an example of something positive… which God smiles upon.
“I, too, feel that I am known by God in these ways, as a woman who has borne two children. I can affirm that I felt something sacred happening in my gestating body during those pregnancies,” she said. “I can also attest that I felt God’s presence with me as I made the decision to end two pregnancies and I felt no guilt, no shame, no sin.” She further added, “A forced pregnancy or birth is not holy.”
In reality, it is abortion which forcibly removes a preborn child from the womb of his or her mother, ending his or her life by often violent means such as suction, dismemberment, or lethal injection. And contrary to popular belief, human beings are capable of moral wrongdoing while feeling no guilt.
Yet as David Closson, Director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, noted in an interview with the Christian Post, this displays a disturbing mindset for a pastor, of all people, to hold.
“[I]f she really does feel that way, it would betray a conscience that has been seared, a conscience that no longer can hear the convicting voice of the Holy Spirit,” he said. “Guilt and shame, those are appropriate responses to doing things that are morally blameworthy. And if it’s true that she feels no guilt or no shame, that speaks to a conscience that has been seared, likely by decades of protesting and trying to convince herself that abortion indeed is not what it actually is, which is the intentional ending of a human life.”
