The Ambition That Destroys Children

Yesterday morning, I cradled my two-week-old son and read again the words of Pharaoh in Exodus 1:22: “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.”

There was a time when fathers like me cradled their sons close to their chest, their arms a barricade against barbarity. There was a time when cruel men entered their homes anyway and battered those arms till they broke. There was a time when mothers and sisters wept and screamed. There was a time when baby boys floated face down in the Nile.

But then my mind turned toward a different kind of Nile, a blood-red river running through America and so many other nations.

For there is a time when men like me walk with wives like mine into buildings and say, “Please take care of this for us.” There is a time when doctors enter the realm where God knits life in order to sever the thread mid-stitch. There is a time when our world’s unseen river runs red with the blood of a million children. Yes, there is a time, and that time is now.

For all the differences between Pharaoh’s infanticide and today’s abortion, both end in a heap of dead children, their bodies discarded like trash. And much of the time, both arise from the same dark impulse: ungodly ambition.

Pharaoh’s Ungodly Ambition

Once, the mighty nation of Egypt was glad to give shelter to Jacob and his sons. Pharaoh received the patriarch’s blessing and offered his family the best of the land (Genesis 47:5–7). A man stood between the two peoples, Hebrew by birth, Egyptian by career: Joseph.

But in time, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). He did not know the man who once saved his nation from starvation; he only knew that man’s many children and nephews and nieces, those Israelites who had “multiplied and [grown] exceedingly strong” (Exodus 1:7).

Other rulers, recognizing the strength of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, made covenants and enjoyed the blessings God promised to the friends of his people (Genesis 12:3). But this Pharaoh was more autocrat than diplomat. His ambitions were too big for peace.

“Come, let us deal shrewdly with them,” he reasoned, “lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land” (Exodus 1:10). Pharaoh had cities to build, and he needed slaves. Pharaoh had a kingdom to expand, and he needed submissive subjects. Pharaoh had a throne to protect, and he needed no rivals.

First he tried harsh servitude, but Hebrew children kept coming (Exodus 1:11–12). Next he commanded the Hebrew midwives to commit murder for him, but they refused, and Hebrew children kept coming (Exodus 1:15–17). So he poured the poison of his ambition down the throats of his people: “Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile’” (Exodus 1:22). Kill the boys. Kill every last one.

America’s Ungodly Ambition

Of course, many pro-choice advocates would object to comparisons between infanticide like Pharaoh’s and abortion like America’s. But for those who believe the child inside the woman is just as human as the child without, the differences are smaller than they may seem. A few months and a few inches may separate the baby in utero from the baby in his mother’s arms, but he’s the same baby.

“Pharaoh thought he was killing a curse; he was in fact murdering a blessing.”

More than that, infanticide then and abortion now often share the same pharaonic spirit. Not always, but often enough, the boys and girls who die by the abortionist’s forceps die as the victims of ungodly ambition. In their book The Story of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas show how this ambition has engulfed both women and men, both abortionists and their allies, in our nation.

WOMEN AND MEN

Many women enter the abortionist’s office conflicted. Even “many writings regarded as pro-choice reveal pro-life yearnings,” such as the woman who wrote after an abortion,

Science tells me
Inside my bones
You are still whispering. (The Story of Abortion, 4)

But it’s also true that Lawrence Lader, the “father of abortion rights,” convinced many that “no woman could be free unless she had absolute control over her fertility.” Certainly Betty Friedan, a leader of second-wave feminism, was convinced, and she and others worked to make “abortion the centerpiece of feminism” (294), or what Lader called “‘The Final Freedom’ on the road to female autonomy” (292).

Lader published his book Abortion in 1966. In the sixty years since, women have been told time and again to foster ambitions bigger than motherhood, which inevitably casts children as enemies of feminine success. Some women swallow the agenda whole and shout their abortion; many others listen more quietly yet still choose autonomy over children.

But alongside the women who don’t want to be mothers are men who don’t want to be fathers. How many women, deeply unsure about what to do, have gotten an abortion under pressure from a boyfriend or husband? Back in the 1830s, a young New York pastor “noted that some New Yorkers blamed women for abortion, but it’s usually men who ‘offer physicians large sums of money [to fix] the problem’” (76). Men today, with ambitions of their own, continue to throw money and manipulation at unplanned pregnancies.

Surely, if every man in America esteemed fatherhood, if he received the title “Dad” as better than “President” or “CEO,” thousands more children would live beyond the womb each year. But male ambition also holds a blade.

ABORTIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES

In the mid-nineteenth century, Anna Lohman, known as Madame Restell, earned enough money aborting babies to spend “$20,000 per year on advertising (the equivalent of $600,000 now)” (116). A century later, abortionist Inez Burns became rich enough to invest “nearly half of her revenue in payoffs and bribes: $6,000 per week to downtown officials, $12,000 per month to San Francisco police, $5,000 ‘to every politician running for office’” (250). Though both women spent time in prison for their crimes, abortions proved lucrative enough to keep killing children upon their release.

Even today, when abortionists perform their services under the auspices of the law, abortion is a business with ambition. When an undercover video in 2015 recorded a senior Planned Parenthood doctor describe the correct ways to “crush” an infant to preserve his or her body parts for research, people like Terrisa Bukovinac woke up to what she called “the abortion industrial complex” (399).

And the complex is a large one, involving not just abortionists but also their allies. When abortion was illegal across the country, newspapers still “benefited greatly” from the advertising of women like Restell — as did the many politicians and police who took bribes along the way (111, 231). Such payoffs became obsolete when Roe hit the books in 1973, and they remain so even after Dobbs, since a woman wanting an abortion can travel across state lines if need be (often with expenses paid by her employer). But the benefits of being pro-abortion still extend beyond the abortionists. Many politicians, for example, build their ambitious platforms by promising as much freedom to abort as possible.

Bigger Vision

When we set the modern world next to ancient Egypt, resemblances emerge. No, America and other nations don’t have a singular madman commanding us to rip our neighbors’ children out of their arms. Nevertheless, a pharaonic spirit bristles beneath our ambition for career, autonomy, sexual freedom, money, office. And behind those ambitions is a trail of dead children every bit as real as the Hebrew boys in the Nile.

What did Pharaoh need? And what does our guilty nation need? Two things: a bigger vision and better blood.

We need a bigger vision. Pharaoh “did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), but, oh, that he would have known him! If he had, he would have known that Egypt owed its existence to the very Hebrews he so feared. He would have known that God once blessed Egypt for blessing his people — and that he was ready to do so again (Genesis 12:3). In his bloodlust, Pharaoh thought he was killing a curse; he was in fact murdering a blessing.

Doesn’t abortion share the same narrow vision? This undesired child looks like a curse, an intruder, a lifelong interruption. And abortion promises rescue. But as with Pharaoh, so with us: The thing we think will undo us is the very thing meant to do good to us. Those who abort children are like men who trample unopened gifts, children who burn their inheritance, women who flush jewels down the toilet, Pharaohs who slay their friends. Babies, like Joseph in Egypt, come to do us good.

Indeed, children are the friends, not the enemies, of the best ambitions. “Let your children live” is not a call to sacrifice ambition; it’s a call to get a bigger one. In the beginning, Adam and Eve received an ambition far larger than Pharaoh’s: Subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing. And how would they do that? Only by obeying the command that came before: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).

Though we live in the garden no longer, having children and loving children remains one of the best ways to make the biggest difference with your life. In Scripture, children are houses that last, arrows that win wars, crowns that adorn our aged heads. So let the Pharaohs of the world build as ambitiously as they want: The result will be a shack that falls swiftly. But the lowliest mom and dad who believe God’s promise are laying the stones of a cathedral.

Yes, we need a bigger vision. But we also need something more.

Better Blood

Yesterday morning, I cradled my two-week-old son and thought about a different boy. For there was a time when a boy was hunted by a Pharaoh-like king yet escaped. There was a time when that boy became a man and was betrayed for ambition. There was a time when the envy and fear of many cried out for his blood. There was a time when that blood ran from his hands like a river.

And there is a time, now and always, when that blood is enough to forgive every woman who has walked into an abortion clinic, every man who has pressured her to go there, every doctor who has fulfilled their desires, everyone who has benefited as a result — and all of us who have not aborted but have still prized ungodly ambition over children. Whatever blood stains our hands, the blood of Jesus Christ can wash us clean.