Redemption & the Impact of Abortion — Dale Eby — Ep. 197

So our topic today is one of our heavier topics and culturally charged. We're going to be thinking about abortion. And to do that, our guest with us today is Dale Eby. And Dale works for Christian Ministry, basically a call-in ministry. So we're just going to start with some of what he hears from people who are calling into this ministry. So yeah, if you could give us, I don't know, a snapshot, I guess, of some of the things you hear, what motivates, what do you hear from people? So I do take billboard calls on a regular basis. And those things are a variety of questions, a variety of feelings behind those questions. In regards to the abortion issue, there are people who are calling because they've had abortions, or they are anticipating an abortion, and they want a second opinion.

It's interesting that they would call a Christian hotline to get an opinion if they're not a Christian. So a man called me and said that he wants an abortion, but he sees his girlfriend doesn't want an abortion. And he's fearful that if she doesn't have an abortion, that his responsibility to her. But he called to get a second opinion, even though he's not a Christian.

So somewhere in his spirit, there was still something wrong with what was going on. A lot of people call and ask the question, "How do I feel about somebody and whether they'll go to hell or not if they have an abortion?" We see there that there's something that God has placed within us that says it's wrong to take life. When four people call in eight days, which happened, who had abortions and gave the trauma of that, I started to sit up and take note.

When the first one called and said, "I had an abortion when I was 16 years old, and now I'm 24, but I've never told anybody," I wondered, "Well, why did you call me and tell me now?" But again, God didn't make us to keep secrets.

And so that had to come out. And even though she was a professing Christian and had asked God for forgiveness, it still had to come out to someone to help work through that. And so we're able to lead her through prayer of repentance for that and to give her a sense of direction as to where to go in her life amidst that mistake that she knew she made and that she didn't ever want to make it again. Another caller from Washington, D.C. asked if we ever get calls from people who have had abortions.

And I said, "We do." And as she progressed in her discussion, I said, "You wouldn't happen to be one of those that is struggling with that, would you?" And she says, "Yes, I am." And this is a very traumatic thing for her. The third one that called said that she's just leaving Planned Parenthood presently and that she knows it's a mistake that she's just had an abortion. And so she went into the Planned Parenthood through a crowd of protesters or people with signs saying it's wrong to get an abortion.

But she put all that aside and went in and had an abortion and then came out and realized this thing was wrong. And now driving home, calls to say, "What can I do? I've made a huge mistake in my life." The fourth one said, "I made this mistake, and I have dreams every night, and it haunts me. And those dreams are such that I see my baby being held in Satan's arms, and it's traumatic." Now, for me, when a baby passes, they go into the arms of Jesus.

But for her, she was going through all this mental anguish with this whole thing. And she was actually seeing this baby as having been thrown away and now in the arms of Satan and was just wondering how she gets rid of these nightmares and all of that.

Does that give you a little picture? So those are just four in an eight-day period. So yeah, I guess if we could frame a little bit how you respond to some of those. I mean, you mentioned we were talking beforehand, your ministry does not have any billboards specifically addressing abortion, but it's clearly identified as Christian and conservative Christian by content. And so probably most people calling in are not going to be at all surprised to find out that you think that abortion is wrong, but they're still willing to call with those kinds of confusions. What kind of help or picture do you try to give in that situation? Yes. And so as we know right now, with the Supreme Court ruling, this has brought it to the forefront again.

And people are looking at Christians, especially right-wing, as being people who are influencing this Supreme Court ruling. And we have the tremendous privilege of saying we are not politically involved. As an Anabaptist, that's a tremendous thing to be able to tell people because they view Christians as running the show for the right-wings. I tell them that we are interested in getting at the heart of people and asking, "What is going on with inside of you?" And that there's a separation of church and state.

And that changes the tone of the conversation. But the person that's calling and saying, "I am angry at Christians, and I want this wave of Christian rightists to stop what they're doing," I have the opportunity to say to them, "God loves you, and God has a plan for your life. And I just care about who you are as a being. Who are you really as a person?" For the Christian that calls who's gone through the abortion and who's been traumatized, I encourage them to get with another Christian woman and share those feelings that keep coming up because Satan wants to keep them in a superstructure of guilt about that. We know we take our sins to the foot of the cross, and we can find complete forgiveness.

Satan doesn't just want us to sin. He wants to keep us in that superstructure of guilt so that somehow we're ineffective. If we can realize that he's taken our sins away, we are made whiter than snow, our sins are taken as far as the east is from the west, we're on our way to rising above that failure and allowing God to make us a better person because of where we have failed. So I think the encouragement is to show people the scriptures like Psalm 139, where it speaks about him knowing us in our mother's womb, Jeremiah 1, where Jeremiah was known in his mother's womb, how that God has made each one of us unique and special and to value life.

I think that's something I try to do is encourage people to value that there has been a conception and that that's a miracle and to caution against resisting what has just happened. I step back for a moment to you talked about as an Anabaptist Christian, not wanting to be involved with politics. I mean, I guess specifically, does that mean you don't identify or wouldn't participate in efforts to influence laws on abortion or influence who's in the Supreme Court? Well, that's a good question because there are many that even in our Anabaptist circles would think that we need to put some pressure on. I'm convinced that the laws change every four years based on administrative personnel and that that's not a lasting solution.

And that it doesn't matter if the laws are all right, there still is going to be the problem of evil and suffering and sin, abortion, whatever it is. We go back to when the temperance movement was in the early 1920s. The reality was that there were still people out there in the woods making moonshine no matter what the law said.

And when we get involved politically, we're just looking at a surface issue instead of getting what's really behind. What's really behind this thing of abortion? The reality is there's been immorality there in many cases. I think the percentage of abortions with single people is much greater than the percentage of people who have abortions who are married.

And so the reality is there's been something else that's broken down at a moral level before it came to the question, "Should I abort or shouldn't I abort?" And I get people who call and say, "Well, my girlfriend's body isn't mature enough yet to handle this child," or, "We're not financially able to bear the burden of a child," or, "This is going to mess up my college education. This is going to mess up my career." Those are real questions, but let's go back and ask the real question. What is life all about? Is there a moral standard that needs to be abided by, or are we just going on at our own rate? Not in every case, but one of those frequent issues is the issue of abortion comes up because you don't have the Christian standard of sexuality, whereas sexual intercourse is within marriage, committed marriage.

But then at the same time, you talk about valuing life. Once life is here, that life is to be valued regardless of what the circumstances were that led to it. The heartbreaker for me is when a parent forces their daughter to get an abortion because she's not married or she's underage. And a girl 13, 14 that calls me and says that she's being forced to have an abortion, she knows it's wrong.

Her dad's a political figure or he's maybe even a leader in their church. I had that already. To save his face, forcing a child, a young girl, to do this with an impact that I know is going to become more clear as she goes into womanhood. Just like the 24-year-old that called and said, "At 16, I had an abortion," and she was holding that for those eight years, never telling anyone, does that say what's going to happen in the future as she becomes a woman? I've had women 20 years after the fact crying about this. It's giving the trauma of this. There's something inside that is just reeling against doing this deed. It's a short-term fix with long-term consequences.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and those are hard stories, especially when it's pressure. And to think about the kind of hypocrisy that comes when it's pressure to a parent wants to save their image or even their religious or Christian image. They don't want the baby that's in their mind brings shame to them or their family. Totally opposite of a redemptive response. So yeah, with all of those difficult stories, what is a redemptive response or how do you encourage somebody to find redemption in those different circumstances? Does it help to realize that scripture does not have a category of one sin being worse than another? Does it help to realize that we all are sinners? That I have lied and lying takes people to hell as well.

And so for this person to realize that we all are flawed human beings, is that identifying with them and helping them to take courage in moving on and that God loves you and God has a plan for you? No, it wasn't right. We recognize that. But we know that God can bring something good out of our mistakes, beauty out of ashes, and that we need to move on. Life is for moving on, not looking back except to learn the lessons.

But moving on and saying, "God has something beautiful in your life, and don't count yourself as being a wasted piece because of this experience." Whether you're the one who's going through it or whether somebody looking on not to see this as something unique. Brings its own kind of pain, but it's not unique. Sin is a human problem of any sort, and redemption is a divine solution. Thank you for joining us for this episode, and thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.