One thing that the Stand for Life organization makes very clear on their website is that they believe everyone is created in the image of God.

Further, the main tenant of Christian belief is that their god is perfect. It’s pretty much what they accept on faith, but trying to find a Bible passage that states God’s perfection is a bit harder. This is the best one I could find:

This God—his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him. – Psalm 18:30

So let’s assume the Christian belief that God is perfect is true, and that the belief that God created all of us in his image is also true.

Logically, if a perfect god makes a copy of himself, we’d be another god, not a human. But if you go around stating you’re a god, people will either label you as a loon, or a blasphemer. So obviously we’re not supposed to take the “in his image” bit literally. So let’s go with a figurative approach and assume he’s creating humans that at least share his “perfection” and see where that goes.

Right away I can see numerous things that make humans imperfect. Medically and morally, we have so many faults we have to go to church to pray for our health and ask for our forgiveness. So no, we’re not perfect.

But let’s look at the issue of abortion, which this week’s sign is obviously referring to.

Do you know who performs the highest number of abortions in the U.S.? It’s not Planned Parenthood. Not even close. Planned Parenthood performs over 300,000 abortions a year.

It used to be accepted that 20-30% of pregnancies ended up with a miscarriage. But’s that’s only true for pregnancies the woman knows about. It turns out that over 2 out of 3 pregnancies end up as a miscarriage, with about half of them happening before the woman is even aware she’s pregnant.

It’s hard to find miscarriage statistics, but we can extrapolate. In 2021 there were 3,664,292 births. That means there were over 7 million miscarriages.

So why is Stand for Life concerned about what Planned Parenthood does when God is killing 7 million babies every year? (And if God is so pro-life, were the nearly 7 million deaths from Covid-19 really necessary?)

Worse, God is killing babies that there is a good chance the woman would like to take care of. It makes no sense at all. God is supposed to be love, yet he either deprives the woman of the pregnancy before she’s even aware of it, or even worse, he lets her get pregnant, and then kills her child.

Doesn’t seem like a perfect or loving god to me.

So why do so many embryos abort? Usually for genetic abnormalities. A few gene mutations each generation are what allowed us to evolve from slime to humans over millions of years. But too many mutations in one generation and we don’t work.

Women’s bodies are smart enough to have some quality control built in and when an embryo is created with too many defects, it is discarded, much like a widget made on an assembly line.

Only with humans, being the complicated beings that we are, there is a lot that can go wrong during the assembly process as atoms are turned into molecules, molecule into cells, cells into organs, until finally, we are a fetus that somewhat resembles our human form. But even at 7-8 weeks, we’re still pretty much identical to a mouse.

So it’s no wonder that over 70% of the time, the project is scrapped because something went wrong.

But sometimes, things go really wrong and the project doesn’t get scrapped.

Ectopic pregnancies, for example. This is when the fertilized egg attaches in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus. The uterus is designed to grow eggs into babies. The fallopian tube is designed to pass eggs into the uterus. Eggs are much smaller than babies if you haven’t figured out that part yet, and when an egg tries to grow into a baby in an area designed only for eggs, the woman’s life is in danger. Without an abortion, she will die.

But right wing Christians get so fanatical about abortion, they keep attempting to make laws to make abortion illegal under any circumstance, even when medically necessary to save the mother’s life. It is not pro-life to let the mother die when the egg will never make it into a baby. (It is also not pro-life to support the death penalty, or support the right for everyone to conceal carry semi-automatic weapons, but that’s a sermon for another week.)

It is also not pro-life to force babies being born to mothers who don’t desire to become a mother, for example, ten-year-olds who were raped. It is immoral and hypocritical to force a child to become a mother, possibly destroying the life of the mother so that a precious egg can be saved.

If you truly believe that an egg, or a zygote is so precious that it’s life must be spared, then I hope you’re able to subsist on drinking water alone, because everything else you put in your mouth was created by the same complex set of chemical reactions that creates humans.

It’s chemistry folks. There is no god that’s up in the heavens dictating our lives and creating all of us. Once you realize that, you can go about taking care of your own life and stop trying to butt into others.

Don’t want to go to a drag show? Then don’t go to a drag show. Don’t want to be gay? Then by all means, don’t be gay. Don’t like abortion, then damn it! Don’t have an abortion!

See how easy that is? Now can we all just get along without telling everyone else how to live their lives?