A CO Woman's Baby Was Cut Out of Her. Is Our Society That Bad?

I read a disturbing story recently about a woman who cut the baby out of a pregnant woman in Colorado. There are really awful headlines like this all the time. Often, I don't take the time to connect with the story and so these tragedies hardly even register - but this one really affected me. If I had seen this headline on a different day, I might not have taken the time to read the details and allow myself to be horrified by it, and it would have been just another story - nothing out of the usual, really, because bad things happen everywhere all the time.


On the other hand, I've been wondering recently whether our society is really all that bad. After all, we don't have outright orgies as part of our culture the way the Greeks or Romans did, or gladiator battles where we watch people die for sport, or child sacrifices the way the Canaanites did. Sure, you get the occasional wacko who shoots up a place, but those are few and far between and in no way celebrated by the mainstream culture. When you think of it that way, we seem pretty far off from an "as-it-was-in-the-days-of-Noah" society, where "the thoughts of men's hearts was only evil continually."

But I've come to realize evil in our society is actually so common that it is easy for the reality to go unnoticed. Unless something happens close to home, we usually don't feel directly threatened or affected by it. We just note the headline and move along, content that nothing egregious happened in our own backyard. How shameful!

Societal Standards

When I read God's law, I sense a certain presumption of decency on God's part. For example, there is not a single law for all the length of Genesis through Deuteronomy that deals with what to do if someone maliciously cuts a baby out of a pregnant woman. The closest you'll find is the following:

If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman's husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22-24)

God gave this command with the reasonable expectation that there may be occasional fistfights, even in a society where people knew the way of God and were trying to live it! Human nature just lends itself to quick tempers and bad decisions in-the-moment. And though this might be expected from time to time, it was not excused - God set up consequences for the injuries caused by such fights in verses 18-19 of the same chapter, but let's get back to the point.

To harm a pregnant woman on accident was a tragedy requiring severe punishment. To do so on purpose was unmentionable! It would require a level of depravity that had no place in a godly society, a situation that everyone would understand should never even come up because it is so contrary to the principles of the law.

We see that one should give "life for life" when a baby was unintentionally killed in the uproar of a fight. Taken on its own, this law tells us what to do in a specific situation and we can easily extend the logic to a more sinister scenario. But, if we search out understanding from the whole law of God, we will discover something very important: that God has a special regard for the lives of unborn children that goes beyond the usual requirement of the law.

Manslaughter vs. Murder: an Exception for the Unborn

In modern law, we use the word "manslaughter" to differentiate from murder in some cases. The distinction is mostly based on whether the person responsible intended to kill the person ahead of time or not. God's law, codified in writing over 3000 years ago, makes a similar difference:

He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. However, if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint you a place where he may flee. But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that he may die. (Exodus 21:12-14)

A man guilty of killing someone in a spur-of-the-moment fight was not automatically put to death! Neither would he go completely unpunished. Instead, he had the opportunity to live in what were called "Refuge Cities," where it would be illegal for the family of the deceased person to come and take his life. There are several technical points here that I'd like to delve into sometime, but for now you can think of this as a sort of open-air, no-bars prison. If the offender left before serving out his time there, the family was free to punish him with death for what he had done.

The take-away is that if you accidentally killed a man in a fight, without intending ahead of time to kill him, then there was a way for your life to be spared. But, as we've seen, if you accidentally killed an unborn child during a fight with someone else, then the punishment was "life for life," even though there was no premeditation involved!

Why the difference here in God's law? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it takes two people to fight - if you engage in a fight, you take your life into your own hands in some sense, slightly reducing the culpability of the other guy if he kills you. The unborn baby, on the other hand, is a completely innocent bystander. Throughout the bible, God is frequently credited with being a defender of the innocent, and I see this law as an incarnation of that principle.

But I'm going to put the discussion of the death penalty on hold here (I feel like I'm heaping up more articles for myself to write, which is a good thing, I suppose!) Let's resume the discussion about whether the society we live in is all that bad.

The Debate in Colorado

When this person in Colorado cut the unborn baby out of this woman's stomach, the child died, but the mother lived. The prosecutors were unsure for a while of what charges to bring against this woman:

Under Colorado law, essentially there is no way murder charges can be brought if it’s not established that the fetus lived as a child outside the body of the mother for some period of time. (Stanley Garnett, CO District Attorney)

This all happened a month ago. The medical examiner could not find evidence that the child was alive after being taken out of the woman, putting murder charges out of the question. In any case, I'm not altogether certain that murder would be the best description of what this woman was trying to do - according to another report, she showed up with the baby at a hospital claiming it was hers and trying to save its life. It seems more likely that she intended to steal the baby to keep for herself alive and it unexpectedly (to her, anyway) died in the process.

This is all quite bizarre and terribly tragic. To add insult to injury, these events have reopened the debate in Colorado as to what the rights of the unborn are. The phrase "terminate a fetus" is the nice way to say "kill an unborn child," and it disgusts me that people use these word games to detach their consciences from reality.

Is Society All That Bad?

We do not live in a godly society today, but one in which truly unspeakable things happen. These evils are so commonplace that we can easily just tune them out, write them off as something that happened far away, and go about our business as usual. Maybe if we all lived in Colorado, we would all be outraged over the discussion of whether an unborn child is a "person" that can be "killed" as opposed to simply a "fetus" or "tissue" that doesn't have a "life" of its own to be taken. Maybe if it happened close to us, or if we knew someone who knew the person this happened to, then we would all be grieving over it. But for most of us, it's just one more shocking headline in a sea of bad news that is so vast that it becomes tedious to read.

The reality is that we do have child sacrifices going on today: have not millions have been sacrificed to the god of personal convenience through abortion? And when it's normal for millions of people to have sex outside of marriage with multiple partners, is that really so different than the orgies that the Romans or Greeks had? Not to mention the epidemic of adultery for those who are married, or the serial divorce-and-remarriage that goes on today, or homosexuality. Our society is rife with cultural norms that God absolutely despises!

And this is the reason that we have so many heartbreaking headlines and senseless tragedies - because we do not allow the law of God to form the baseline of decency in our society. Instead, we routinely set deplorable standards in God's eyes. From time to time, we stop for a moment and marvel at how such a terrible thing could happen, not realizing that we have heaped it on ourselves for generations. I wish I could tell you to expect society to get better with time! That the steady march of civilization would deliver us from outbursts of violence! Instead, I have to tell you that we are really no better off for all of our advancement, and that God is going to bring wrath on the entire world because of these things.