Indifference Is Still Murder
Last weekend, Abolitionists Rising came to Boston for the “We Will Be Heard” mission. Christians came from across the country to preach the gospel, hold signs, distribute literature, march through the streets, and publicly confront the evil of abortion in our biggest city. AND… it was a tremendous blessing for us to have even a small part in it.
On Friday evening, there was a public lecture. On Saturday, abolitionists carried the truth into the crowded streets around Faneuil Hall. There was preaching, singing, praying, marching, and public witness in a city that is knee-deep in the blood of infants. Boston has heard nearly every conceivable voice on every conceivable issue, but last weekend, the voices of our unborn neighbors were finally heralded in the streets.
The event was called “We Will Be Heard,” which is a fitting name since the children being murdered are too small to be heard. Their mouths are too small to testify. Their cries do not penetrate the womb, which doubles as an execution chamber. They cannot organize a march, hire a lawyer, call the police, or beg the church for help. If they are going to be heard, someone else, us, must open our mouths for them.
And that brings us to the sixth commandment.
“You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13).
The Hebrew word translated “murder” is רָצַח, rātsaḥ, and it does not prohibit every taking of human life. Scripture recognizes capital punishment, just warfare, and lawful self-defense. So, this commandment is not talking about the lawful taking of life, but the unlawful kind. It safeguards and protects the image of God in man, which was earlier established in Genesis 9, where God said to Noah: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man” (Genesis 9:6).
From the earliest pages of Scripture, we learn that human life is sacred because human beings bear God’s image. That image is not stamped upon us when we take our first breath, receive a birth certificate, become viable, develop self-awareness, or become useful to society. God knows and forms His children in the womb. David says, “You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). John the Baptist leaped for joy while still in Elizabeth’s womb, and Luke called him a “baby,” using the same Greek word he later uses for the newborn Christ. The fertilized egg in the womb is not a potential human being. It is a human being with tremendous God-given potential.
And our culture is killing these children on an industrial scale.
In 2025, an estimated 1,126,000 clinician-provided abortions occurred in the United States. That number does not include abortions obtained outside the clinical reporting system, like with the morning-after pill. To put that into context, with more than 50 years of so-called “pro-life” organizations existing, there have been no decreases in abortions. It has increased and even become something you can do at home with a DIY infanticide kit. Because of this, more than 4,000 children every day are murdered through this demonic practice. That is the size of your entire family after seven generations, which means what will take you, your children, and five other generations to produce will be murdered in a single 24-hour period. About 128 every hour. More than two every minute.
While we slept last night, children died. While we ate breakfast, children died. While we drove to church, sang our hymns, adjusted the thermostat, and greeted friends, children died.
And without getting into the gory details of what happens during the various kinds of abortions, if you do any amount of research on it, you will understand that this is not a highbrow, honorable way to die. This is not the overly humane lethal injection administered to criminals. This is murder on a level that will cause most of us to vomit if we think about it for more than half a second. And it is being perpetrated, unrestrained, by licensed serial killers on the littlest members of our society.
Now, we should be clear. Abortion is not evil simply because it is bloody. Many surgeries are bloody, and they save lives. Abortion is evil because the blood being shed belongs to an innocent human being as a result of terminating them. A child does not become more or less human according to his size, location, dependence, development, or ability to feel pain. The sixth commandment does not say, “You shall not murder people who are large enough for you to consider worthy of protection.” It says, “You shall not murder.”
AND… it would be easy for us to try to direct all of the guilt to the abortion clinics. It would be easy to point at the abortionist, the politicians, the activists, the mother, the father who paid for it, and everyone else whose hands are directly involved. And, yes, their guilt is real. Scripture recognizes that some sins are more heinous than others. Directly killing a child is not morally identical to failing to think about that child.
But the sixth commandment does not merely forbid driving the knife into your neighbor’s chest. It also requires us to use lawful means to preserve our neighbor’s life.
The Westminster Larger Catechism says the sixth commandment requires “all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others.” It also says the commandment forbids “the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life.”
In other words, the commandment doesn’t merely ask, “Did you kill someone?” It also asks, “What did you do when someone else was being killed?”
For instance, if you saw a man being murdered in the street and stood idly by doing nothing, could you congratulate yourself because you were not holding the smoking revolver? If you saw a cashier being held at gunpoint and refused to call the police, warn anyone, seek help, or render any conceivable aid because you were too cowardly or callous to get involved, could your conscience be clean? Would you have no guilt?
You may not be able to tackle the gunman. Wisdom does not require reckless heroics. But love requires that you do whatever is lawfully within your power. The inability to do everything does not excuse the refusal to do anything.
Solomon says, “Deliver those who are drawn toward death, and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Surely we did not know this,’ does not He who weighs the hearts consider it?” (Proverbs 24:11–12).
We cannot say we did not know.
We know that more than one million children are being killed every year. We know where the clinics are. We know what the pills do. We know what the suction machine removes. We know what the politicians celebrate. We know what the corporations fund. We know what the culture demands.
And yet we can go entire days without thinking about it.
We can discuss sports for hours but cannot pray for the holocaust of infants for a mere five minutes. We know the injury report, the trade rumors, and the playoff standings, but we don’t spend a minute thinking about how we can get involved or how we can end this tragedy forever.
We can become furious over taxes, gas prices, elections being rigged, traffic issues, bad cell phone service, and someone saying something stupid on the internet, while more than four thousand children are carried into eternity every day without the slightest uptick in our blood pressure.
We scroll past the photographs because they are upsetting to us. We avoid the videos because we do not want them ruining our evening. We refuse to look squarely at the brutality because the truth might make demands upon us.
So we live like this is someone else’s problem, someone else’s mission, someone else’s ministry. Someone else can stand outside the clinic. Someone else can preach in the street. Someone else can support and persuade mothers to keep their children. Someone else can confront the fathers who cheer it on or do nothing to stop it. Someone else can adopt. Someone else can give. Someone else can speak. Someone else is just another word for complicity.
Unlike Nazi Germany, there are no cattle cars passing conspicuously beneath our windows, but there are Amazon packages containing abortion pills being delivered to our neighborhoods. There are no smokestacks from ovens spreading our neighbors’ ashes across our midday skies, but there are clinic dumpsters, laboratory containers, blood-soaked instruments, and “medical waste bags” from more than a million missing children every year.
And we have learned to live normally in the midst of the greatest mechanized and industrialized slaughter of human life in all of human history.
Now, I am absolutely not saying that we bear the same guilt as the serial abortionist. We do not. But many of us must confess the guilt of indifference. We have not killed with our own hands, but we have prioritized our comfort with our silence. Not everyone in this room has scheduled an abortion, but we have scheduled our entire lives with calendars too busy to hear the cries of all the children being thrown away.
That is the respectable, modern, and even Christian way of violating the sixth commandment. Knowing the good we ought to do, doing nothing, and, as James 4:17 says, that is sin!
May God break our hearts over this. May He forgive us for the years we barely noticed. May He forgive our cowardice, our coldness, our excuses, our love of comfort, and our preference for a quiet life over a faithful one.
And may that grief move us toward lawful, peaceful, courageous Christian action to abolish this evil.
Let us repent together by asking God to forgive us and asking God to direct us on what we should do, both as a church and as individuals.
