The anti-abortion movement has been attempting to remake itself in recent years as a kinder, gentler cause more concerned with women’s health than with the apocalyptic warnings associated with the movement's more extreme fringes. The recent set of videos smearing Planned Parenthood by falsely alleging that the women’s health organization sells fetal tissue for profit are part of this trend.
Although the videos, produced by the so-called Center for Medical Progress, have prompted investigations in several states (none of which have turned up any wrongdoing) and even a congressional hearing this week, they are in fact the product of some of the most extreme anti-choice activists in the country. The group is run by a young and previously little-known activist, David Daleiden, but it appears to rely heavily on the knowledge and resources of its board member Troy Newman of Operation Rescue.
Newman, who now advises activists on how to harass abortion patients and providers in the hope of shutting down clinics, has a long history of championing the most extreme wing of the anti-choice movement.
His ideology is perhaps most clearly spelled out in “Their Blood Cries Out,” a book he published in 2000 and revised in 2003, that attempts to convince Christians to join the abortion “rescue” movement in order to absolve the nation of its “bloodguilt” for abortion and prevent God from destroying America in punishment.
Although “Their Blood Cries Out” is now out of print, it has had some influence among anti-abortion activists. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life wrote the foreword to the 2003 edition. Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion terrorist who killed abortion provider George Tiller after spending time with Operation Rescue, had a signed copy. (There are long passages in the book comparing Tiller to Adolf Hitler.)
“Their Blood Cries Out” is not written in focus-grouped, more moderate language that even activists like Newman are now attempting to use. Instead, it’s an Old-Testament-heavy tirade that calls for the execution of abortion providers, calls women who have abortions “murderesses” and warns of God’s impending judgment on the nation for legal abortion, a judgment that Newman says has already begun through calamities such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the AIDS epidemic.
Newman wrote the book with contributions from Cheryl Sullenger, his Operation Rescue colleague who spent time in prison in the 1980s for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.
Here are the six most terrifying passages of Newman’s tour de force:
Execute Abortion Providers
Newman explains that abortion providers and women who seek abortions bear “personal bloodguilt” for their actions, while the nation as a whole bears “community bloodguilt” for failing to stop them — the church through failure to win souls and the government through a failure to prosecute abortion as murder, as he says the Bible commands.
He illustrates the levels of “bloodguilt” with this chart:
Although he never explains exactly what he thinks the civil punishment for women who have abortions should be, Newman directly calls for the execution of “abortionists” as “convicted murderers” who are bringing God’s judgment on America:
When moms, dads, abortionists are added together, well over 100,000,000 people bear personal bloodguilt for at least one abortion. The doctrine of community bloodguilt found in Scripture further implicates the entire nation. The perpetrators are far too numerous and the bloodguilt has spread too far. We deserve God’s judgment.
In addition to our personal guilt in abortion, the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people. Instead, the act of abortion has been elevated to a “God-given right” and the abortionists canonized as saints. Consequently, the entire nation has the blood-red stain of the lives of the innocent upon its head.
He explains that the only way to purify the land is through atonement…or the “lawful execution of the murderers, which is commanded by God in Scripture":
The innocent blood of the New Covenant in Christ has the power to atone for all the innocent bloodshed from the beginning of time to the end, and to purify the whole earth - the land. Rejecting that innocent blood is to reject the only standard that is effective against innocent bloodshed, excluding the lawful execution of the murderers, which is commanded by God in Scripture.
… And Maybe Even The 'Murderesses' Who Have Abortions
While Newman never explicitly calls for the execution of women who have had abortions, as he does abortion providers, he makes very clear that he sees these women as equally culpable for the supposed crime.
He tells the story of a woman in California accused of paying two men $1,000 and some “sexual favors” to murder her husband. Both the woman and the men who executed the hit, he reports, received the same sentence. How, Newman asks, is this different from abortion?
There was no outpouring of public concern from the community declaring her a victim of society. There were no help centers set up to give aid to all future contract killers so that they might find alternatives to murdering their husbands. The churches did not welcome her on the condition that neither of the parties would discuss the crime. There was no legislation brought forward by the National Organization for Women to pardon her and all future murderesses. There was no sympathy publicly expressed for her — only the satisfaction that comes from witnessing justice.
Why, then, do we consider any differently the women who seek to hire killers to murder their pre-born children? Why the hesitancy to say that not only the mothers, but also the fathers who willfully abort their babies, are guilty of murder? Why is there such outrage expressed at the notion that those who know of the crime but do not intervene, like most of the churches in America, share a portion of the guilt?
Who holds the fathers, the mothers, the neighbors, the pastors, and the bystanders guilty? Who would dare?
God can! God does!
…
By comparing abortion directly to any other act of premeditated contract killing, it is easy to see that there is no difference in principle. However, in our society, a mother of an aborted baby is considered untouchable where as any other mother, killing any other family member, would be called what she is: a murderer.
'No Comfort' For Women Until They Admit To 'Murder'
In a chapter titled “Moms Who Murder,” Newman writes that while it may be “politically correct” not to tell a woman who has had an abortion that she is a murderer, that is the only way to lead her to “repentance”:
In our current social climate, it is acceptable to lay blame for abortion at the feet of the abortionists, the social liberals who encourage the abortions, and the law-makers who allow and even pay for them. But the mother is the one person we are not allowed to call guilty. Ironically, she is the one who needs most to see what she has done.
Even in the pro-life movement, rescuers, those who take direct action to save a life, want to call abortion murder, but they are hesitant to call the mother a murderer to her face for fear of offending her and the “politically correct” crowd. By confronting the woman with her sin, our objective is to get her to see the evil that has resulted from her actions. By withholding truthful confrontation from her, we prevent her from being brought to repentance and ultimate restoration.
He continues on the “contract killer” theme:
Those responsible for innocent bloodshed should not be excused or comforted in their sin, yet, as a society, women who have abortions are treated as victims and those who support them in the decision to kill are considered heroes who were willing to stand by their friends or family members during a time of crisis. In reality, the woman is the same as a contract killer, hiring out the murder of her defenseless child, and the supporter is a co-conspirator, aiding and abetting the crime. They believe that their charitable act of lending support will some how make up for their participation in murder. Until they can both face the fact that they bear responsibility for the murder of an innocent child and own up to it, there should be no comfort for them.
'Abortion Is A Sacrifice To Demons'
Newman writes that “in addition to murder, abortion is also a form of idolatry.”
In a chapter called "Baal is Alive and Well on Planet Earth," he explains that like Baal worshipers in the Old Testament, Americans are now engaged in “idolatrous child sacrifice.” Both, he says, are the brainchildren of Satan: “Throughout history the Enemy has been known to take the innocent blood of every boy or girl he can get, whether it is through Baal worship or abortion”
“Dead babies defile our land and God is furious. We must expect to suffer the same consequences as that of Old Testament Israel," he writes, reminding readers that said consequence was "complete annihilation.”
He continues:
The correspondence to today’s society is striking. Our American culture figuratively worships at the altar of Baal and Astoreth. It rabidly promotes and defends with religious fervor a corrupt lifestyle of illicit sex, then aborts the offspring that results, sacrificing them, as it were, upon the altar of “convenience as the sacrament of “Choice.”
The argument can logically be made that abortion is a sacrifice to demons. The evil spirits to which children were sacrificed in the Baal groves are probably the same ones hanging out down at the Planned Parenthood offices!
…
The nation is being ravaged by a horde of thieves and murderers. Our government school system has been invaded by Midianites who are razing our crops before the children have a chance to bear fruit. The Midianites are encamping all around us, desecrating our land with drugs, homosexuality, pornography, lewdness, foul language, anti-God legislation, prostitution, idolatry, and divorce.
He adds:
Abortionists and "safe sex" proponents are as the prophets of Baal and Ashteroth. Jezebel rules in Congress, Planned Parenthood, and in many of our churches ... Then, as now, sexual immorality leads to child killing. The spirit of Jezebel, embodied in the widespread practices of recreational sex and abortion, is prosperous here in the United States and the Baal/Ashtoreth trade -- as reflected in pornographic films, books, videos, TV, magazines and the Internet -- is big business
It's time, he writes, to "send the likes of Jezebel back to the pit of hell."
9/11 And AIDS Were God’s Warnings About Abortion
After concluding that "judgment for America is a foreseeable inevitability” because of legal abortion, Newman explores what that judgment might look like. He posits that God is already "warning this nation, preparing her for a day of reckoning” through everything from road rage to terrorist attacks to AIDS.
It is possible that America is already within the clutches of remedial judgment. One needs only to analyze the current societal dilemmas to see the hand of God moving upon our land. The historical record of the Bible shows that God chastens before He sends cataclysmic destruction.
Listing a parade of current "societal dilemmas," including the “drug epidemic,” “school shootings,” “unbridled pornography,” “divorce, marital infidelity, and rebellious children,” “terrible violence, from rape to road rage” and “unprecedented terrorist attacks,” Newman writes, “In all of these, it may be that God is showing that His hand of protection is being withdrawn.”
He has more solid evidence that disease and natural disaster are warnings from God:
There is good reason to believe that the root cause of droughts, floods, and wildfires is not global warming but God’s discipline on a rebellious nation stained with bloodguilt. AIDS, cancer, mutated antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other plagues meet the criteria for being judgments from God… Since Scripture tells us that God places wicked people to rule over nations that are in rebellion to Him, wicked leaders and ungodly Congressional officials are manifestly a judgment from the Lord.
(Newman has recently called the drought in California and other unfriendly "weather patterns" part of God's judgment for abortion.)
But what will the final judgment look like? He writes that "there can be no doubt" that God is preparing an "oppressor" to arrange for the “final and total destruction” of America. Possible God-sent adversaries, he speculates, are "Islamic jihadists," China, or “a world organization such as the pro-abortion United Nations."
If You Disagree, Enjoy Hell
Newman's message to "those who are unconvinced that abortion is wrong, unwilling to admit any responsibility, or refuse to lay down their lives for the cause of righteousness":
Those in that unrepentant state are unable to discern God's heart in this matter and will probably go to their grave blood-guilty, their souls corrupted with the innocent blood of murdered children. They can only look forward to the time when, at death, they will hear the innocent children howling their names in testimony against them, demanding vengeance.
