Outside the coastal town of Huanchaco, Peru is a 500 year old burial ground full of children’s bones. The children belonged to the ancient Chimú people of western Peru, and were buried along with llamas or alpacas. Both the animals and the children - who were between the ages of five and fourteen - had one consistent characteristic: an uninterrupted, systematic slice across the sternum. This was done (most likely) so that the child’s heart could be removed. After unearthing the two-hundred and sixty-ninth child there remained no question for the archaeologists: these children were intentionally killed and offered along with the animals as a human sacrifice to appease their gods. According to National Geographic it is the largest child sacrifice find in world history.

The Bible says in the book of Romans chapter 1 that we all - every single human being - knows there is a God. From looking around at all that has been made, humans are able to deduce that there is a Being with invisible attributes that created all the nature we can see. We are therefore, without an excuse for unbelief. Romans 1 goes on to say that we don’t want to know this truth so we suppress it with all of our might. Rather than worship the Creator we worship what has been created and we do this because we can’t help it; we were made to worship something. And the act of worship is no longer physically bowing down before a stone statue as in the past. Worship comes from the heart, and we will worship what we love. As St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo has said: “In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.”

quieter than the dead

Archaeologists have recorded events of human sacrifice going back for millennia and for many reasons. It’s possible that the leaders of the Chimú culture that sacrificed their children because they believed the moon was a god named Si or Shi, and controlled the weather.

In scripture, Molech, or Moloch was the name of the false god the Canaanites worshipped and gave their children to to be burned. The tragedy is, God’s people wanted so much to be like the Canaanites that they practiced the same idolatry even though the Lord strictly forbade it:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.

Leviticus 20:1-5 (See also: 1 Kings 11:7, 2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 32:35, and Leviticus 18:21)

We are shocked at the Chimú and other child-sacrificing cultures, but there are ways in which our culture is much worse. We have ultrasound technology that helps us see what takes place during an abortion and yet we perform them anyway. Second, the way in which we destroy our children through dismemberment and extraction at a stage when the baby can feel pain is more barbaric than a cut to the sternum. Third, the amount of child deaths in the United States from abortion is in the tens of millions; much more than the worldwide totals of child sacrifice among ancient civilizations. We have a country filled with millions of professing Christians that could speak out about abortion, but are as quiet as the children buried in the Peruvian sand. Lastly, we have the written Word of God, the Bible to convict us of our wrongdoing; something the pagan cultures did not have. It seems to me, sadly, that there has never been another society like ours: one that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and yet intentionally murders its most vulnerable people every day of every year.

whoring after ourselves

And for what? Why do we whore after the ability to kill our unborn? To what god are we sacrificing our future generations? Answers to these questions are myriad, but I would offer that one reason we lust after “reproductive freedom” so passionately is because we believe that we have the freedom to rule ourselves, and we desperately love that belief. I say “desperately” because that fervor of faith, that desperate-ness is what’s holding down the truth about God. Human being’s faith in their imagined autonomy is what’s suppressing the truth that God IS. We are exchanging the love of the one for love of the other. Autonomy is our American Molech.

We are the same as the ancient pagans only rather than a stone statue for Molech, our Molech is within us. Our stone statue is our “freedom of the will” to do whatever we want with our bodies; and the offering we give in order to truly feel free is our very own children. The gruesome truth is, in the eyes of those who promote it, the more abortions that take place, the more widespread and available it is, the more free women are. To restrict access to abortion is to oppress women.

Some examples of what we truly love:

“…legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course…”

Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her written dissent, Gonzales vs. Carhart, April 2007

"I've tried my very best to live a life of my own making, and not just a series of events that happened to me. But one that I could stand back and look at and recognize my handwriting all over. Sometimes messy and scrawling, sometimes careful and precise. But one that I had carved with my own hand. And I wouldn't have been able to do this without employing a woman's right to choose."

Michelle Williams, at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards

“We are a proud abortion provider. We believe that abortion is health care, and we believe, fundamentally, that self-determination begins with being able to control your own body and freedom begins with being able to control your own body.”

Alexis McGill Johnson, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, December 2020

This is the 48th year that we are marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and each year we have grown in our idolatrous worship of the “will” of the woman. Looking around at nature, however, and reading the book of Romans should convict us of three things: that there is a God, that He is holy, and that we are not. The blood of our sons and daughters offered up on the alter of an imagined autonomy should also convict us. Autonomy, like all other created things, is just another false god.