Lecrae’s Abortion Answer is Bad. Real Bad
Lecrae took to his channel to talk about abortion, and it was a big swing and a miss with such an easy lob with which to connect. It was especially surprising since he was not caught off guard by anything anyone asked him. It’s not like when he gave an atrocious answer on whether or not homosexuality is a sin that left him stuttering like a fool and ashamed of Christ, or his answer on whether or not Christians should go to church, but rather he uploaded the video himself and had time to plan out his response. Like with his whole “give abortive women money or they’ll kill their babies” tweet.
In the video, Lecrae spends a bit of time giving his pro-life creds but then reminds his audience that there is a spectrum of people on the prolife issue doing different work. He says rather than being at the clinics holding graphic imagery, he’s more in line with “holistic care for young women who are processing the reality of having an abortion.”
He recounts how as a young man he paid for an abortion for his girlfriend – that he came from a disenfranchised background where they had no way to take care of the child, and then explains:
[Abortion] is a moral issue but it’s also a socio-economic issue. It’s also an issue of systemic oppression and marginalization and if you don’t address those issues, then you’re not going to deal with what ultimately allows abortion to thrive…
One, we didn’t know any other options. No clue. Two, we did not have the financial capability to move forward, we did not have the family support to move forward, we didn’t even know there were other realities, and so you’ve got to deal with that. That’s the circumstance in many cases. Now you’re also bringing on compounded issues [sic].You’re talking about communities and individuals where a brother has just been killed over senseless violence, a mother may be sick and living on Medicaid, and there’s PTSD going on in your world because of maybe some of the things you’ve encountered or seen – the child’s father may be incarcerated for different reasons.
There’s so many circumstances coming into play and you’re saying, ‘hey, don’t terminate the life of the child.’ Well, you’ve got to remember that there’s all these other issues coming into play for certain individuals that no one is addressing.
So what I personally believe is that when you begin to address some of those situations and those circumstances, when you begin to say, ‘hey listen, here’s healthcare for you so you can now take care of a baby.’ Do you know much a doctor’s bill for birth and the child is?
When you begin to address all these barriers, then you begin to put in the minds of individuals, ‘Hey, this is doable.’ You begin to present them with options.And some of us will say, “well let’s just make it illegal.” Murder is illegal. Still happens every day. Still happens every day. Should it be illegal? Yes, murder should be illegal, but what I’m telling is if you make murder illegal as we’ve seen, it doesn’t mean murder stops. And so sure, it might be the right thing to do to advocate for the end of murder, but that does not absolve the problem [sic]. It doesn’t make the problem go away. You still have individuals and circumstances where murder thrives.
So what I’m saying is what are you going to do about the environments that allow this to continue? And for me I want to see those environments change. I come from those environments. I work and serve in those environments and so if you just outlaw something, I know for a fact that’s not going to be the solution. Not to say you don’t outlaw it, but to say ‘are we thinking critically about what it really looks like to tackle this?’
This is not a hard response. At all. “Yes, abortion should be illegal. Full stop. We should pass laws immediately making it a felony to kill babies in the womb. Furthermore, we should punish the doctors performing and the women having the abortion, as well as enabling boyfriends, husbands, and other accessories to murder.”
The fact is he would never give this answer to the question of whether 19th-century chattel slavery should be illegal. “Maybe it should be illegal, sure, but that’s not going to stop it. Slavery will still happen every day. We need to incentivize the plantation owners by giving them education on crop yields, purchasing new tools and machinery for them, giving them grants to hire un-enslaved workers, pass laws making it easier to sell their cotton, etc. We need to change the circumstances that allow kidnapping and slavery in the first place.”
All of this is notwithstanding the fact that countries that have arguably more robust social welfare programs and socialized healthcare like Canada or Australia still have the same rate of abortion as the United States, despite having Lecrae’s wish list of social support, like options for paid 12-18 month parental leave.
This is just another step towards an all-too-familiar trajectory.
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This is what you call the devils advacate. He is not a man of God. Forget about rapping for Jesus, rap for your father satan. I’m glad I never heard any of his music. I look at people and feel so sorry for what they will go through in hell and being torture forever is not pleasant. Why would you want to suffer like that especially when you know what your going to go through in the bible. You have to rebuke that antichrist spirit and every other evil spirit out in this world.
Your piece is so obviously biased you’re not even interacting with the points that Lecrae has raised.