"Abolishing Abortion" by Rev. Frank Pavone

My latest FREE review book is “Abolishing Abortion: How You Can Play a Part in Ending the Greatest Evil of Our Day” by Rev. Frank Pavone. 

For my reviews I’m supposed to give a summary and my opinion of the book. The summary should be fairly obvious. Author Rev. Frank Pavone, president of the National Pro-life Religious Council and national director of Priests for Life, explains how the church should band together and oppose abortion. He first looks to America’s founding fathers and how they risked their lives for a new nation to pursue life and liberty. So let’s protect that life. Second, he examines the tax code laws, and how they are enforced, to encourage churches to jump into educating their members about life issues they can vote on. Many churches think this will jeopardize their tax-exempt status, but the author shows this to be untrue from a legal standpoint. And third, from a health and medical standpoint, he argues abortion is not in the best interests of either the fetus or the woman, and encourages the church to support women’s and babies’ rights and welfare while supporting life in love. In all these things, he encourages the reader to repent of self-interest, self-centeredness, indiference, and to fight for life in love, extending love and the value of life to all. 

Here’s the review part. This book may be most useful to churches or people on staff at churches. Or staff wondering if they’ll hurt their tax-exempt status if they speak out about abortion. For me personally, the chapters on tax exemption were kind of a slog. But it’s also interesting to see how a couple of secular laws have had such a profound affect on the freedom of speech for the church decades later. 

I learned a lot, like that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family is active in the pro-life movement as a natural extention of civil rights. I learned that what Roe v. Wade actually says is that fetuses are not people protected by the Constitution. It doesn’t conclude they aren’t human, just that they are unprotected. The book points out that anytime a government removes a group of people from its protection, genocide results. Horrifying. The author also looks at statistics that show 80 percent of Americans think abortions should be illegal in some situations. 

Pavone also says most Americans prefer not to think too closely about abortion, because in so doing they can’t justify their inaction anymore, and if they love someone who’s had an abortion, this creates internal conflict they don’t know how to reconcile. That’s why talking about these issues IN LOVE, with an understanding of Jesus Christ’s forgiving sacrificial love, is so essential. Only Christ’s supernatural love and forgiveness allows someone to simultaneously acknowledge that life was taken during an abortion, and that that act can be forgiven completely. 

For a faster read about the realities of abortion, I would probably recommend Abby Johnson’s “Unplanned.” Also, the above photo was not a setup. Laundry and finishing the book were on my to do list that night, and the juxtaposition of statistics on abortion in the midst of clean baby clothes was jarring. Four out of five stars for “Abolishing Abortion.”