October 16, 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of Planned Parenthood’s founding by racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Her self-described goal was to exterminate blacks and sterilize “idiots,” “morons” and the “feeble-minded.” In one revealing letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, Sanger described how to handle the issue of black extermination:

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

One of her more famous quotes makes the stomach churn:

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Perhaps there are those who still feel that way. Is it possible that there are abortionists who feel that they perform an act of mercy when they kill babies? The following story concerns an abortionist who believes just that.

Dr. Sarah Wallett

There are times in life when, as a Christian, we read or hear something sinful so couched in a mist of Christian ideology that our knee-jerk reaction is one of revulsion. The juxtaposition of faith and sin causes a gut-wrenching and heartsick effect and we want to correct the misunderstanding of Christian faith immediately. Such is my reaction to the story of Dr. Sarah Wallett, a self-proclaimed Christian who performs abortions because she believes “it is the most important thing that I will ever do.”

In early August, Dr. Wallett wrote in her jarring column at Refinery29 that her Christian faith is precisely why she kills unborn children. For an abortion provider to claim that ripping an unborn baby limb from limb is Christ-like is repulsive and couldn’t be further from the truth.

She described her childhood in a Christian home where her family attended church regularly, said prayers before meals and where she was taught “that it was my duty to help people in need and leave the world a better place than I found it,” and added, “The patients I see every day are so clearly people in need — and the medical care I provide them is both life-changing and, in many circumstances, life-saving.”

It calls into question the Christian teaching she actually received — where did she learn that murder was a Christ-like attribute?

She then offered up a list of complaints about the stigma she faces as an abortion provider (“there are no positive images of abortion providers or the value in the work that we do”), legislators who work to revise abortion laws (their “sole goal is clearly to make this work more difficult … create laws that interfere with the medical care I provide, because they do not like the work that I do”) and her concern about abortion laws in other states (“similar to the horrific one in Texas”).

She blasted the laws in her state of Tennessee that “do nothing to keep my patients safe,” such as OB-GYNs like Dr. Wallett having admitting privileges in a local hospital, working in an ambulatory center or providing patients with information about abortion and requiring them to have two visits to the health center prior to having an abortion. Dr. Wallett wrote that “many of these laws, in fact, harm the same women they’re supposedly intended to help,” although it isn’t clear how having access to a hospital or receiving medical information harms the patients.

The abortion provider claimed over and over again that she implements her faith throughout her work of taking tiny human lives — providing compassion and empathy to her patients who have chosen to have an abortion and feel the need to justify it to her, “a task no one should ever have to do.” “My faith teaches me to withhold judgment and to extend acceptance to all,” Dr. Wallett said as she described patients who suffered through the experience of having friends and family beg them not to have an abortion.

One can only imagine the scene of loved ones imploring a pregnant woman to choose life, that they would adopt her baby. But she ended up in the office of a compassionate and accepting killer.

Her patients also have strong faith, she said, and “[g]ood, moral women have abortions every day,” adding that it’s her duty to provide a positive “counterpoint” to the shame and misinformation pregnant women experience and hear that causes pain.

What kind of upbringing was this? How can anyone look at Scripture and believe that God would have us murder the most innocent and vulnerable among us?

The closest analogy from Scripture regarding killing one’s young is the child sacrifice to the pagan deity Molech, which was practiced by the Ammonites and later, the Israelites (1 Kings 11:1-8). God called this practice an “abomination,” and forbid the Israelites to observe the barbaric ritual. “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord” (Lev. 18:21). Any Israelite who practiced the child sacrifice was to be put to death (Lev. 20:2).

On the contrary, the Bible is replete with scriptures telling us how much he loved and wanted us before we were born. God called us and named us when we were still in our mother’s womb (Is. 49:1). He formed us with purpose (Ps. 139:13). The Lord says children are an inheritance and a reward (Ps. 127:3). He also tells us that while a mother may not have compassion on the baby in her womb, He will never forget him or her (Is. 49:15).

Slaughtering innocent unborn children has nothing to do with Christianity. It goes against all biblical teaching of protecting human life and the most vulnerable among us. It directly violates the sixth Commandment: “You shall not kill” (Ex. 20:13).

If Dr. Wallett takes pleasure in her work of taking innocent lives, she will answer to God for that. But she cannot tie abortion to the Christian faith in any logical or truthful way.