John Newton and the Cause of Life

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.... I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now, I see.”

A couple of years ago a movie came out called “Amazing Grace.” The movie was about William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery in England. One of the characters portrayed in this movie was John Newton.

John Newton was as some would say “bred to the sea.” His father was a captain in the Mediterranean trade. Young Newton came by the job of captain the hard way. He became a libertine rebel. He once said that, “I was once so proud that I acknowledged no superior.”

The life of a sailor in the eighteenth century was hard. When Newton was sent ashore with the other sailors to prevent their desertion he deserted with the group. He was soon captured, jailed for two days and sent back to the ship, kept in irons, stripped and publicly whipped. He was reduced in rank from a midshipman to a common seaman.

He had misused his rank and was too harsh with the regular seamen, his peers reviled him. Newton first wanted to commit suicide then he wanted to kill the captain. He actually made plans to this end. Newton was due to make a five-year voyage; his captain’s life was probably spared because they came upon a slave ship. The captain of this ship had a bunch of mutinous sailors and wanted to make a trade. This captain spotted Newton and realized he knew his father and took him aboard.

You think he would have changed his ways. No such luck. He took to ridiculing this captain in song and taught the song to all his mates. When the captain died the first mate took over hated him more than his first captain. Newton deserted and went to work for a white slave trader in African and his black wife. He made enemies of them too and was enslaved. After some years of this he went to work for another slave merchant. In 1747 he met with a vessel called the Greyhound the captain was looking for a man named John Newton. Newton was told he needed to return to Liverpool because he had inherited some money. This wasn’t true. Newton did as always he took to mocking the captain and ridiculing the “gospel history,” the captain took to calling him Jonah.

One night on the voyage home he was awaken by a violent storm, it seemed as if everything was breaking up around him. He heard the men up top say, the ship was sinking. After much hard work and loss of life Newton went to the captain and said, “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy on us.” His Christian conversion was at hand.

Newton became a Christian and a captain making several voyages on slave ships as both. He finally came to realize that contrary to popular belief he was trading in human beings and that these human beings had the same rights that he had. He left the trade and became a monk. It was during this time that he wrote the song, “Amazing Grace.” And penned the words “was blind but now I see.”

Slavery ended in England and in the New World. But for every generation there is a battle waged in the conscience of man. Today in America there is a battle of ideas, or should I say of conscience. Eighty years ago we began to hear:

"Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."

But what is meant by birth control?

"As an advocate of birth control I wish ... to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feebleminded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation.

"On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

Margaret Sanger, "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review , October 1921, page 5.

So who are these unfit mentally and physically defective?

"[Slavs, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are] human weeds ... a deadweight of human waste ... [Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a] menace to the race."

"Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ... We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."

Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review.

To what end?

"[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children... [Women must have the right] to live ... to love ... to be lazy ... to be an unmarried mother... to create... to destroy... The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order... The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel , Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race . New York: Brentanos Publishers,1922.

Surely, these must be the quotes of a long defunked organization or some group like the KKK but no, alas, these are the words of today’s largest women’s reproductive health providers founder. Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood.

What would I like to see you do? I’d like to see you educate yourself about what is really being advocated by today’s pro-choice activists. Remember, we are talking about innocent human beings. We were all once an embryo, a fetus and a baby. But what do these words mean? Embryo is Greek for young animal or fruit of the womb and fetus is Latin for young one or offspring. Semantics, that’s all it is, semantics!

Our Declaration of Independence says that our creator has given us the right to life. Let’s not let people take from the innocent, helpless, defenseless babies their God given right to life. I encourage you to look at this issue with an open mind and think again about this issue. Not any other issue such as capital punishment and the like but this issue.

This issue is a personal one for me. If Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land in 1969 my wife would not be here. Even though here father and mother were married they already were raising five children. One more child, eight years younger than the last, would just be a bother. It was her father who talked her mother into delivering the baby and not having one of those back alley abortions you always hear about.

Please, open your mind and think. As John Newton made a difference just by taking care of his conscience maybe you can make a difference by searching yours. Once blind, I hope you will see.