What Is Going On In Christian Crisis Pregnancy Counselling?
E. S. Williams, Wakeman + Belmont House Publishing
91 pages,
£3.50, ISBN 1-870855-45-0
This book is a broadside against CARE, the well-known mainstream Christian charity, and in particular, against the way it runs its pregnancy counselling network, which now consists of about 160 centres throughout the UK.
The author analyses the approach used by several big-time abortion agencies like the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Marie Stopes International. Basically, they offer pregnant women three choices – parenthood, adoption, or abortion. According to Ted Williams, CARE does exactly the same. The abortion agencies also major on non-directional counselling, the woman’s feelings, personal values, informed choice, and so on. According to Ted Williams, CARE does exactly the same.
What then, you may ask, is distinctively Christian about CARE’s approach? This is the heart of Dr Williams’ case. How can a Christian organisation counsel a woman to consider the option of abortion? ‘It is a terrible wrong that such advice should be given by secular clinics, but is it not worse for it to be given by church-based centres? It is as if the Bible … does not exist’ (p. 48).
The author’s uncomfortable conclusions are that ‘CARE’s … ideology makes void the absolutes of God’s moral law’ (p. 79) and that ‘CARE is an apostate organisation’ (p. 81).
Ted Williams has a point. Many readers are already dismayed, for example, by CARE’s liberal approach to sex education, by its woolly thinking regarding the status of the human embryo, and by the conscious decision of its offshoot organisation, CARE for the Family, to omit all reference to the Bible in its literature. It is a sad, sad day when any Christian organisation loses its way. According to this book, CARE has yet another case to answer.
Dr John R. Ling,
Aberystwyth.