Methodist Minister Said Caring About Aborted Babies is Idolatry

It’s bad enough that the United Methodist Church supports legalized abortion, but what a Methodist pastor says about those who care about unborn babies should tell us how low the church has sunken.

Steve Ertelt reports for Life News, May 18, 2015, that pro-life advocate Sarah Terzo, who has a knack for documenting the history of the abortion debate and the abortion advocacy movement by posting quotes from pro-abortion activists through the years, posted a new quote that features Methodist Minister John M. Swomley.

Terzo explains that Swomley is an ordained United Methodist minister who was professor of Christian Ethics (!) at St. Paul’s school of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri from 1960 to 1984, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, and a longtime board member and sometimes vice president of the pro-abortion American Civil Liberties Union and chair of its church–state committee.

This is what Methodist Minister John Swomley wrote about pro-life Americans in his 1999 book Compulsory Pregnancy: the War against American Women:

“Opponents of abortion in America have attributed to fetal life a sacredness that is actually idolatry… Fetal idolatry denies a woman’s right to control her body, her life, her destiny, all of which must be sacrificed to an embryo or fetus once she is pregnant…

Fetal idolatry shows no mercy. … One of the major critiques of idolatry about unborn life is its lack of concern for the abundant or purposeful life to which all of us should be called. No one of us should be an unwanted child or have to experience emotional abandonment or lack of compassion and love in childhood.”

Nothing much has changed in the United Methodist Church (UMC) since Swomley’s book. As examples:

In January 2015, Bill Mefford, director of civil and human rights at the UMC’s Washington office, used the March for Life to mock the event with a sign and picture he posted on Twitter, saying, “I march for sandwiches,” thereby comparing an unborn baby to a sandwich.
In 2014, Methodist Health Care Ministries, whose logo claims they are serving humanity to honor God, gave almost half a million to the nation’s top abortion provider Planned Parenthood.
In 2013, a pro-abortion article was posted on the General Board of Church and Society website and the United Methodist Church opposed the bill to ban late-term abortions.

This is why pro-life Methodists have left the denomination over the last couple of decades and continue to leave the church in droves, causing historic low membership rolls for the church.

I did an Internet search for John M. Swomley and discovered that he died on August 16, 2010, in Kansas City, Missouri at age 95 after living with Alzheimer’s for several years.

That’s 95 years more than the millions of aborted unborn babies, whom Swomley dismissed as “idols,” who never had a chance to breathe even one day of air.