Finland's Interior Minister Sparks Firestorm with Bold Support for the Unborn

Teresa Neumann : Jul 15, 2013
Chris Barnekov – Life News

Her comments, that animals have more protections than unborn babies, have created an uproar in the strongly pro-abortion Scandinavian country.

(Finland)—Life News reports that in a July 6 speech to a Lutheran missions gathering in Kankaanpää in southwestern Finland, Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen lamented that animals have more protection in Finland than unborn human babies. The minister cited the fact that in her country animals being slaughtered must be killed painlessly, but that Finnish politicians refuse to even discuss the pain that fetuses feel during an abortion.

Räsänen, who is a medical doctor, used Acts 5:29 as the basis for her comments, saying, "We must weigh whether we are ready to go against public opinion, peer pressure and even law if these contradict the Word of God."

When many Lutheran officials distanced themselves from the Interior Minister's comments, Räsänen's reply was that she did not call "for breaking the law, but instead sought to bring about a change in the law which would allow a conscience protection for health care professionals so that they would not be forced to abort a pregnancy."

One Lutheran pastor, Halvar Sandell, was succinct in his assessment of the state of Christianity in Finland, saying that if people were upset with the church and left as a result of the Interior Minister's comments, they probably have "never actually encountered the Christian Gospel."

"When testimony such as Räsänen's arises," he continued, "the resistance to the Gospel is channeled. But the positions Räsänen has urged on the community are not specifically Christian doctrines. Rather, they conform to the natural law, which can be grasped and understood even by those who are outside the explicit Christian confession."