Democratic Party candidate Spencer Waugh stated, at the October 1, 2024, forum for candidates for Iowa House District 21, that, “You also need to know that faith plays a role too. Because it always has. Jesus Christ is my Savior and I’m not going to apologize for that. And my primary job as a Christian is to love God first and to love my neighbors second. And that is the lens that has helped me to serve others to serve my community.”
Who is our neighbor? When Christ was asked this question by a lawyer, Christ told how a man was robbed and beaten and left beside the road. Several persons came upon him but each turned away without helping. Finally, a Samaritan took care of the beaten man, bound his wounds, and paid for his care by another. When Christ asked the lawyer who was a neighbor to the victim, the lawyer answered, “He who showed him mercy.” Christ answered: “Go and do likewise”. (Luke 10:25-37)
Waugh was asked about his position on Iowa’s heartbeat bill, which, with some exceptions, prohibits the killing of an unborn child by abortion after a heartbeat has been detected. Waugh answered the bill was “too extreme”. He claimed that the passage of this law may exacerbate the shortage of obstetrician-gynecologists in Iowa, which could ultimately endanger women and unborn children because “life threatening conditions” may not be detected in a timely manner.
Waugh also made the outlandish claim that “a foundational problem with this bill is that it sets up a paradigm in which fundamentally, women are valued only for their reproductive organs.” The heartbeat bill doesn’t even mention a woman’s reproductive organs. Does Waugh actually believe, through some form of intellectual voodoo, that wanting to protect an unborn child from abortion “sets up a paradigm in which fundamentally, women are valued only for their reproductive organs”? Does he believe that the rejection of that paradigm makes abortion morally acceptable?
Waugh’s purported concern for the lives of unborn children, hypothetically threatened by a shortage of obstetrician-gynecologists, contrasts sharply with a complete absence of any recognition by him, or any comment by him at all, on the very real danger of death by abortion for the unborn child selected for abortion.
Why is the unborn child apparently a “neighbor” for Waugh, if it’s care may be hypothetically threatened by a shortage of obstetrician-gynecologists, but the unborn child is not at all a “neighbor” if it faces the very real danger of death by abortion?
If Waugh is really motivated by Christian love for his neighbor, he ought to support the heartbeat bill, and “show mercy” to the unborn child threatened by abortion. While he is considering that he might reflect that the most accurate translation of the Sixth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is “Thou Shalt Not Murder.”
Finally, Waugh should ponder the words of the man he identified as “Jesus Christ, my Savior”: “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” (Luke 17:2)
Donald W. Bohlken of Indianola is an attorney and a retired administrative law judge with the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals
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