ELECTION, NOT SELECTION R. Kendall Soulen The nature of abortion is changing in our society and around the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, when abortion laws were liberalized in many Western countries, the issue of abortion chiefly concerned women with crisis pregnancies and dealt with whether or not to have a child. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the issue of abortion increas- ingly arises outside the context of crisis pregnancies and concerns what kind of child an individual or couple wishes to have. This is a change with vast implications. If unchecked and unchallenged by church and society, it will gradually transform our culture into one of widespread eugenic se- lection, in which humans routinely arrogate to themselves the power to separate the fit from the unfit before birth. This is a development that all Christians, pro-life and pro-choice, should unite in deploring and oppos- ing with active spiritual and practical measures. All Christians, pro-life and pro-choice, know clearly something that the world knows only vaguely, if at all: God loves all members of the human family irrespective of their genetic makeup. What is more, they know something that the world can scarcely be expected to know at all: God is especially zealous on behalf of those whom the world judges unfit, unwanted, and undesir- able. Indeed, God upsets the standards of human wisdom by time and again preferring just these as the bearers of God's salvation. A society that silently tolerates the routine abortion or destruction of the undesirable before birth will become ever more disfigured in its own visible makeup and ever more hardened to the wisdom of the gospel. Before we become that society, we need to pause and examine the path that we are on and earnestly ask ourselves where that path is taking us. Prof. R. Kendall Soulen, Professor of Systematic Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary, 4500 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016. E-maü: ksoulen@wesleysem.edu PRO ECCLESIA VOL. XV, No. 4 379