A Christian Response to Abortion, Part One

I am irrevocably pro-life. I should probably say that now because there is a point in writing these that I did not sound prolife, but, hang on, we will get there. Embracing a particular position does not require a person to embrace every position, argument, or methodology associated with it.

          Today, I drove by a yard full of crosses. Each one represents children killed by abortion in Allen county. It was meant to be (and is) a chilling sight. It is also an exceptionally divisive one that leaves no room for conversation. Even my language of “children killed by abortion” is divisive. Someone who has studied the science and ethics, yet does not believe that a fetus is a child will---at best--- roll their eyes at the drama in much the same way I react to people who call themselves “dog grandparents.” Yet with over 600,000 abortions in 2016, this is not an issue that Christians can regulate to the gallery of political hot-button issues.

          Much of this issue has become a language game. Is someone who supports abortion anti-life, pro-choice, or pro-women’s reproductive rights? Is someone who opposes it pro-life, ani-choice, or anti-women’s reproductive rights? Many words we use have not objective meaning. “Conception” is not a biblical, theological, or medical term and literally just means “when life begins”; that is incredibly unhelpful. “Late term abortions” are medically speaking non-existence because “late term” means after the due date; what people generally mean is third-trimester abortions. Partial birth abortions and refusing medical care to a baby born alive even during an abortion procedure are illegal in the United States, yet many pro-life groups still talk about these issues as if we need to stop them. (Both were banned under President George W. Bush.)

          Many of the more emotive “arguments” against abortion are not helpful to a thoughtful discussion either. One of the more common pro-life signs is a picture of a near-term baby with the caption “my heart started beating at 5 weeks.” The logic behind this sign falls apart when scrutinized. First, it is false advertising to use a picture of a near-term baby; at five weeks, we are all still a barely macroscopic puddle of cells. More disturbing is the fact that if the argument is that a beating heart is proof that the fetus is a human, what was it for the first five weeks of development?

Abortion has two definitions: it the purposeful ending of a pregnancy after fertilization by the sperm or after implantation into the uterine wall. The distinction between these two definitions matter because the first would include certain contraceptives (such as some morning after pills) and embryonic stem-cell research as abortive and the second does not. One of the greatest complications of the “when life begins” question is that modern medication is now capable of things our great-grandparents, let alone the writers of Scripture, could not have dreamed of. In natural conception, there is no need to distinguish between fertilization and implementation. Many women “miscarry” a fertilized egg in their normal periods and never know it because that fertilized cell (or couple of cells) could never survive without implementation. Now, we have the option (and regularly do) separate these two events by days, months, or even years. Or modern health providers are capably of using chemicals to allow one, but not the other.

When taken in isolation, the Bible’s teaching on abortion is not as clear as most evangelicals would assume. There is only one passage of Scripture that directly addresses the ending of a women’s pregnancy. Squeezed in the middle of the case laws regarding treatment of slaves and murderous livestock is a case law that says that if a man accidently causes a women to miscarry or birth a child with a deformity, the man should be punished in kind up to “life for life” (Ex 21:21). This is a good place to start the argument against abortion, but not a silver bullet. These are case laws that expand on how the Ten Commandments should be lived out in ancient Israel, not for all people for all times. We do not take the verses before and after it as “how-to’s” for modern law. Generally, if these specific case studies are the only place something is found in the Bible, we do not take it as literally authoritative though there may be principles that can transfer to the modern world.

Pro-life camps will often point to the four passages that talk about God “knitting” or “forming” someone in the womb (Ps 139:13-16, Jerm 1:5; Job 31:15; Ps. 22:10). Although great rhetoric, these do not address when a person begins; just that God makes people. It is like saying that a carpenter made a chair in his workshop--- that does not answer the question at which point did the block of wood become a chair?

A much stronger argument comes from how the narratives of Scriptures treat unborn characters. Jacob and Esau are presented as already having their personalities and agency in Genesis 25, and in Luke 1, John the Baptist can hear and respond to Mary’s voice in-utero. These three babies were older in gestational age, so they do not help with the question of early abortions. But combined with Exodus, a biblical scholar may say with certainty that towards the end of pregnancy, a fetus is a human.

The official position of most evangelical, historical black, and Catholic churches is that abortions at any stage of pregnancy are wrong. Where do they get this if not from a chapter and verse? They get it from what Catholics call “church tradition” and protestants call “church history.” The Bible is not meant to be read by me and my buddies alone. It was meant to be interpreted and understood within the context of the whole Christian witness throughout all of time, in every language, and from every place. There is not much people from all those places agree on, but that abortion is wrong may make the short list. One of the oldest Christian writings outside of the Bible is the Didache which was at least partially written while some of the apostles were still alive. It includes prohibitions on abortion. From the second century, the Letter of Barnabas (probably not written by Barnabas), The Athenagoras, and the Apocalypse of Peter (again, not written by Peter) all agree that Christian do not practice or condone abortions.

 From that same time, Christian apologist Tertullian defended Christians from the accusation of cannibalism. We take for granted that when we talk about drinking Christ’s blood and eating his body people know we are not consuming actual human flesh and blood. Second century Romans did not know this, so Tertullian was obliged to explain it. He asked his Roman readers to reflect on what they do know about Christians. What did Christian have a reputation for? They value human life even lives that Romans do not, such as the unborn, so how could they eat people? Tertullian explained that, “In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb.”  He goes on to explain in graphic, gory detail some of the abortive practices of ancient Rome, which were apparently common. In a culture that treated abortion as commonplace, Christians contended it was murder.

The Bible taken in isolation do not allow modern Christians to apply the prohibition of murder to the fetus, but two thousand years of Christians interpreting it this way do. This opens a whole set of biblical passages that address abortion, including one of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:13). Modern Christians echo John Chrysostom when he calls abortion, “murder before birth.”  

None of the above resolves the lingering problem of the first few days and weeks of a fetus’ existence. When does the products of conception transition from a lump of cells to a living being? Up until modern pregnancy tests, women could not have known they were pregnant until a fetus was about 4 or more weeks along (often even more than that).  We are really asking at what point a fetus can be described as having the imago dei and being both physical (body) and spiritual (soul). The only account in the Bible of a person receiving the image of God is Adam when God “breathed the breath of life” into him (Gen 2:7). A truly unique event in history (only happened once) the creation of the first humans fail to illuminate when this event happens for the rest of us. Does it happen when the sperm pierces the egg? When the DNA mix? Upon the first successful cell division? When the cells implant themselves into the uterine wall and begin to multiple in earnest? At the first heartbeat? At the (shifting) point of viability?

Philosophers have some compelling theories on this question, but until science or biblical scholars give us a better answer, Christians error on the side of life. Life is too precious to risk because we do not have all the epistemological answers. We know that life is precious to God. We know that when the Bible talks about the unborn, it treats them as people. We know that two thousand years of church leaders considered abortion a type of murder. The exact moment that life begins may be something we never know. But we know enough to protect the possibility of it.