Teaching on Abortion

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.Jeremiah 1:5

Abortion can be a very difficult issue to understand, but the most important thing to remember in any discussion on this topic Is that God loves each and every one of us, no matter what happens to us or what we've done. There are links to resources below if you are recovering from an abortion or are thinking about getting one.

All human beings have rights. While specific rights can vary from culture to culture, the vast majority of people understand that it is important to treat others with dignity and respect. From our Christian point of view, it is easy to understand why: God created each and every one of us in His image and likeness, which means that we should strive to love each and every human with the same love that we have for our closest relationships. The worst tragedies in human history have happened when a group has been seen as less than human: the chief example of this is slavery, where Africans were treated as property by their masters, justifying all sorts of abuse.

But how do we know that a fetus is really a human being, and not just some collection of cells? We can see that life starts at conception in scripture, such as in Jeremiah 1:5: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you", James 2:26: "The body apart from the spirit is dead" (the physical fetus must have a human soul/spirit), as well as Psalm 139:13-14: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb." and Job 31:14-15: "He who made me in the womb…".

We can also see this on a basic level, in human intuition: if you put all the ingredients for a cake together and put it in the oven, and I go in and dump it all out, you'll (rightly) exclaim "Why did you destroy my cake?!" There is no denying that if I hadn't done anything, it certainly would have been a cake. While this analogy is far from perfect, hopefully it serves to provide an intuitive understanding for why it is incorrect to claim that a fetus isn't human.

Understanding that a fetus truly is a human person, known and cared for by God, also shows us why there are no exceptions for abortion: we wouldn't say that someone born from incest or with Down Syndrome is less than human, so how can we take their lives? This is also why abortion can't just be a personal belief. Imagine if the people in the Civil War had thought that slavery was just a personal belief, that they had no business telling people what was right and what was wrong: the injustice would have carried on for even longer and had an untold impact on countless lives., So too, do we have an obligation to make right an injustice, to make an effort to protect human life.