I sat in my medical school OB/GYN class in shocked silence as the professor flippantly described the details of an abortion procedure. He might as well have been talking about clipping your toenail.
On the surface pro-choice seems like a great concept. When I walk into a store and I am looking at 500 kinds of cereal, I have the choice to pick any cereal I want. It seems right for me to have that choice, but does abortion as a choice conflict with a Christian worldview?
Here are several factors to consider.
1. Humanity
Is the fetus a human being? Does the fetus have a soul?
I once asked this question to a Christian pro-abortionist and he, after a few seconds, shook his head. No, it does not have a soul, he said.
Really?
If the fetus is alive, it has to have a soul, doesn’t it? Or, was he suggesting that a fetus can be alive but not have a soul? When is the baby alive?
A baby's first heartbeat is heard just 16 days after conception.
SIXTEEN DAYS! Slightly more than 2 weeks. By the time a mother realizes that she is pregnant, the baby has a heartbeat.
What else is it other than a living being? What non-living thing has a heartbeat?
If it is a living being, doesn’t it have a soul?
Abortions of 20-week old fetuses are legal in the USA. Here is an MRI Scan of a 20-week old fetus:
2. Other Such Decisions
Pro-choice for a woman is the decision to take the life of another human being, no matter how it is worded.
In that instance, the comparison should then be made with other instances of killing humans, not in other instances of choosing cereal.
Here are two other instances of a human taking the life of another human: in war or in burglary (eg. home invasion). The law justifies killing another human in those instances. Specifically, I intend to consider the innocence of the offended party – the person that was killed.
a. A key difference between burglary and abortion is that the aborted human being (fetus) has no choice whatsoever in the matter. A burglar, if he is not killed, can be tried for breaking the law. He had the choice to break in or not. He chose to break in (thus broke the law) and got killed for it. He is not innocent in the matter and paid for it.
b. In case of war killings, there are also certain rules within which human killing is permitted - the Geneva convention protocols. If innocent people are killed even during a war, the offender will have to face a tribunal or give answers to explain how such a dastardly event happened. For example, in 1968, American troops killed 300 Vietnamese civilians, known as My Lai. Even though they were in a war, was the killing of innocent civilians a crime? Absolutely! In 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered a missile strike on a mall in Ukraine deliberately attacking innocent civilians. Even in war where human killing is permitted to an extent, there are specific laws that prevent the killing of those that are innocent.
The innocence of the victim, therefore, is a key factor in this scenario. Of all the people that can claim innocence, no one can claim more innocence than a child, let alone an unsuspecting fetus. If abortions were performed even under war rules, they would be tried for war crimes because the action was done against innocent victims.
3. Ownership
A second argument that pro-choice enthusiasts make is that a woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her body.
The argument goes that a woman’s body is her own and she can do whatever she wants, just like she can do whatever she wants with the piece of toast that she is eating. It is hers, she bought it, owns it and can do whatever she wants because of her ownership of it. Similarly, they contend that a woman owns her body and therefore she has the freedom to do what she wants with it.
However, from a Christian perspective, is this true?
The Bible has two opinions about the ownership of a person’s body.
Firstly, it says that in a married relationship each person‘s body belongs to the other person so that they cannot do what they want with their own body. In a sense when a Christian couple gets married, the physical union between the couple gives ownership of the other person’s body.
The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife (1 Corinthians 7:4).
Secondly, when a person becomes a Christian, their body belongs to the Lord. And the Bible removes any inclination of doubt when it reiterates that the body does not belong to a person.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
So a Christian woman cannot do whatever she wants with her body however frivolous it may seem, especially so when it involves the killing of a human being.
Contrary to a self-centered living, the Bible entreats us to live for Jesus Christ and NOT for ourselves. And He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again (2 Corinthians 5:15).
4. Pro = Anti?
Another phrase I have heard is that pro-choice does not necessarily mean pro-abortion. That is, that pro-choicers can be anti-abortionists. I am baffled by this viewpoint. I consider myself quasi-intelligent and I have not found anyone who can reasonably explain to me how pro-choice is not pro-abortion, unless you are talking about the choice to pierce your ears.
5. The Excuses
Then we have the videos of the buying and selling of aborted baby parts. There is no denying the veracity of the videos. These were not actors or cartoons pretending to sell baby parts. These were actual people who were employed by Planned Parenthood.
One of the most ridiculous excuses I have ever heard when these videos were released was that the videos were edited! Yes, the videos were edited to make it shorter for content for viewability but they were not edited to make up something that was not there! That excuse shows more than anything else, the absolute blind denial and refusal to consider reason or morality.
Here are all the videos: Center for Medical Progress
Here is one of the videos:
6. What is abortion medically?
This is the assessment of the most commonly done abortion procedure, called dismemberment. This is how a former abortion provider, Dr. Anthony Levatino, describes it:
A dismemberment abortion involves reaching into a woman’s uterus with forceps and “grabbing whatever is there. Maybe you rip off a leg, which is about four inches long,” then you pull out “an arm, the spine. The skull is the most difficult part. Sometimes there’s a little face staring up at you.”
He understandably called it “an absolutely brutal procedure, in which a living human being is torn to pieces.”
Watch the reactions of people who find out how an abortion is done.
The Abortion Procedure
We wouldn’t even think of doing that to animals and yet how seared is a human conscience to inflict this on another human being.
7. Natural Cousins of Abortion
An extension of the pro-choice philosophy is the Nazi philosophy, which has its basis on natural selection by Charles Darwin.
The classic example of this is the abortion of Down syndrome babies in the Netherlands.
“We haven’t come this close to Nazi before,’ said Dr. Stefan Paas, in response to the new law forcing mothers to abort Down’s syndrome babies.
A moral duty to abort: Handicapped children cost money, so parents: abort or face a fine [Huffington Post]
There are numerous examples of people who would have been aborted based on medical advice, whose parents chose not to – and who ended up being fathers and mothers, and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and friends and colleagues and … humans.
One such example is famed singer Andrea Bocelli. Bocelli revealed in the past that his parents were advised to abort him because doctors predicted the future famous singer would be born with a disability.
It was immediately apparent at birth that Bocelli had poor eyesight and he was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma. But, thanks to his parents’ disdain for medical “advice”, he still lives and sings.
Abortion is thus closer to the Holocaust than to a woman choosing to have her eyebrows waxed.
Just for comparison:
Number of human beings killed in the Holocaust: 6 million
Number of human beings killed from 1973 due to Roe v Wade: 60 million – the heart-wrenchingly sad equivalent of 10 Holocausts. Yes, TEN.
8. Is Abortion progress?
The abortion law of 1973 was based on the thinking that a fetus was just a clump of cells until the 28th week. Science has shown us that that thinking is outdated. As outdated as thinking that cigarette smoking does nothing to the body.
A fetus at 7 weeks is not a clump of cells: this mother shared the picture of her miscarried fetus.
A neonatologist today would instantly identify the fallacy that a pre-28th week fetus is just a clump of cells. Abortion is thus anti-science and anti-progress.
Finally, science is catching up with reality and the truth.
Science Is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost [The Atlantic]
9. The Agony of the Choice
I do not in any way intend to mitigate the potential agony of a mother who has to decide what to do with the fact of her pregnancy. Maybe the pregnancy was not planned. Maybe it rose out of a series of sinful choices. Maybe it arose out of a terrible event – even rape or incest.
Several facts are indubitable. There is no question that the mother faces an arduous task to decide between two possibly bad choices. There is no question that at the center of the choice is a (tiny) human being. There is no question about the innocence of this person. There is no question that any person deserves life by default. Life, any person would agree, is a right.
The basis of pro-choice is humanistic secularism. Not any religion and definitely not the Christian faith.
Jesus came to give life. John 10:10. For a mother. Also for a fetus.
Anush A John
