A Christian and Pro-choice
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).