What does the Bible say about abortion?

Question 12062.

The Bible never uses the word, and yet what Scripture says about abortion is a good deal clearer than is usually admitted, because the question turns on something the Bible addresses directly. What is the life in the womb? Answer that, and most of the argument resolves itself.

I want to work through the texts rather than the slogans, take the hard cases seriously rather than waving them away, and finish where any Christian treatment of this must finish, which is with mercy for those who have been through it.

The question underneath the question

Almost every public argument about abortion is now conducted as though the central issue were the rights of the mother, and that is understandable. But rights conflict only if there are two parties. If the unborn is not a human being, then abortion raises no more moral difficulty than any other procedure. If the unborn is a human being, then no appeal to autonomy settles anything, because autonomy has never included the right to end somebody else’s life.

So everything hangs on the status of the unborn, and this is precisely where Scripture speaks. It does not give us a policy document about abortion or a chapter headed what to think about abortion. It gives us a consistent account of what God is doing in the womb, and the account is not ambiguous.

That is why I want to spend the first part of this article on the texts rather than the ethics. Get the anthropology right and the ethics follow. Get it wrong and no amount of moral reasoning will help.

What Scripture says about the unborn

David writes that God formed his inward parts and knitted him together in his mother’s womb, that he was fearfully and wonderfully made, and that God’s eyes saw his unformed substance. Psalm 139 is not a poetic flourish about God’s general interest in people. It describes a personal relationship between God and a developing child.

Jeremiah is told that before God formed him in the womb he knew him, and before he was born he consecrated him and appointed him a prophet to the nations. Isaiah says the Lord called him from the womb. Paul says God set him apart before he was born. In each case the person addressed is continuous with the one in the womb, not a later addition to it.

The most striking is in Luke. Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps in her womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting, and Elizabeth says the baby leapt for joy. The Greek word Luke uses there, brephos, is the same word he uses of the newborn Jesus in the manger and of the infants brought to Jesus to be blessed. Scripture does not switch vocabulary at birth.

Exodus 21 and what it actually says

The passage most often raised against the Christian position about abortion is Exodus 21:22-25, where men fighting strike a pregnant woman. Older translations rendered the outcome as a miscarriage with only a fine payable, which was taken to show that the unborn was worth less than an adult.

The Hebrew says that her children come out, using the ordinary word for giving birth rather than the word used elsewhere for miscarriage. The most natural reading is a premature birth, and the passage then distinguishes between a case where there is no further harm, which incurs a fine, and a case where there is harm, which incurs life for life.

Read that way the text says the opposite of what is claimed. It extends the full protection of the law of retribution to a child born prematurely because of an assault. Even on the older reading, a penalty attached to causing the loss of an unborn child is hardly evidence that the child did not matter.

The commandment against shedding innocent blood

The sixth commandment prohibits murder, and Genesis grounds the seriousness of taking human life in the image of God. Genesis 9:6 makes the shedding of human blood an assault on God’s own likeness, which is why it carries the weight it does.

Scripture reserves particular horror for the shedding of innocent blood, and more particularly for the sacrifice of children. The practice of passing children through the fire to Molech is described as an abomination that God did not command and that never entered his mind, and it is among the reasons given for the judgement that fell on both Israel and the surrounding nations.

I do not draw a crude equivalence between ancient child sacrifice and a modern clinic. The motives and the settings are entirely different, and it does no good to shout the comparison at frightened women. What I do say is that Scripture treats the deliberate ending of a child’s life as belonging to a category of grave evil, and that its reasoning does not stop at the moment of birth.

So what does the Bible say about abortion?

Putting those strands together, the biblical position on abortion is that the life in the womb is a human being made in God’s image, that the deliberate ending of such a life is the taking of an innocent life, and that this is prohibited. That is my position and I hold it without embarrassment.

It is worth noting that the early church reached the same conclusion long before there was any Christian influence on law. The Didache, from the first or early second century, tells believers not to procure abortion, and the Epistle of Barnabas says the same. Christians said this while living as a persecuted minority in a society where exposing unwanted infants was routine.

That historical detail matters because Christians are sometimes told that what they say about abortion is a modern political invention. It is not. It is one of the oldest recorded distinctives of Christian behaviour.

The hard cases deserve better than slogans

Where the mother’s life is genuinely threatened, a real conflict exists between two lives. Christian ethics has generally held that a treatment aimed at saving the mother, which results in the death of the child, is not the same act as a killing aimed at the child. I hold that too. Such cases are rarer than the debate implies and they are agonising when they occur.

Pregnancy resulting from rape is the case that shifts most people, and rightly so, because the horror of it is real. What I would say gently is that the crime was the rapist’s and the punishment falls on a child who did nothing. We do not usually think a person may be executed for the offence of their father. The woman deserves overwhelming support, and in this country she is far more likely to be offered a procedure than a decade of practical help.

Diagnosed disability is the third, and it is the case where our society is least honest with itself. I have written on that separately in how Christians should view those with disabilities. A society that screens out a whole category of human being is making a judgement about which lives are worth having, and it should at least be made to say so plainly.

When does human life begin?

Biologically the answer is not seriously contested. At conception a genetically distinct, living human organism exists, with its own DNA, developing on its own trajectory. Every later marker offered as the start of personhood is arbitrary in a way conception is not: implantation, a heartbeat, brain activity, viability, birth. Each is a stage in the development of something already there.

Viability is a particularly weak criterion, since it depends on the state of medical technology rather than on anything about the child. A baby who was not viable in 1970 is viable now, and nothing about the baby has changed.

The Christian answer is that personhood begins at conception, and I hold that as the reading most consistent with Scripture and with biology. I have set out the wider question in what personhood is.

The law in this country

Abortion in Great Britain is governed by legislation permitting it up to twenty-four weeks on grounds that in practice have been interpreted very broadly, with no time limit at all where there is a substantial risk of serious disability. Around a quarter of a million procedures take place annually in England and Wales.

Those figures are worth pausing over, because familiarity has a numbing effect on how we speak about abortion. Whatever your view, that is a very large number of decisions being made under considerable pressure by women who are often frightened and frequently alone.

Christians should be willing to argue about abortion in public and to work for better law, and should do so without pretending that law is the whole answer. A legal change that left the underlying pressures untouched would push the problem elsewhere. What actually reduces abortion is a combination of protection in law and practical support that makes another choice possible.

What the church should be doing

It is not enough to hold the right view about abortion and to say so at the right moments. A congregation that opposes it and offers nothing to a frightened young woman in its own pews has taken the cheap half of the position. The expensive half is money, housing, childcare, transport, and years of friendship.

It also means being a place where an unplanned pregnancy can be disclosed without a sharp intake of breath. If a young woman in your church would rather deal with this alone than tell anybody, the culture of that church has already made the decision harder.

And it means supporting the organisations that do this work well, with time as well as with a standing order. I would rather see a church quietly funding a family for three years than running a campaign for three weeks.

If you have had one

Some reading this have been through it, perhaps decades ago, and have carried it silently since. I am not writing to prosecute you, and if this article has been a weight rather than an argument, then let me be as clear as I can.

There is no sin outside the reach of the cross. Not this one. 1 John 1:9 says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and there is no exception clause anywhere in the sentence. David committed adultery and arranged a murder and wrote Psalm 51 afterwards, and God received him.

Guilt that drives you to Jesus is doing its proper work. Guilt that keeps you away from him has been hijacked by the accuser. Speak to a minister or a Christian counsellor who will not flinch, and stop carrying this alone. Many women also carry unacknowledged grief alongside the guilt, and grief deserves to be grieved rather than buried.

Why Christians are often heard badly about abortion

I want to be candid about our side of this. A great deal of Christian speech about abortion has been angry, and anger is not the same as conviction. Placards outside clinics, graphic imagery pushed through letterboxes, and the assumption that every woman walking through a door is a villain have done real damage to a case that did not need any help to be unpopular.

The New Testament tells us to speak the truth in love and to let our speech be gracious. Neither instruction contains an exemption for subjects we feel strongly about. If a woman in crisis would rather talk to anybody in the world than to a Christian, our manner has undone our message, whatever we happen to be right about.

There is also a consistency problem that gets noticed. A church that campaigns about abortion and shows no interest in the child once born, or in the mother once she has decided, is open to the charge that it cares about a cause rather than about people. James 2:15-16 has some sharp words for those who wish a hungry person well and give them nothing.

None of this is a reason to be quiet. It is a reason to be careful, because the way we talk about abortion is itself a witness, and at present it is often a poor one.

Answering the arguments you will actually meet

The commonest objection is that a woman has a right to do as she wishes with her own body. The reply is straightforward. The body in question has a different genetic code, frequently a different blood type, and about half the time a different sex. Whatever the unborn child is, it is not a part of the mother’s body in the way a kidney is.

The second objection is that nobody can say when personhood begins, so the matter should be left to conscience. That does not follow. Uncertainty is a reason for caution rather than for licence, and any builder who demolished a structure while unsure whether somebody was inside would be prosecuted regardless of his sincerity.

The third is that opposition is a religious view that should not be imposed on others. Every law imposes somebody’s moral judgement, including the current one, and the argument about abortion does not depend on revelation at any point. The claim that the unborn is a living human being is a matter of embryology, and the claim that innocent human beings should not be killed is held by people of every faith and none.

The fourth is that restricting abortion simply drives it underground. That is a serious empirical claim rather than a moral one, and it should be examined rather than dismissed. It also cuts both ways, since the same reasoning would leave any law unenforced wherever people intended to break it.

So, now what?

So, what now? If you are still working out what you think about abortion, start where Scripture starts, with the question of what the unborn child is. Read Psalm 139 slowly and then ask whether the being described there can be a matter of indifference.

If you hold the biblical position already, the question is what it costs you. Opinions are cheap. Offering a spare room, or the fees for childcare, or fifteen years of showing up, is not. That is where this stops being a debate and becomes discipleship.

And if you are pregnant, frightened, and reading this at two in the morning, please talk to somebody before you decide anything. Not to the internet. To a real person who will still be there in a year. There is nearly always more time and more help than it feels like there is.

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

Psalm 139:13-14 (ESV)

For Further Study

For further reading, Millard Erickson provides the most careful evangelical survey of the doctrine of humanity and the image of God on which any Christian answer here depends, and Charles Ryrie and Lewis Sperry Chafer set out the underlying anthropology within a dispensational framework. J. Dwight Pentecost is worth reading on the Christian life and its practical ethics, and John Walvoord on the wider question of God’s dealings with those who die in infancy. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is useful on the Hebrew of the Exodus 21 passage, which repays being examined in the original rather than through a translation footnote.