Can you be pro-choice and Christian?

Question 60047.

Can you be a pro-choice Christian? I want to answer the pro-choice Christian question carefully, because it is almost never asked in the abstract. Behind it there is usually a person, and often a hard story, and a pastor who answers as though he were scoring a debating point has failed before he starts.

So let me set out what Scripture says about the unborn, what the strongest arguments on the other side are, and where that leaves a believer who has arrived at a different conclusion. And then let me say something to the reader who is asking this question because of what happened to them, or to someone they love.

What Scripture teaches about life before birth

The Bible does not treat the unborn child as a project in progress or a potential person. It treats the unborn child as a person, addressed by God and known by God. David writes that God formed his inward parts and knitted him together in his mother’s womb, and that God’s eyes saw his unformed substance. You can read that at Psalm 139:13 to 16.

The Lord tells Jeremiah that before He formed him in the womb He knew him, and before he was born He consecrated him. Isaiah says the Lord called him from the womb and named him from his mother’s body. In each case the identity of the person is continuous across birth, which is exactly the point at issue in the modern argument.

The New Testament continues it without any sense of making a new claim. Luke, a physician, uses the same Greek word brephos for John leaping in Elizabeth’s womb and for the newborn baby lying in the manger and for the infants brought to Jesus. The vocabulary simply does not shift at the moment of delivery.

What a pro-choice Christian has to account for

Behind the specific texts lies the foundational one, and it is the point at which the pro-choice Christian position comes under most pressure. Genesis says God made man in His own image, and it is on that basis that Genesis 9 grounds the prohibition of shedding human blood. The prohibition is not derived from usefulness, capacity, viability or wantedness. It rests on the fact that a human being is stamped with the likeness of God, and that stamp is present from the beginning.

This is why the Christian position on the unborn has historically been so consistent, right back to the Didache in the first or early second century, which explicitly forbids abortion in a Greco-Roman world where exposure of unwanted infants was routine and legal. The early church took in the babies left on rubbish heaps. That instinct was not sentimentality; it was theology.

If you want the fuller treatment of the biblical material, I have set it out in what the Bible says about abortion, and the related question of what happens to such children in what the age of accountability is.

Addressing the arguments a pro-choice Christian makes

The most common biblical argument a pro-choice Christian will raise concerns Exodus 21, where a man who strikes a pregnant woman so that her children come out is fined if there is no further harm and pays life for life if there is. Some read this as valuing the unborn less than the mother. But the Hebrew phrase describes the children coming out, that is, a premature birth, and the harm clause applies naturally to either mother or child. The passage protects the unborn rather than discounting them.

A second argument heard from the pro-choice Christian side appeals to the breath of life in Genesis 2, suggesting that personhood begins with breathing. That reads a great deal into a single description of a unique creative act, and it sits awkwardly with the texts we have already seen, where God knows and consecrates people before birth. It also proves rather more than its users want, since it would classify anybody on a ventilator as less than human.

A third argument, and much the strongest, is not exegetical at all. It says that whatever the moral status of the unborn, the law is a blunt instrument, and criminalising desperate women produces its own horrors. That is a serious argument about legislation rather than about ethics, and a pro-choice Christian who makes it is not necessarily denying the humanity of the child. It is worth distinguishing that position carefully from the claim that abortion is morally neutral.

Where the line actually falls

So let me be as precise as I can, because the phrase pro-choice Christian covers two very different people. A believer who says that abortion takes a human life, and who is wrestling honestly with how the law should respond in a fallen society, is having an argument about political prudence. I disagree with where many of them land, but they are inside the tent, and treating them as apostates is both unjust and counterproductive.

A believer who says that the unborn child is not a human life, or that its life is a matter of indifference, has moved onto different ground. That is a different kind of pro-choice Christian, and it is not a policy disagreement; it is a claim about who counts as a neighbour, and Scripture answers it clearly. I do not think that position can be squared with the Bible, however sincerely it is held.

And it is worth adding that the hard cases are genuinely hard. A pregnancy that threatens the mother’s life presents a tragic choice between two lives, not a straightforward wrong. Christians of firm conviction have always recognised this, and pretending that every case is morally identical does no service to the truth.

Pastoral compassion and moral clarity

Here is where I want to slow down. A great many women in our congregations have had abortions. Some were coerced. Some were terrified and alone. Some believed the leaflet that told them it was a cluster of cells. Almost all of them have listened to sermons on this subject with their hearts hammering, waiting to hear whether there is any mercy for them in the room.

There is. The blood of Jesus covers this sin as completely as it covers every other, and I mean completely. David committed adultery and arranged a murder and was forgiven and restored, and God still called him a man after His own heart. If the gospel can hold that, it can hold this. 1 John 1:9 is not written with exceptions.

Which means the church has two jobs and must not drop either. Tell the truth about what abortion is, so that fewer people walk into it uninformed. And be the sort of community where a woman in an unplanned pregnancy has practical help offered before she has to ask, and where one who has already been through it can say so out loud without being destroyed.

Why the language keeps shifting

It is worth noticing how much of this argument is conducted through vocabulary. Products of conception. Termination. Tissue. Every one of those phrases is doing work, and the work is to put distance between the speaker and what is being described. Language of that kind is a reliable sign that somebody knows, at some level, what is actually happening.

Christians should be scrupulous about the opposite temptation. Placards, gory photographs and the word murderer aimed at frightened young women have done enormous harm and have driven people away from the very help they needed. Truth telling does not require brutality. In fact brutality usually obscures the truth, because the hearer stops listening to the content and hears only the hostility.

So use accurate words, gently. Child. Life. Death. Grief. Those are honest words, and they leave room for the conversation to continue rather than ending it.

The wider culture of life

One fair criticism of Christians on this subject is that our concern has sometimes stopped at birth. If we believe every human life bears the image of God, that conviction should be visible in how we treat the disabled, the elderly, the refugee and the prisoner, not solely in how we vote on one issue. A consistent ethic is far more persuasive than a single campaign, and considerably harder.

It should also be visible in adoption and fostering, in supporting single mothers, in practical generosity to families who have taken on a child with severe needs. Those things cost money and years and sleep. They are also the strongest argument any church can make, because they answer the accusation that we care about the unborn and not about the born.

James defines pure religion as visiting orphans and widows in their affliction, which in his world meant the two categories of person with no safety net at all. Every generation has to work out who that is now, and then go and do it.

So, now what?

If you are wrestling with whether you can be a pro-choice Christian, do not settle it by tribe. Read Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1 and Luke 1 with the question in front of you, and let the texts speak before the politics does. Then be honest with yourself about which of the arguments you actually hold: the one about the child, or the one about the law.

If you have had an abortion, the word to you is not condemnation. It is forgiveness, freely offered, at cost to God and not to you. And if you are simply a member of a church that talks about this a great deal, the question worth asking is what your congregation actually does for a frightened twenty year old who turns up pregnant. What would she find if she came to you?

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.

Psalm 139:13 and 14, ESV