The Christian case against abortion: a summary

Abortion is one of the most contentious issues facing the world today. On one side of the debate, the pro-life movement argues that human life begins at fertilisation and all human beings have a right to life. Therefore, humans should not be destroyed in the womb. On the other side, pro-choice activists believe that a woman can choose abortion because of “reproductive rights”. They say embryos have no rights, because they lack certain properties that would grant them these privileges. It is beyond the scope of this article to address all their arguments in favour of abortion. This article will summarise how Christians can respond.

Scientists discovered in the mid-1800s that human life begins at fertilisation. This is not a point which is debated in the academic literature on abortion. Once the sperm and ovum cells fuse, both of these non-human entities cease to exist and a new human being, a single-celled embryo (also called a zygote) comes into existence. This embryo has a biological continuity with each more mature stage that it develops into, so the embryo, “Keanu”, who began at fertilisation is the same organism as the adult, “Keanu”, into which the embryo develops. 

While it was discovered over a century ago that human life begins at fertilisation, new evidence keeps coming to light which reinforces the understanding that human embryos are full human beings. For example, an article published in Nature Cell Biology shows that “[re]modelling of the human embryo at implantation is indispensable for successful pregnancy”. In other words, it is the embryo itself which directs these changes and makes itself ready for implantation. As the abstract reads: “our results indicate that the critical remodelling events at this stage of human development are embryo-autonomous, highlighting the remarkable and unanticipated self-organising properties of human embryos” (Marta N. Shahbazi, et al, “Self-organization of the human embryo in the absence of maternal tissues”, 4 May 2016, DOI: 10.1038/ncb3347). 

In fact, a study published by Steve Jacobs showed that 96% of biologists agree life begins at fertilisation. Eighty-five percent of those biologists identify as pro-choice. While 4% of biologists disagreed, this is such a small minority that it can be defined as a scientific consensus.

Read more:

Abortion through the eyes of a neonatal physician

The Abortion Debate: Life, Equality, and Choice

Christianity, the Sexual Revolution and the future of the West

Should praying outside abortion clinics be banned?

Once one establishes the scientific truth that human life begins at fertilisation – so that all human embryos are biological human beings throughout their entire existence – the conversation usually moves into philosophy of personhood (non-religious discussions) or theology of ensoulment (religious discussions). The philosophical and theological questions are related. Christian theologians have traditionally considered the soul to be the animating factor of the body, so if the embryo is moving, it is alive and therefore has a soul. And if it has a soul, it then has human rights as someone made in God’s image.

Those who are argue about personhood pick one, or multiple, function(s) a human can engage in – such as engage in rational thought, or being sentient - and argue since the embryo lacks that/those function(s), he or she is not a person. But this is backward thinking. After all, the reason the embryo will become rational, sentient etc,  is because it is a human being. The embryo’s underlying human nature grounds all of its capacities. Once the embryo exists, it has these capacities latently (i.e., inherently) and just needs time to develop the organs necessary to engage these functions. The reason “Keanu”, the toddler, is able to start walking is because “Keanu”, the embryo, had the inherent potential to walk. He just needed time to develop his legs and a central nervous system in order to be able to engage these functions. The same is true for psychological capacities which require development of a brain to the stage it can engage in these higher functions.

Therefore, the morality of abortion is simple. However the abortion issue itself is quite complex and much more could be said. The basic case I have outlined above is that all human beings, at all stages of life, have human rights and should be seen as bearing the image of God. No pro-choice thinker has ever raised a compelling argument for why some human beings have rights and others do not. Humanity has a long, sad history of denying rights to a subset of human beings, from Hitler’s Holocaust, to Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, to America’s chattel slavery and Tuskegee experiments. Denying human rights to individuals based on age and a lack of development is equally arbitrary. There is no good reason to think that now, finally, humans can decide which human beings can rightly be denied fundamental rights.

There are several arguments in support of abortion raised specifically by pro-choice Christians, however. One is because it’s so common. It has also been argued that there has been a misunderstanding of what ancient Christian thinkers thought about the soul and abortion itself.

Abortion, as a concept, has a long history, and was practised by ancient cultures. The early Christians and the ancient Jews were aware of it. Some Christians say the Bible makes no mention about the wrongness of abortion, and Jesus never mentioned it, nor did God give any laws forbidding abortion to the ancient Jews. Therefore, abortion must be acceptable to God.

The point about Jesus is a fallacious argument from silence. It doesn’t follow that because Jesus never spoke about it he would have accepted it as moral. In fact, John 21:25 says not everything Jesus did was written down. It’s entirely possible Jesus did talk about abortion but it was not recorded. Or it is possible he did not, but his numerous teachings about how much he loves children and about how we should love our neighbour and our enemies would have been seen by his disciples and the early Church to include unborn children, especially since they were Jews, and Jews considered children a blessing, an inheritance from the Lord (Ps. 127:3).

This also explains why there were no laws against abortion in the Levitical law [of the Old Testament]. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures used the same word for child to speak of unborn children and children outside the womb. No distinction was made between the two, so there was no need to condemn abortion, since any law against harming children would have outlawed harming unborn children as well. Additionally, as children were seen as an inheritance from the Lord and barrenness was seen as a curse, the Jews likely did not need to be told not to kill their children, especially since surrounding cultures, such as the Canaanites, did sacrifice their children to pagan gods and were condemned by God, even going so far as to command the Israelites to wipe them out. And, of course, God reinforced how wicked child sacrifice is when he told Jeremiah that commanding such a thing never even entered into his mind (Jer. 19:5).

Get access to exclusive bonus content & updates: register & sign up to the Premier Unbelievable? newsletter!

There has also been disagreement over when the early Church viewed ensoulment as occurring. The soul has always been seen as the animating factor of the body, so the early Christians would have recognized ensoulment to happen by at least quickening, the point at which the mother can feel the child moving within her body. But there were different views about just when, exactly, ensoulment occurs. The assumption by pro-choice Christians (and non-Christians) is since the early Church did not think early embryos had souls, they would have thought these children were not made in God’s image and so it would have been acceptable to abort them. This argument, too, is faulty, for if one examines ancient documents written by Christians one realises that even though they disagreed on when ensoulment occurs, they still universally rejected abortion as an affront to God’s dignity, a violation of Natural Law, and a grievous wrong.

One of the more famous philosophers appealed to is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas believed, they argue, ensoulment doesn’t occur until after fertilisation, around 40 days for boys and 80 days for girls. But this is because Saint Thomas did not have the benefit of 19th Century embryology. If he had been alive today, he would agree that ensoulment happens at fertilisation. Because St. Thomas was heavily influenced by Aristotle’s philosophy and the current understanding of human development of the time, he also believed in Aristotle’s view of ensoulment, a position referred to as delayed hominisation (the process by which humans gain their unique characteristics). This is the view that the soul doesn’t enter the body of the fetus until he attains the “form” of humanity. As we now know the embryo is biologically human from fertilisation, we can be sure that ensoulment occurs at fertilisation, since that’s the point at which the organism’s life begins.

Even though there was disagreement among early Christians regarding when ensoulment occurs, we know they opposed abortion in no uncertain terms. The Didache, which is one of the earliest Christian documents not contained in the Bible and is said to be a collection of teachings of the Apostles, states in 2:2: “you shall not abort a child or commit infanticide”. This passage is a clear condemnation of abortion, an act which violates Natural Law. Another early Christian document, The Epistle of Barnabas, was just as unambiguous. In chapter 19, the author writes: “you shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor again, shall you procure its destruction after it is born.” The Didache presents abortion as “the way of death”, and The Epistle of Barnabas presents abortion to be in opposition to the way of light.

Abortion has been unequivocally condemned by the Christian Church since its inception and there are good reasons to believe it was equally condemned in the ancient Jewish culture from which Christianity sprang. Until the mid-1900s, Christian theologians and philosophers from all the different denominations of Christianity universally condemned it. Also, we are given clear prescriptions throughout Scripture to speak up for those who have no voice (Prov. 31:8), and to rescue those being led away to death (Prov. 24:11). Christians are duty-bound by Scripture and their own tradition to oppose abortion, and we are duty-bound to work toward saving the life of the unborn.

Clinton Wilcox is a staff apologist for Life Training Institute. He specializes in training pro-life people to make the pro-life case more effectively and persuasively. He is also a certified speaker and mentor for Justice for All. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter.