Christians, You Can’t Support Abortion

On May 2, 2022 the unthinkable happened. A leaked draft of the majority opinion from the Supreme Court regarding overturning Roe v. Wade spread across the internet. Let’s ignore the serious issues revolving around leaked Supreme Court documents and focus on the abortion issue. As of my writing this, the Supreme Court has not officially made the ruling, though, we expect it will be soon.

The reaction to this document was all too predictable. Pro-lifers were overjoyed while abortion advocates gnashed their teeth and warned that all women’s rights would soon be stripped away. Meanwhile, some of us are still waiting with cautious optimism. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t surprised by any of the reactions. Some Christians really let us all down.

Christians Support Abortion?

Some Christians outright support abortion. I’ll discuss why that may be later. On the other hand, the ones who really took me by surprise were settled in the middle ground or were silent on the issue.

Quiet Women

The Christian publishing world and speaking circuit is not wanting in female teachers, and I would have expected all of them to have some sort of response to the likely Roe v. Wade determination. Instead, they were silent on abortion and they conducted business-as-usual social media activity. I’m not talking about nobodies like me. I’m talking about Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, Pricilla Schirer, Christine Caine, and Jackie Hill Perry, for example. These women have something to say about everything, yet they remained silent on a court victory that saves babies’ lives…

Unity No Matter What

Then there are Christians admonishing other Christians for speaking out against abortion because it might sound mean, make other people feel guilty for their previous abortions, or cause division between pro-life and “pro-choice Christians.”

Abortion is sin, and we ought to feel guilt about sin. Additionally, there is no Scriptural support for light having unity with darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14). Abortion is essentially human sacrifice to the idol of self. It’s demonic, and no Christian can support abortion, if only for that reason alone.

A Woke Joke

Then, of course, we have the man who has done nothing but disappoint Christians for years. Phil Vischer. He has fully drank the Kool-Aid of wokeness. He consistently speaks out in favor of Critical Race Theory (CRT), rejects young Earth creationism, and enjoys shaming white Christians on his podcast and Twitter account.

In a recent podcast, Vischer discussed the need for nuance in abortion, and the conversation spilled over onto Twitter, as well. The following tweets consist of Vischer splitting hairs over the semantics of “murder” and “killing.” Meanwhile, identifying as pro-life because he still wants to see “abortion minimized.” Wow, Phil. You sit among the great men of faith like John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, and the Apostle Paul.

I think you missed the original point of the exchange. I’m still pro-life and still want to see abortion minimized.

— Phil Vischer (@philvischer) May 21, 2022

Phil Vischer isn’t alone in the big wide world of wokeness. For many Christians, it is a comfortable middle ground. In the middle, people strive to be Christian enough for the conservatives and worldly enough for everyone else. The whole thing is a joke, though. You can’t compromise between the world and your faith. God demands all of use, not just the parts we are willing to give Him.

The Statistics: How Many Support Abortion?

Pew Research Center released updated abortion statistics in May 2022. The results paint a sad picture, but they also offer some hope. Despite what legacy news and pro-choice advocates would have us believe, most Americans do not support abortion under all circumstances. On the other hand, most Americans reported supporting abortion at least some of the time. Below are adult responses to a survey inquiring when abortion should be legal.

36% – legal in most cases

19% – legal in all cases

6% – legal with few exceptions

27% – illegal in most cases

8% – illegal in all cases

2% – illegal with few exceptions

2% – no response

Looking Deeper

Of the 61% who said abortion should be legal:

56% – believe how far along the pregnancy is should be considered

65% – do not believe life begins at conception

Of the 37% who said abortion should be illegal:

46% – legal if the mother’s life or health are at risk

36% – legal if pregnancy is the result of rape

27% – “it depends” if pregnancy is a result of rape

I know, that’s a lot of numbers, but when simplified, these numbers tell a sad story. Only 8% of American adults believe abortion should be abolished. Ninety percent of American adults support abortion in some, if not all, circumstances. You might think, “Sure, but Christians don’t fit into those statistics.” I’ve got bad news for you.

According to research from Lifeway, seven in ten women who have an abortion identify as Christians. There’s reason to believe that more people identify as Christian than who actually are born-again Christians, but nonetheless, we can’t pretend that Christian and “churched” women are not seeking abortions.

Who Are The Christian Women Getting Abortions?

The Lifeway research breaks down the 70% as follows:

27% – Catholics

26% – Protestants

15% – non-denominational

2% – Orthodox

The Protestant breakdown is Baptist (33%), Methodist (11%), Presbyterian (10%), and Lutheran (9%).

Why Do We So Often Support Abortion?

We have been sold lies. The pro-choice message focuses on our love of self and arguments that sound loving, but the message falls apart when we look more closely. So, what are some of the most popular reasons people give for why they support abortion?

1. “My body, my choice.”

The idea here is simple. Bodily autonomy. Women argue that pregnancy affects their bodies, and they have the right to end a pregnancies and to choose what happens to their bodies.

One problem. The baby you’re growing in your body is not your body.

The baby has two arms, two legs, a head, a heart, and its own DNA separate from the mother. Scientifically speaking, and I know everyone wants to be true to the science, that’s a whole individual person inside the woman.

The woman had a choice. She chose to have sex. She had various forms of birth control available, too. Pregnancy is a very natural and predictable consequence of sexual intercourse. You’ll find that in the science books, too, if you look hard enough.

On the other hand, sometimes a pregnancy is the result of extra circumstances that were not entirely (or at all) in the woman’s control.

Birth Control Malfunction

Birth control is not 100% reliable, and the manufacturers are sure to put that in the fine print. A person can do everything “right” and still end up pregnant. Fun fact: Pregnancy is always a possibility when you have sex and are fertile. We aren’t victims in these scenarios. It’s always a gamble, and we should deal with the consequence, not destroy it.

The Big Exceptions To Support Abortion

The other big argument is for abortion in cases of rape, incest, or a particularly young female. Who doesn’t immediately feel for the women in these situations?

How will she explain the pregnancy? How will it change her life? Will she need to drop out of school or quit her job? And the unwanted pregnancy on top of the shame she might experience from the assault could feel like more than she is ready to take on. No one would argue this is a great situation, but how good or bad the situation is does not matter more than a human life.

There are consequences for other people’s sins, and we have to live with them all the time. A drunk driver kills a pedestrian. A husband cheats on his wife and gives her an STD. Someone lies about a coworker, ruining her reputation. A bully at school beats up the new kid. All of these scenarios involve someone sinning against another person, and there are consequences that were not self-inflicted. It isn’t fair, but that’s the nature of living in a fallen world.

We don’t honor God when we respond to sin with sin. No one can argue this isn’t an extremely difficult thing to deal with, but taking an innocent life because someone did something terrible to you is not an appropriate response.

2. “Abortion Is Necessary Healthcare.”

I looked up “healthcare” in multiple dictionaries. The definition is generally the same in all of them. Here’s an example:

Healthcare

a.) efforts made to maintain or restore physical, mental, or emotional well-being especially by trained and licensed professionals.

b.) the field concerned with the maintenance or restoration of the health of the body or mind.

c.) the maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration, or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people.

Overall, the focus is on maintaining a person’s well-being across the many facets of health (e.g., physical, mental, etc.). No matter what a doctor is doing to provide healthcare for a mother, abortion is decidedly not healthcare for the unborn child. Of course, this is when someone will interject with, “But what about to save a mother’s life?”

A mother in danger generally doesn’t need a pregnancy to be terminated. It is not uncommon to provide medical services to a pregnant woman. Yes, the baby may be at risk in some cases, but the baby is less at risk than when the doctor is performing an abortion. Certain death and risk are not the same.

Miscarriage

I keep hearing that women who have a miscarriage will be denied healthcare if abortion is banned. That’s just not true. Miscarriage and abortion are not the same thing. A miscarriage is sometimes called a spontaneous abortion, but that is not the same as an elected abortion. A miscarriage is when a woman’s body “aborts” an unviable pregnancy or cannot carry the baby. One is a choice. The other is the unwanted death of a mother’s child. Let’s not confuse that.

A woman who experiences a miscarriage may need a dilation and curettage procedure, also known as a D&C. In the case of miscarriage, a D&C is used to scrape out any tissue left behind in the miscarriage. It sounds ghoulish, but the D&C prevents infection. This procedure is also used for abortions, but banning abortion would not prevent women from receiving the healthcare they need after a miscarriage. This is just a scare tactic abortion advocates like to use.

Ectopic Pregnancy

The other healthcare item those who support abortion claim will be withheld if abortion is banned is ectopic pregnancy treatment. The lie we constantly hear is that women who have ectopic pregnancies will be left to suffer and die to save the baby.

Let’s clarify ectopic pregnancy. It is when an embryo implants outside of the uterus. These embryos have no chance of survival due to lack of nutrition and hormones. God designed the woman’s body to carry a baby in her uterus, and her fallopian tubes (a common location for ectopic pregnancies) simply cannot sustain life. Thus, removing an unviable or dead embryo is not an abortion.

No one is planning to refuse women access to healthcare for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. We should also keep this issue in perspective. Studies report that abortions for cases of rape or incest range from less than 1% to 1.5%. This is hardly the biggest issue in the abortion argument, yet it’s all we hear about.

Risk to the mother, on the other hand, accounts for approximately 4% of abortions. That statistic is misleading, though. First, it includes ectopic pregnancy, and those have essentially no viability, are rarely fatal when untreated, and the embryo has often already died once discovered. Second, no one can prove how many mothers have been saved with abortions because they can be performed when the doctor perceives risk, not necessarily imminence. So, are these life-saving procedures or just an overabundance of concern for the mother?

3. “Abortion Is Safe.”

Abortion is never safe for the unborn baby. When people claim it is safe, they are completely disregarding the life in the womb.

I won’t pretend that women who get abortions have astronomically high death rates. However, I don’t think we can ignore the real side effects and risks that accompany abortion.

Possible side effects include cramping, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. More serious complications include bleeding, infection, and organ damage. Meanwhile, 1 in 100 early abortions and 1 in 50 late-term abortions have much more serious complications. Some of those risks include incomplete abortion, cervical damage, perforation of the uterus, and death.

Safe? I guess it depends on what you mean by “safe.”

Mental Health

A common argument from men and women who support abortion is that women are happy and relieved by their decision. Live Action has some interesting data to refute the there-are-no-mental-health-effects refrain so often sung by abortion advocates. According to Live Action, a study reported only 1.4% of participants claimed to have post-abortive mental health symptoms two years after the abortion. That would be great news for abortion supporters if 50% of the paid participants hadn’t dropped out of the study before they could respond.

We don’t know what happened to that 50%, but I have serious doubts that women who are happy about their abortion would skip the opportunity to be paid to tell someone about it.

A different study, discussed by Live Action, refuted the findings of the previous study. Dr. Hanna Soderberg found that approximately 60% of post-abortive women experienced distress, and 70% said they would never have another abortion.

Medical records in Finland indicated that women who had abortions were 6-7 times more likely to die by suicide after one year than women who gave birth. Researchers in Britain reported women who had abortions were 225% more likely to attempt suicide than women who gave birth.

Yet another study, which focused on women who took the abortion pill, reported that 77% of the women regretted it. In addition, 38% claimed to suffer from mental health symptoms such as, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation.

Your chances of physical survival may be quite high as the mother, but to say women walk away unscathed from this “safe” procedure is a cruel lie.

4. “It’s Not A Real Person.”

This lie continues to persist, despite modern scientific achievements. How we speak about the unborn, babies’ viability, and what we can see in the womb have all worked against our ability to see unborn babies as real people.

Our Language

Not knowing the baby’s sex doesn’t do the child any favors. We all end up referring to the baby as “it.” I do it, too. This isn’t because I don’t think the baby is a person, but rather, I simply don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet. But it definitely helps dehumanize the child. Killing an “it” is a whole lot easier than killing a boy or girl, you know?

Viability

In 1973, the year of the Roe v. Wade case, babies under 28 weeks would most likely die if they were born. In 2022, the survival rate for those same babies hovers around 79%. The argument is silly to me, but for some folk, the fact that a baby can’t survive if born makes them disposable. Well, thanks to modern medicine, that reasoning is becoming less reasonable.

A Better Look Inside

A contributing factor in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 was the big question we still disagree on today. When does life begin? It’s just a clump of cells, right? Well, I can see why Planned Parenthood discourages ultrasounds for women considering abortion. That clump resembles a person way too much to sell the it’s-not-alive lie. Before Roe v. Wade, though, the clump idea wasn’t a hard sell because ultrasounds didn’t offer much information to the untrained eye.

Medicine has made vast improvements in ultrasound technology, so we can see that “clump” quite well now. Take a look at the picture below. The ultrasound from before Roe v. Wade is nearly impossible to distinguish babies in, and there are two in it! The modern ultrasound doesn’t just show me a baby exists; It shows me a cute baby.

I’ve had five babies. Each time I could see a picture of the baby and hear the heart beating. I could even see the heart beating. 3D imaging allows us to look inside the womb and watch our unborn babies suck their thumbs, hiccup, yawn, and stretch. Science has given us proof that a human being is growing, living, and waiting to make an entrance into this world…alive.

If you haven’t, check out Abby Johnson. She worked at Planned Parenthood, and she is now a well-known and vocal pro-life advocate. She used to support abortion, in part, because she bought into the lie that abortion wasn’t really harming the baby. Then, in 2009, she assisted in the abortion of a baby 13 weeks along. Johnson says she watched as the baby fought for its life during the procedure. Not a clump of lifeless cells. A baby. A real person.

Abortion Is Selfish

These four popular reasons people use to support abortion, along with others, often appeal to emotions with anecdotal (and uncommon) stories. They leave science at the door and talk about rights and the patriarchy. Pro-choice advocates scream and yell like maniacs at rallies about how pro-lifers are controlling women. And this all reveals the underpinnings of the pro-choice movement.

We have made idols of ourselves. Love for self is unchecked and out of hand. The LGBTQ+ community is evidence of this. I literally just watched a commercial from Disney+ about Pride month featuring two drag queens.

Pride in who we are, no matter how sinful, is celebrated in our culture. We say stupid things like “my truth” and we dismiss constructive criticism and correction. How dare someone speak to me in any way other than affirmation, am I right?

The Result Of Pride And Selfishness

When we are unwilling to see ourselves as we truly are, then we begin to allow all kinds of sin into our lives. We refuse to deal with the consequences of our actions because we don’t want to, and we have been given a way out. Abortion is a way out of the consequence of our sexual behavior. Abortion also allows us to avoid the consequences of another’s sin against us, and we think it’s all right because it isn’t “fair.” But when was life ever fair?

Christians, we have diluted ourselves into thinking we have the right to do anything necessary to continue in our sin and avoid undesirable outcomes and circumstances.

Does The Bible Support Abortion?

The Bible does not say, “Thou shall not abort babies in the womb.” Therefore, abortion advocates predictably claim the Bible doesn’t speak against it. The problem I have with biblically illiterate people is that they insist on using the Bible as a cudgel against biblical truths. They’re getting it wrong, and they are being wrong with smug expressions on their faces. Why don’t we look at God’s Word for guidance in abortion?

We Are Made In God’s Image

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Genesis 1:27

“And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” (emphasis mine)

Genesis 9:5-6 (ESV)

Don’t Kill

“Thou shalt not kill.”

Exodus 20:13

“For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law.”

James 2:11

“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (emphasis mine)

John 10:10

God Values Children And Unborn Babies

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

Jeremiah 1:5

“When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

Exodus 21:22-25

“For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”

Psalm 139:13-16

“Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”

Psalm 127:3

You can search further in the Scriptures and find even more evidence that God opposes abortion. Sad circumstances, selfishness, perceived rights, and pitiable people do not negate the sin in abortion. We may not feel like it is straightforward, but it couldn’t be more black and white. No Christian should support abortion. Period.

What If You Have Had An Abortion?

Sadly, some pro-life advocates speak cruelly to women who have had an abortion. Although I’m not personally responsible for those individuals, I’m still so sorry for their behavior. The whole world is telling women that abortion is safe, normal, and even commendable. No one can expect a woman to make the biblical choice when she doesn’t know better. The abortion happened, and there is no way to undo the procedure. On the other hand, there is really good news.

God can forgive your abortion. I’ve never had an abortion, but I have sinned plenty in my life. My sin separated me from God just as everyone else’s does, too. The Bible says that no one is righteous (Romans 3:10), and each of us has fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). None of this surprises God, though. Even while we were sinners, He loved us and sent His Son, Jesus, to die on the cross for us (Romans 5:8). John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “Whoseoever” can be you if you repent and believe.

An abortion is not unforgivable, and it doesn’t mean a woman is excluded from fellowship. God is ready to forgive, and believers are ready to welcome a new sister in Christ into fellowship. I earnestly pray that no woman lets her past dictate her future, keeping her from the Lord.

Final Thought

Abortion is one of those topics in which people are passionate on both sides, and that’s a very real danger. I think passion is good. Ask my husband, and he’ll tell you I’m passionate about nearly everything. I’ve yet to find a topic I can’t manage to get worked up over. Passion, however, can cloud our judgment and entice us to follow our hearts rather than the Lord.

Let’s cool down on the abortion issue and take ourselves out of it. What does God say about life? In whose image have we all been created? Does God have an opinion on murder? On children? Believers, we know the answers to those questions. Christians can’t support abortion and live a faithful, obedient, and counter-cultural life.

Abortion is the world’s way of trying to save themselves from the consequences of sin. Are you brave enough to stand against abortion and lovingly tell others that salvation can only be found through Jesus Christ?

Image courtesy of Misael Moreno via Unsplash.