Abortion

Abortion and the exposure of infants were common in the Greek and Roman world, and the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament speak about them directly. The Didache, a church manual probably from the late first or early second century, sets out the way of life and the way of death, and in its list of commands under the way of life it forbids killing a child by abortion and killing a newborn. The Epistle of Barnabas, from about the same period, repeats the prohibition in almost the same words. Neither text argues the point; both treat it as part of the ordinary moral teaching a new Christian receives alongside the commands not to murder, steal or commit adultery.

The apologists of the second century, defending Christians against the charge that they were secretly murderers, turned the charge around. Athenagoras of Athens, in his Plea for the Christians addressed to the emperor Marcus Aurelius around 177, argued that Christians could not be guilty of murder at their meals, since they regard women who use drugs to cause abortion as committing murder and hold that the child in the womb is a created being and an object of God's care. Tertullian, in his Apology around 197, wrote that for Christians, since murder is forbidden once for all, it is not lawful to destroy even what is conceived in the womb, and that to prevent a birth is only a quicker way of killing. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea, in a letter of 374 setting out rules of church discipline, said that a woman who deliberately destroys an unborn child is guilty of murder and that the fine distinction between a formed and an unformed fetus is not admitted among Christians. Michael Gorman's short study Abortion and the Early Church (1982) gathers this evidence and is the place to start if you want to read it for yourself.

The early church was not lenient about this, but it was not merciless either, and the difference matters for pastors. The Council of Elvira in Spain, around 305, imposed lifelong exclusion from communion in some cases. The Council of Ancyra in 314, in its twenty-first canon, noted that the older rule had excluded such women until the end of their lives, and reduced the penance to ten years, explicitly as an act of mercy. Basil, in the same letter, also set a term of years rather than permanent exclusion. The church treated abortion as a grave sin and also as a sin for which there was a way back. Both halves of that will matter in section 5.

There was one real debate inside the tradition, and it should be told honestly because the minority view in section 3 appeals to it. Following Aristotle, many Christian thinkers believed that the rational soul was not present from the very beginning of pregnancy but was given some weeks later, once the body was formed. The Greek translation of Exodus 21:22-23, the Septuagint, made a distinction between a fetus that was formed and one that was not, and Augustine, in his questions on Exodus, reasoned that under that law destroying an unformed fetus was not counted as homicide in the strict sense. Thomas Aquinas also held a form of this delayed view. What this debate changed was how grave an early abortion was judged to be and what penance followed. What it did not change was the judgment that abortion is a serious sin: Augustine and Aquinas both condemned it at every stage. In 1869 Pope Pius IX removed the distinction from Catholic church law, and the scientific understanding of conception that emerged in the nineteenth century made the old embryology impossible to hold in its original form.

The Bible contains no command that names abortion, and both sides of the debate agree on that. They disagree about what the silence means. Those who hold the historic view argue that abortion was not a practice Israel's law needed to address, because a people that counted children as the LORD's gift and barrenness as a sorrow did not seek to end pregnancies; the general commands against shedding innocent blood (Proverbs 6:17; Deuteronomy 27:25) and the prophets' horror at the killing of pregnant women and their unborn children in war (Amos 1:13; 2 Kings 8:12) cover it. Those who hold the minority view argue that if abortion were the grave wrong the tradition says, it is strange that neither the law nor Jesus nor Paul mentions it, when abortion was well known in the world of the New Testament.

The texts that speak of life before birth are the ones you worked through in the inquiry. Psalm 139:13-16 praises God who formed the psalmist's inmost being and saw his unformed body. Jeremiah 1:5 says God knew the prophet before he formed him in the womb. Job 10:8-12 and 31:15 describe God shaping a person in the womb, and 31:15 does it to say that the slave has the same Maker as the master. Psalm 51:5 traces the psalmist's sinfulness back to conception. Luke says the baby leaped in Elizabeth's womb at Mary's greeting (Luke 1:41, 1:44), and Luke uses the same Greek word, brephos, for the unborn John, the newborn Jesus and the infants brought to Jesus for a blessing. Defenders of the historic view take these texts together to show that scripture treats the person in the womb as the same person who is later born, and that God's care for that person has already begun. That is why the inquiry asked you to notice the pronouns: the psalmist does not say God formed a thing that later became me; he says You knit me together.

The minority view reads the same texts differently, and its reading deserves to be heard in its own terms. Psalm 139 is a hymn of praise about God's knowledge, they say, not a statement about the moral status of embryos. Jeremiah 1:5 speaks of God knowing the prophet before he was formed at all, which, if pressed as a statement about personhood, would prove too much, since nobody thinks Jeremiah existed as a person before conception; the verse is about God's purpose, not about when a human life begins. Some also point to Genesis 2:7, where the man becomes a living being when God breathes into him, as a sign that full human life is tied to breath. Defenders of the historic view reply that a hymn can still teach, that God's foreknowledge of Jeremiah before conception does not cancel his forming of Jeremiah in the womb, and that Genesis 2:7 describes the unique creation of the first man from dust, not how his descendants come to be. Each reply has been answered in turn. What you should notice is that both sides argue from the same texts, and that the question between them is how a theological truth about God's care becomes a moral rule about human action.

One passage has become a battleground and you need to know why. Exodus 21:22-25 deals with men who are fighting and strike a pregnant woman. The Hebrew says that her children go out. If there is no further injury, the man pays a fine; if there is, the law requires a life for a life, and then eye for eye. The BSB, like the NIV, reads the first case as a premature live birth: the child comes out early but survives, and the fine is for the injury and the risk. The RSV and the NRSV read it as a miscarriage: the child dies, a fine is paid, and only harm to the woman brings the life for a life. On the miscarriage reading, some argue that the law valued the fetus less than a born person, since its death was answered with a fine. On the premature birth reading, the law protects both mother and child with the same penalty. The Hebrew can bear either reading, as the word study in the inquiry showed, and serious scholars hold both. Two cautions apply on any reading. The passage is about an accidental injury in a fight, not a deliberate decision to end a pregnancy. And a law that sets a lower penalty for a harm does not thereby make the harm permissible.

Here is the plain statement the evidence supports. From the Didache to the present, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, and the great majority of Protestant churches, including nearly all the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America, have taught that abortion takes the life of a human being made in God's image and is gravely wrong. John Paul II restated the Catholic teaching in Evangelium Vitae (1995). Orthodox churches have held to the canons of Basil. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches across the world hold the same conviction, and evangelicals in North America were mobilised on the issue in the late 1970s, notably by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979). That is a consensus across the historic churches, and a lesson that presented it as an open question with two equal sides would not be telling the truth.

There is also a minority of Christians who hold a different view, and they should be described as they would describe themselves. Several mainline Protestant denominations in the United States, among them the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), have adopted statements supporting legal access to abortion, usually while describing the decision as a grave one. The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, founded in 1973 under an earlier name, gathers religious groups who share that position. The Christian ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison set out a theological case in Our Right to Choose (1983), and more recently Margaret Kamitsuka, in Abortion and the Christian Tradition (2019), has argued for what she calls a pro-choice theological ethic. Most who hold this view do not say abortion is morally trivial. They say that the decision belongs to the woman, before God, and not to the state.

Their arguments, at full strength, run like this. Scripture does not forbid abortion, and Exodus 21, on the miscarriage reading, treats the loss of a fetus differently from the death of a born person. The tradition itself did not hold that full personhood begins at conception, as the debate about formed and unformed fetuses shows, so the present consensus is less ancient than it claims. A pregnancy happens inside a woman's body and demands of her what no law demands of anyone else, and she is a moral agent made in God's image, able to discern before God what she can bear. And the experience of the world is that laws forbidding abortion do not end it but drive it into secrecy, where women die. The World Health Organization counts unsafe abortion among the leading preventable causes of maternal death, and those deaths fall overwhelmingly on poor women in poor countries.

Those who hold the consensus answer each point. The silence of scripture is the silence of a people for whom the practice was unthinkable, and the texts of section 2 speak clearly enough about whose life is at stake. The old debate about ensoulment never led any church father to permit abortion, and the modern knowledge that a distinct human organism exists from conception removes the ground the old distinction stood on. The burden of pregnancy is real, but the right answer to a heavy burden laid on one person is for others to share it, not to end the life of the one who causes it, and the woman's dignity as an image-bearer is exactly matched by the child's. And unsafe abortion is a tragedy, but the answer to a tragedy that kills women is to care for women, not to make the killing of children safer. The minority replies in turn that this answer asks poor women to carry the cost of the church's conviction while the church does little to share it. Notice that this last reply turns from the status of the unborn to the church's own practice. That is a fair challenge, and one the consensus should be able to meet. Section 5 is about meeting it.

One more distinction runs through the whole debate. What is morally right and what the law should require are related but not identical questions. Most Christians who hold the consensus believe the law should protect unborn life, but they differ among themselves on how, on what penalties are just, and on whether women themselves should ever be prosecuted; many pro-life Christians argue that they should not. Some Christians who believe abortion is gravely wrong nonetheless doubt that criminal law is the best way to reduce it. Keep the moral question and the legal question apart in your own thinking, and notice when someone slides from one to the other.

Among Christians who hold the consensus there is a genuine disagreement, and it concerns the hardest cases. Here the church is divided, and each position has serious defenders and serious arguments. Three positions are worth setting out.

The first holds that a direct abortion is never permitted, whatever the circumstances. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church, and it is shared by many Orthodox and some Protestant Christians. Its central conviction is that one may never directly and intentionally kill an innocent human being, even to save another life, because both lives belong to God and neither may be treated as a means. Paul's refusal to do evil that good may result (Romans 3:8) is often cited. But this position is less rigid than it is often described, because of what Catholic moral theology calls the principle of double effect. An action with two effects, one good and one bad, may be permitted if the action itself is not wrong, the bad effect is not intended, the bad effect is not the means to the good, and there is a serious reason. So a woman with cancer of the womb may have it removed even though her unborn child will die, and in an ectopic pregnancy, where the embryo has implanted outside the womb and both will die if nothing is done, removing the damaged tube is widely accepted. Catholic moralists still debate exactly which treatments for ectopic pregnancy fall within the principle. The strength of this view is its clarity and its refusal to rank one human life above another. Its critics say the line between intending and foreseeing a death can become too fine to bear moral weight.

The second holds that abortion is permitted only when it is necessary to save the mother's life. This is the position of many evangelical and Pentecostal churches and of many Protestant statements around the world. Its argument is that when continuing a pregnancy will kill the mother, and often the child as well, saving the life that can be saved is not choosing one human being over another but rescuing whom one can. Some compare it to the right to defend life, though the child is in no sense an aggressor. Jewish tradition reached a similar conclusion early: the Mishnah, the collection of rabbinic law compiled around 200, teaches that when a woman's life is in danger in childbirth, her life comes first, until the greater part of the child has been born. The strength of this view is that it answers the cases that trouble the conscience most, where doing nothing means two deaths. Its critics on one side say it permits what the first position forbids, the direct taking of an innocent life; its critics on the other side say a threat to the mother's health, not only her life, can be grave enough to count.

The third holds that, beyond the life of the mother, abortion may also be permitted in a few other grave cases: pregnancy after rape or incest, and severe conditions in which the child cannot survive after birth. Some Protestant churches have held this view. The Southern Baptist Convention, in a resolution of 1971, went further still, supporting laws that would allow abortion after rape or incest, where there was clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and where there was likely damage to the mother's emotional, mental and physical health; it reaffirmed that resolution in 1974 and reversed it in 1980. Its argument about rape is that the woman did not consent to the act that began the pregnancy, and that requiring her to carry the child of her attacker lays on her a second violation; in places where rape is used as a weapon of war, as it has been in eastern Congo and elsewhere, this is not a theoretical case. Its argument about lethal conditions is that carrying a child who will certainly die within hours or days may impose great suffering without saving anyone. Those who hold the first two positions answer with real force too. A child conceived in rape is as innocent and as fully an image-bearer as any other, and some people conceived in that way have spoken publicly of their gratitude to be alive. Healing for a woman who has been violated does not come through a second death. And for a child who will not live long, many Christians have turned to what is called perinatal hospice: carrying the child to birth, holding and naming and loving the child for the time that is given, and grieving together. Those who hold the wider view reply that the gratitude of some does not create a duty for every woman, that what a church admires as costly love freely given it should be slow to require, and that a rule which obliges a young girl made pregnant by rape to carry the child demands of a child a heroism the church would not demand of an adult in any other case. Both sides of this argument are speaking out of compassion, and a pastor should be able to state each in a way its holders would recognise.

Notice what all three positions share. All of them hold that the unborn child is a human life made in God's image. All of them treat abortion for reasons of convenience as wrong. They differ about the narrow band of cases in which two grave goods collide. That is a real disagreement, and it is a disagreement within a consensus, not a sign that there is none.

In almost any congregation of more than a few dozen people there are women who have had abortions, and in many congregations there are more than the pastor would guess. Many have never told anyone. Some had no real choice: they were pressured by a husband, a boyfriend, a parent or an employer, or they were very young, or they had been abused. Some made the decision freely and regret it; some do not regret it; some carry grief they cannot name. Every one of them is made in God's image, every one of them is a person for whom Christ died, and every sermon on this subject is heard by them first. The church's long history of treating abortion as grave and also as forgivable, from Ancyra's reduced penance onward, is the right history to stand in.

So preach the truth and preach it with the gospel inside it. Say that the unborn child is a human life and that God cares for that life, and in the same breath say that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), that if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us (1 John 1:9), and that a bruised reed he will not break (Isaiah 42:3). Never make a woman's past a public example. Never use language that mocks or labels. If a woman tells you privately about an abortion, listen more than you speak, do not tell her what she ought to feel, and do not repeat what she has told you. If what you hear reveals that she was abused, forced or trafficked, or that a child is at risk now, follow the steps in the Pastoral Care lessons Protecting the Vulnerable and Domestic Abuse; some things cannot be kept secret, and her safety, and the safety of others, comes first.

Speak to men as well, because the church often does not. A pregnancy has a father, and in a great many abortions a man has pressured the woman, refused responsibility, paid for the procedure or simply disappeared. Some of those men are sitting in your church. Joseph, when he learned that Mary was pregnant, was unwilling to disgrace her publicly (Matthew 1:19), and then he stayed. The church that calls women to carry their children must call men to stand by them, and must say plainly that abandoning a pregnant woman is a sin and not a misfortune.

Then make the conviction cost the church something. A church that condemns abortion but expels a pregnant teenager from the choir, shames an unmarried mother from the pulpit, or offers nothing when a family cannot afford another child has made abortion more likely, not less. In some countries pregnant schoolgirls have been barred from returning to school, and churches have sometimes supported such rules; that pushes frightened girls towards secret and unsafe abortions. Ask what a woman in your community would need in order to carry a child she did not plan: food, money for the clinic and the birth, a place to live, a way to finish school, someone to care for the baby while she works, protection from a violent man. Scripture says God settles the lonely in families (Psalm 68:6) and that pure religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:27). Adoption and fostering are part of that answer, as they were for Moses in Exodus 2, but they are not the whole of it, and they must be done with care, within the law and never as a trade in children. The minority view's sharpest charge against the consensus, in section 3, is that the church asks poor women to carry the cost of its conviction alone. The only answer to that charge is a church that carries it with them.

Turn to a new page in your casebook and head it Abortion in my setting. Do not write about any real woman, and do not write anyone's name. Instead, write down what you know about the situation in your community in general terms: what the law in your country says, whether abortion is common and how it is usually done, what happens to unmarried girls who become pregnant, what your church teaches and how it usually speaks about the subject.

Then write two short paragraphs side by side. In the first, write the strongest case for the historic Christian consensus in your own words, with three texts. In the second, write the strongest case for the position on the hard cases that is not your own church's, whether that is no exceptions, the life of the mother only, or wider exceptions, with its texts. Read the second paragraph back and ask whether someone who holds that view would accept it as fair.

Finally, write a short plan, of three or four lines, for what your church could do in the next year to make it easier for a woman in your community to carry a child she did not plan. Name roles, not people: the women's leader, a nurse in the congregation, the deacons who handle the benevolence fund. If you are not a leader yourself, write down which leader you will bring the plan to, by role, and when.