Why we value all human life: A Christian explanation

God says all human life has inherent value, despite the distortions sin and its curse of aging, death, and diseases has brought upon the world. God has the authority to say this because he has created everyone and everything, and he says he created humans in his image and likeness. He has instructed humankind not to shed human blood, “for in the image of God has God made mankind” (Gen 9:6b). God did not say what it is exactly about humans that makes all of us bearers of God’s image, but it is clear that God’s image is not tied to whether other humans, even our own biological mothers, deem us to be useful or desirable. God just says human life bears God’s image without any qualifications at all, so we ought to treat all human life with sanctity without any qualifications at all, especially human life that others have labeled unuseful, unwanted, and worthless. This includes the unborn, the elderly, the capital criminal, the poor, people with special needs, people who make different choices than you do, as well as everyone else and anyone else you can think of. God says all human life has value as a reflection of him.



What God says and what our society says about human life differ greatly. Fifty years ago roughly two out of every three American households had children in them, but today that number has been cut in half. We value what we have the most of, which is why seniors tend to value the past and young adults tend to value the future. Now that most of our households are without children, Americans do not value them as much as they did before.
Even households with children are valuing their children less and less. For every ten children born this year, eight of them will be used to having a non-family member get paid to take care of them regularly until they are old enough to go to school. Half of these children will be under paid care for the vast majority of time they are awake during weekdays, seeing their parents a little each morning and a little each night. Some parents have no economic choice when it comes to raising their children without paid childcare, but for many parents, especially in two-parent homes, the amount one spouse gets paid per hour barely outweighs the cost of paying someone else to care for their children. There seems to be another non-financial factor at work. Our society gives hardly any value to parenting, and it is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of question to ask: Which came first, devaluing parenthood or young children?
Once our children grow up enough to “do” something like participate in a sport, hobby, or some sort of other competition we likewise start to value them again. We fill their schedules and ours with an onslaught of activities, ensuring everyone has little free time for fun together and rest. But in their earliest years, when children cannot do anything we deem “useful,” we’d rather not be around them very much if we can help it.
Our society associates value with usefulness, which becomes a problem not only for young children, but for elderly people too. When our grandparents and parents stop being “useful” to us and our greater society, we’d rather not be around them very much either if we can help it. A skyrocketing industry in America is assisted living facilities in which people pay up to thousands of dollars a month for a family member to live under the watch of an institution when they should no longer live alone, even though these seniors are well enough to stay out of the care of a skilled nursing home. Like with childcare, there are many situations where assisted living is the right choice, but a factor we don’t like to talk about is that we as a society do not desire having the elderly among us in our homes like our ancestors did and other cultures still do.
Somehow a person’s usefulness and desirability has become a factor as to whether their human life is valuable, which means the flipside would also be true that once a human is neither useful nor desirable, then that human is also not valuable. That human is now expendable. Maybe that human is not even human at all, or at least not a human person with rights everyone must recognize. Instead, that human is an unviable tissue mass inside a mother’s womb. Sure, we say the thing inside the womb is a potential human person, and despite not knowing exactly when a fertilized egg, zygote, embryo, or fetus becomes an actual human person in our eyes, we just err on the side of destruction whenever it is not wanted. We can also err on the side of destruction when we think a human has or may have a poor quality of life and as such is not useful or desirable, making it worthless. The rest of us can take pity on such poor, useless, undesirable, “things” and tell ourselves that the only loving thing to do is find a way to extract the world of them in the least invasive manner. After all, the story goes that children can ruin people’s lives when they are unwanted by their parents. People with special needs are a burden and have a low quality of life. Elderly people have suffered enough. It’s only right, for their sake and for ours, for these lives to be extinguished.
Sin has so marred and distorted God’s image in us that we hate, kill, destroy, rape, and exploit each other and the rest of God’s creation instead of treating them like God would. We also stopped valuing human life as sacred. We stopped valuing children as the blessings God says they are. We stopped seeing ourselves as creatures, beholden to our Creator, and started seeing ourselves as accidental products of time and chance. This has made us view nature as a malleable construct that we are empowered to twist and mold like silly putty in our collective hands. Sin mixed up what we crave, how we think, and what we do, and as a result God has even given us over to follow our misguided impulses to their disastrous ends.
Thankfully, God also did something else. He sent his Son to take on our human nature, be born into our world and grow up to an adult. As an adult he revealed God’s ways and talked about God’s kingdom, which upset many who heard him. They conspired to have the authorities try him as a criminal and put him to death. And through his death God undid death itself and the evil forces that hold power over death and enslave us to fear death. God raised his Son Jesus to new life, and he promised to pour out his Spirit as a down payment on his people, so that whoever trusts in him will also share his new life in his kingdom. A life where there are no sex traffickers. A life where there are no murderers or rapists. A life where everyone has everything they need. As God’s people we are to give our communities a taste of what this life is like. Yes, Christians fall short of that ideal, but believe me we are trying, and a good place for us to start is by valuing all human life.