Abortion: A Rational Look at An Emotional Issue

by R.C. Sproul

Although heralded by the abortion lobby as both “safe and legal,” it is now apparent that abortion is merely “legal.” The complications of this, the most commonly performed medical procedure in America today, are legion. They include sterility—occurring in as many as 25 percent of all women receiving mid-trimester abortions; hemorrhaging—nearly 10 percent of all cases require transfusions; viral hepatitis—occurring in 10 percent of all those transfused; embolism—occurring in as many as 4 percent of all cases; cervical laceration; pelvic inflammatory disease; genital tract infection; cardiorespiratory arrest; acute kidney failure; and amniotic fluid embolus.16

At the same time, the cultural and political stigmatization of abortion providers has dramatically reduced the number of qualified physicians willing to serve them. As a result, many clinics have been forced to rely on less adequately trained personnel—nurse practitioners and doctors who more often than not have failed in private or institutional practices.

am convinced that if the most ardent feminists thought that abortion was in fact a type of murder, they would be as ardently opposed to abortion as they are in favor of equal rights for women.

Given this understanding of our use of the term murder, we must be careful to insist that pro-abortion and pro-choice activists are not necessarily advocating murder. They are not endorsing the premeditated, willful destruction of human beings with malice aforethought. Almost universally, the proponents of abortion act on the conviction that what is being aborted is less than a human being.

Many in the anti-abortion camp base their convictions on inferences drawn from the Bible or from decrees pronounced by their churches. This raises an obvious problem. If one group determines its position exclusively from the Bible or church teaching, what is the effect for people who do not embrace the authority of the Bible or of the church? At this point, the issue of religious tyranny, or the illegitimate intrusion of the church into the realm of the state, rises immediately. In other words, who has the right to say what’s right and on what grounds?

Whatever happens to the Constitution or to American ethics will not determine when human life begins. That is an objective question, for better or for worse.

If David was overwhelmed by the heavens, how much more should we be with our modern understanding of the cosmos?

In biblical terms, the sanctity of human life is rooted and grounded in creation. Mankind is not viewed as a cosmic accident but as the product of a carefully executed creation by an eternal God. Human dignity is derived from God. Man as a finite, dependent, contingent creature is assigned a high value by his Creator.

Though there is no biblical warrant for seeing man as godlike, there is a high dignity associated with this unique relationship to the Creator.

The murder of Officer Tippet was just as much an assault on his dignity as the murder of Kennedy was on his. Each was a human person. Each had personal worth and dignity. Kennedy’s person was no more laden with dignity than Tippet’s. What made the outrage over Kennedy’s death greater than that over Tippet’s death was the office Kennedy held. He was the president of the United States. He was the supreme publica persona of our land.

The significant point is that the moral basis for capital punishment in Genesis is the sanctity of life. The biblical ethic is that because man is endowed with the image of God, his life is so sacred that any malicious destruction of it must be punished by execution. Note that this verse implies that an assault against human life is considered by God an assault against Himself. To murder a person is to attack one who is the image-bearer of God. God regards homicide as an implicit attempt to murder God.

The death penalty mandated in scripture actually affirms the sanctity of life.

The legalists of His day were confident that if they obeyed the explicitly stated aspects of the law, they could applaud themselves for their great virtue. They failed, however, to grasp the wider implications. In Jesus’ view, what the law did not spell out in detail was clearly implied by its broader meaning.

The unborn remain anonymous “things” that are discarded. Fetuses have no names. They have no personal biographies. They tend to be presented to the public mind as abstract entities. I have heard fetuses described in abortion debates as “undifferentiated blobs of protoplasm,” “biological parasites,” and “so much domestic sewage.” It is difficult for people to become concerned about the fate of blobs of protoplasm or domestic sewage. After a child is born, no one is much concerned about the destiny of the placenta. Perhaps this demonstrates why the film The Silent Scream provoked such an outcry. In this film, viewers had a window into the womb that revealed a graphic picture of what actually happens in an abortion. Pro-abortion activists decried the film as emotionally provocative and inflammatory. They were certainly correct in that assessment. The film was indeed emotionally provocative, precisely because what was once hidden from the human eye was made clearly visible.

In The Silent Scream, we saw what looked like a formed human being going though obvious pain and distress in trying to escape the destructive instruments of the abortionist. The face was contorted into what resembled agonized human pain. The mouth opened in what looked like a human scream. Those factors were indeed emotionally provocative. The drama on screen did not resemble removal of a “tumor” or a “parasite” from a human body.

The fact that people become emotional about the abortion issue has a rational basis. The emotion is not arbitrary or capricious. The emotion is rooted in the deep human consciousness of the sanctity of life. It is emotional concern for the well-being of people—living people. Granted, many people remain unconvinced that the fetus is a human person. But if a fetus is a living person, ...

When we turn to the Bible, we discover that it offers no explicit statement that life begins at a certain point or that there is human life before birth. However, Scripture assumes a continuity of life from before the time of birth to after the time of birth. The same language and the same personal pronouns are used indiscriminately for both stages. Further, God’s involvement in the life of the person extends back to conception (and even before conception). This passage supports the point: 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. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Ps. 139:13–16)

The psalmist credits God for fashioning him in the womb. He also uses the term me to refer to himself before he was born. It is noteworthy that the Hebrew word translated as “unformed substance” is the Hebrew word for “embryo,” and this is the only instance of that word in the Bible.

In adults, heartbeat and brain waves are commonly referred to as “vital” signs. When both brain waves and the heartbeat cease for a period of time, a patient may be declared legally dead. Vital signs are a demonstration of life. When such signs are clearly present in the developing embryo, why are people so reluctant to speak of prenatal life? The embryo or fetus is not yet an independent living human person, but that does not mean he or she is not a living human person. If independence is the critical criterion for distinguishing living people from living nonpeople, then we must admit (as some readily do) that even birth does not yield a living person. At birth, the baby is disconnected physically from the mother—and in that sense is independent—but a newborn is still desperately dependent on outside help for survival. The newborn can breathe by himself in most cases, but he cannot feed himself.

Assuming that what is legal is therefore right leads to some serious traps. The first pitfall involves a fallacy. It is identified as the argumentum ad populum, a fancy way of saying that truth is determined by counting noses (or ballots).

This fallacy assumes that if a majority agrees that something is true, then it must be true. This is the type of argument that ancient astronomers forgot to tell Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Even though people ought not to uncritically accept whatever the government declares is legal, the fact remains that many people do. We cannot, therefore, ignore this as a powerful factor in explaining the massive shift in public opinion on abortion in the past decades.

How our consciences are informed is crucial. At the Diet of Worms, Luther was called on by church and state to renounce his views. He declared, “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot . . . recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.”49 Luther was saying, “Show me by the teaching of the Bible, or by clear and sound reasoning, or I will not change my position.” He was not willing to follow a certain path merely because it was the conventional or socially acceptable path. He sought a clear and certain basis for his conduct.

The legitimacy of law enforcement presupposes that the laws themselves are just. Any unjust use of force is evil. It is a sign of tyranny.

There is one nonnegotiable issue, though, regarding government involvement: Government must be involved in protecting people from murder. The protection of human life is at the heart of the role of government.

What is an appropriate role, then, for people and churches that wish to contest abortion laws? When the church calls on the state to prohibit abortion, the state is not being asked to establish a religion. Nor is the state being asked to be the church. The church is simply asking the state to be the state. If it is the role of the state to protect, sustain, and maintain human life, and if it is the conviction of the church that abortion involves the destruction of human life, then it follows that the church has the right to call the state to outlaw abortion. The church is not asking the state to baptize human beings, but to protect the lives of unborn humans. From a theological perspective, abortion is a “common grace” issue; that is, it involves the common welfare of humanity. When the church encourages the state to aid those suffering from a natural disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake, the church is asking the state to assist in the common cause of meeting human need. Though Christians and churches may at times overstep the boundaries and improperly intrude their religious concerns into the public sphere, I do not think this is the case with abortion. There is no greater arena of common grace and common concern than human life.

The state’s responsibility is to protect and defend life. The church’s responsibility is to call the state to be the state.

Violent backlash.

At all times unless they try to enforce something God forbids or enforce abstaining from something God commands.

No because it involves another person, not just the one making the decision.

The concept of the right to privacy, on which legalized abortion is based, is not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the Constitution.

If any single cell of a woman’s body is analyzed to find its essential biological structure, each and every cell will have the same genetic fingerprint. Likewise, an analysis of the cells of the fetus will determine that each cell has the same genetic fingerprint—which is different from that of the mother.

Two distinct sets of human tissue reside in the pregnant woman’s body.

The loss of a woman’s life in abortion is a tragic thing; but if abortion is evil, then the life lost is that of the guilty party. The destruction of the unborn baby is the loss of the innocent party. Ideally, we should refrain from abortion altogether, because then neither the woman nor the baby would die. If the practice of abortion is unjust, then the protection of those who engage in the practice is not the duty of the state. Concern for them is certainly the duty of the church, but to protect a criminal in the course of committing a crime is not the responsibility of government.

If a murderer is killed as a penalty for killing someone else, the punishment is perfectly just. The penalty may not be merciful, but it is not unjust. An injustice would be done to the murderer only if his penalty were more severe than his crime.

Although the death of a woman in any abortion—legal or illegal—is tragic, the focal point of the abortion debate must remain the unborn child. • Anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment views are not biblically inconsistent. A high view of the sanctity of life is foundational to both positions.

From a legal perspective, a vote for choice is a vote for abortion. The difference between the two positions is inconsequential, and legally, they are allies in the same camp.

A person who is conscientiously pro-choice must understand that he or she is a legal ally, willingly or unwillingly, with the pro-abortion position. If you the reader have taken a pro-choice position to avoid either extreme camp, you must squarely face the reality that from a legal standpoint you have chosen the pro-abortion camp.

Indeed, as others have said, the most dangerous place in the United States for a human being is inside the womb of a woman.

hedonism is an ethical philosophy in which the good is described as the maximum achievement of pleasure with the maximum avoidance of pain. It means grabbing all the gusto while having as few aches and pains as possible.

As a philosophy, hedonism has long had problems. Realizing that an unbridled pursuit of pleasure may bring as a consequence an abundance of undesired pain (for example, a pounding headache may follow overindulgence in the pleasures of alcohol), the ancient Epicureans sought to achieve a moderated and balanced quest for pleasure. There is a paradox in hedonism, because if we fail to achieve the pleasure we seek, we are frustrated, and if we gain the pleasure we seek, we tend to be bored. Thus, the pursuit of pleasure may be doomed to either frustration or boredom.

Hedonism as a formal ethic has few serious advocates beyond the likes of Hugh Hefner, but at the practical level we are all influenced by it. Unless we are masochists, most of us do not enjoy pain, so we eagerly seek ways to escape or at least diminish it. This is why t...

abortions performed to save the lives of women are exceedingly rare. The real issue is abortion for convenience or because the child is simply not wanted.

if it is unjust to kill a three-year-old child or a three-day-old child because he or she is undesired, then it is likewise unjust to kill a living human before birth.

Obviously, after an abortion it is too late for a woman to change her mind about the desirability of the child.

Why not counsel women that keeping their baby is the best option because they could have whatever outcome they desire without having to have their baby killed. Carrying to term would give them the chance to hold the baby in their arms and then decide whether to keep the baby for themselves, or should they still decide that they don’t want to keep the baby, adoption is always an option. Abortion is a final decision they can never take back, with the worst possible outcome: death.

Choosing the alternative of adoption may cost her a large price, but it is an honorable price. She will have acted justly and not compromised her integrity.

I chose the term integrity carefully. To have an abortion to avoid shame or scandal is not an act of integrity. Integrity is very much at the heart of this debate. To destroy a living fetus shows a lack of personal integrity.

People who are deeply concerned about the abortion issue can accomplish something by going beyond protesting to the loving action of adopting unwanted children.

If the victim were my own daughter or a member of my church, I would counsel her to maintain the pregnancy on the grounds that the developing baby within her is a co-victim of the rapist’s heinous crime. To kill the fetus, who is innocent of the offense, is to add insult to injury. I would want to move heaven and earth to secure an extraordinary support system for any woman put in this dreadful position and to seek compensation for her injury.

If the choice is between allowing “nature” to kill the mother or “man” to kill the baby, I would choose the passive action of possibly letting a woman die from natural consequences rather than intervening to directly kill the unborn child. The excruciating issue is “passive” or “active” killing. Another reason to choose not to kill the child is the possibility that God will sustain the mother’s life.

A woman on welfare who has six children and no husband and who is desirous of an abortion does not have an immediate need for a lecture on morals! . . . She of course needs to know of the reconciling work of Christ, and when she responds to His love, the Holy Spirit will quicken her to moral issues. . . . Often by ministering to the physical, tangible need we are privileged to meet the deeper spiritual one as well. —Bill Crouse

She told me she had carried a secret guilt for a long time, something she had not told even her husband—she had had an abortion. She asked me whether I thought her cancer was a punishment sent from God because of her sin. In such a situation, a pastor often gives the patient unqualified assurance that God would never do such a thing as inflict cancer on a person as punishment for sin. Such consolations, however, are not grounded in truth. The Bible reveals that God may and sometimes does administer temporal punishment for temporal guilt in the form of disease or even death. God afflicted Miriam and King Uzziah with a disease for their sins. Both were stricken by leprosy as acts of divine judgment (Num. 12:1, 9–11; 2 Chron. 26:16, 19–21). On the other hand, the Bible also warns against assuming that an affliction is a sign of divine discipline. The entire book of Job dispels that notion,