To Whom Abortion Matters
As one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in human history is wavering in its stability, the matter of abortion has skyrocketed back to the top of America’s public conscience.¹
The immense sensitivity around the topic makes many people hesitant to approach it at all. The red-hot activism of vocal minorities on either side seems to make non-activists feel intimidated and go silent.
But at some point, the sheer polarity and significance for human life wrapped up in the matter force us to choose a side and eventually answer a Big Question: What should abortion outcomes be, legally and ethically?
I find it helps to start with a different question. And the more clearly, kindly, and reasonably we can answer that second question, the more clearly, kindly, and reasonably we can answer the first.
To whom do abortion outcomes matter?
A Human Matter
Abortion is a complex interlocking web of human relations. It’s a chain reaction of cause and effect on many individuals, from which none can emerge unchanged. It starts with a woman being sexually known by a man and vice versa, producing the unique mutual awareness only sex can create. At the same time, the woman begins to carry a chromosomally distinct human, just as the biological act was designed to achieve.² It is impossible for the two people involved in this sexual and creative act to be unaffected physically and emotionally.
In a perfect world, this procreative sexual contact would be a cause for celebration and joy and take place in a context of social stability and security. But in the real world, marred by sin and warped human behavior of every kind, this moment often dawns not with joy but with dread and fear and doubt and regret and emotions seemingly too deep to name. And it takes place in environments too challenging to imagine. And all this can be the case even if the act of sex was voluntary and consensual.
But whatever emotion the pregnancy produces, the abortive act changes course decisively. Abortion manually separates two naturally linked things: the mutual knowledge created by sex and the creation of human offspring by sex. (Contraception performs the same separation, but before a chromosomally distinct being is created.) Just as in creating new life, removing new life is an event that cannot leave people unaffected. At least three parties are touched every time.
But this is only a micro-perspective. There has never been a human society that has not understood abortion in this sense. We know what we are doing. Statistical results are particularly telling in large countries like the United States and China, where verifiable masses of people are simply missing from adult society.³˒⁴
The phenomenon of abortion is as old as history and covers a geography as diverse as the earth itself.
Abortion is, and always will be, a human matter.
A Christian Matter
Part of the inheritance of the Christian worldview is a belief in universal human dignity. All people, at all times, in all places, carry it. Whether they win pageants and Super Bowls or are on life support and have prosthetic limbs makes no difference. God breathed his own life and image into the material bodies of Adam and Eve—a life that animates and enshrines all their descendants with irrevocable value to this day (Gen 1:27-28).
This animating and dignifying act of God to all humans takes place early and invisibly: “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…my frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret” (Ps 139:13-15).
Abortion is not directly addressed in Scripture, but the intrinsic value of human life is a repeated theme. And this belief was applied directly to abortion ethics in some of the earliest post-biblical Christian teaching called the Didache: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”⁵ Several other church fathers wrote similar sentiments.⁶ Early Christians in the Roman empire took an interest in the recovery of babies who had been “exposed” (left outside to die).⁷
There is not even a hint in the ancient literature that this humanitarianism was a guise for political control, or a cover for anti-women sentiments. On the contrary—caring for all human life became the calling card of sincerity by which Christians were known. And Christianity grew like wildfire in part because of the dignity it granted to women.⁸
Secular humanitarianism, for all its self-assuredness of originality, is fruit from a historical Christian tree.⁹
Abortion is, and always will be, a Christian matter.
A Women’s Matter
The female carrier of human life must be recognized as having a unique role. I didn’t carry our first-born child last year. That was my wife’s honor, and hers alone. And it was she who bore the physical challenges of that pregnancy, and she alone. So it is with every pregnancy, regardless of its outcome or environment.
I do not mean that men are wholly unaffected (see above), and I do not mean men should be disallowed from the debate. Abortion dialogue cannot be confined to the echo chamber of either sex. That’s why I defined abortion above as a human and Christian matter.
But I do mean that abortion is especially a women’s matter. Particularly in a broken, post-Edenic world in which pregnancies take place in every inconceivable and impossible situation with drastic challenges often being absorbed by women. God himself seems to have a habit of comforting pregnant women navigating a world that was poised to be cruel and harsh to them (Gen 16:7-15; Luke 1:26-38). How could we fail to acknowledge this reality?
So any approach that seeks to care for a baby in the womb but fails to care for the woman whose womb carries the baby is destined to be a failure. The same can be said for any approach that tries to instill morality but instills shame instead.
All these dynamics cannot avoid affecting women in particular.
Abortion is, and always will be, a women’s matter.
A Children’s Matter
Adults are never aborted. We have other terms for adult death by any cause. Every abortion in history has been the removal of one kind of human, and one kind only—children.
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belong the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:14). In a culture that prioritized adult desires, actions, and opinions, Jesus made space for people too small to make room for themselves.
Abortion is, and always will be, a children’s matter.
A Personal Matter
My mother was half of an unexpected pregnancy. She and her twin sister, my aunt, were put up for adoption in 1967. I’m confident my biological grandmother—whose name I’ve never heard and whose face I’ve never seen—agonized over those decisions more than my imagination can reconstruct.
I was also an unexpected pregnancy, or at least it seems likely. My mom and dad were in early college in 1988. She’d recently had a child and a divorce, so I doubt they were thinking “kid.” But when the pregnancy test said “kid” anyway, I’m sure they had some pressure-filled choices to make.
And in the mid-2000s, I was a promiscuous and arrogant teenager and did not consider a baby entering the world an option. During one pregnancy scare, I urged a girl to take an abortifacient medication. I will never know whether a pregnancy began and ended, or if one was never there.
I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant. But I know what it’s like to panic.
Abortion is, and always will be, a personal matter.
A Political Matter
This part is not enjoyable. Only unhealthy people enjoy contentious division. Only unhealthy people enjoy saying something controversial, not because they enjoy the truth but because they enjoy the controversy. “A fool delights in expressing his own opinion” (Prov 18:2) and of fools we have no lack.
Mistaken approaches are easy to see on both sides. Provocative and offensive claims from the pro-choice side are sometimes matched by self-righteously militant condemnations from the pro-life side. The motto for many seems to be, “My end justifies my means, so my means is meanness.” And both sides feel unquestionably in possession of the moral high ground.
No sane person longs to enter such an arena.
Yet entering is necessary. Sometimes biblical issues (on which the church cannot go silent) intersect with public issues (from which the populace cannot run). And where the Venn diagram of Scripture and public morality overlap, there we should find a vocal church. This vocal church should inform and produce people who influence every arena of society, from social attitudes to legislation.
No, I do not think this means that political engagement is the primary (or even secondary) call of the church. Jesus said, “Make disciples” (Matt 28:19) not “make laws” or “make nations.” His kingdom is not of this world, and his servants do not fight as if it were (Jn 18:36). We are disciple-makers, not lobbyists (save those Christians who are lobbyists by trade).
No, I do not think this means the church is licensed—biblically or legally—to commit to a political party. The day we wed ourselves to a leader other than Jesus is the day we become an unfaithful bride and put on our minds the things of man and not of God (Matt 16:23), having lost the ability to tell the difference.
And therefore no, I do not think being pro-life makes someone a committed conservative any more than being pro-immigrant makes someone a committed progressive. There is freedom to move amongst the issues. As Christians “vote their conscience,” we will doubtlessly add up the political calculus differently. Assuming Christian identity and unity are intact and supreme, this phenomenon does not bother me. “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom 14:5).
But this does not mean that a vibrant, clear, pro-infant, pro-woman, pro-human ethic is optional. Christians from every part of the political spectrum must be concerned about all human life if our humanitarian ethic is to be consistent.
And we cannot allow this ethic to be privatized or hidden. Nor can we erase the fact that all ethics involve not just what you do, but what you allow. Nor can we, at the very moment Roe v. Wade is wavering, pretend we’re not sure whether it should fall.
Abortion is, and must remain, a political matter.
So…What’s the Matter?
Now we’ve drawn close to an answer to the Big Question: the preservation of all human life is the natural outcome of the Christian worldview. This means everyone. Children. Women. Men. Born. Unborn. All ethnic groups. All ages. All geographies. All beliefs. All who agree. All who disagree. Everyone, everywhere, is a person to be respected and preserved and honored.
Our current public abortion debate fails to see this, because it hinges on a “baby versus woman” approach, turning two priceless co-heirs of God into competitors in a zero-sum contest.
The pro-choice movement will not lead us out of this trap. It cannot, because its existence depends on the existence of the trap. The pro-choice movement says in no uncertain terms that a woman’s desire should not be informed by morality, but morality should be informed (indeed, defined) by a woman’s desire. This turns a multi-factor situation (in which the woman’s voice counts) into a one-factor situation (in which only the woman’s voice counts). This rigs the game from the start. “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
But, if it is nimble enough and willing enough—indeed, Christian enough, if it dares and cares to be—public pro-life energy could broaden its passion to preserve fetal life into an equal passion to provide for the needs of women caught in unexpected pregnancies and the most challenging of circumstances, and reinvent itself to truly become a “womb to tomb” force for good. Holistic thriving for all persons is the only worthy goal.
This would involve an outpouring of resources into organizations like our Bronx-based partner Expect Hope, which houses and supports women in unplanned pregnancies and provides them with resources, to go along with emotional, spiritual and material care. Only through an explosion of initiatives like these—and a thousand others that only those in the foster, adoption, and prenatal care spaces could anticipate or design—will our Christian witness on the subject of life be truly representative of the full heart of God.
On the verge of what may be the fall of Roe v. Wade and one of the more publicly volatile moments in living memory, I pray our church will say to both female image-bearers of God and unborn image-bearers of God, “On the basis and authority of God’s very words, you matter.”
That’s our Big Answer.
Josh Gerstein, Alexander Ward, “Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows” in Politico, May 2, 2022.
Maneka Vig, “What Is A Zygote? How Is It Different From An Embryo?” in ScienceABC, January 25, 2022.
John Elflein, “Number of legal abortions reported in the U.S. from 1973 to 2019” in Statista, May 11, 2022.
Emma Hemminki, Zhuochun Wu, et. al., “Illegal births and legal abortions: the case of China” in Reproductive Health, vol. 2, 2005.
Didache 2.2.
Tertullian, Apology 9.8.; Chrysostom, Homily 24 on Romans.
Louise Gosbell, “’As long as it’s healthy’: What can we learn from early Christianity’s resistance to infanticide and exposure?” in ABC Religion & Ethics, March 13, 2019).
Catherine Kroeger, “The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church” in Christianity Today, December 19, 2017.
Garrett Raburn, “You’re More Christian Than You Think”, www.missioncity.nyc/content, January 5, 2022.
