Abortion

daniel on Sep 10th 2008

I don’t think I’ve ever addressed this issue on my blog before. Let me fix that now.

Abortion is abhorrent. Especially late-term and partial-birth abortion. At that stage of pregnancy you can’t mistake it: This is a baby. It moves on its own. It has a brain, a heart, nerves, blood, and all the stuff of life.

Early term abortion is a bit different, depending on how early you’re talking. You can say that sperm plus egg equals human with a soul, but of course you can’t really build a convincing scriptural case from that. The only passages that really speak to the issue are poetic passages that approach it tangentially while speaking to something else. Again, not convincing.

Ironically for modern Christians, I think their case is built more on science than on scripture. I say this because — and this is a whole other post — modern Christians are become increasingly science-phobic as science attacks the creation poem found in Genesis 1.

We can see inside a womb like never before. We can view the stages of pregnancy with at least a certain amount of clarity.

In any case, we can say definitively that the life of the body is in the blood. One of the central narratives of the Jewish law is that blood is sacred. So we can say that a human child in the womb is alive (and thus has a soul) when it has blood in its veins. This is a crude rule of thumb, but it seems pretty solid.

Still, abortion is abhorrent and just plain wrong. But it’s also mind-boggling. In a world chock-full of devices and methods and medications to prevent pregnancy, how does someone still get pregnant by accident? You have to either be wilfully ignorant or be the victim of a cruel confluence of extremely unlikely events. (Watch Laura and I be the victims of a cruel confluence of events because I said that!) There should be no need for abortion these days. Women may have the right to choose a contraceptive, but they should not have the right to choose to kill a person. Women do not simply arbitrarily get to pick when they feel their baby is a human.

If you get pregnant and you don’t want to be pregnant, at least live with the consequences and give the child up for adoption or something like that.

Filed in main | 8 responses so far

8 Responses to “Abortion”

  1. # Chris Hubbson 10 Sep 2008 at 10:56 am

    OK, here’s the part that boggles me. Here in the States we have strict laws, for instance, about protecting the eggs of the bald eagle. There are no arguments about when the egg “becomes” a bald eagle, or stage of viability, or any of that. Everyone can plainly see that if you leave the egg alone, you’ll get an eagle, and since we want to protect/promote bald eagles (they are the national symbol, after all), the laws are simple. Don’t mess with eagle eggs.

    It boggles me that we don’t seem to use the same common-sense logic when it comes to human pregnancy. All arguments about when viability occurs aside, let’s face if, if you leave the pregnancy alone, you’re gonna get another human being. Apparently human beings aren’t as inherently valuable as bald eagles. Either that or the NOFBE (the National Organization for Female Bald Eagles, naturally) hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet.

  2. # *danielon 10 Sep 2008 at 12:52 pm

    Well, if we’re going to talk in terms of rarity, then bald eagles are worth much, much more than humans. That doesn’t touch on any issue of intrinsic worth, of course.

    If we’re going to talk in terms of choice, bald eagles aren’t choosing to abort their own eggs. Some birds do abort eggs they can’t possibly incubate, so that’s not to say no bird aborts an egg.

    But anyone in favour of abortion probably doesn’t ascribe to the scriptural idea that humans are in the image of God and that their lives are more valuable than animals anyways. You’d be wasting your breath on them, I think.

    In any case, I think that this is all a very useful to think about.

  3. # Rogeron 10 Sep 2008 at 5:37 pm

    Chris: Excellent point. I’ve never heard that one before.

    Daniel: A couple points the post touches on or around but doesn’t address:

    1) “[O]r be the victim of a cruel confluence of extremely unlikely events.” Or rape. (Or is that considered an unlikely event?)

    2) “In a world chock-full of devices and methods and medications to prevent pregnancy…” How would you classify the aborteffective contraceptives (forgive me if I’ve misspelled)? Is that OK because it causes a flushing of the system before blood is flowing through the baby? I honestly have no stance on this, so I’m just asking, not goading.

  4. # Rogeron 10 Sep 2008 at 5:40 pm

    Also, “WOAH. It’s called a line break!”, but your comment section doesn’t allow for them. :P

  5. # *danielon 11 Sep 2008 at 12:06 pm

    Roger, the line break thing does bother me. I want to fix it, but I have no idea how to do that.
    In any case, 1) Yes, being raped is extremely unlikely. And cruel. But I wasn’t thinking about that. And as far as I’m concerned, using the morning-after pill isn’t killing anything, so there is that. 2) There has to be a point at which you say that a certain mass of tissue is an actual baby. Conception is a convenient point, and a great rallying cry, but I don’t see the case for it, scripturally. 3) Yes, I’m of the opinion that abortificant contraceptives are all right to a point. And that point would seem to be about the fifth week or so. 4) Just a general thought: If a contraceptive prevents implantation, how can that possibly be considered an abortificant?

  6. # Sarahon 14 Sep 2008 at 9:10 pm

    Wow. I truly feel you’re copping out on this whole abortion issue. Kudos to you for not agreeing with killing a recognizable baby in the womb — but honestly, isn’t it just convenient for you that the Bible doesn’t say in scientific terms that life begins when the sperm and the egg combine. All common sense leads to the point that life begins at conception. If God creates new life and the basis of life is when blood flows, what was happening in the preceding 5 weeks? Was God creating a non-living blob of tissue that we have the option of discarding if we catch the pregnancy early enough? Or does God not begin His work of creation until the fifth week?

    Not only does it make common sense to assume that life begins at conception it is a scientific fact. Embryology textbooks state clearly that life begins at conception, before implantation (which is also why if a contraceptive prevents implantation – i.e. the pill or other hormonal contraceptives – it’s an abortificant) Here’s a quote from a leading and university-used embryology textbook “:

    “[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”
    The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th ed.
    Keith L. Moore, Ph.D. & T.V.N. Persaud, Md., (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998), 2-18.

    You can read more here: http://abort73.com/HTML/I-A-1-medical.html

    Sigh … I hear enough of this kind of ridiculous stuff from people who don’t know God, it bothers me so much to hear it from you.

  7. # *danielon 15 Sep 2008 at 11:06 am

    Sarah, all common sense doesn’t lead from that premise to that conclusion. If it did, everyone would agree that abortion is wrong. You need to follow a specific train of logic — and not good logic, and certainly not scriptural logic — to get from A to B. Let’s dispense with claiming ownership on common sense, first of all.

    This may bother you, but I’m not trying to avoid ruffling imaginary feathers. You need more than hand-waving and deprecative rhetoric to make a case. I’m not arguing medical facts. We all know the medical facts. You can’t build a case on medical facts alone, because those facts do not say anything about personhood.

    A person’s life is holy, right? No-one has the right to take that person’s life because his life is holy. We can say without equivocation that murder and killing of any kind is evil and wrong. It is evil and wrong because you are depriving a person of their life, something that is not within your right to do. It is God’s right and God’s right only.

    The key is, of course, that idea of personhood. It’s not wrong to deprive some cells of a person of their life — we do it all the time in surgery and cancer treatment — and it’s not wrong to deprive a life-making cell of it’s life (we can agree that it’s okay to kill a sperm before it meets an egg, right?).

    My point is that it very much is a blob of tissue. It will become a person, yes, but until that point it is not a person. Until that tissue exhibits the characteristics of a person — and scripture makes it clear that blood is holy and defines personhood — the tissue is not a person. That tissue may contain all the component that define individuality, but that tissue is not an individual. Much like a blueprint is not a car, and a bunch of aluminium is not an airplane, and an egg is not an eagle. That’s common sense right there.

  8. # Sarahon 17 Sep 2008 at 2:09 pm

    So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to respond to your above comments, Dan. I researched the concept of “the life of the flesh is in the blood” and read the passages in Genesis and Leviticus that refer to the above line. I’ve never really heard of it before you brought it up.

    Anyways, the following are my thoughts:

    First off, regarding common sense. I think it’s silly for you to say that if common sense leads us from A to B we would all be following the train. If you take a good look at the world we live in, and the arguments and thoughts that people have, I think you would agree that common sense is often ignored when people want to create philosophies that allow them the freedoms they like. Our world is often very nonsensical when issues are straightforward. Jesus referred to this phenomenon himself and said that he revealed the great things of this world to the babes and made the thinking of the “wise” foolish. That doesn’t just apply to salvation, it applies to understanding this world as well, I believe. And as for claiming ownership on common sense, I don’t — I just believe that if anyone looked at our two arguments they would see that the one makes most sense (this doesn’t mean it’s TRUE of course, because common sense is fallible), but life AND person hood beginning at conception makes most sense and follows a logical course.

    So lets talk about what apparently this boils down to — not human life beginning but human life equaling a person. It’s funny because this whole concept of a human life not being a person til a certain stage really only took off when Roe vs Wade ended. Isn’t that ironic …

    Taken with the whole of scripture in mind the verses in Genesis & Leviticus are both talking about a symbolic connection between blood and life, the basis for the sacrificial system. Any other mention of human life in the womb or life beginning in Scripture does not mention blood. In fact it’s often mentioned that the women conceived and bore a son. Why is conception mentioned? Because it’s the obvious, logical and very beginning of human life. But not person hood? The Bible doesn’t ever talk about life and person hood as separate things. The soul, spirit and body are talked about as one. God told Jeremiah that before he created Him He knew him. If we are a distinct person in God’s eyes before we are even born, then it follows we would be the same in the first 5 weeks of life, right? From David, Job, and any other reference to life in the womb we only see that person hood is already there. The angel Gabriel told Mary she would be with child (i.e. pregnant) and Mary then immediately left to visit Elizabeth who was 6 months pregnant with John the Baptist. John responded to Jesus in Mary’s womb (who was likely only around 10 days past conception). Jesus was fully human as well as fully God, so although John was responding to the Son of God, Jesus was clearly a fully human person at that point as well.

    I can’t see that all the comments in the Scripture are only referring to the unborn child AFTER blood starts flowing. That is not scriptural logic.

    In any case, I would think that you could see that your argument is not as infallible as you made it out to be based on the medical & scriptural evidence, and if there was a chance you were wrong, wouldn’t you rather err on the side of caution? Lives hang in the balance on this … and personally I’d rather be get to heaven and realize that I could have had more freedom then get to heaven and realize I unintentionally murdered my own offspring or condoned it in others.