This Sunday: Is Abortion Wrong?

Q: Is miscarriage in the case of abortion a sin?

A miscarriage is the unintended death of an unborn baby, also referred to as a spontaneous abortion.

I don’t believe a miscarriage is a sin (though it is a consequence of living in a sinful, fallen world). It is not a procured abortion. There is no intent on the part of the mother to terminate her pregnancy. She wants to have the baby but for whatever reason her body is unable to carry the child.

Miscarriage is suffering, not sin.

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church, Vancouver, Canada]

Q: Do Aborted Fetuses Go to Heaven?

I have reservations in answering this question. The truth is, I am, at best, guardedly optimistic (though more so for the aborted children of Christians [whether because of elective abortion or miscarriage] than of non-Christians; see Acts 2:38–39; 1 Corinthians 7:14).

In the end, the most Biblical and responsible answer is to be agnostic on the matter.

Let’s start with some foundational Biblical presuppositions.

1. The doctrine of original sin says every human being, from conception, is legally guilty of sin. (David alludes to his own prenatal guilt in Psalm 51:5.)

2. The general way that people come to faith is through the preaching of the word of Christ (Romans 10:17).

3. The unborn are human beings (see my previous posts), which means they have an eternal destiny: a resurrection of the body either to eternal glory or eternal wrath (John 5:28–29; Acts 24:15). (Note: this resurrection doesn’t happen at death, either for the aborted fetus or for any of us. Resurrection happens when Jesus returns. Resurrection should also not be equated with “heaven,” but that’s the subject for another post.)

We may say of the unborn, then: (1) they are guilty of sin; (2) they haven’t come to faith (at least, in the usual manner); and (3) they have an eternal destiny. The fate of individuals who are guilty of (1) and (2) is, according to the New Testament, hell. It must be admitted that the unborn are guilty of unrepentant sin.

However, we should also concede that it is possible for God to save the unborn (and very young, infant children) in an atypical way. (He’s God!) Both the fetal Jesus and the fetal John the Baptist are examples of the Spirit dwelling in the unborn (Luke 1:39–45). King David seems to expect to join his dead infant son when he, himself, dies (2 Samuel 12:23); a possible indication of the view that the unborn (and those who do not have the capacity for faith) will be saved in the end.

John Piper holds this view. He believes “God has a way to cover [the sins of those who don’t have the capacity for faith, such as babies and the profoundly mentally disabled].” He appeals to Romans 1:19–20. You can read his argument here. I must confess that I am not entirely convinced, though I dearly hope that he is right.

It does bears noting that the Bible’s silence on this matter is one for which we should be thankful. Imagine, for instance, if we had chapter and verse clearly stating that all children who die before they reach the age of three will be resurrected to eternal life. How many babies, infants, and toddlers would be killed by well-meaning parents to secure their eternal destiny?

Ultimately, I don’t believe we can say with complete certainty what happens to aborted fetuses and must be content to leave things in the hands of our just and merciful God.

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu]

Q: Who sins in abortion, the woman having the abortion or the doctor performing it?

The answer, of course, is both. Both the mother who wants, permits, and approves of the killing of her child, and the doctor who kills the baby are guilty. Both need to repent. But the net of guilt is cast wider than simply the mother and physician.

The boyfriend who prods his girlfriend to kill their unborn child sins. The parent who’d rather not deal with the stares and gossip and drives her daughter to the abortion clinic sins. The person who actively participates in a culture that abdicates parental responsibility and devalues prenatal life by promoting individual privacy at the expense of the unborn sins. In fact, I’d argue that each of us by simply paying taxes in our province that then go to government-funded health care that pays for abortions sins. It should crush us that being a tax-paying resident or citizen of Canada means we pay for the legal killing of our country’s children.

In the end, all of us need to repent of our complicity in abortion.

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church, Vancouver]

Q: Abortion: What about the cases of rape or incest?

This is a follow-up to the question, "Is abortion a sin?"

Depending on which statistical source you trust, anywhere from 1-3% of North American women who have abortions choose do so because they were raped or the victims of incest. In Canada, one hundred thousand abortions are performed annually, which means between 1,000 to 3,000 are the result of rape or incest.

The question is, are abortions for these reasons morally permissible? A couple of preliminary observations. First, some people are under the mistaken belief that the great majority of abortions are because of rape or incest. This just isn’t the case. In fact, it is rarely the case.

Second, rape and incest are terrible, terrible evils. According to the United Nations, some 24,000 women were raped in Canada in both 2001 and 2002. This doesn’t include all the rapes that were unreported or unrecorded. It also doesn’t tell us how many women are the victims of incest. These are sad, shocking, horrifying figures, and a sign of our nation’s fallenness. (In fact, Canada has one of the highest rape rates in the world.) No woman should ever be abused.

However, in cases where a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest, she should not commit another act of evil by aborting her child. If the unborn child, at any stage of pregnancy, is a living human being, a person who ought to be protected, as I argued in my last response, then abortion is to kill a defenseless child. It’s murder. And the fact is, abortion in the case of rape or incest is punishing someone—the unborn baby—who’s innocent.

Some will say, “But every time the woman looks at her child she’s going to be reminded of the violence that was done to her.” Yes, that may be so. But that doesn’t justify abortion. Imagine a woman who’s been raped, becomes pregnant, and decides to keep her baby. A week after he’s born, she realizes that he’s too painful a reminder of her assault, so she decapitates him. In such a case, we would—I hope—be appalled and condemn what she’s done. Give him up for adoption, we’d say, or go to counseling. You can’t kill your one week-old baby.

But birth doesn’t make a baby a human being. Conception does. Why is it wrong to kill a born child but not an unborn one? You could only say the latter is permissible if you assign different moral value to the unborn. Yet, biologically and theologically, that simply isn’t defensible.

I should note, too, as an aside, that contrary to popular belief, abortion is legal at every stage of pregnancy, right until birth. In fact, the baby isn’t recognized as a “person” under Canadian law until her entire body has been delivered. Yes, you read that correctly. In practice, in most Canadian provinces you won’t be able to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion after 20 weeks (though in some places you can still procure an abortion up to 24 weeks). Nevertheless, as several prominent Canadian legal cases have demonstrated, the (deliberate or accidental) death of an unborn child is not treated the same as that of a child who’s been born. Three prominent Canadian legal cases are worth searching for on the Internet: R. v. Sullivan (1991); Tremblay v. Daigle (1989); and R. v. Drummond (1996).

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church]

Q: Abortion: What about Emergency Contraceptives?

This is a follow-up to the question, "Is abortion a sin?"

There are presently four different kinds of emergency contraception pills (ECPs) available throughout the world. Two of them are available in Canada (and the United States), one is only available in Europe, and the fourth only in China. The two ECPs available in Canada work in similar ways. In simple terms, they either keep the ovaries from ovulating or prevent sperm from fertilizing an egg. In both those cases, conception hasn’t occurred. However, a third option is also possible—and here the science is still in its nascency—namely, that ECPs may prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted on the uterine wall. There are many who don’t want to call this last scenario an abortion; but terminology aside, it does prevent a human life that’s been conceived from continuing and having a chance to develop.

Unfortunately, much of the available literature on ECPs is unnecessarily vague about how they work. In Vancouver, where I live, for instance, Vancouver Coastal Health—which runs all the hospitals in the Greater Vancouver Region—publishes a brochure on one of the two ECPs available in Canada, called “Plan B.” You can find a copy of this brochure here. Under the “How does it work?” section, they say:

It may keep the ovaries from letting out an egg, keep the sperm from meeting the egg, or stop the egg from attaching to the wall of the uterus.

What they fail to say is that in the third case, the egg is already fertilized. It is, biologically and theologically, a living human being. A very, very small and undeveloped one, yes, but one nevertheless.

Part of the difficulty in thinking about ECPs lies, surprisingly, in how pregnancy is defined. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), pregnancy doesn’t begin when a sperm fertilizes an egg (what is commonly called conception, or fertilization). Pregnancy, according to the ACOG, begins when the fertilized egg is implanted in the lining of the uterus, typically five to seven days after fertilization. If this definition strikes you as weird, it should. (You can read about this controversy here.) If you accept their definition, it conveniently allows for drugs and medications like ECPs to be used without being seen as abortifacients. But if you think, as I do, that it is more correct and precise to say that pregnancy begins when life begins, you must say that pregnancy begins at conception. That being the case, ECPs, while not always allowing a zygote to die, may in some cases do just that (which is very much an abortion), and hence, should not be seen as Biblically or ethically permissible. (This, in fact, raises the whole issue of contraception in general, and whether any form of contraception is allowed by the Bible. I can’t get into that debate here.) (For more on the ECP known as “Plan B,” see this article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, here.)

Before I wrap up this answer it bears reflecting on why anyone would want to take an ECP. In virtually every instance it’s because a woman has premarital sex and doesn’t want to get pregnant. So if you’re not married, don’t have sex. You won’t get pregnant and you won’t have to worry about what to do. If you are married, why wouldn’t you want to have a baby? That question deserves very significant attention, more than I can give here. Too many people delay having children after they’ve been married for what can only be called selfish (and, therefore, sinful) reasons. But I digress.

Lastly, since we’re discussing medicine, it bears noting that almost all abortions in Canada are publicly funded, which means our tax dollars go to the legalized killing of our nation’s children. That is a harsh reality and it should break our hearts, lead us to repentance, and move us to act.

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church]

Q: Is abortion a sin?

In order to answer this question we need to answer two preliminary ones: What is abortion? and What is sin? Let’s take the second one first.

What is sin? One way to answer this question is to appeal to Romans 14:23b where the Apostle Paul says, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” That’s quite a comprehensive answer. Anything we do that doesn’t come from faith in the Triune God of the Bible, Paul says, is sin. So, we should ask, does abortion proceed from faith or lack of faith? The answer should be obvious.

In case it’s not, J. I. Packer, one of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last one hundred years, writing about the Puritan pastor John Owen, offers us another way to think about sin. This is a lengthier quote, but well worth reading and contemplating:

John Owen . . . in his monumental work on sin, wrote a paragraph in which he summarizes God’s view of sin. Read with care the words that Owen used to describe how the creature acts toward his Creator: disgrace, fraud, blasphemy, enmity, hatred, contempt, rebellion and injury, poison, stench, dung, vomit, polluted blood, plague, pestilence, abominable, and detestable. Sin is essentially the resolve—the mad, utterly blameworthy, but nonetheless, utterly firm resolve—to play God and fight the real God. Sinners resolve to treat themselves as the center of the universe and so they keep God at bay on the outer circumference of their lives—or so they think. They won’t allow the Creator to rule over them as he wills to do. . . . They . . . resent the claim to dominion that he makes. This is why people like Luther, Calvin, and Owen say, roundly and without question, that sin wills the fundamental abolition of God. Sin wills that God should not be there. Sin plays God, sin fights God, and sin wishes that God didn’t exist at all.

We’ll return to this quote in a moment. Let’s turn now, however, to the other preliminary question: What is abortion?

Wikipedia’s got a fine definition: “Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo, resulting in or caused by its death.” Strictly speaking, miscarriages are abortions in the technical sense. For the sake of the response to this question, however, they won’t be considered as “abortions” (what are, more precisely called elective [or procured] abortions).

Notice, now, that the definition says abortion results in the death of a fetus or embryo. Death is a very important word here. The clear implication is that the fetus/embryo is alive before it’s aborted. It’s living. Science, in fact, confirms this. All fetal physiologists and embryologists agree, regardless of their religious views, that human life begins at conception. They disagree on the value of this life and on whether or not it should be considered a person, but they all agree that when a male sperm fertilizes a female ovum, human life begins. The science is indisputable.

The Bible tells us, however, what science cannot; namely, that you are very much a person known and loved by God even in utero. In Psalm 51 David says that from the time his mother conceived him he had a sinful nature (v. 5). In other words, personhood is attributed to the initial stage(s) of life.

A second text that informs this question is Luke 1:39–45. Mary has just been told by the angel, Gabriel, that she will be pregnant with the Messiah. She immediately leaves her hometown of Nazareth to visit her cousin Elizabeth in Judah. The Gospel writer tells us that she went immediately (v. 39). Given the distance between Nazareth and Judah this would have been a three-to-four day journey. So, three or four days after Gabriel has announced the big news to Mary, she meets her cousin, who, by the way is herself six months pregnant. (Her son is John the Baptist.)

As soon as Mary arrives, Elizabeth recognizes that something astounding has happened. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to me ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy” (vv. 42–44). So, Mary is already pregnant by this time. To be more precise, she’s (only) three or four days pregnant, yet Elizabeth recognizes that the embryo she’s carrying is “my Lord!” We forget sometimes that Jesus didn’t come as a fully formed baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. He came first as a fetus, an embryo, a zygote, a single cell. He had/was a body/soul at conception. His body was only a cell, but it was a body, nonetheless. He was already the Lord as an embryo.

Let’s return, then, to our definition of abortion: “the termination of a pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo, resulting in . . . its death.” From science we’ve established that the embryo/fetus is alive, and from the Bible we’ve determined that the embryo/fetus is a person, a full-fledged human being. What, then, does that say about abortion? I hope you see that when definitions call abortion “the termination of a pregnancy” what they’re describing is the putting to death of a living human being. That’s not politically correct, but it is correct. In any other context we call that murder. Murder is most clearly a sin (Exodus 20:13).

And, therefore, to answer the original question, abortion (that is, elective, or procured, abortion) is a sin.

Let’s go back to our lengthy quote from Packer/Owen, above. “Sin is essentially the resolve . . . to play God and fight the real God.” Isn’t that what abortion does? Abortion says to God, “I don’t care what You’re creating inside me. I’m going to decide my own fate, and that of my child.” Abortion is not only a sin against the unborn child, it is, ultimately (as with all sin), a sin against God.

Let me make three closing remarks:

1. Abortion is a grievous sin. The church, throughout its history, has always called abortion murder; some saying it’s even worse than murder. The most defenceless human beings are being killed by the very people entrusted to care for and protect them. 

2. Abortion is a sin that can be forgiven. If you’ve had an abortion or been complicit in one (for instance, encouraged a girlfriend to have an abortion), you need to confess your sin to God and repent. The Bible says you can be and have been forgiven. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Rest in that and turn from your old ways.

3. Nevertheless, abortion has devastating consequences. I know many women (and men!) who are crippled with guilt over killing their unborn children. In most cases, that guilt never goes away. Legally, before God, that guilt is gone if you know and trust Jesus. You can have the assurance that He paid for even this sin on the cross. But, if you’ve had an abortion, you will very likely carry the emotional and psychological scars and wounds from it for the rest of your life. This underscores the seriousness of sin. There are real and devastating consequences. Perhaps, though, if you’ve had an abortion, God will use you in your tears and your testimony to change people’s lives; even, to rescue unborn children.

I know this response may have left you with even more questions. I blog about abortion on a regular basis at tubytu.wordpress.com and you may find additional help there. There are also lots of great web sites. Start with abort73.com. Then, if you are bold enough, go to silentscream.org and watch a video of an abortion done at 11 weeks after conception. I must warn you, it is very graphic and heartbreaking. I pray God will move you to consider how you can be involved in the efforts to protect the unborn.

[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church, Vancouver. Dr. Tu is a close friend of Pastor HM's & has recently completed his doctoral work on this very issue]