2
The Joy of Death
“You Must Be Prepared to Kill”
Antonia Senior, a British journalist, had always firmly supported abortion. “Then came a baby, and everything changed. . . . My moral certainty about abortion is wavering, my absolutist position is under siege.” Eventually, the young journalist hardened back to her absolutist support for abortion: Yet, surprisingly, she continued to acknowledge that life begins at conception.
“My daughter was formed at conception,” Senior writes. “Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life.” She concludes, “Yes, abortion is killing. But it’s the lesser evil.”
What evil could be greater than taking a human life? In Senior’s view, even worse would be putting limits on women’s right to control their reproduction: “You cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology. . . . The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life.”
Senior ends her article with this chilling line: To defend women’s rights, “You must be prepared to kill.”1
How have we come to the point where many people are “prepared to kill”? What worldview explains such a drastic devaluation of life? Like Senior, most scientifically informed people know that life begins at conception. When dealing with horses or hummingbirds or any other organism, the accepted science is that a new individual begins at fertilization. From that moment on, the organism merely unfolds the capacities that belong intrinsically to the kind of being it is. The same scientific facts apply to humans.2 Everything intrinsic to a human being is present from fertilization. No outside force or substance enters into the embryo at any point to transform it from some other creature into a human. The entire human being develops in a seamless continuum from conception.3
According to personhood theory, however, even though the fetus is human, it can be killed without any moral consequence. We have no moral obligation to protect the fetus until it attains personhood (see chapter 1). To understand the deeper roots of abortion, we must ask: Where did this body/person dichotomy come from, and why does it have such inhumane consequences?
By contrast, as we will see, the biblical worldview is wholistic. It recognizes that body and soul are complementary, forming an integrated psycho-physical unity. Everyone who is human is also a person. We are embodied persons. The Christian ethic is based on a rich, multidimensional view that says people have moral worth on all levels, physically and spiritually.
The beauty of the biblical ethic emerges clearly when compared to the cold, callous view of life in today’s secular thinking. Yet that positive message will get through to people only if we back it up with acts of grace and mercy to those who have experienced the trauma of abortion—women (and men) who were persuaded by the abortion “script” that the fetus is a mere thing with no moral worth. And we must come alongside those who stand against the pressure to abort and courageously choose to carry their babies to term.
The Court Takes Sides
As we saw in chapter 1, personhood theory, with its dichotomy between body and person, prevails today among secular bioethicists—as well as religious ethicists who take their lead from secularism. Joseph Fletcher, a former Episcopal priest, expresses the two-story divide when he writes, “What is critical is personal status, not merely human status.” In his view, genetically defective fetuses and newborns do not attain the status of personhood: They are “sub-personal” organisms and therefore fail to qualify for the right to life.4
Another example comes from Hans Küng, a liberal Catholic theologian, who writes: “a fertilized ovum evidently is human life but is not a person.”5 Princeton ethicist Peter Singer writes, “the life of a human organism begins at conception” but “the life of a person—. . .[a] being with some level of self-awareness—does not begin so early.”6 For Singer, simply being human has no moral significance. And if you think it does, you are guilty of speciesism, defined as an immoral prejudice in favor of your own species (parallel to racism).
People often claim that laws legalizing abortion are neutral. The idea is that since no one agrees when life begins, the state should remain neutral by permitting abortion. But laws permitting abortion are not neutral. They express personhood theory, which is a substantive philosophy excluding babies in the womb from constitutional protection. In the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun asserted point-blank that the unborn baby is not a person: “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” If the fetus were recognized as a person, he acknowledged, then abortion would necessarily be illegal: “If the suggestion of personhood is established, . . . the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed.”7
By legalizing abortion, then, the Supreme Court did not remain neutral. Instead it established personhood theory, with its two-story body/person dualism, as the law of the land.
The Ghost in the Machine
What are the sources of the body/person dichotomy? Where did it come from and how did it develop? Its deepest roots go back to the dawn of Western philosophy. The ancient Greek thinker Plato said the soul in the body is like the driver of a chariot trying to steer an unruly horse.8 He treated the body as external to the true self.
Dualism took on a modern form, however, in the work of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. Using our two-story metaphor, Descartes placed the body in the lower story, conceiving it as a machine—a robot or automaton, like a clock or a windup toy. In fact, he thought of all nature as a vast machine set in motion by God at creation and ever since moving in fixed patterns, subject to mathematical necessity.9
In the upper story Descartes placed the human mind—the realm of thinking, perception, consciousness, emotion, and will. In his words, the mind is a “rational soul united to this machine.” Cartesian dualism was irreverently dubbed “the ghost in the machine.”10 If you saw the 2004 movie I, Robot starring Will Smith, you might remember that the phrase was used repeatedly to describe an especially capable robot: “There may be a ghost in this machine.”
Descartes is best known for his famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” In that phrase he located authentic human identity in the mind alone. The implication is that the body is not an aspect of the true self; instead the body is a mechanism that serves the needs and desires of the mind, like the pilot of a ship or the driver of a car. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains, “Since Descartes in the seventeenth century we have had a vision of the self as a sort of immaterial ghost that owns and controls a body the way you own and control your car.”11
What the typical philosophy textbook does not mention is that Descartes was a devout Catholic, and his two-story division was actually an attempt to render a mechanistic worldview compatible with church teaching. His strategy for protecting the spiritual realm was to separate it completely from the material realm.12 As one philosopher explains, Cartesian dualism “appeared to effect a compromise and reconciliation between the Church and the scientists.” The rule was “to each its own jurisdiction—to the scientists, matter and its mechanical laws of motion; to the theologians, mental substance, the souls of human beings.”13
It was a clever strategy, but did it work? No, because it does not hold together logically. How can a free mind influence a body that functions as automatically as a machine or robot? How can a mind control a body whose behavior is determined by mindless mechanical laws? These two concepts are logically contradictory. The term “Cartesian” came to refer to the irreconcilable conflict between a free subject connected somehow to a deterministic machine.
As Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain explains, “Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances—on the one hand, the body which is only geometrical extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought.” The human being is “split asunder.”14
Nevertheless, the Cartesian two-story dualism was largely accepted. What was its appeal? For scientists, the appeal was that its mechanistic philosophy seemed to justify human control over nature. If nature is a machine, then we only need to uncover its laws to master and manipulate it.15 Descartes himself said he hoped to empower humans to become “masters and possessors of nature.” The human will was pitted against the blind, mechanical workings of nature to wrest from it what we want. The Cartesian promise was that the mind would become independent of the body and its limitations.
The Logic of Abortion
Do you see how this history explains the arguments for abortion? At least since Descartes, the mind has been regarded as the authentic self. It is the part of us that thinks and can say “therefore, I am.” The body has been reduced to the sub-personal, functioning solely on the level of biology and chemistry. On that level, virtually everyone today agrees that the baby in the womb is human—biologically, physiologically, genetically human. When recognizable organs are being harvested and sold by Planned Parenthood—fetal eyes, hearts, lungs, brain tissue—it is no longer feasible to insist that the fetus is “just a collection of cells.” Virtually no professional bioethicist denies that life begins at conception.16
In the two-story metaphor, however, to talk about the fetus as biologically human is in the lower story, the realm of science—where the body has been reduced to a mindless machine to be used and exploited, like the rest of nature. It is just a disposable piece of matter.
This explains why being biologically human is no longer thought to confer any moral status or to warrant legal protection. To be human is no longer equivalent to being a person. Human life has been reduced to raw material with no intrinsic purpose or dignity, subject to whatever purposes we choose to impose.
The core question in abortion, then, is the status of the human body. Is the human body an integral part of the person, sharing in its dignity? Or is it extrinsic to the person—a piece of matter that we can control and manipulate any way we want, like driving a car?
People do not have to adopt personhood theory consciously for it to have an effect. It is implied in the practice of abortion itself. To support abortion, by sheer logic, we must decide that human life in its earliest stages has no real value—so little that it may be killed for any reason. Then we must decide that at some later stage it is transformed into a different kind of being of such high value that killing it is murder.
By sheer logic, then, in accepting abortion, we implicitly adopt some form of body/person dualism, even if we do not use those terms. Our actions can imply ideas that we have not clearly thought through.
Of course, when people are actually making a decision about whether to have an abortion, their choice is often based on personal reasons—fear of losing a job, dropping out of school, financial cost, or social stigma. Christian women have told me their first and greatest fear was, What will the people in my church think? These are genuine concerns, and churches ought to be the first to step forward with financial support, child care, job training, counseling—and most of all, with grace and mercy.
In discussing personhood theory, however, we are not talking about people’s personal reasons or feelings but about the logic inherent in supporting abortion. As an analogy, imagine a person asks you why someone is a Christian. Then imagine the person asks for a logical argument why Christianity is true. Your answer might be quite different. Personhood theory is the hidden premise in arguments for abortion.
Once we recognize the dualism inherent in personhood theory, we have new tools to engage with our friends who support abortion. The most obvious problem for the theory is that no one can agree on how to define personhood. If it is not equated with being biologically human, then what is it? And when does it begin?
Every bioethicist offers a different answer. Some propose that personhood emerges when the developing organism begins to exhibit neural activity, feel pain, achieve a certain level of cognitive function or consciousness or intelligence, or even have a sense of the future. Fletcher proposes fifteen qualities to define when human life is worthy of respect and protection (such as intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, a sense of time, concern for others, communication, curiosity, and neocortical function). Score too low on any measure and for Fletcher you do not qualify as a person. You are “mere biological life.”17
But which of these cognitive functions are really pivotal for defining human life? And how developed do they have to be? No one agrees. To choose any stage in gestation as the point when a pre-born baby becomes a person is arbitrary and subjective.
The problem is that most of these characteristics emerge gradually. They are not traits that someone either has or does not have. They are matters of degree—quantitative differences. What we do not find is a clear qualitative transition point for the momentous transformation from a non-person to a person.
For that matter, even fully developed adults have these traits in varying degrees. When I meet someone who is more intelligent than I am, does that mean they are more of a person than I am—and should have more rights than I have? Pro-life apologist Scott Klusendorf says the idea of basing legal protection on traits that vary among the population “relegates the proposition that all men are created equal to the ash heap of history.”18
The only logical grounds for affirming that “all men are created equal” is an appeal to a Creator. That’s why the American founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that human rights are “endowed by [the] Creator.” Even if the founders did not always live up to their own highest ideals (some were slave owners), they were correct on this point. Even arch-atheist Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that the “Christian concept . . . of the ‘equality of souls before God’ . . . furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”19
For the founders, that Christian concept was so obvious that they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Today, however, those truths are no longer self-evident. We need to frame explicit arguments that the existence of a Creator provides the only logical basis for equal rights.
Who’s Really Discriminating?
What about timing? Most people say a baby becomes a person while still in the womb. Miranda Sawyer, the British broadcaster whose story we read in chapter 1, concluded that personhood begins sometime before birth: “Once an embryo has developed enough to feel pain, or begin a personality, then . . . ending that life is wrong.”20
But bioethicist John Harris scoffs at that idea: “Nine months of development leaves the human embryo far short of the emergence of anything that can be called a person.” Harris defines a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Killing is wrong only in the case of someone who is cognitively developed enough to harbor an explicit, conscious desire to live. “Nonpersons or potential persons cannot be wronged in this way because death does not deprive them of anything they can value,” Harris argues. “If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed”—as though the worth of life depended on our private will.21
James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, advocates waiting three days after a baby is born before deciding whether it should be allowed to live. The rationale is that some genetic defects are not detectable until after birth. His colleague Francis Crick agrees: “No newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and if it fails these tests, it forfeits the right to life.”22 Peter Singer says even “a three-year-old is a gray case.”23 After all, how much cognitive functioning does a toddler have?
As we saw earlier, Singer accuses others of discrimination on the basis of species (what he calls speciesism), yet ironically he proposes discrimination on the basis of cortical function. But why should mental function be the basis for moral decisions instead of membership in the human species? Certainly being human is more objective and easier to determine.
A Christian concept of personhood depends not on what I can do but on who I am—that I am created in the image of God, and that God has called me into existence and continues to know and love me. Human beings do not need to earn the right to be treated as creatures of great value. Our dignity is intrinsic, rooted in the fact that God made us, knows us, and loves us.
Scarlett Johansson’s Blood-Stained “Human Right”
If doctors deny personhood on the basis of defects, where do they draw the line? What about mild or correctable defects? A news story from England quotes a father named David Wildgrove: “It was strongly suggested that we consider abortion after they found our baby had a club foot.” Wildgrove was appalled. He knew that club foot is easily corrected, even without surgery. (Splints and casts are used to set the foot in the correct position.) Famous people born with club foot include poet Lord Byron, actor Dudley Moore, and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, winner of a 1992 Olympic gold medal.
Yet a 2006 study found that in England today babies with club foot are frequently aborted. Wildgrove’s son was not one of them: “We resisted, the problem was treated, and he now runs around and plays football with everyone else.”24
Then there are the wrenching cases of babies born alive after an abortion. In the now-infamous case Floyd v. Anders, a little boy survived for twenty-one days after an abortion. Yet a federal judge said that because the mother had decided to abort him, “the fetus in this case was not a person whose life state law could protect.”25 So a child who survived an abortion for twenty-one days was “not a person,” nor protected by state law.
When police came upon Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic in Philadelphia, they discovered a horrifying scene of dead babies, many of whom had been born alive and then intentionally killed by “snipping” the spinal cord with a scissors. But the officers were told by their supervisor that the investigation of abortion was not their business. The supervisor apparently felt that even when an attempted abortion yields a live baby, it is not legally protected in any way. (Gosnell was later convicted of first-degree murder.)26
As columnist George Will trenchantly observes, by refusing to protect a baby born alive in a botched abortion, the law is essentially saying the goal is not just to end the pregnancy. It is saying, “If you pay for an abortion, you are owed a dead baby.”27
The lesson is that any definition of personhood not connected to simply being human is subjective and arbitrary. Yet these ungrounded definitions have life-and-death consequences. When ethicists decree that someone is a non-person, then doctors and judges will deny them legal protection. As a result, human life is no longer inviolable.
Actress Scarlett Johansson has stated that abortion is no longer “‘a woman’s rights issue’ but ‘a human rights issue.’”28 Yet it is a strange human right that justifies killing humans.
Arguments defending abortion demean the body to the subpersonal level. They trivialize the body as a form of raw material that can be tinkered with, manipulated, experimented on, or destroyed with no moral consequences. They reduce human life to utilitarian calculations weighing practical costs and benefits. As Klusendorf writes, if the unborn are not persons, then killing them for virtually any reason “requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled.”29 At Planned Parenthood clinics, aborted baby parts are treated as nothing more than tissue for research, or garbage to pick through for sellable bits and then thrown away.30
The development of ultrasound has transformed the debate by making the baby visible in the early stages. These images have changed many people’s minds. Yet not all. In media interviews I have often been asked how people can look at a baby in the womb, kicking its legs, sucking its thumb, and still say, “No, not a person.” My answer is, “You are witnessing the power of a worldview. Once someone has accepted the two-story worldview, they can literally look at a baby as just an organism, a piece of matter, with no value and no right to protection.”
Using more academic language, Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, says the two-story view “dualistically sets up the concept of ‘personhood’ in opposition to nature and the body” and thus “it fails to do justice to the concrete reality of our embodied lives.”31 The Christian ethic rejects dualism and recognizes our dignity as embodied beings.
In recent years, bioethicists have begun to apply the two-story worldview not only to abortion but also to infanticide. In 2013, two philosophers created a firestorm with an article arguing for what they called “after-birth abortion.”32
What did they mean by that phrase? Infanticide. The killing of newborn babies.
The two philosophers argued that a baby is human but not a person—and that prior to personhood, human life has no moral claims on us. “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing [to] someone a right to life,” they maintained. Thus “fetuses and newborns are not persons.” And “since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions.”33
Do you recognize the key elements of personhood theory? According to these philosophers, a newborn is “merely human” and thus a “non-person.” It exists only in the lower story, which implies that it has no moral value. It is merely a piece of matter that can be used for research and experimentation, harvested for organs, then tossed on the garbage heap.
Pro-life thinkers have long warned that America is heading in the same direction as the Nazis in Germany, and that is not just scaremongering. The Nazis did not begin by killing Jews. They first used their gas chambers to kill the handicapped, and the movement was led by the medical profession. Doctors argued that the lives of disabled people were “not worth living” (the German phrase was “lebensunwertes Leben”).34 Disturbingly, the 2013 article uses exactly the same phrase, arguing that after-birth abortion should be permitted for infants whose lives are “not worth living.”
Science and the Soul
The fact that bioethicists come to such wildly conflicting definitions of personhood shows that the concept is virtually impossible to define once it is cut off from the sheer fact of being biologically human. The central role that biology plays in the debate casts a surprising new light on what both sides are really saying.
For example, it is commonly said that pro-life people are motivated by religious teachings about the soul, while pro-choice people rely strictly on science. Blogger Libby Anne writes, “The vast, vast majority of anti-abortion advocates have a problem with abortion because they believe the zygote/fetus has a soul.” She concludes that opposing “abortion based on the ensoulment of the zygote really is about pushing specific religious beliefs on the general public . . . [which is] a blatant violation of the separation of church and state.”35
But this common objection gets things exactly backward. As a sociological fact, it’s true that many pro-lifers are members of religious communities, which teach that humans have (or are) spiritual souls. Yet pro-life arguments do not start with the soul; they start with science.36 No one argues about the moral worth of human life until scientific evidence first establishes that life exists.37
In the United States, many laws against abortion were first passed in the nineteenth century, when medical knowledge first established that life begins at conception. That’s when the genetic die is cast. On purely scientific grounds, older concepts were ruled irrelevant, such as “quickening” (the moment when a mother starts to feel the baby moving) or the moment when the baby takes its first breath. As a result, it was physicians—not churches—who were the leading advocates for laws criminalizing abortion.38
After all, governments do not decide whether to give legal protection to thirty-five-year-old adults based on whether they have a soul. The law protects them because they are human beings.
Of course, people are much more than biological organisms, and biology is not the most important dimension to life. Yet biology gives a baseline for identifying who is human. It is an objective, empirically testable, universally detectable marker of human status. The body is something we can see and identify scientifically—something we can all agree on. Human persons reproduce “after their kind,” just as Genesis 1 says. Thus everyone who is human is also a person; they do not need to meet any additional criteria.
By contrast, personhood theory says some humans do not qualify as persons. In that case, how do we determine which humans do qualify? How do we identify the additional criteria they must meet? As we have seen, no two bioethicists agree on what personhood is or when it begins. Their definitions are purely subjective, reflecting their own personal values.
Why do we even need the concept of personhood as distinct from simply being human? As science journalist Dick Teresi points out, when talking about your pet, you do not talk about cat-hood or dog-hood as something distinct from the biological fact of being a cat or dog. No, if your pet is biologically a dog, that’s enough. Teresi concludes that the two-story concept of personhood is a “philosophical/religious” concept39—not a matter of facts but a statement about values. Each bioethicist proposes a different list of the capacities needed to qualify as a person based on what they value most.
Personhood theory thus reflects the fact/value divide, which says values have no grounding in facts but are subjective choices (see introduction). The lesson is that when you accept a modernist concept of the body in the lower story, inevitably you end up with a postmodern concept of personhood in the upper story, cut off from any objective criteria.
Ultimately, someone will have to draw the line defining who qualifies as a person. But without objective criteria, the concept will be defined by raw power. Whoever has the most power—namely, the state—will decide who qualifies as a person.
In 2016 an international group of bioethicists published a statement calling on state authorities to start making hiring decisions in health care. It urged governments to set up “tribunals” to coerce doctors and other healthcare workers to perform abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia even if they believe those practices are morally wrong. And if doctors continue to protest, the statement said, they should be punished by being required to perform community service and attend re-education sessions.40
Infanticide as state policy has been around a long time. Just open your Bible to chapter 1 in the book of Exodus:
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives . . . “If you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives feared God, however, and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. (Exod. 1:15–17)
When the state decides who qualifies as a person, the door is open to tyranny and oppression. If the state creates rights, the state can also take them away. Anyone at any stage of life could be demoted to the status of non-person and denied the right to live. When America’s founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that humans have unalienable rights “endowed by their Creator,” they meant rights must come from a transcendent source—a source higher than the state. Otherwise they are not “unalienable.”
Who’s Bringing Religion into the Public Square?
Today many people think it is inappropriate to talk about rights endowed by a Creator, at least in the public square. Why? Because in the fact/value split, when a position is labeled religious, it is assumed to be private and subjective, not shared by others within the polity. Ironically, however, by that definition it is the secular view of personhood that should be barred from the public square. Though it claims to be scientific, in reality it is private and subjective.
Listen to Yale professor Paul Bloom, writing about abortion in the New York Times: “The question is not really about life in any biological sense,” he writes. “It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing.” And what “magical” force has the power to convert a “mere physical thing” into a person with a dignity so profound that it is morally wrong to kill it? That “is not a question that scientists could ever answer,” Bloom intones. “It is a question about the soul.”41
So who’s injecting religion into politics?
Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level. They can no longer deny that an embryo is biologically human. As a result, they have switched tactics to an argument based on personhood, defined ultimately by their own personal views and values. And when their view is codified into law, their private values are imposed on everyone else.
This switch in tactics was evident in a fascinating debate a few years ago. It began when professor Stanley Fish wrote in the journal First Things that pro-lifers have no right to bring their views into the public arena. Why not? Because their views are based on faith, he claimed, while abortion advocates base their views on science.42 Robert George of Princeton challenged Fish to a debate at a meeting of the American Political Science Association. In his paper, George argued that in reality it is the pro-life position that is based on science.
As is customary, the two scholars exchanged their papers ahead of time. When the meeting opened, Fish threw George’s paper on the table and announced, “Professor George is right, and he is right to correct me.” The admission was met by stunned silence.
Fish later explained his startling turnaround. Supporters of abortion have typically cast themselves as “defenders of rational science against the forces of ignorance and superstition,” he said. But when science began inexorably pushing back the moment when life begins, “they shifted tactics. . . . Nowadays, it is pro-lifers who make the scientific question of when the beginning of life occurs the key one . . . while pro-choicers want to transform the question into a ‘metaphysical’ or ‘religious’ one by distinguishing between mere biological life and ‘moral life.’”43
The phrasing “mere biological life” versus “moral life” is Fish’s way of saying body versus person. His point is that when pro-choicers lost the argument on the scientific level, they “shifted tactics” by adopting the two-story dualism and appealing to a non-scientific, non-empirical concept of personhood.
It’s time to turn the tables on the old stereotypes.
With every advance of science, it becomes more evident that to be pro-life is to be on the side of science and reason. Scientists recently discovered that when a sperm meets an egg, an explosion of tiny sparks erupts from the egg at the exact moment of conception. Scientists have even captured these astonishing fireworks on film. “To see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking,” researchers said.44 Human life literally begins in a bright flash of light.
Why Abortion Is Anti-Science
The only strategy left to those who support abortion is to dismiss the evidence from science. Jennie Bristow, editor of Abortion Review, wrote an article titled, “Abortion: Stop Hiding behind the Science.” The article starts, “With anti-abortionists pushing ‘scientific evidence’ on fetal viability, it is time to restate the moral case for a woman’s right to choose.” Notice the scare quotes around the phrase “scientific evidence” as though to discredit the very idea. Repeatedly Bristow insists that “the question of abortion cannot be resolved at a scientific level . . . it is a political issue about women’s need for abortion in a society committed to women’s equality and individual autonomy.”45
Translation: Who cares about scientific facts?
Personhood theory, with its dismissal of biological facts, is the unspoken assumption even in arguments that do not state it directly. Consider the claim that a fetus’s right to life depends on whether or not it is wanted. A few years ago, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said, “When does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feelings of the parents.” She added, “An unwanted pregnancy can be biologically the same as a wanted one. But the experience can be entirely different.”46
So biological facts matter less than the “feelings of the parents.”47
A Salon article asks defiantly, “So What If Abortion Ends Life?” The author, Mary Elizabeth Williams, starts by acknowledging the scientific facts: “I believe that life starts at conception. . . . Throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me.”
Williams even castigates her fellow liberals for denying this obvious fact: “When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person.” Obviously there is no “magic moment,” no sharp disjunction, no sudden transformation. Human development is a gradual, continuous process.
Yet because Williams supports abortion, she herself is logically required to select some “magic moment.” For her, the deciding factor is autonomy. Whoever has autonomy wins. Here’s how she puts it: “A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.”
Williams ends her article with these heart-wrenching words: “The fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.”48
Those who support abortion are not relying on science. They have taken a moral stance that the Declaration of Independence is wrong in pronouncing that all people are created equal. Williams states it bluntly: “All life is not equal.” To borrow a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some lives are more equal than others.
Who’s Imposing Their Beliefs?
The debate on abortion is often portrayed as a conflict pitting those who think the state should remain neutral on moral issues against those who want to “impose” their beliefs on others. Yet, as we have seen, personhood theory is far from neutral.
A few years ago I was invited to speak at a Christian worldview conference hosted by an Ivy League university, and I quickly noticed a pattern emerging. After each speaker, invariably some student would raise the same question, phrased in different words: If we talk about a Christian worldview, aren’t we imposing our views on others? Clearly, even well-educated, Ivy League students have absorbed the secular doctrine that it is illegitimate to speak from a Christian perspective in the public arena—that doing so violates ideals of neutrality and objectivity.
When the same question came up after my lecture, as it inevitably did, I was ready with a counter-question: Is the secular position neutral? Is it unbiased and objective? Of course not. It rests on a highly contentious, two-level view of human nature that involves a crassly utilitarian view of the body (lower story) along with a subjective, arbitrary definition of the person (upper story). Nothing neutral about any of that.
And when the government mandates policies based on that worldview, it is imposing a secular ideology on an entire society.
The problem is that worldviews do not come neatly labeled. No one says that bioethical controversies involve two conflicting views of human nature. Instead people fall back on stereotypical phrases—science versus religion, facts versus faith. When we hear that kind of language, we should press everyone to put their worldview cards on the table. Only then will there be genuinely free and open debate.
I was once invited to be a guest on a National Public Radio program in San Francisco. Before the show, the producer interviewed me about my views on various subjects, including abortion. He commented that most people think abortion is acceptable “until the fetus becomes a person.”
“That phrase carries enormous philosophical baggage,” I pointed out. “It assumes a fragmented, fractured view of the human being that treats the body as extrinsic to the person, and therefore expendable. By contrast, those who oppose abortion hold a wholistic view of human nature as an integrated unity—which means the body has intrinsic value and worth.”
The producer seemed surprised by this argument and had no answer. So I went on. “The pro-choice position is exclusive. It says that some people don’t measure up. They don’t make the cut. They don’t qualify for the rights of personhood.”
By contrast, I said, “the pro-life position is inclusive. If you are a member of the human race, you’re ‘in.’ You have the dignity and status of a full member of the moral community.”
A few days later the producer contacted me to say my interview had been canceled. It can be difficult for secular people to accept the dehumanizing implications of their own views. I had used venerated liberal buzzwords (inclusive, wholistic) to demonstrate that a biblical worldview actually fulfills the highest ideals of liberalism better than any secular worldview.
Young people seem to grasp this better than their Baby Boomer parents. Studies consistently find that voters under thirty are more pro-life than their parents. Among millennials, 51 percent believe abortion is morally wrong, compared to 37 percent who say it is morally acceptable.49 The reason is not that millennials have grown more conservative generally. It’s that they understand abortion as a human rights issue. Having grown up in a world surrounded by ultrasound images, they have greater empathy for the child now visible in the womb. And having grown up in a scientific culture, they have witnessed the miracle of neonatal medicine that makes it possible even for babies born extremely prematurely to survive and flourish—babies the same age as those being aborted down the street at the abortion clinic.
As one columnist writes, for many millennials, “the willful destruction of life in the womb seems less an act of ‘reproductive freedom’ than an act of violence against an innocent victim.”50
Are Human Rights a “Christian Myth”?
The only worldview with the intellectual resources to protect those innocent victims is Christianity. Even secular thinkers often admit as much. Yuval Harrari, author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, argues that if you accept that life evolved by material processes (which he does), there is no logical basis for human rights.
Consider the Declaration of Independence and its concept of “unalienable rights . . . endowed by [the] Creator.” Harrari argues that natural selection is a process for culling the most viable variations among living things. Thus the key to evolutionary advance is not equality but difference: “‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’”
In a materialist worldview, of course, there is no Creator to “endow” humans with rights. “There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose,” Harrari writes. Organisms simply do whatever their evolved capacities enable them to do: “Birds do not fly because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings.” And those evolved capacities are not “unalienable.” They are constantly mutating and changing. So much for unalienable rights.
Phrase by phrase, Harrari picks apart the key claims in the Declaration. According to evolutionary materialism, he says, humans are merely biological organisms driven by instinct to seek pleasure. He concludes that the concept of equal rights is nothing but a “Christian myth.”51
As the implications of evolutionary materialism filter down through the public mind, the rights enjoyed in free societies will be demoted to the status of “myth.” And then who will defend those rights?
Wife Tells Husband: Man Up
We should not forget that half the population is effectively disenfranchised when it comes to abortion. Men are repeatedly told that they have no right to hold a position on the subject because they will never get pregnant themselves. On my Facebook page, a lively discussion on the topic ended when one woman snapped angrily, “I do not discuss abortion with men.”
And many men are happy to duck the issue. “I lined up on the pro-choice side,” writes Ruben Navarrette Jr.
I arrived there for a simple reason: Because I’m a man. Many will say that this is not a very good reason, but it is my reason. Lacking the ability to get pregnant, and thus spared what has been for women friends of mine the anguishing decision of whether to stay pregnant, I’ve remained on the sidelines and deferred to the other half of the population.52
This attitude may sound humble. But Navarrette says he came to see that in reality his attempt to be neutral was “another name for ‘wimping out.’”
It was his wife who challenged him to change his mind. “She’s pro-life. . . . She’s not buying my argument that, as a man, I have to defer to women to make their own choices about what to do with their bodies. To her, that’s cowardly.” It’s time to man up, Navarrette’s wife said to him. “These are babies that are being killed. Millions of them. And you need to use your voice to protect them. That’s what a man does. He protects children—his own children, and other children. That’s what it means to be a man.53
Being a man also means protecting women. Many women are pressured by parents, husbands, or boyfriends into abortions they do not want. In a Medical Science Monitor study, 64 percent of post-abortive women in America said they “felt pressured by others” to have the abortion. For themselves, 54 percent said they “were not sure about the decision at the time,” and 50 percent actually “felt abortion was morally wrong.”54
A full half of women having abortions believe it is morally wrong.
No wonder that, in the same study, 78 percent of women checked off that they felt “guilt” afterward and 56 percent reported “feeling sadness and loss.” In one of my classes, a student named Christopher said, “I was pro-choice until I saw what abortion was doing to women. I have several friends who have had abortions. Every one of them wanted the abortion beforehand. And every one of them regretted it afterward. They were convinced they had taken a human life. When I saw how they struggled with guilt and depression, that’s when I began to rethink the issue.”
Being a man means protecting the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, and the disadvantaged.
More importantly, that is what it means to be a Christian. They oppose abortion because of the biblical admonition to protect those who are weak, powerless, dependent, and needy. As Jesus told his followers, whatever we do to “the least of these,” we do to him (Matt. 25:40).
Justice for the Unborn
“From ancient times,” writes Timothy Keller, “the God of the Bible stood out from the gods of all other religions as a God on the side of the powerless, and of justice for the poor.”55 The Bible is clear that God’s love extends to all humans, including those not yet born. The most eloquent expression is by the poet and prophet King David:
You created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb. . . .
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body. (Ps. 139:13, 15–16)56
Similarly, Job says God created him at the beginning of his life: “Did you not . . . clothe me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews” (Job 10:8, 11)? Jeremiah reports that God called him to be a prophet even before birth: “The word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart’” (Jer. 1:4–5). These verses make it clear that God is intimately involved in people’s lives before they are born.
In the New Testament, Luke gives a startling account of a child who was even filled with the Holy Spirit before birth. John the Baptist was specially commissioned to proclaim the arrival of the Messiah. For that prophetic task, he received God’s Spirit (together with his mother) while in the womb: “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” That infilling empowered her to recognize the newly pregnant Mary as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:41–43). The tiny embryo in the womb was already “my Lord.”
Columnist Matt Walsh writes, “Jesus was Himself at one point an unborn child. If there were any questions before His arrival about the sanctity of human life, those questions were answered 2,000 years ago.”57
How to Be Countercultural
Theologically liberal organizations like the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights argue that the Bible does not forbid abortion. And it is true that there are no explicit verses against it. That’s because during the biblical era, the Jews did not think abortion was acceptable and therefore there was no need to outlaw it. They regarded abortion as a form of murder; thus laws against murder were sufficient.
By the time of the early church, however, Christians did have to take a stand. As we will see in the next section, in Greco-Roman culture both abortion and infanticide were widely accepted and practiced. Thus it is remarkable how strongly and uniformly the church fathers stood against both practices. The Didache, an early Christian text (AD 50–120) says, “Do not murder a child by abortion, nor kill it at birth.” The second-century Epistle of Barnabas says, “You shall not slay a child by abortion.” Justin Martyr wrote, “We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly born children . . . [for] we would then be murderers.” Athenagoras wrote, “We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder . . . [for we] regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care.”
In the early third century, Tertullian wrote, “It does not matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. In both instances, destruction is murder.” In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea wrote, “A woman who deliberately destroys a fetus is answerable for murder.” John Chrysostom asked, “Why do you abuse the gift of God . . . and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder?” Jerome called abortion “the murder of an unborn child.” Augustine warned against the terrible crime of “the murder of an unborn child.”58
The historical record of Christianity is impressive for its uniform opposition to abortion. The early Christians were not being “conservative” in the sense of following the lead of their culture. Instead they were radical, even countercultural.
Even if we are not certain that the child in the womb is fully a person, when in doubt a “generous justice” would counsel us to err on the side of protecting life. That is what we would do in any other situation. If we witnessed an auto accident and we were uncertain whether the victim was still alive, we would not say, “Since we’re not quite sure, let’s kill him.” No, we would try to save his life. The same principle applies to abortion.
Why Women Love Christianity
The early church would not have been successful in overcoming abortion, however, if it had not at the same time promoted a high view of women. This is an important lesson for churches today. Because of Christianity’s opposition to abortion, critics today portray it as hostile to women’s rights. But surprisingly, in the early church it was the church’s opposition to abortion and infanticide that made it especially attractive to women.
Here’s why: A culture that practices abortion and infanticide is a culture that demeans women and disrespects their unique contribution to the task of reproduction. It does not treat women’s ability to gestate and bear children as a wondrous and awesome capacity but as a liability, a disadvantage, a disability. It does not value and protect women in their childbearing capacity but seeks to suppress women’s bodily functions, using toxic chemicals and deadly devices to violently destroy the life inside her.
Up until now, we have talked about how abortion expresses a low view of the body in relation to the fetus. But there are two bodies at stake—and abortion expresses a disrespect for women’s bodies as well.
That disrespect was common in Roman society at the time of the early Christian church. Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, writes, “The Greco-Roman world was a male culture that held marriage in low esteem.”59 It also held women in low esteem, expressed partly through a high rate of abortion, which was a huge killer not only of children but also of women in this period. Infanticide was widely practiced as well. In fact, leading thinkers of the ancient world—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero—recommended infanticide as legitimate state policy.60
Archaeologists have discovered sewers clogged with the tiny bones of newborn babies dumped down the drain. A news article explains, “During Roman times, it was not uncommon for infants to be killed as a form of birth control. It was not a crime, as newborn infants were viewed as being ‘not fully human.’”61 Most of those babies were girls. In fact, it was rare for a Roman family to have more than one daughter. Historians have uncovered a letter written in the first century BC by a Roman soldier to his pregnant wife back home, saying, “If it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it”62 (leave it to die).
In this context, the Christian church stood out for its high view of women. By prohibiting abortion and infanticide, it showed that it cherished the female contribution in bringing new life into the world, treating it as something worthy of respect and protection. Little girls were not to be thrown down the sewer but loved and cared for as much as boys. The early Christians went beyond simply condemning abortion to providing alternatives—rescuing and adopting children who had been abandoned.
We should never defend Christianity by saying it is traditional. From the beginning, it has stood against the traditions of its day. Today, as in ancient times, abortion and infanticide are practiced primarily against baby girls. Sex-selection abortion has created a surplus of men in several nations, from China to India. Girls are also more likely to die from malnutrition and neglect. Adult women are subject to violence and death at the hands of husbands and other family members. The United Nations estimates that 200 million women are demographically missing.
Some have labeled it “gendercide.”63
A documentary on the issue says, “The three deadliest words in the world are, ‘It’s a girl.’”64 The world desperately needs the biblical view of a woman’s worth.
How Ancient Culture “Humiliated” Women
In the early church, women were also drawn to Christianity because of the biblical sex ethic. It is no secret that the major factor driving the demand for abortion and infanticide is sexual immorality. Sex outside of marriage produces children who are unexpected and unwanted. Historian Michael Gorman writes, in the Greco-Roman world, “by far the most frequent reason [for abortion] was to conceal illicit sexual activity.”65 There is a direct and obvious relationship between sexual hedonism and abortion.
And sexual hedonism is another expression of a low view of women. In ancient Greek and Roman culture, it was widely accepted that husbands would have sex with mistresses, concubines, slaves, and prostitutes (both male and female). An ancient Athenian saying was, “Wives are for legal heirs, prostitutes are for pleasure.” In Rome, the taxes collected from prostitution constituted a significant portion of the royal treasury.66 (This may be one reason Jesus hung out with prostitutes: There were so many of them!)
Promiscuity was even held to be divinely sanctioned. The Roman gods practiced both adultery and rape. In Homer’s Iliad, Hera, the wife of Zeus, decks herself out to seduce him away from the Trojan battlefield. She is so successful that, to compliment her, Zeus runs through a list of other women, goddesses, and nymphs he has bedded (he ignores the men he has bedded), insisting that none of them attracted him as much as she does at that moment. Touching.
By contrast, the church fathers wrote sermons urging husbands not to have sex with slaves or prostitutes. These practices were not easy to eradicate. In the fourth century, John Chrysostom was still preaching on why it’s not okay for married men to have sex with their slaves. An ancient Christian treatise on the sufferings endured by married women included the “humiliation” of being replaced by servants in their husbands’ affections.67
And what about the humiliation of those female servants who were coerced into sexual slavery? In Roman culture, sexual violence against poor and powerless women was widely accepted. Because they were regarded as social non-persons, they were not thought to have any legal rights that could be violated. Beginning in the fifth century, Christian leaders finally began to wield enough political influence to pass laws against sexual slavery. The church fathers called it “coerced sin.” How could the church preach against sexual sin when many women (and men) had no choice? For a slave to resist the sexual advances of her or his master meant death. One historian notes that the most reliable index of the Christianization of an ancient society was the recognition of the injustice of sexual slavery. “Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture . . . the progressive realization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization.”68
Let that historical fact sink in: The most reliable index of how deeply Christianity had permeated a society was whether it outlawed sexual slavery. Today, as sex slavery and sex trafficking are again becoming widespread, modern Christians must recover their rich moral and humanitarian heritage. As the Western world sinks back into pre-Christian morality, followers of Jesus must once again become countercultural.
“A Common Table, but Not a Common Bed”
In what other ways was Christianity attractive to women? In ancient culture, many marriages were not love based. Spouses were selected with an eye to things like social status, property rights, and legal heirs. In sharp contrast, the New Testament taught men to “love their wives as their own bodies.” The husband’s “headship” was redefined as self-sacrifice, modeled on Christ’s sacrificial love (Eph. 5:25–33). Men were not to abandon their wives through divorce. They were not to abuse their wives physically or emotionally: “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them” (Col. 3:19).
Husbands were positively commanded not to seek out slaves and prostitutes for sex but instead to keep up regular sexual relations with their wives: “Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again” (1 Cor. 7:5).
To the shock of the ancient world, the New Testament taught that men (not just women) were to be faithful to their spouse. Christianity stood out as radically different because it taught that a husband actually wrongs his wife by his adultery. Jesus said, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12). Such even-handed treatment was revolutionary. At the time, “people thought men couldn’t commit adultery,” explains Beth Felker Jones. It was “women’s bodies [that] were property and could be ‘stolen’ or ‘damaged.’” Jesus “challenges the whole market economy that would buy and sell bodies, especially women’s bodies. Adultery isn’t a property crime. Adultery is a violation of God’s intention for humanity. . . . Jesus radically equalizes the man and the woman in the one-flesh union.”69
Likewise, Paul enjoined a symmetry unheard of in pagan culture: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor. 7:3–4). Nothing like this had ever been said before.
To stress that he was describing an obligation, not an option, in this passage Paul borrows legal language. The word used for marital “duty” normally refers to a debt of money. The word used for “authority” included state authority. The word for “deprive” normally meant to “defraud” or “refuse payment.”70 Paul did not care that in the ancient world men’s sexual freedom was considered completely acceptable. In the church there was a new law: Men were called to sexual fidelity and exclusivity just as much as women were. Note that a woman was even given “authority” over her husband’s body, an idea so radical that even today there are probably few who fully practice it.
Paul describes the mutuality of marriage again in these words: “A married man is concerned about . . . how he can please his wife . . . a married woman is concerned about . . . how she can please her husband” (vv. 33–34). This mutuality is so complete that some church fathers even treated the first part with incredulity—surely Paul was joking when he said a married man should care about pleasing his wife.
At a time when wives were considered legally the possession of their husbands, Paul’s writings were radical. By elevating the status of women, they delivered a severe blow to the double standard that was the pre-Christian norm. And by keeping sex within marriage, the biblical ethic drove down the demand for abortion and infanticide. Children were born into families committed to loving and caring for them.
A second-century document called “The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus” sums up the surprising behaviors that set Christians apart from the pagan world: “They beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed.”71
Radical indeed.
No wonder women flocked to Christianity. As Stark writes, “The Christian woman enjoyed far greater marital security and equality than did her pagan neighbor.” He adds, “Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”72
Then, as now, what Christians do with their sexuality is one of the most important testimonies they give to the surrounding world. They are called to build a community of families that respects women and cares for the young and vulnerable.
The Real War against Women
From ancient times, the principle is that a culture that engages in abortion, infanticide, and sexual license is a culture that disrespects women. At first sight, modern societies may seem to contradict that principle. After all, Western culture accepts these practices yet women there have greater rights and opportunities than anywhere else in the world.
Yes, but at a price. “Here is the bargain we professional women have been making,” writes economist Jennifer Roback Morse.73 To achieve higher levels of education and professionalism, women are required to suppress their fertility with birth control—to neuter themselves with toxic chemicals during their peak childbearing years. (The World Health Organization classifies hormonal contraceptives as a “class one carcinogenic,” that is, a substance known to cause cancer in humans.) Since all contraceptives have a failure rate, women then resort to abortion as a backup. (According to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, about half of women getting abortions claim they were using contraception during the month they got pregnant.)74
To avoid being derailed from their education or career path, women are urged to “meet their sexual needs” through casual affairs without emotional commitment. Reporter Hanna Rosin writes (approvingly) that during college, “women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment . . . and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t get in the way of future success.”75
The problem is that when women are finally established in their careers, many are finding that their fertility has declined—sometimes damaged by sexually transmitted diseases—and they are no longer able to have the families they want. At that point, they are subjecting themselves to invasive, expensive, and often disappointing fertility treatments, or turning to morally problematic practices such as surrogacy. When they do get pregnant, women who have had abortions are more likely to suffer complications such as very premature birth, so that their babies spend months in the neonatal intensive care unit.76
Is this pro-woman?
Morse is writing from her own experience. She put off marriage and family to get ahead professionally, then found that she could not have children when she wanted to. She and her husband suffered through years of infertility before finally adopting a child from overseas. She concludes that young women “are being sold a cynical lie.” They have accepted the cultural imperative that they must get established in their careers before they can think seriously about marriage and motherhood. “They do not realize that they are giving themselves over to careers during their peak fertility years, with the expectation that somehow, someday, they can ‘have it all.’”77
The ideal worker standard in American business was set in an earlier age, when men could function in the workplace essentially as though they were single because their wives were home full-time to cook, shop, maintain the home, and raise the children. Today the same standard still prevails in the corporate world, with the result that women are also required to function essentially like single men if they want professional careers. Many young women are petrified of getting pregnant and falling off the career track.
This issue is personal for me because I got pregnant with my first child when I was in seminary. The only way I knew to fulfill my deepest aspirations was in the academic world, so dropping out of school to raise a child felt akin to falling into a black hole. Later I discovered that I loved being a mother, but at the time I felt deeply ambivalent about becoming pregnant. It seemed to me distinctly unfair that my husband, for his part, did not face the possible loss of his professional life. The sacrifices women are required to make in industrialized societies by giving up their public life and career is a major reason many hold a negative view of pregnancy and childrearing and then resort to abortion.78
A better solution would be for universities and workplaces to be responsive to both mothers and fathers looking for a better work/family balance. There is nothing sacrosanct about the 1950s ideal worker standards, and we should not feel compelled to abide by them when they no longer work. (They were not particularly healthy at the time either, because children rarely had close relationships with their fathers. There was a lot of “father hunger” even when fathers were technically in the home.)
Morse sums up: “Until now, we [women] have been adapting our bodies to the university and the market. I say, we should respect our bodies enough to demand that the university and the market adapt to us and our bodies.”79 That is, instead of asking women to bully their bodies with toxic chemicals (contraceptives), violent acts (abortion), and invasive laboratory-based fertility treatments so they fit into a career path designed essentially for single men, we should design career paths that are supportive for parents—both mothers and fathers.
A culture that respects women’s bodies will create more flexible career trajectories that allow women to have their families at the time that is biologically optimal. It will create education and work patterns that fit around family responsibilities. When we do that, we will reduce a major motive for abortion.
Welcoming the Wounded
It is also crucial that the church once again becomes known as a place that values women. Rejecting abortion is a way of expressing respect not only for the child but also for the mother.
The link between the two was clear to me even before I converted to Christianity. In my teens and young adulthood, I identified with the hippie movement—natural food, natural childbirth, natural fiber clothing. I was not morally opposed to abortion. (Even after I became a Christian, it took several years before I understood why abortion is morally wrong.) Yet I did not consider it an option because I saw it as a violent intrusion into the natural processes of the body. I believed in working with, not against, the natural functions of a woman’s body. Childbearing is a healthy biological function, not a disease to be attacked with sharp instruments and life-destroying chemicals. Eventually I joined an organization called Pro-Life Feminists, because it seemed to me that a genuine feminism should support, affirm, and respect a woman’s body and her distinctive role in reproduction.
The church should also strive to be known as a sanctuary for those wounded by the callous cynicism of the abortion culture. Women who have had abortions are often afraid to even talk to Christians about it. One of my students, Nicole, was attending a Christian college when she was raped in her dorm room by an angry former boyfriend. When she realized she was pregnant, her first thoughts were, What will my church think? Will my family be shunned? Panicked, she set up an appointment for an abortion at the first available date. Even today, she has not told anyone in her church about it.
“Christians are more likely to accept a convicted criminal than a woman who has had an abortion,” Nicole told me. “That may sound like an exaggeration, but think about it: Many churches have prison ministries. But how many have ministries to women who have had an abortion?”
Ironically, Nicole was pro-life at the time of her abortion—and she still is. How tragic that she was so certain she would be rejected by her church that she overrode her own moral convictions. What message is the church sending women that many are afraid of reaching out to those most equipped to help them?
Lecrae: “A Part of Us Died”
And what about men who are wounded by abortion? One of my students, Hannah Zarr, used to work at a pregnancy center, and she recalls the despair of the fathers who accompanied their wives or girlfriends. One man put his head in his hands, then paced the floor, and finally confided to Hannah that he wanted to keep the baby but his girlfriend did not. “He kept asking me, if his girlfriend decided to go through with the abortion, what could he do?” Hannah told me. The answer is that legally there is nothing a father can do. The Supreme Court rejected spousal consent in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976) and rejected even spousal notification in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
Hannah said, “As I looked into the man’s eyes—filled with such desperation—I realized how unfair it is that legally he had no say whatsoever regarding the life of his child. It was his child too. But he had no way to protect his baby.”80
Even men who push their wives or girlfriends into getting abortions may regret it later. Lecrae Moore, a Grammy Award–winning hip-hop artist, has publicly admitted the role he played in persuading his girlfriend to abort their child in 2002. At the time, he had converted to Christianity but was still living a lifestyle of drugs and sex. As he dropped off his girlfriend at the abortion clinic, he knew his action was—in his words—an expression of “me choosing my life over yours.” In his song “Good, Bad, Ugly,” he says, “I was too selfish with my time / Scared my dreams were not gonna survive / So I dropped her off at that clinic / That day, a part of us died.”81
Lecrae did not confront his sense of guilt until years later, when he was preparing to marry the woman who is now his wife. “I literally broke down over the guilt and the remorse and the shame of it all,” he says. “That was the beginning of the healing process for me.”82 Abortion is the number one cause of death for African Americans today.83
The next time you are in a church service, look around at the pews and consider the sheer number of people who have been affected by abortion—both women and men. How can you bring a biblical message of hope and healing? As John Piper says, “The gospel teaches us how to live, but it also rescues us when we fail to live the way we are supposed to live.”84
Fortunately, creative Christians are breaking the mold by starting recovery programs for those who regret their abortions, such as Rachel’s Vineyard and Surrendering the Secret. Yet the number of people affected by abortion far exceeds those who are currently getting help.85
“You Have No Right to Talk”
Another creative response to abortion is the work of pregnancy centers that give support to people who experience a problem pregnancy. These centers offer practical help, social support, financial assistance, clothing, and child care for pregnant women and their children.
A secular friend of mine once said angrily, “You pro-life people have no right to talk about abortion until you are willing to stand alongside pregnant women and give them support.” But his demand has already been granted. In the United States there are roughly twice as many pro-life pregnancy centers as abortion clinics.86 These centers are all or mostly operated by Christians. Secular people who claim to care about women are missing in action when it comes to giving practical help to women facing a difficult pregnancy.
In 2016 Stephanie Chatfield, the wife of Michigan state representative Lee Chatfield, publicly revealed that she had an abortion. Her husband had been tipped off that an unnamed source planned to go public with the information in an attempt to discredit him. So Stephanie decided to get out in front with her own confession.
In a Facebook post, she shared that as a teenager in high school she attended a party where she drank too much alcohol. “I have no memory of the majority of that night, but judging by my appearance and physical condition the next morning, I knew I had been taken advantage of,” she wrote. “Three weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.” She did not tell anyone. “I was ashamed and I was scared.” A week later, she had an abortion.
Today she calls that decision “the worst one of my life.” She writes, “It was my easy way out, but little did I know that I would be stricken with an unbearable guilt for the months and even years to follow. . . . It’s haunted me. It’s made me weep. It’s made it difficult to look in the mirror at times.”
Finally she confided in her parents and in Lee, who at the time was her ex-boyfriend. They embraced her with the good news of “the full forgiveness and grace that God freely offers through His Son Jesus Christ. . . . Christ took my place on the cross and bore the weight of my sin, so that I could have eternal life.”87
In her Facebook post, Stephanie addresses young women who are facing an unplanned pregnancy:
There are crisis pregnancy centers in our area that exist for the sole purpose of helping girls like you. The support is there. You will not be judged, but rather you will be loved and forgiven. Be courageous. Reach out and look for support!88
Imagine the healing potential if churches were to become widely known as places of transparency and healing. Too many people have the impression that Christians are people who claim to be holy while looking down on others. We should strive to make our churches places where people like Stephanie feel safe to share their stories and to encourage others.
Love in Action: Baby Boxes
Meanwhile, across the globe, a pastor has discovered a creative way to help save abandoned babies. In a ragged working-class neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea, one house has a small drop box built into the wall. A hand-scrawled sign outside the drop box says, “If you can’t take care of your disabled babies, don’t throw them away or leave them on the street. Bring them here.” The box is lined with a soft pink and blue blanket and has a bell that rings when the little door is opened.
The drop box is in the home of Presbyterian pastor Lee Jong-rak, and since 2009 Lee has saved the lives of more than six hundred children. He and his wife adopted ten (the maximum number allowed in South Korea), then arranged for the adoption of others.
Inscribed along the top of the drop box is Psalm 27:10, “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in” (ESV).
Pastor Lee’s concern for the disabled started when he and his wife gave birth to a baby who was severely brain damaged. The tragedy sparked a cascade of questions that even caused him to rethink his Christian convictions: “I asked God, ‘Why would you give me a handicapped child?’”
As he cared for his helpless son, however, Lee began to be convinced of the preciousness of life. At the hospital where his son spent most of his early years, he began to encourage other families with disabled children. In South Korea, Lee says, babies with deformities are seen as a national shame. It is a culture addicted to perfection, where cosmetic surgeries have become as common as haircuts.89
The abandonment of babies is not a problem only in South Korea, however. In 2016 the first baby box in the United States was installed at the Woodburn Fire Department in Woodburn, Indiana. Under Indiana’s Safe Haven Law, a mother has thirty days after the birth of her baby to decide if she wants to keep the child or turn it over to authorities with no questions asked.
When a mother places her baby inside the baby box, it locks automatically and authorities are alerted. Within three minutes of the call, emergency personnel arrive to take care of the baby.
Appropriately enough, it was a woman who was herself abandoned as an infant who founded the Safe Haven Baby Boxes organization, which is now sponsoring additional depositories in other states for mothers in crisis. “As a child who was abandoned by my birth mother two hours after I was born,” Monica Kelsey says, “I am honored that Christ has me spearheading a program that will save the lives of abandoned children.”90
The best scenario, of course, is that someday drop boxes will no longer be needed. In the meantime, they are one way for Christians to show the world that even those who have been rejected as unwanted have great value in God’s eyes.
In the ancient world, Christians were distinctive for their humanitarian efforts—taking care of babies and slaves, of widows and orphans, of the sick and elderly, of the unwanted and abandoned. Today, as the West sinks back into pre-Christian practices, we must once again be ready to stand with courage and conviction. We need to confront the underlying worldview of personhood theory, with its dehumanizing impact, and then find practical ways to express the Bible’s high view of human life.
As the population ages, the question of personhood is also coming to the fore in a new and troubling way as we care for a growing population of the elderly. In addition, new ethical challenges are being raised by technology. In the next chapter we will analyze practices such as euthanasia and eugenics, stem cell research, and the sale of fetal tissue—while offering life-giving Christian alternatives.