Responding to the reality of abortion

This article was first published in our recent Social Issues Bulletin – Issue 61, which is available to download here.

The last time there was even a small, slightly modest, ‘pro-life’ law change was in 1990 when the time limit was lowered from 28 weeks to 24. And even then, at the same time as the time limit was reduced, Parliament approved an amendment to legalise abortion to birth in cases of ‘serious handicap’. This has been used to justify abortion on the basis of club foot, cleft lip and other treatable disabilities.

In other words, it has been more than 35 years since there was any positive legislative movement on this issue. And this year, the situation has only become more extreme. MPs and then Peers have approved an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to partially decriminalise abortion in England and Wales and this has officially become law. A woman who procures abortion pills and takes them at home will not be guilty of an offence, even if she terminates her baby right up to the point of birth.

In light of these tragic and disturbing realities, it is right that we ask ourselves: what must we do?

Abortion: its reality and its impact

Before answering that question, I think it would be helpful at this point to clarify what abortion actually is. As with so many things, it is surrounded by euphemisms (healthcare) and so let’s clarify.

• Medical abortion (85% of UK abortions): medical abortions use drugs to kill unborn babies.
• Early medical abortions: the mum is given a drug called Mifepristone and the result is the lining of the womb begins to deteriorate and the growing child is starved of oxygen and nutrients. A second drug called Misoprostol is taken and this is to induce contractions to push the unborn child out the uterus.
• After 21 weeks and 5 days, Potassium chloride is injected into the baby’s heart and they suffer a heart attack. Surgical abortion uses metal instruments to kill and extract the unborn baby.

We also need to recognise both the scale of abortion and its ramifications for the whole of society.

Back in 1996, CARE organised an event in the Royal Albert Hall. As part of the service of commemoration, rose petals were dropped from the ceiling of this immense venue. 1 million in total, to mark each of the 1 million abortions that had taken place since 1967. Writing about CARE’s history in Turning the Tide, Celia Bowring said this: “I felt the tears come streaming down my face. There was something so beautiful and yet so awful about each of those petals. How could we treat the unborn in this way?”

Tragically, if you were to attempt to do the same thing today, you would need not 2 million, or three. Not five or six. Not even eight or nine. No, you would need more than 11 million petals to mark the lives lost. And that is just in the UK.

Yet it is at this point that we must acknowledge something. It is one thing to point out the numbers, it is another to remember that behind each one there is a story and stories of different kinds as well.

When you start looking at the reasons why women choose an abortion, it is simply not the case that every one of them makes it as some sort of ‘political statement’ asserting their rights. It is one of the desperate ironies that, on the one hand, you have an abortion lobby desperate to celebrate abortion and see it as the highest good. And on the other, you have stories of women going through a crisis pregnancy, who deep down don’t want to have an abortion but feel like they have no other option.

All sorts of factors push women towards an abortion, including poverty and the dad’s failure to stick around. We must also account for the fact it has been culturally normalized and so some women will choose it because they think it is normal and even ‘empowering’.

Yet when a woman has to decide whether to have an abortion, she is often at the point of crisis. The pregnancy may be unexpected, unplanned, or complicated for medical reasons. A colleague of mine who is involved in post-abortion counselling said: “Her hormones are all over the place and she is facing an uncertain, possibly frightening future.”

Abortion harms the baby and it also harms women as well. One of the most pernicious lies the abortion lobbies tries to sell is the notion that you can have an abortion and it solves your problem. Do they honestly believe that you can act against nature in such a way and not experience any consequences?

Here is my colleague again on what many women experience and feel after an abortion: “Many will feel deep sadness, isolation, guilt and shame but also depression. Many self-harm, either physically or through other means such as emotional eating or sabotaging relationships. Some become suicidal, some abuse drugs or alcohol to numb the feelings or deny that the abortion happened or that they have any pain.”

And even more broadly, it harms wider society. One example of this is the collapse in the birthrate which means we are storing up huge problems over the coming decades as the number of people dying is greater than the number being born.

Abortion is a serious sin

The reality of what happens during an abortion, the truth about its scale and its consequences across society lead us to another conclusion. Abortion is a serious sin. Today it is common to avoid this sort of language, even in the church. But I don’t think we serve anyone by playing this down.

Every sin is worthy of condemnation and must meet the justice of God. But throughout the Bible, there are some acts and sins that are more severe than others. This is taught very clearly in the various penalties attached to different crimes in the law of Moses. For example, the crime of intentional murder carries a stronger penalty than some forms of stealing. In other words, taking another human being’s life is a more serious sin than stealing a chocolate bar from the shop. 

Abortion involves the taking of human life and it is therefore a more serious sin than others. If we turn to the book of Psalms, we find another element we must consider.

Consider Psalm 106:34:-39: “They did not destroy the peoples as the LORD had commanded then, but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshipped their idols which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan and the land was desecrated by their blood. They defiled themselves by what they did by their deeds they prostituted themselves.”

Do you notice the condemnation that Israel, by sacrificing children to a false god, had “shed innocent blood”? This is a key biblical category when it comes to abortion. It does not deny biblical teaching on original sin, or the doctrine of total depravity. Rather, the category of the innocent simply reflects reality that an individual can be innocent of any crime, yet receive a punishment as if they were guilty of a capital offence.

This obviously applies to abortion. Aborted babies have done nothing deserving anything remotely close to what is done to them. Biblically, therefore, abortion involves taking innocent lives.

The seriousness of this becomes even clearer when we consider how the Bible is crystal clear about the value of human life. If any of us has any doubt about this at all, I would start by pointing us to the incarnation of our Lord Jesus.

To my mind, this is the most powerful argument for the dignity of life in the womb that you can find. The eternal Word – the one by whom and for all whom all things were made – the Son of God himself – willingly took on flesh and exchanged the glory and light of heaven for the darkness and vulnerability of the womb.

Conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, we do not need to choose an arbitrary point in his development when he ‘became’ incarnate. The idea that Jesus only became a human person at week 12, or 24, or at birth is foreign and alien to Hebrew thought and to biblical teaching. Psalm 139 reminds us that God knits us together in our mother’s womb and we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (v. 15). Multiple people in the Old and New Testament are set apart for the Lord’s purposes while they are still in the womb (e.g. Genesis 25:23; Judges 13:5; Isaiah 49:1; Luke 1:15; Galatians 1:15). Moreover, Luke uses the Greek word ‘brephos’ to describe both John the Baptist in the womb (Luke 1:41) and the newborn Lord Jesus (Luke 2:16). This Gentile physician clearly saw personhood in both. From the very moment of conception, all human beings are made in God’s image – and it is deeply evil to intentionally desecrate the work of God by destroying what he has made.

Yes, a human embryo in the womb just after fertilisation is desperately vulnerable. But is that any different from humanity at other stages of life? A newborn baby is vulnerable. A toddler is vulnerable. A teenager is vulnerable. As our bodies age, our vulnerability only increases.

In fact, this is the biblical paradox of being human. We are, on the one hand, frail and fragile masterpieces. David says in Psalm 8:4, “what is man, that you are mindful of him?’ Here he acknowledges our smallness compared to God. But in the very next verse he expresses wonder at our dignity: “yet you made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honour.”

An embryo in the womb is desperately vulnerable, but no less human and worthy of protection than anyone outside the womb. The Bible does not force us to classify human beings in this way, whereby we say some have dignity and some don’t.

Life, biblically speaking, is sacred from conception through to its natural end.

So how is abortion justified? Especially when advocates today, by and large, agree that life begins at conception.

The answer lies in an especially pernicious philosophy called personhood theory. Our secular world has abandoned God and in doing so, has fundamentally destroyed the notion that humans are embodied souls. Instead, we are simply evolved animals, bags of chemicals who have no real purpose or meaning in this world.

One of the results of this pernicious lie is it creates a false dichotomy between our physical selves and our ‘real selves’. In other words, in the womb, we are just a physical fetus and most personhood theory believers say you are really only human when you are born.

This is what Professor Nancy Peacey says in her brilliant book (p. 20), Love Thy Body:

The assumption at the heart of abortion, then, is personhood theory, with its two-tiered view of the human being – one that sees no value in a living human body but places all our worth in the mind or consciousness.
Personhood thus presumes a very low view of the human body, which ultimately dehumanizes all of us. For if our bodies do not have inherent value, then a key part of our identity is devalued. What we will discover is that this same body/person dichotomy, with its denigration of the body, is the unspoken assumption driving secular views on euthanasia, sexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, and a host of related ethical issues.

You can see why, under this analysis, abortion is possible. Yes, they say, life begins at conception, but not human life. That only begins when you’re born, or in the case of ethicist Peter Singer, much later in life when you’re two or three years old.

Personhood theory is deeply wicked. It forces apart what God, the Creator, has joined together. We should recognise it, call it out and point people to God’s better story.

We should seek a total end to abortion

So here we are.

More than eleven million abortions since 1967, when parliament passed the Abortion Act. Hundreds of thousands now each year. Countless lives lost and many more broken by our permissive abortion laws. And so the question is: what next?

Politically, the answer seems obvious: make abortion ever more available. Even the recent move to partially decriminalise abortion still means a woman can be criminalised and a doctor too if she procure an abortion for a healthy baby outside of her home. It won’t be long before campaigners argue this is an unsatisfactory arrangement and push for full decriminalisation. 

If you were to ask me what signs of hope are there politically, I would say: relatively few. The best I can think of is that our ever more extreme abortion laws are at least out of step with the general public. Polling has demonstrated that whilst the British public support abortion, they do not think it should be available on demand for any reason. There are also some signs that younger voters, Gen Z, are more likely to be pro-life.

The truth is that politically, at the moment, the best you could hope for is to nudge things in a better direction. For example, pursuing a reduction in the time limit from 24 weeks to 22, on the same rationale and basis as the limit was reduced in 1990 is one area that might yield progress.

In my time at CARE, I’ve been involved in attempts to outlaw abortion on the basis of Down syndrome, or disabilities that are treatable, of sex-selective abortion and a reduction in the abortion time limit. And all have failed. Even in Northern Ireland, nominally the most pro-life part of the UK, a private members bill to outlaw abortion to birth for fetal abnormality failed to progress.

Pursuing these incremental laws does not change our end goal. We want an end to abortion.

The church has a vital role to play

In pursuing this goal, the church has a vital role to play. Yet perhaps too often, fear of what people might think overrides our commitment to biblical truth.

The more I’ve worked on this issue, the more convinced I am that the Devil has blinded us with fear of man. We tip-toe around it too much, if we even mention it at all. We are more concerned with not causing offence than we are with proclaiming the truth.

Yet we must be wary of the other extreme. There is a danger we talk about abortion in such a totally insensitive, tactless and cruel way that might be filled with truth, but has no grace in it at all.

As ever, he is our example. Our Lord Jesus Christ, we are told by the Apostle John, came from the Father, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). I think this means acknowledging the pain and hurt of past abortions, as well as its sinful character as we hold out Christ as the great Saviour from sin. It means being compassionate as we recognise the complexity of emotions involved in a crisis pregnancy and seek to persuade others. And we must be patient in explaining the Bible’s better story when it comes to abortion.

So, what can churches do?

The first part of the action we must take is to pray about this issue in our churches. This should be done both in our pastoral prayers and also in our prayer meetings. If your church has small groups, then it should be included within that.

There are multiple ways of doing this. For example, you can highlight one key piece of legislation to help your church pray through that. Or you can lead your church in lament for the lives that have been lost.

This does seem to be a practice that we have lost – the art of lamenting. And what topic, apart from the sheer number of lost souls out there, should call forth lament from us other than the number of abortions happening each year and the way this horrendous practice has been normalised?

Pray for all endeavours to persuade women not to have abortions. Pray for groups like Options and Pregnancy Centres Network that they will be helped to speak the truth in love. Another idea is to use key anniversaries to pray about this issue. You’ll need to get creative and you’ll need to be intentional but please pray!

Beyond praying, there are so many different ways to get involved in pro-life action. Here is an excellent section from a sermon preached by John Piper:

Let me begin by saying this morning that in the diversity of the body of Christ some Christians should be focusing pro-life energy on the enactment of legislation that will protect the unborn. Other Christians should focus pro-life energy on educational strategies that promote the wisdom of sexual chastity before marriage and heterosexual faithfulness in marriage. Other Christians should focus pro-life energy on crisis pregnancy ministries—counselling, housing, health care. Other Christians should focus pro-life energies on adoption services—counselling, foster care, new parent connections. Other Christians should focus their pro-life energy on post-abortion ministries of counselling and care. Other Christians should focus their pro-life energy on sidewalk counselling or other forms of peaceful, public demonstration. Some Christians should specialize in extraordinary prayer, some should specialize in thinking and writing, and some should specialize in public action.

In terms of public action, can I commend March for Life? It is an opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with some evangelicals, but also with Catholics and those who support the pro-life position.

For any preachers and elders reading this, you could follow the example of John Piper and devote at least one sermon a year specifically to the issue of abortion, in recognition of the seriousness of the issue.

Secondly, you could provide a series of seminars, perhaps reflecting different perspectives: from a doctor, from a campaigner, from a woman who has had an abortion in her past.

Thirdly, you could teach on abortion in a wider series on what it means to be human.

Conclusion

There is much in this article I have not said. For example, I’ve said little about the reality of home abortions and the damage done by this policy. I’ve said nothing really about the new national buffer zone law and the fact that some campaigners like Isabelle Vaughan-Spruce have been arrested for silent praying. Nor have I unpacked in full detail what decriminalisation of abortion really means.

But what I hope you have heard is a passionate plea to take this issue seriously and to preach, teach, pray and where you can, take political action. Surely the overwhelming scale of this evil, combined with its multidimensional impact on society means that as pastors and leaders in Christ’s church, we have a duty to speak out?

Finally, as we look ahead, our hope rests not ultimately in politics, but in the Lord Almighty. For he is sovereign over all things. He has revealed his heart for those who are on the margins of society, for the most vulnerable. With his help, let us do likewise, speaking up for those without a voice.