With its implications for the concepts of freedom, family, and life itself, abortion divides Western society like few other issues. While pro-life and pro-abortion advocates do not always identify as Christian or secular respectively,1 these two worldviews traditionally represent opposite sides of the abortion controversy. To engage effectively in this controversy, Christians must accurately understand and logically respond to pro-abortion arguments. The following analysis introduces these topics by contrasting biblical and secular foundations for deliberation about abortion, outlining scientific observations that each side must consider, and presenting a dialogue of core arguments from both perspectives.
Fundamentally, Christianity acknowledges that a knowable, rational, holy God exists.
To begin, how do biblical and secular worldviews supply foundations for addressing abortion? Fundamentally, Christianity acknowledges that a knowable, rational, holy God exists. Objective truth, logic, and morality rest in God’s unchanging character. These concepts provide a basis for scientific inquiry, rational argument, and ethical deliberation, enabling meaningful discourse on abortion.
The biblical view also affirms humans as embodied, relational beings fashioned in God’s image (Genesis 1:27). While theologians differ in interpreting God’s image (the imago Dei), the image clearly separates people from animals and establishes a strong prima facie right for an innocent human not to be intentionally killed by another human (Genesis 9:6). Correspondingly, a biblical view recognizes every human life as inestimably valuable, even before birth.2 This view also establishes responsibilities to care for family, love others, and protect the vulnerable.3
In contrast, secular worldviews deny any Creator, especially a Creator with moral expectations. Truth, logic, and ethics become human constructs ultimately arising from neural chemistry.4 In this worldview, humans can invent morality however it suits them but cannot foundationally explain why morals should value all human life,5 especially if humans are merely animal by-products of unguided evolution. No life—much less that of a voiceless embryo—has objective significance. Although this view establishes no ultimate purpose for happiness or survival, many people prefer to pursue these ends and have no consistent basis to refrain from doing so at others’ expense.6 A result is expressive individualism, a philosophy which deifies the lone human as his or her own authority, own truth source, and own end in life.7
Clearly, these two worldviews offer extremely different foundations on which to build cases for or against abortion. A biblical view brings its own philosophical tool set to the work site, having a basis for objective morality, logic, and scientific inquiry. The secular view, however, must borrow these tools. In this sense, no secular argument about abortion foundationally works without “cheating.” Another notable point is that Christians and secularists must build their arguments with the same set of bricks—the same scientific facts.
Medical advances have wheeled in cartloads of these bricks, establishing five premises about human reproduction from the moment of fertilization.8 First, the being conceived through human fertilization is human. Second, the being is alive. Third, the being is a complete individual. Fourth, this individual is distinct from the mother, having a different, complete genome and body—which is, in half the cases, male. The mother’s immunological response to pregnancy affirms the newly conceived individual is (literally) a foreign body and not part of the mother. Fifth, fertilization marks the beginning of a lifespan, a development journey that will proceed continuously until the individual dies. Ultimately, both Christians and secularists must acknowledge newly fertilized zygotes as distinct, complete, living human individuals who will remain such until death.
From these facts, Christians can build the following robust, consistent argument on the foundation of a biblical worldview:
Some secularists, acknowledging the truth of statement one, borrow moral content from theism to claim statements two through four.9 However, since secularism provides no overarching moral standards10—and secular individualism is consistent with pro-abortion advocacy11—secular stances traditionally favor abortion. Arguments from these stances often focus on at least one of two subjects: a preborn human’s personhood or a woman’s personal interests.12,13 An examination of both types of arguments follows.
Personhood arguments claim abortion is ethical because preborn humans do not qualify as “persons.” Before medical advances confirmed statement one above, pro-abortionists could more easily deny preborn humans’ personhood by denying their humanity. A more advanced argument claims that the preborn, despite being humans, do not qualify as persons with full human rights; therefore, abortion is not immoral.14
Some of these arguments propose that existing humans become “persons” after passing a distinct physiological cutoff point, such as the development of a heartbeat, brain activity, detectable movement, sensation of pain, viability outside the womb, or birth.15 Alternatively, personhood arguments may state that one or more psychological or moral criteria establish personhood by degrees.16,17 These criteria may include, among other factors, capacities for self-awareness, desire, motivation, reasoning, communication, and relationships.
Often, pro-life responses to these arguments essentially ask, “Is it true that a human is a person because they meet X (proposed personhood standards), are in Y (circumstances), or could experience Z (events)?”18 An intuitive way to discern the answer is to use a reductio ad absurdum19 technique which could be called, for the purposes of this discussion, the “right to kill” (RTK) test. This test asks if citizens would have a right to kill a postnatal human who fails X standard(s), is not in Y circumstances, or could not experience Z event(s). For instance, would citizens have a right to kill postnatal humans who may be unconscious, immature, immobile, dependent, insensitive to pain, inviable outside hospitable conditions (as all humans are),20 experiencing cardiac arrest, or lacking capacity for reason, desire, self-motivation, communication, or relationships? Many people will recognize the answer is no, even if they cannot explain why.21,22
Notably, the RTK test only “works” when responding to people who already believe such killing is immoral.
Notably, the RTK test only “works” when responding to people who already believe such killing is immoral. But ethicists such as Michael Tooley and Peter Singer, who champion a more consistent secular worldview, conclude that killing postnatal humans—typically infants and individuals with various disabilities—who lack certain criteria is ethical.23,24 But, apart from such views’ chilling consequences in terms of immediate and potential cost to human life, who has the right to decide which criteria endow personhood? Attempts to determine immaterial personhood by measuring material traits already presuppose that those traits grant personhood, begging the question.25 Ethicists who position themselves as authoritative for evaluating personhood implicitly claim a degree of omniscience that would qualify as divine—which does not compute with secularism. Worse, the logistics of individuals presuming moral authoritativeness result, as the late Yale law professor Arthur Leff observed, in either totalitarianism or moral polytheism,26 neither of which engender functional, free societies.27
Other pro-abortionists, conceding that preborn humans are (at least at some point) persons, argue that a woman’s rights to determine her own future and to avoid bodily processes that she would rather forgo supersedes a preborn person’s right to life. Of these arguments, Judith Jarvis Thomson’s may be most famous.28 Thomson suggested that, like a woman would not necessarily be obligated to share her kidney function to save a dying violinist against her will, mothers are not necessarily obligated to “lend” their bodies to fetuses. Other arguments compare fetuses to parasites which need not be tolerated. An additional line of women’s interests-based arguments suggests that the burden of unwanted parenthood robs a woman of the chance to control her destiny.29,30
While these arguments do not necessarily view abortion as immoral, still other pro-abortionists recognize that killing preborn persons is prima facie wrong but maintain that abortion should still be legal, especially for cases involving rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. Naomi Wolf adopts this approach, calling abortion a “necessary evil” for feminine freedom and equality.31 Wolf argues that women should be “man enough” to face this evil and try to atone for it through a secular sort of penance—for instance, by giving girls contraception. Wolf also applies analogies to argue that abortion, like certain forms of warfare or the withdrawal of palliative life support, can entail an ethical form of ending lives.
From a biblical view, no self-interest-based argument justifies taking a life made in God’s image, except perhaps as an inescapable final resort to save a life made in God’s image. But pro-life advocates can often refute self-interest arguments simply by showing that these arguments involve faulty analogies or fail the RTK test. For instance, Francis Beckwith notes that Thomson’s violin analogy (among other issues) fails to differentiate between treatment withdrawal and active killing, misrepresents pregnancy, and neglects the fact that interactions between strangers entail different moral obligations than parent-child relationships.32 The differences between human pregnancy and intraspecies parasitism are even more overt.33 Similarly, Wolf’s warfare analogy neglects to recognize that exceedingly few abortions remotely meet “just war” criteria34 except in genuine conflicts between maternal and fetal rights to life.35 Regarding Wolf’s other analogy, withdrawing futile palliative treatment clearly differs from actively killing humans who would not otherwise die.
For other arguments, the RTK test often works wonders.36 For instance, would a woman have a right to kill a postnatal human who was conceived through rape or incest or who reminded her of a traumatic experience?37 No. If a woman did not want the strain of a difficult supervisor, could she have her boss assassinated so long as she followed Wolf’s advice to acknowledge the moral gravity of this decision and to perform penance, perhaps by giving coworkers donuts? No. If the burden of caring for an ailing mother could jeopardize a woman’s future, does being a free woman give the daughter a right to control her own destiny38 by paying someone to dismember her mother? Never. So, why should a mother have a right to do so with her daughter?
The biblical view offers the ultimate foundation for valuing freedom, family, and life.
Ultimately, secularists who acknowledge the medical facts of prenatal life and who prima facie oppose intentionally killing persons cannot support abortion while remaining philosophically consistent. As the RTK test shows, such a stance is internally contradictory and requires borrowing moral content from outside of secularism. The views of more consistent secularists, like Peter Singer, entail grave practical, philosophical, and social consequences, while still borrowing concepts such as morality, logic, and justice from outside of secularism. But the biblical worldview—with its philosophical robustness, consistency with medical knowledge, and emphasis on valuing all humans—provides the stance on abortion that is the most logical, scientifically valid, and practically conducive to human flourishing. Thus, the biblical view offers the ultimate foundation for valuing freedom, family, and life.
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