Today Secular Pro-Life is highlighting a recent Gallup poll showing that 1 out of every 5 non-religious persons (i.e. atheists, agnostics, or "no religion") self-identifies as "pro-life." The standard interpretation of this statistic is that the vast majority of secularists are pro-choice, hence the pro-life position is one primarily driven by religion. But SPL rightly points out that around 15% of American adults, around 34 million, self-identify as non-religious. One out of five means at least six million people, a substantial minority, even if you wouldn't necessarily meet one every day.
SPL's blog regularly receives comments from people trying to "uncover" their secret religious affiliation. Their presence at the Reason Rally was not exactly well-received by all. Why is this?
Part of it, I suspect, is that the secular movement, like any other movement, has to try to foster some degree of solidarity among its supporters; otherwise it may simply die out. Call it the Darwinian theory of social movements. As long as the secular movement remains relatively small in America--15% is still a pretty small minority--they will tend to make less of an impact if they cannot agree on a political agenda. After all, the secular religious agenda is almost exclusively negative. Without a positive political agenda, there is simply no point for the movement to exist.
Another part of it, which is perhaps related to the first part, is what I call the "secularism as religion" phenomenon. Many secularists abandon religion for what I perceive to be basically a good reason: they find that religious people defend their assertions on the basis of religious traditions rather than open themselves up to correction by reason. This is because the faithful often follow the line of reasoning which goes, "I want to believe whatever is true, and my religion is true, therefore I believe whatever I have learned from my religion." A common objection to this line of reasoning is that the second premise cannot be justified other than by a painfully circular argument: my religion is true because it says it is true. All secularists wish to avoid such nonsense, and so they abandon religion in favor of reason.
The problem is, secularists are not immune to making their own movement into a "religion" in the sense I have just stated above. They begin to reason the same way as the religious faithful: "I want my beliefs to be based on reason, secularism is based on reason, therefore I will believe whatever is consistent with the secular movement." When it comes to controversial issues like abortion, just fill in the blanks: pro-choice is secular belief, pro-life is a religious belief, hence if I want to be reasonable I must be pro-choice. This is nonsense, but you will find that solidarity breeds much nonsense.
I am certainly not suggesting there are no intelligent arguments for the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. I just think that the visceral hatred of SPL and its mission stems from irrational impulses. Accusing SPL of being "secretly religious" is the most ironic of accusations, since it seeks to discredit someone's view solely on the grounds that it breaks with secular orthodoxy. The irony would be amusing if not for the high stakes in this debate.
Perhaps part of the claim that SPL is "secretly religious" stems from SPL's own need for solidarity, which happens to come largely from religious organizations. It is true that they link to blogs like Jill Stanek's, whose views are hard-line conservative and religious, and that they work with sites like LifeNews.com, which has a specifically religious and conservative affiliation. But keep in mind that SPL maintains a pro-contraception stance and remains willing to openly debate the rape exception, two positions which are out of sync with standard pro-life religious orthodoxy. Many of their members also openly support gay marriage, although the purpose of their organization is not to address such issues.
The point of SPL, as I see it, is not to advance secularism, but rather to advance the pro-life movement from a secular perspective. As they do so, it's natural for them to make friends among religious pro-lifers. In my opinion, the religious pro-lifers stand to gain quite a bit more from SPL than the other way around in terms of intellectual credibility; in terms of resources, however, quite the opposite is true. I don't think anyone needs to apologize for this.
(As an illustration of one of my points above, I've been impressed with SPL's ability to clearly and openly discuss the issue of bodily integrity with regards to the abortion debate, something which many religious conservatives seem unable to do. It is SPL's willingness to delve seriously into all the philosophical dimensions of the abortion debate that makes me believe they will grow to have a huge influence on the pro-life movement.)
I consider myself a religious man, but I very much believe in a secular society, by which I mean a society based on a few basic principles on which most great religious and intellectual traditions can agree, principles encapsulated in such great words as our own Declaration of Independence: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." My own reason for believing in a secular society is religious: I believe "Blessed are the peacemakers" is a rule which we ought to follow in both our personal and political lives, and I would rather that important questions remain unresolved among us than that we fight each other over the answers. A society which uses violence to settle questions of doctrine is a society that believes in no higher authority than itself--not even reason.
Abortion is violence against human beings. If one accepts this proposition, then one must accept that even in a secular society, abortion cannot be tolerated.
It is the mission of the pro-life movement to offer convincing proofs of the two propositions just stated. Thus, contrary to popular belief, there is nothing in the world more natural than for pro-life arguments to be secular. Whether or not Christianity or some other religion is true is extremely important to all of us as human beings, but it is irrelevant to the abortion debate. For that reason, I applaud the efforts of SPL, and I hope that more and more secularists will be swayed by our arguments.
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Notes on a secular argument against abortion
A couple of weeks ago I went to a nice presentation by Kelsey Hazzard for the Virginia Atheists and Agnostics, in which she argued against abortion on a purely secular basis. The great thing about the presentation was the extended Q&A time, during which a lot of members of the group got to express their opinions and concerns. I didn't say anything, I just wanted to listen and get a feel for the state of the argument among committed secularists. After contemplating what I heard, I decided to write some thoughts on the issue.
First, I think abortion law, like all law, should be settled on a secular basis. It is difficult to define what I mean here by "secular," but to keep things simple, I'll say that the law should be decided on the basis of scientific facts and moral arguments premised on basic individual rights as expressed in, say, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. I should not have to appeal to any particular religious doctrine to make a case for something to be illegal. This is both a practical and a charitable principle; it lets all sorts of people enjoy freedom of conscience while living at peace with one another.
Second, educated atheists understand perfectly well that human life begins at conception. There is nothing controversial about this. The details of embryonic and fetal development are widely available on the Internet, and do not need to be rehearsed every time this debate is had. The real questions are moral and philosophical. What do we mean by person? Who has rights? And what rights to human beings have?
Some common defenses of abortion I heard were as follows. The unborn do not possess consciousness, therefore they are not persons. In some ways this is perhaps the objection to making abortion illegal. Analogies do not seem to impress the pro-abortion-choice crowd. A person in a coma still has rights, doesn't he? (Maybe not.) A person who is sleeping certainly has rights. (But that's not the same at all!) A newborn infant hardly qualifies as conscious. (Peter Singer says we can kill them, too. But let's not talk about Singer; let's just agree that consciousness begins somewhere in the third trimester, maybe.)
Consciousness is a very slippery concept, emerging gradually rather than at any well-defined moment in time. But conception is a pretty well-defined moment. Again, scientifically this is uncontroversial. If we equate personhood with consciousness, then in terms of personal rights we have no way of drawing boundaries between people. This might be acceptable in many situations, but in matters of life and death, how can we justify moving boundaries?
A most absurd version of this argument: "If my mother had aborted me, I wouldn't have cared." Of course not. You wouldn't have been. If this argument could justify abortion, it could justify any killing at all. If you kill me today, I won't care tomorrow.
Another argument is that the unborn child is not connected to society. No one would miss her. The only person to whom she has a connection is a mother who doesn't want her. I have a couple of objections to this. First, does the argument still have any weight of others connected to the unborn child (e.g. the father or the grandparents) object to her abortion? Second, does the conscience of other members of society have any bearing? (I once saw a picture on facebook that suggested: "Don't want to pay taxes for abortions? Don't make me pay taxes for wars!" I think that's a pretty good compromise.) Third, what about analogies, such as hermits removed from society, or others with very few social contacts?
This argument basically comes down to a perverse form of utilitarianism. You are only justified on the basis of your worth to society. It would be far beyond the scope of this post to get into all the reasons that is a terrible idea. Let us instead turn our minds to a real-world example. How do we feel about sex selective abortion in China, India, and other nations? Is it acceptable to abort girls because they are less wanted in your culture? Right here at home, we read that 90% of children diagnosed with down syndrome in the womb are aborted. Is this acceptable?
Another argument concerns a woman's right to make her own health decisions. Carrying a pregnancy to term is a risky decision; by many estimates it is more risky to a woman's life than getting an abortion. Certainly a woman should be allowed to decide which risks to her life she is going to take, even if it's a relatively minor risk, and even if someone else's life depends on her.
It's important to mention that the pro-life position usually allows for a woman to abort in case of an added threat to her life, due to a pregnancy complication. More controversial is the idea that women who are raped have the right to abort, on the grounds that they should not be forced to care for a child she did not willingly consent to caring for. I will go ahead and say, perhaps controversially, that I more or less accept this argument in the case of rape. (This certainly does not settle the ethical issue in my mind, but perhaps it does settle the legal issue. I am not at all suggesting that children conceived in rape ought to be killed, or that they have no competing rights claim in this case. I am suggesting, however, that a woman's right to autonomy may win out against the competing claim to her protection.)
However, in all other cases, we cannot avoid dealing with the obvious question of responsibility. The argument is so often framed in terms of a woman's rights but never about a man and a woman's responsibilities. Clearly, sex resulting in conception involves a man and a woman. Two people consenting to sex are implicitly consenting to take responsibility for the life they may conceive. I am not suggesting every sex act must be for the purpose of procreation. If a couple doesn't wish to conceive, contraception is an option. However, just because I drive safely doesn't mean I will never have an accident, and I must pay for the consequences of my mistakes. Likewise, a man and a woman who never meant to conceive are not thereby relieved from the responsibility of caring for the child they have conceived.
This is a widely accepted notion once birth occurs. It is only controversial when we are speaking of life before birth. There are, of course, lots of interesting modern questions that could be raised concerning the roles of women and men in families. How much responsibility should parents bear for the well-being of their child? How should women and men share this responsibility? What kind of family structure would grant women and men true equality? What societal factors can help or hinder this? As interesting as all of these concerns are, they have nothing to do with abortion. Whatever responsibilities men and women should bear in relation to their children, they have already begun to bear them as soon as they conceive, because that is when a new life begins.
Given the importance of the right to life, apart from which no other right has any worth, it would appear that any couple who consents to having sex and thereby conceives should be expected to refrain from killing the new human being they have brought into the world. Treating abortion as a back-up contraception is simply a denial plain fact, which is that abortion is the intentional killing of a human being.
One more remark on this: I realize that it can be uncomfortable for young pro-life activists to talk about responsibility in parenting. I, for one, am not married and have no children. However, I simply don't think we can avoid the topic in reference to the political theory. We cannot talk about legal rights without also talking about responsibilities. The connection between sex and life is obvious, and we have to find ways to address the issue directly. We cannot shy away from talking about sex in a responsible manner--which does not mean insisting on abstinence only education, demanding laws against sex outside of marriage, or any other such absurd and invasive laws. I firmly believe that it is possible to live in a society which is neither prudish nor childish about sex. There are certainly ways to prevent conception if we wish, but abortion is not contraception. As soon as we accept the moral consequences of a scientific fact, we can get the abortion question right.
Finally, I want to briefly mention an issue that I have been meaning to address at length, but will not have room to address fully here. Not surprisingly, one of the atheist/agnostic students was sharp enough to bring it up. Since life begins at conception (an this is scientific fact) we have to deal with this question raised by embryology: what do we do about the enormous number of spontaneous abortions that happen early in most pregnancies? Studies estimate that as many as 90% of embryos die within the first three weeks after conception. Women who have spontaneous abortions this early rarely even know they were ever pregnant. It may not be as high as 90%, but even a conservative estimate would give 60%, a clear majority.
What are we to say to this? Is our species afflicted with a plague? And if all human beings, from the moment of conception, deserve full moral standing, shouldn't we be focusing all our efforts on saving these tiny humans from the destruction that awaits them in the womb?
I will have to save my full response to this for another time, because I think it brings up a pile of philosophical assumptions that have to be waded through to get to the full answer. I admit, this is a serious problem for the pro-life movement on an intellectual level, but I remain optimistic. Let me throw in one quick observation and call it a day. I'm guessing about 90% of people in the world are dead by the time they are 90 years old. Does that mean we should also turn all of our focus toward saving old people and extending their life just a few more years? Obviously not. Valuing of human life does not mean we are willing to spend unlimited resources (which we don't have) to provide unlimited life and health to everyone (which we can't do). To return to my first point, we simply need to agree on some basic moral principles to guide our legal system, which are based on individual rights shared by all human beings.
While I fully endorse the right of all human beings in our society to live, work, worship, believe, teach, speak, and think as they like, and while I do fully endorse a woman's "right to choose" what to do with her own body, I do not consider it an exception to say that abortion should be illegal in a secular state guided by the rule of law. As a matter of scientific fact, we are killing thousands of human beings every day in clinics all around the country. The sooner we accept the moral implications of this fact, the sooner we can reform our society into the just society we all desire.
First, I think abortion law, like all law, should be settled on a secular basis. It is difficult to define what I mean here by "secular," but to keep things simple, I'll say that the law should be decided on the basis of scientific facts and moral arguments premised on basic individual rights as expressed in, say, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. I should not have to appeal to any particular religious doctrine to make a case for something to be illegal. This is both a practical and a charitable principle; it lets all sorts of people enjoy freedom of conscience while living at peace with one another.
Second, educated atheists understand perfectly well that human life begins at conception. There is nothing controversial about this. The details of embryonic and fetal development are widely available on the Internet, and do not need to be rehearsed every time this debate is had. The real questions are moral and philosophical. What do we mean by person? Who has rights? And what rights to human beings have?
Some common defenses of abortion I heard were as follows. The unborn do not possess consciousness, therefore they are not persons. In some ways this is perhaps the objection to making abortion illegal. Analogies do not seem to impress the pro-abortion-choice crowd. A person in a coma still has rights, doesn't he? (Maybe not.) A person who is sleeping certainly has rights. (But that's not the same at all!) A newborn infant hardly qualifies as conscious. (Peter Singer says we can kill them, too. But let's not talk about Singer; let's just agree that consciousness begins somewhere in the third trimester, maybe.)
Consciousness is a very slippery concept, emerging gradually rather than at any well-defined moment in time. But conception is a pretty well-defined moment. Again, scientifically this is uncontroversial. If we equate personhood with consciousness, then in terms of personal rights we have no way of drawing boundaries between people. This might be acceptable in many situations, but in matters of life and death, how can we justify moving boundaries?
A most absurd version of this argument: "If my mother had aborted me, I wouldn't have cared." Of course not. You wouldn't have been. If this argument could justify abortion, it could justify any killing at all. If you kill me today, I won't care tomorrow.
Another argument is that the unborn child is not connected to society. No one would miss her. The only person to whom she has a connection is a mother who doesn't want her. I have a couple of objections to this. First, does the argument still have any weight of others connected to the unborn child (e.g. the father or the grandparents) object to her abortion? Second, does the conscience of other members of society have any bearing? (I once saw a picture on facebook that suggested: "Don't want to pay taxes for abortions? Don't make me pay taxes for wars!" I think that's a pretty good compromise.) Third, what about analogies, such as hermits removed from society, or others with very few social contacts?
This argument basically comes down to a perverse form of utilitarianism. You are only justified on the basis of your worth to society. It would be far beyond the scope of this post to get into all the reasons that is a terrible idea. Let us instead turn our minds to a real-world example. How do we feel about sex selective abortion in China, India, and other nations? Is it acceptable to abort girls because they are less wanted in your culture? Right here at home, we read that 90% of children diagnosed with down syndrome in the womb are aborted. Is this acceptable?
Another argument concerns a woman's right to make her own health decisions. Carrying a pregnancy to term is a risky decision; by many estimates it is more risky to a woman's life than getting an abortion. Certainly a woman should be allowed to decide which risks to her life she is going to take, even if it's a relatively minor risk, and even if someone else's life depends on her.
It's important to mention that the pro-life position usually allows for a woman to abort in case of an added threat to her life, due to a pregnancy complication. More controversial is the idea that women who are raped have the right to abort, on the grounds that they should not be forced to care for a child she did not willingly consent to caring for. I will go ahead and say, perhaps controversially, that I more or less accept this argument in the case of rape. (This certainly does not settle the ethical issue in my mind, but perhaps it does settle the legal issue. I am not at all suggesting that children conceived in rape ought to be killed, or that they have no competing rights claim in this case. I am suggesting, however, that a woman's right to autonomy may win out against the competing claim to her protection.)
However, in all other cases, we cannot avoid dealing with the obvious question of responsibility. The argument is so often framed in terms of a woman's rights but never about a man and a woman's responsibilities. Clearly, sex resulting in conception involves a man and a woman. Two people consenting to sex are implicitly consenting to take responsibility for the life they may conceive. I am not suggesting every sex act must be for the purpose of procreation. If a couple doesn't wish to conceive, contraception is an option. However, just because I drive safely doesn't mean I will never have an accident, and I must pay for the consequences of my mistakes. Likewise, a man and a woman who never meant to conceive are not thereby relieved from the responsibility of caring for the child they have conceived.
This is a widely accepted notion once birth occurs. It is only controversial when we are speaking of life before birth. There are, of course, lots of interesting modern questions that could be raised concerning the roles of women and men in families. How much responsibility should parents bear for the well-being of their child? How should women and men share this responsibility? What kind of family structure would grant women and men true equality? What societal factors can help or hinder this? As interesting as all of these concerns are, they have nothing to do with abortion. Whatever responsibilities men and women should bear in relation to their children, they have already begun to bear them as soon as they conceive, because that is when a new life begins.
Given the importance of the right to life, apart from which no other right has any worth, it would appear that any couple who consents to having sex and thereby conceives should be expected to refrain from killing the new human being they have brought into the world. Treating abortion as a back-up contraception is simply a denial plain fact, which is that abortion is the intentional killing of a human being.
One more remark on this: I realize that it can be uncomfortable for young pro-life activists to talk about responsibility in parenting. I, for one, am not married and have no children. However, I simply don't think we can avoid the topic in reference to the political theory. We cannot talk about legal rights without also talking about responsibilities. The connection between sex and life is obvious, and we have to find ways to address the issue directly. We cannot shy away from talking about sex in a responsible manner--which does not mean insisting on abstinence only education, demanding laws against sex outside of marriage, or any other such absurd and invasive laws. I firmly believe that it is possible to live in a society which is neither prudish nor childish about sex. There are certainly ways to prevent conception if we wish, but abortion is not contraception. As soon as we accept the moral consequences of a scientific fact, we can get the abortion question right.
Finally, I want to briefly mention an issue that I have been meaning to address at length, but will not have room to address fully here. Not surprisingly, one of the atheist/agnostic students was sharp enough to bring it up. Since life begins at conception (an this is scientific fact) we have to deal with this question raised by embryology: what do we do about the enormous number of spontaneous abortions that happen early in most pregnancies? Studies estimate that as many as 90% of embryos die within the first three weeks after conception. Women who have spontaneous abortions this early rarely even know they were ever pregnant. It may not be as high as 90%, but even a conservative estimate would give 60%, a clear majority.
What are we to say to this? Is our species afflicted with a plague? And if all human beings, from the moment of conception, deserve full moral standing, shouldn't we be focusing all our efforts on saving these tiny humans from the destruction that awaits them in the womb?
I will have to save my full response to this for another time, because I think it brings up a pile of philosophical assumptions that have to be waded through to get to the full answer. I admit, this is a serious problem for the pro-life movement on an intellectual level, but I remain optimistic. Let me throw in one quick observation and call it a day. I'm guessing about 90% of people in the world are dead by the time they are 90 years old. Does that mean we should also turn all of our focus toward saving old people and extending their life just a few more years? Obviously not. Valuing of human life does not mean we are willing to spend unlimited resources (which we don't have) to provide unlimited life and health to everyone (which we can't do). To return to my first point, we simply need to agree on some basic moral principles to guide our legal system, which are based on individual rights shared by all human beings.
While I fully endorse the right of all human beings in our society to live, work, worship, believe, teach, speak, and think as they like, and while I do fully endorse a woman's "right to choose" what to do with her own body, I do not consider it an exception to say that abortion should be illegal in a secular state guided by the rule of law. As a matter of scientific fact, we are killing thousands of human beings every day in clinics all around the country. The sooner we accept the moral implications of this fact, the sooner we can reform our society into the just society we all desire.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Free Markets, Evolution, and Design
I've noticed that a lot of atheists and Christians share the same basic premise about evolution: Surely a loving God would not have allowed spontaneous, unplanned growth to be the mechanism by which new species came into being. Christians who take this point of view hold onto God and reject evolution; atheists hold onto evolution and reject God.
That's kind of interesting. It's almost the exact same impulse that leads people to be skeptical of free markets. How can free, spontaneous growth lead to economic prosperity? Surely anyone who cares about the poor, our environment, and the betterment of society will have a better idea than to leave the economy up to free, unplanned exchanges between individuals.
Thus I shouldn't be surprised if secular liberals reject the free market. Spontaneous evolution is, for them, the result of the absence of sovereign grace; if we want to run the economy right, we need to figure out how to do what a loving God would have done had he bothered to show up.
One might then ask why it appears that so many Christians who reject Darwinian evolution appear to accept free market ideology. My response would be that it is doubtful that these Christians have any sort of genuine commitment to the principles of economic freedom. Voting Republican is certainly no sign of believing in the free market. And if many Christians do seem skeptical of big government, this surely has many explanations unrelated to economics, such as the tradition of individualism in American Protestantism.
And we should not be surprised if we see many Christians rejecting the principles of free markets. I believe I heard a comment from N. T. Wright once to this effect: "Many of the same Christians who reject Darwinian evolution also embrace social Darwinism."
Let me make one thing clear: social Darwinism is a caricature of the free market. The free market is not about "survival of the fittest." It is simply about unplanned, free exchanges between individuals. Indeed, this requires as its foundation a respect for human life, without which free trade will never happen.
But the idea that something unplanned can lead to the best result seems to bother us all on some level. Christians, because surely God's design of the world means he actually designed it; the plans must be lying around in His attic somewhere. Secularists, because surely we rational humans can do better than nature's horrific disorder.
On that provocative note, I think I'll stop here, and leave the details for another time.
That's kind of interesting. It's almost the exact same impulse that leads people to be skeptical of free markets. How can free, spontaneous growth lead to economic prosperity? Surely anyone who cares about the poor, our environment, and the betterment of society will have a better idea than to leave the economy up to free, unplanned exchanges between individuals.
Thus I shouldn't be surprised if secular liberals reject the free market. Spontaneous evolution is, for them, the result of the absence of sovereign grace; if we want to run the economy right, we need to figure out how to do what a loving God would have done had he bothered to show up.
One might then ask why it appears that so many Christians who reject Darwinian evolution appear to accept free market ideology. My response would be that it is doubtful that these Christians have any sort of genuine commitment to the principles of economic freedom. Voting Republican is certainly no sign of believing in the free market. And if many Christians do seem skeptical of big government, this surely has many explanations unrelated to economics, such as the tradition of individualism in American Protestantism.
And we should not be surprised if we see many Christians rejecting the principles of free markets. I believe I heard a comment from N. T. Wright once to this effect: "Many of the same Christians who reject Darwinian evolution also embrace social Darwinism."
Let me make one thing clear: social Darwinism is a caricature of the free market. The free market is not about "survival of the fittest." It is simply about unplanned, free exchanges between individuals. Indeed, this requires as its foundation a respect for human life, without which free trade will never happen.
But the idea that something unplanned can lead to the best result seems to bother us all on some level. Christians, because surely God's design of the world means he actually designed it; the plans must be lying around in His attic somewhere. Secularists, because surely we rational humans can do better than nature's horrific disorder.
On that provocative note, I think I'll stop here, and leave the details for another time.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Secular ProLife
Students for Life of America is trying to reach a maximal audience by branching out toward the secular side of the abortion issue. A recent e-mail from them linked to the web site SecularProLife.org, which has as its subtitle, "Pro-life for a reason."I have to say, that subtitle made me smile.
As their description on facebook says,
SecularProLife.org exists to promote secular pro-life arguments and fight the media portrayal of pro-lifers as "religious extremists." The scientific facts support our cause- let's use them!Although this group is just getting off the ground, I'm encouraged by their mere existence. In order to defend innocent human life, it is necessary to break down the walls of rhetoric that the pro-"choice" movement has made over the years.
We are not anti-religion. We welcome people of all faiths, atheists, agnostics, etc. We don't get involved with things like the pledge of allegiance, gay marriage, or In God We Trust on coins. SecularProLife.org is dedicated solely to issues of life and death.
Specifically, the separation of church and state should not be given as a reason to defend abortion. The pro-life position on abortion is non-sectarian. It is not based on any specific doctrine of any religious denomination. It is based on good scientific evidence and one basic moral principle: that all human beings deserve the chance to live.
In honor of SecularProLife.org, I decided to write my top reasons why I don't use the Bible to defend the unborn. I'm sure this list will scandalize some Christians, but I feel like this stuff needs to be said--if for no other reason than that innocent children should not have to die because we can't agree on a single religion.
Top 5 reasons I don't use the Bible to defend the unborn
- Non-Christians don't care about the Bible. This sounds really straightforward, but sometimes it feels like conservative politicians forget this.
- Christians don't care about it, either. That's right, I said it. The fact is, about half the country doesn't agree with the pro-life position on abortion. About 80% of the country is Christian. That means there have to be plenty of Christians out there who are pro-choice; what are you going to do about it? Quoting scripture probably isn't doing the trick. Maybe they're from a more liberal mainline denomination that doesn't interpret scripture like you do. Or maybe one of the other reasons below has something to do with it.
- The Bible doesn't even mention abortion. There is no commandment given by God in the Bible that prohibits, specifically, killing a child in the womb. Of course, "Thou shalt not kill," but everyone already agrees with that. Defining the word "kill" can be tricky, though, and unfortunately the Bible doesn't give us straightforward guidance on the issue. (Phrases often quoted such as "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," when read in context, are not at all about the life of the unborn.)
- The Bible may even find abortion acceptable. There are some interpretations of Exodus 21:22 that find no legal rights given to the unborn (see the NRSV). Whether this is true or not is not mine to say, but I have wondered many times about this verse.
- The scientific facts are more compelling than the Bible. Consider one of the most often quoted passages of scripture used in pro-life circles:
For you formed my inward parts;
This actually gives an image of life in the womb that is misleading and could suggest that unborn children are nothing more than bits and pieces being "knitted together." Other than for fear of defying God's sovereignty, why not "abort" such a creature? If growth in the womb is really a process of parts being put together, then maybe it's not too late to "abort" such a process.
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)
The scientific image, on the other hand, is one of continual growth. From the moment of conception, a human being in the womb is doing what humans do--growing, consuming nutrients, and struggling to survive. All the various parts of the human body naturally differentiate (very quickly!) from stem cells. From the time you're about 8 weeks old in the womb, you already have major vital organs--a heart, a brain, something like lungs--and even more, you have fingers, toes, and eyes that are not much more than little buds. All of these parts will grow--they won't be "put together." You are a complete organism from day 1.
So there you have it. I will say that there is a right way to use the Bible in defense of the unborn: to inspire hope, to motivate change, and to provide a foundation for compassionate ministry to women in need of better options than abortion.
With that, I think there's one scripture passage that reminds me that I need to speak out on this issue, whether or not I use the Bible to do it:
If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength being small;
if you hold back from rescuing
those taken away to death,
those who go staggering to the slaughter;
if you say, "Look, we did not know this"--
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?
And will he not repay all according to their deeds? (Proverbs 24:10-12)
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