Abortion

I hope, as Trying to Walk approaches two years of weekly publication, that readers have noticed an absence of political content.  This is not by chance.  It is my express purpose and desire to avoid political topics and maintain a focus on spiritual issues. Political rumination in these articles would confuse and dilute any spiritual value that may be provided.

Some loyal readers may be concerned to find abortion as a topic of consideration here. They shouldn’t be. Abortion may have been co-opted as an issue by political players but it is actually a religious/spiritual issue before it is political.  It is a moral concern more than a political one.

For the person that is a serious Christian, the whims and fads of the current age are not a guiding force.  The factor that determines what a serious Christian thinks about any matter is what God’s book, the Bible, has to say about it. Nothing else matters to the serious Christian, no matter how trite that statement may seem to some, and it’s important that statement is made because it is far from trite.

This implies that there are Christians that are not serious Christians, and sadly it is true that there are such Christians. A Christian who is not serious about his/her Christianity does not care what the Bible has to say about an issue and is therefore willing to let the whims or the fads of the day determine what they believe about any issue. Jesus spoke of the uselessness of such ideas in Matt. 15:9, where He said, “In vain do they worship me teaching for doctrine the precepts of men.”

The word “abortion” is not found in the Bible. In its common usage in our world today, abortion means the termination of a pregnancy by causing the death of the fetus. The Bible does have a word, or two, for “causing the death.” It is “kill.”  In the KJV of the Bible, Exodus 20:13 is translated, “Thou shalt not kill.” “Kill” is not an unreasonable translation of the Hebrew word “ratsach” that is used there. However, a more proper translation would be “murder” which is the word found in many translations, including the New King James Version.

This is an important distinction, even outside the discussion of abortion. Kill is the more generic term which refers to the ending of life no matter how it happens nor the reasons behind it. Anytime something or someone ends the life of anything, that thing has been killed. A political movement can be killed. A flood in which no one died could kill the tourist industry in a certain area.

 To “murder” is to purposefully end the life of an innocent being without proper cause. If a person is carelessly handling a gun and it fires and someone is killed, the gun handler didn’t murder anyone. He is guilty of manslaughter because he did kill someone, but it was not purposeful so it doesn’t rise to the level of murder. If a burglar in your house runs at you with a knife and you purposefully shoot and kill them, this is not murder because the burglar is not innocent and self defense is a proper cause.

A very good example of murder, both because the victim was innocent and the act is done purposefully to end a life, is abortion. The Ten Commandments were a list of rules God gave the Israelites at Mt.Sinai. The first four are rules for attitude and behavior towards God. The last six are rules for proper attitude and behavior towards mankind. The first of the rules regarding mankind that applies outside the family is, “Thou shalt not murder,” from Exodus 20:13. Jesus repeats this command in Matthew 5:21-26 and strengthens it by going beyond the act to condemn even thoughts that tend in such a negative direction.

Proponents of murdering helpless babies in the womb attempt to avoid the harsh reality of their desires by referring to the baby as a “tissue mass,” using the word “fetus” in an attempt to distance the baby from the human race. The issue then hinges on whether the fetus, a word which refers to a developing, unborn mammal, is a human being.

At birth it is obvious that the fetus is a human being. The question is, “at what point did the existence of this human being begin?” This is not a hard discussion. There is only one point at which it may be said that there is something now in existence which did not exist before this point. All the rest is sophistry.

At the point when the sperm penetrates the egg something new comes into existence. It wasn’t there before, but now what was an egg and a sperm have become united into an embryo which is in a constant state of change. It grows. It develops. It adds new parts and gets bigger and more complex every day. Before the sperm and the egg united this was not happening. This embryo did not exist, but now it does. From here on, it will change and develop but it will still be the same embryo. It will, before long, be the baby to which the mother gives birth.  It has been the same being all along that it will be after birth.  

It was never part of the mother’s body. Parts of a person’s body never separate and become “born” to live their own existence. It was never a tumor, or some such growth. Tumors do not leave the host to begin their own separate life. The growing embryo is not akin to a tonsil or appendix one may have removed. It is just as helpless after birth as it was before, but now that it has been brought out into the world its needs will be taken care of in a slightly different manner. It is what it has always been. It has been developing since its inception at fertilization, and it will continue to develop for the next several years.

This is simple. There is no other point besides fertilization of the egg which qualifies for the beginning of a new life. Everyone knows that. To propose otherwise is wish-casting sophistry used to soften the harsh reality of murder. Abortion is wrong because it is murder.

What about the “life of the mother” as an issue? What about rape? These are separate issues. The question that has to be answered is, “Is murder acceptable?” The answer is no. I have much sympathy for a woman who has been raped and is thus pregnant. That does not change the fact that murder is a sin and is not allowed by God.

What about the life of the mother?  Such a situation would occur only when the fetus is relatively large and at that point could be delivered by Caesarean section. There is no either or, abortion or death of the mother.

What about the mother’s body, the claim that, “I can do what I want with my body.” We are not talking about the mother’s body. We are talking about a separate individual who is currently at a stage in their development in which they perform all necessary life functions through direct contact with the mother’s body, but they are not any part of the mother’s body. If they were, they would not ever be able to live on their own outside the mother’s body.

We must face the fact that to be a proponent of abortion is to be a proponent of murder. Abortion is the purposeful killing of an innocent victim without proper cause. Personal freedom is not proper cause. That is really all there is to it. Your feelings and my feelings are no part of the issue. The Ten Commandments tell us not to murder, and Jesus tells us not even to think about it.