Abortion and Christians

 

Isn’t it amazing how the world can change in just a couple months? 

Conservative politicians found ways to pass laws that seemed to contradict the Roe V. Wade ruling. They used their political power to put biased judges into what was previously seen as a bastion of political neutrality, the Supreme Court. The Court overturned Roe V. Wade. Millions of voters began protesting the loss of their ‘rights’ and began threatening to vote those politicians out of office. So now many of those same politicians, who claimed they were only doing the 'Christian' thing, are back-pedaling, changing their stance on abortion, and trying to distance themselves from the Roe v. Wade fallout they instigated.

This is not a discussion of the pro-life/pro-choice debate. That discussion is purely political, not biblical. I want no part of it, no matter how loudly politicians try to attach ‘Christianity’ to it.

The word ‘abortion’ is in the Bible, but not in its 21^st century meaning. In English Bibles that translate the Hebrew word shakhal as abortion, the context makes clear it refers to what today is called a miscarriage: that is, an accidental, unwanted loss of a pregnancy, not a purposeful termination of one.

The Bible does not say, ‘Thou shalt not commit abortion.’ But neither does it say that until childbirth a pregnant woman has complete autonomy over her body, including the fetus she’s carrying.

So does that mean the Bible is silent on the subject of terminating pregnancies? Not at all. Let’s take a look at what the Bible does say about pregnancy and childbirth and see what principles it contains.  

The very first childbirth mentioned in the Bible is that of Cain. On that occasion Eve remarked, “I have brought forth a man with the help of Jehovah.” (Genesis 4:1) The statement could be misleading: Eve no longer had a relationship with Jehovah. It’s not impossible that she was crediting the miracle of birth to Jehovah even though she was no longer in His favor. Or, it being probably the most pain she or Adam had ever experienced, she may have been crediting Jehovah with keeping her alive through the ordeal. Far more likely, however, is that she believed (based on Genesis 3:15) that this man-child would be the savior who would get them out of this mess they’d gotten themselves into. She was, not surprisingly, wrong about that. 

But that attitude – that somehow the next child born would be the one to fix Adam and Eve’s colossal mistake – persisted throughout Bible times. 

For Israelite mothers, bearing a child was a sacred experience; being barren was viewed as a curse. Pregnancies were a blessing. Harming a pregnancy was a crime, potentially a capital crime. (Exodus 21:22-25)

Children are consistently described as ‘an inheritance’, ‘a gift’, ‘a favor’, from God - by those in an approved relationship with the God of the Bible. However, we also read in the Bible about those with a different view.

People who abandoned Jehovah and turned to worshiping pagan gods such as Molech would voluntarily toss their infants into the burning lap of a huge metal cow-headed image of their god. (Jeremiah 32:35) I cannot imagine how parents who loved their children did so. I suspect that most of those pagans who practiced this secretly viewed those babies, like mothers seeking abortion today, as an inconvenience.

If the Bible contained a “Thou Shalt Not...” for every possible scenario it would be so long that it wouldn’t fit on any library shelf in the world. More than that: would a list of thou-shalt-nots really draw you closer to God? There’s a story that as his death was approaching, comedian W. C. Fields was seen reading the Bible. When asked what he was looking for so late in his life, his reply was, “Loopholes.”

If you approach the Bible with an open mind and the intent to find out how to be acceptable to God, you’ll find principles that you can apply in every situation. Those principles make clear that God views life as a gift and children as an inheritance. 

I hesitate to think what He views politicians as.

For Part One of this column, click here. Feel free to leave a polite comment. Comments are monitored, so don't waste your time trying to post spam.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several books, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.

Does a fetus have human rights?

 

Today I learned something new: A human being is not the same thing as a human person. Seriously.

This column is not intended to be a political statement. I’m neither Republican nor Democrat. I am assiduously neutral as to politics. 

The Supreme Court, I’ve discovered, is not. Their decision to end Roe v. Wade had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with their respect for life.  If they respected life they would not have ruled, in the same week, that state laws restricting guns are unconstitutional.

But the Roe v. Wade decision created such a furor in the news I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Surely, in this scientific age, the legal status of a fetus has been well established?’

Apparently not.

Scientifically, a human being is an individual of any size or age with 46 chromosomes. When 23 male chromosomes in a human sperm cell unite with 23 female chromosomes in a human ovum, within 24 hours a human being comes into existence. It is unique, different from both its mother and its father. It will remain a unique, individual human being until the day it dies, and neither scientists nor lawyers debate that.

It is first dubbed a zygote, then a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus. But all its genetic details, from hair color to eye color to male or female gender – even some thought processes – are written down in its DNA from Day One. While it draws nutrients from its mother, Science acknowledges that its growth is governed and controlled, not by its mother’s body, but by its own DNA. It is a unique human being.

The loud chant that is heard at every women’s rights protest, “MY body, MY choice!” is just not scientifically accurate. After Day One, that blastocyst is its own body, living within hers. It is more separate from her body than if she had a conjoined twin.

This is a medical fact, not a religious opinion. Dr. Herbert Ratner wrote that "It is now of unquestionable certainty that a human being comes into existence precisely at the moment when the sperm combines with the egg." Dr. Bradley M. Patten from the University of Michigan wrote in Human Embryology that the union of the sperm and the ovum "initiates the life of a new individual." And John L. Merritt, MD and his son J. Lawrence Merritt II, MD, present the idea that if "the breath of life [referenced at Genesis 2:7] is oxygen, then a blastocyst starts taking in the breath of life from the mother's blood the moment it successfully implants in her womb.”

When a fertility clinic fertilizes several eggs they are all, scientifically speaking, human beings. The one that gets implanted into a womb may well grow. At some point in its growth it will obtain the status of human person. The legal and medical status of the other fertilized eggs? Human beings, but not human persons.

Many human beings die before their mothers even know they exist. About 1/3 of all zygotes don’t last more than a few days. Of those that reach blastocyst stage roughly half fail to implant on the uterine wall. But if one does implant it becomes an embryo, and by week 11, a fetus.

Some are lost for no known reason. Some are lost because of something in the mother’s diet or water or air or activities, or some complete mystery that happens to her, without any knowledge on her part. Others are lost because the mother suspects or knows she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be, and she takes some action that results in the death of the human being growing inside her.

If a fetus had human rights, at some point her intentional actions would become no different than those of a criminal whose assault of a pregnant woman results in the termination of her pregnancy – the criminal can be charged under the federal “Unborn Victims of Violence act” (H.R. 503, 2001). If the fetus has no human rights, how can a criminal be charged with harming it?

At what point does a human being become a human person?

Some argue that taking the first breath makes a being a person; others say No, personhood starts with brain activity; still others create philosophical lines between ‘potential human’ and ‘human person’.

The doctors cited above made clear that breathing isn’t the start: a blastocyst is taking in the breath of life from its mother’s bloodstream. 

The 'brain activity' camp doesn’t have a decent argument, either: If a fetus doesn’t become a person until it has “rational attributes” as they contend – a sense of self, the ability to interact intelligently with the external world – then  there are an enormous number of already-born folks – from brain damaged to severely autistic to Alzheimer’s victims, and others – who could be labeled non-persons, having no life rights, because of having lost their rational attributes. Most infants, for that matter, don’t have a ‘sense of self’ separate from their mothers prior to about two years of age. That’s what the ‘terrible twos’ is all about... a baby’s discovery of itself as an individual. If that definition were correct, no one could be charged with a crime for throwing a teething baby in the garbage!

Feminist professor Mary Anne Warren asserts that a fetus has no rights. “There is only room for one person with rights within a single human skin,” she says. Hmmm... I have to come back to the "conjoined twins" argument again.

Militant abortion rights activist Peter Singer, director of the grossly misnamed Center for Human Values at Princeton University, goes beyond even Ms. Warren. He says that dogs, pigs, apes, monkeys and other creatures may be persons; but that some human beings, including fetuses, disabled human adults, and even normal human babies who haven’t yet demonstrated a sense of self, should not automatically  be considered persons. An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012 quoted several other medical authorities holding the same opinion, some suggesting that defective babies could be used for medical experimentation or organ harvesting.

Speaking on the subject of babies born as they were about to be aborted, (something, again, I hadn’t thought about before sitting down to write this but that is apparently quite common) Singer defended infanticide. "We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. If… the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either."

Medical science has reached the point where 60-70% of preemies born at 24 weeks survive. According to Singer, nothing should be done to keep those kids alive.

Regular readers of this column know my beliefs are not based on which way the wind of human thought is blowing, but on what the Bible says about a subject. Does the Bible have anything to say about abortion? Are Christians anti-abortion? Are anti-abortionists Christian?

It’s going to require a Part Two to deal with all that.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.

Voting on when life begins

 

In 2011, voters in Mississippi had the opportunity to decide when human life begins.

Not in actuality, or course. When human life begins is a scientific fact. It might be debated by politicians, but it isn't changed by a vote. What they voted on was a legality.

The official ballot summary of the measure read:

"Initiative #26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to define the word 'person' or 'persons', as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof."

The measure was defeated 57% to 42%.

 

While the Mississippi Constitution uses the word “person” several times, such as in section 22, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property except by due process of law,” it had never defined just exactly who or what a “person” was. Until our confusing times, it had apparently never needed to be defined.

But now, when even words like “man,” “woman,” and “marriage” have become ambiguous, it seems “person” needs a definition.

 

Somewhat surprisingly given the current climate, at least 38 states already have “fetal homicide” laws; that is, laws which penalize an act of violence which causes physical harm to an unborn child. Mississippi, for example, already had laws on the books that defined manslaughter as including “the willful killing of an unborn quick child by an injury to the mother of such child.” (Miss.Code Ann.§ 97-3-37) They also define murder to include murder that is done “with deliberate design to effect the death of an unborn child.” (§ 97-3-19)

Political groups lined up on both sides of the Mississippi debate but, really, they were just using the publicity to further their own agendas. There are already laws on the books that specifically exclude from prosecution “acts committed by the mother, a medical procedure performed by a medical professional or lawfully prescribed medication.” (§ 11.7.13)

 

Thus even if the new wording was adopted women would have continued to ask for abortions, and doctors would have continued to perform abortions, without fear of criminal action.

If abortion were entirely about “a woman’s right to choose,” then removing an embryo would be no different from a woman electing to have her gall bladder removed. Yet, if a woman with no pain went to a doctor for such an operation, with few exceptions the doctor would probably try to talk her out of it.

Significantly, the Bible describes an embryo as a person. David wrote of God: “Your eyes saw my embryo; and in your book all my members were written, the days they were formed, and not one was among them.” (Ps. 139:16) Notice he did not say ‘my mother’s embryo.’ That verse also makes it clear that David considered himself to have been a person even before all his ‘members were formed.’

Similarly, the Bible character Job poetically describes a day nine months before his birth when his mother may have exclaimed, `A man-child hath been conceived.' (Job 3:3) Job did not consider his beginning as simply a bit of tissue that his mother had a choice to retain or discard.

 

Professor Jerome Lejeune, the researcher who discovered the genetic cause of Down Syndrome, testified before the Fifth Judicial District of Tennessee on September 21, 1989, that “as soon as he has been conceived, a man is a man.”

 

And he wasn’t a lone voice in the wilderness. Here’s what some other scientists have said:

 

“A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization.” - The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th ed. Keith L. Moore, Ph.D. & T.V.N. Persaud, Md.

"The penetration of the ovum by a spermatozoan and resultant mingling of the nuclear material each brings to the union … marks the initiation of the life of a new individual." - Human Embryology, 3rd ed. Bradley M. Patten

"The zygote thus formed represents the beginning of a new life." - J.P. Greenhill and E.A. Friedman Biological Principles and Modern Practice of Obstetrics

"A new genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte." - Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Miller, Human Embryology and Teratology

 

The pro-abortion crowd always brings up very sensitive questions such as:

• What if the mother’s life is in danger?
• What if she was raped?
• What if she is too young or mentally unstable to be a mom?
• How do you weigh the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research against the lost life of an embryo?
• How do you weigh the emotional needs of the wannabe mom against the lives of the unneeded embryos that end up being discarded after in vitro fertilization?
• What about custody of the frozen embryos in cases of divorce?

In every case, challenging as the question may be, difficult as the answer may be, at its core it is a simple truth: an embryo is a human life.

Regardless of how the good people of Mississippi voted. 

Please leave a respectful comment. To read another of my columns on this subject, click here.

 

 Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.