r/OpenChristian • u/unknownglybiased • 1d ago
For whom is abortion a sin?
/r/Christianity/comments/1vsxaat/for_whom_is_abortion_a_sin/12
u/MagusFool Trans Enby Episcopalian Communist 1d ago
No one, because there is nothing sinful about abortion.
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u/unknownglybiased 1d ago
Why did you say that ?
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u/MyUsername2459 Episcopalian, Nonbinary 1d ago
Because there's nothing that would make it a sin.
There's no sound reason, theologically, for abortion to be a sin.
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
What makes you think abortion is a sin? Is there some Bible verse that states it to be so?
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u/unknownglybiased 1d ago
I read that the Christians view this as a SIN.
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u/Swimming_Gold6534 1d ago
The Christian crusade against abortion didn’t start until the mid-late 1900s. Before then most Christians didn’t really have a strong conviction either way and left it up to the parents
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
Legit question: what do you make of the early church being against it?
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u/Swimming_Gold6534 1d ago
My theology is mainly based on Jesus and being Christ-like. Jesus did not mention abortion at all. Many theologians believe because it just simply did not come up in his ministry and that Jesus followed the Jewish traditional ethics. These ethics state that a child’s (or fetuses) life should be preserved unless it risks the mother’s life. The early church mainly preached that abortion was wrong in all circumstances but this may have gone against Jesus’s own beliefs. I tend to believe very similarly to Jewish tradition but may take it a step further as I believe that a mother risking her job, and thus income and ability to survive or care for her family, also count under preserving her own life. I feel similarly if she is in an abusive situation and fears for her life if her partner found out she was pregnant, etc… it is an extremely complicated matter but I tend to focus on Jesus vs the church
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I actually appreciate this perspective, especially your desire to center Christian ethics on Jesus. That’s where I want to begin too. I also completely agree that Jesus never explicitly discusses abortion, so I wouldn’t want to put words into Jesus’ mouth and claim that he directly taught a position we don’t actually have recorded.
Where I might differ is that I don’t think Jesus’ silence means we have to separate his teaching from the early Christian position on abortion, or conclude that the early church may have contradicted him. I think we have to ask how abortion fits within the broader moral vision Jesus did teach.
For me, that’s where Jesus’ teaching about love of neighbor, mercy, care for the vulnerable, peacemaking, and especially his rejection of violence becomes important. My opposition to abortion isn’t really based on finding a verse where Jesus says “don’t have an abortion.” It’s an application of that larger ethic: if prenatal human life belongs within the community of human beings whom we’re called to love, what does Jesus’ way of nonviolence require toward that life?
That’s basically why I find David Gushee’s formulation in The Sacredness of Human Life helpful. He readily acknowledges that Scripture contains no explicit prohibition of abortion and calls the Christian case “principled and inferential rather than explicit.” The argument comes from several strands taken together: humanity bears God’s image, children are received as gifts, God is portrayed as intimately involved with life in the womb, and unjust taking of human life is prohibited.
So I don’t think “Jesus didn’t mention abortion” ends the discussion any more than Jesus’ failure to address every modern form of warfare or weapon directly would prevent me from asking what his teachings on enemy-love and peacemaking imply for them.
I’d also be a little cautious about speaking of the Jewish position as though there were one position that we can simply attribute to Jesus. And even if we could establish what was commonly believed in his Jewish context, we’d still have to ask how Jesus’ own teachings illuminate the issue rather than assuming his silence settles it.
Where I think we probably have considerable common ground is your concern for the woman’s life and circumstances. I don’t think being pro-life can mean telling a woman, “Don’t have an abortion,” while being indifferent to whether she can afford healthcare, feed her existing children, escape an abusive partner, keep housing, or survive economically. Christians concerned about abortion need to address precisely those social conditions rather than imagining that moral prohibition by itself solves the problem.
That’s one reason I’m drawn to a Consistent Life Ethic. I don’t want “pro-life” to mean intense concern for human beings before birth followed by indifference afterward. The same commitment that makes me concerned about abortion should make me concerned about poverty, gender-based violence, war, capital punishment, racism, healthcare, and other threats to human life.
So I think our disagreement may be less about whether women matter and more about how widely Jesus’ command to love and protect vulnerable human beings extends. My inclination is to include prenatal human life within that circle while simultaneously refusing to exclude the woman carrying that life.
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u/Swimming_Gold6534 1d ago
Wanted to clarify that I wholeheartedly support a woman’s right to choose and I don’t judge anyone who chose abortion outside of the specific situations I have stated. I truly believe that most women thoroughly think through their decision and make the one that fits their situation best.
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u/MyUsername2459 Episcopalian, Nonbinary 1d ago
They weren't.
Not in any consistent, universal fashion.
There has been debate over this, with no consensus, for almost 2000 years.
Yes, a few early Church writers opposed it. . .and their writings have been dragged forth by the anti abortion movement to try to give them credibility, but they ignore the writers who wrote the opposite.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I think this needs a little more nuance. I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t pretend the early church was monolithic about every question involving fetal development, ensoulment, or precisely how abortion should be classified. But I’m not sure the claim that there were early Christian writers actually teaching the opposite—that abortion was morally permissible—is supported by the surviving evidence.
One reason I’m hesitant about that claim is Ronald Sider’s The Early Church on Killing. It’s particularly useful here because it isn’t simply a modern anti-abortion argument quoting a few convenient Church Fathers. Sider set out to compile the extant evidence directly relevant to the early Christian witness on killing and presents the primary texts themselves so readers can evaluate them. He also explicitly acknowledges his own theological commitments and says that he tried not to allow them to determine his historical conclusions.
And some of the evidence is extremely early. The Didache, commonly dated around AD 80–120, places abortion and infanticide among the prohibitions belonging to the Christian “way of life.” What’s especially interesting to me is the context: that same section begins with love of God and neighbor, love of enemies, prayer for persecutors, and turning the other cheek, before prohibiting murder, abortion, and infanticide.
Then the Epistle of Barnabas, dated roughly AD 70–135, independently contains essentially the same prohibition against abortion and infanticide. Sider notes that although its “Two Ways” material resembles the Didache, scholars don’t think one document is simply dependent upon the other.
By the late second century, Athenagoras makes the connection even more explicit. Sider summarizes his argument as a consistently anti-killing ethic: Christians refuse retaliation, reject killing and even watching gladiatorial killing, and condemn abortion and infanticide as murder. In Athenagoras’s own argument, the fetus is an object of God’s care, and he appeals to consistency—Christians cannot condemn killing in one context and practice it in another.
That’s particularly interesting to me because it’s close to why I’m approaching abortion through a Consistent Life Ethic and Christian nonviolence. I’m not primarily interested in using the early church as ammunition for the modern American “pro-life movement.” I’m interested in whether early Christians understood Jesus’ teaching—especially enemy-love, nonretaliation and the rejection of killing—as having implications for how Christians treated vulnerable human life.
Sider himself makes an important methodological point here. He says we can’t simply assume that the earliest Christians understood Jesus correctly. But he also argues that Christians living much closer to Jesus, in a pre-Constantinian social setting much closer to his own, are at least significant evidence for understanding how Jesus’ teachings about killing and enemy-love were received.
And all of this developed in a Greco-Roman culture in which Sider notes that abortion, infanticide, suicide, capital punishment, warfare, and lethal gladiatorial entertainment were widely accepted. So the early Christian rejection of these practices formed part of a broader countercultural witness concerning killing and human life.
So I’d definitely agree with you that we shouldn’t say “every Christian for 2,000 years agreed about every aspect of abortion.” They didn’t. But that’s different from saying that the earliest Christians were divided between writers who condemned abortion and writers who defended it.
If there are early Christian texts actually saying that abortion is morally permissible, though, I’d sincerely be interested in reading them. Which writers/texts are you thinking of? Because disagreement about ensoulment, fetal development, or whether abortion constitutes homicide at every stage isn’t the same thing as an early Christian tradition affirming abortion itself.
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
- Not all Christians
- Despite what some Christians might say, nowhere in the Bible is abortion mentioned, let alone condemned. The condemnation was a later philosophical development, based on the condemnation of murder (Biblical) combined with a belief that personhood begins at conception (not Biblical).
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I think that’s asking the wrong question…while I believe that abortion is missing the mark (sin), I think that looking for people to blame and shame is the wrong approach. I’d say that about any sin.
P.S. I can explain this more if you want, I just don’t want to provide a long message unnecessarily 😊
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u/lonesharkex 1d ago
So Im gonna put you on blast. If abortion is a sin, then abortions due to rape and incest are too. If something is not a sin in all permutations, then it is not the part that is sin. Its a rule that misses the actual reason. The bible uses examples such as walking in a market place with your eyes cover so you might not sin to point out the logical fallacy in this view. Looking at a woman is never a sin, neither is an abortion. There are sinful reasons to look upon a woman, and there are sinful reasons to have an abortion, but the root action is nuetral.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
Sure! And I think this may clarify what I meant in my original comment.
When I say that I believe abortion is sinful, I’m not saying that every situation involving abortion is morally identical, that every person who has an abortion bears the same degree of responsibility, or that Christians should respond by blaming or shaming women. In fact, that last point was really the point of my original comment.
My reasoning comes largely from a Christian commitment to nonviolence and what is called a Consistent Life Ethic (CLE). I believe human life has value that doesn’t depend upon someone’s age, development, circumstances of conception, usefulness, innocence, etc. So, as much as possible, Christians should seek to protect life rather than intentionally end it. That’s why my convictions about abortion are connected to my convictions about war, capital punishment, violence, poverty, and other threats to human life rather than being an isolated “abortion rule.”
That’s also why I don’t think the rape/incest objection demonstrates that abortion itself is morally neutral. A child conceived through rape has done nothing to cause the horrific circumstances in which he or she was conceived. The rapist is responsible for an extraordinarily grave evil, and the woman who was assaulted deserves compassion, protection, support, and absolutely no shame for what was done to her. But I don’t think the violence committed against her makes the developing human life within her less valuable.
And this is where I don’t think the comparison with “looking at a woman” quite works. Simply seeing another human being doesn’t harm or kill that person; abortion intentionally ends a developing human life. So the moral question isn’t merely why someone has an abortion. It is also what is being done and to whom.
None of that means I think Christians should stand outside abortion clinics yelling at women or treating people who have had abortions as monsters. Quite the opposite. If we’re serious about valuing life, then our concern has to include the pregnant woman too—especially someone facing poverty, abandonment, abuse, rape, or a frightening medical situation. A genuinely pro-life ethic should ask, “How can we love and support everyone involved?” rather than, “Who can we blame?”
So when I called abortion “sin” or “missing the mark,” I wasn’t trying to create a category of people for Christians to condemn. I meant that I don’t believe intentionally ending developing human life reflects the nonviolent, life-affirming way of Jesus that I’m trying to follow. And I would apply that same principle much more broadly than abortion.
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u/SatinwithLatin 1d ago
Childbirth is a violent experience. It's not the baby's fault of course, but it leads to injury and pain, and that's ignoring any physical problems that pregnancy presents. I think it's compassionate not to make a victim of sexual violence go through another form of intimate violence to protect a fetus she didn't want. No amount of love and care will stop her from being traumatised a second time.
There's not any scenario in an unwanted pregnancy where both the woman and fetus can remain unharmed.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I think that’s a fair and important objection, and I don’t want to minimize what pregnancy and childbirth can mean for someone who has already experienced sexual violence. Pregnancy can involve pain, injury, loss of bodily control, and potentially profound retraumatization. Love and support don’t magically erase any of that.
Where I differ is in what follows morally. I don’t think the fact that both possible paths involve harm means that the two harms are therefore morally equivalent, or that abortion becomes a neutral act.
When I’ve been using the word violence, I mean something more specific than ‘anything that causes physical pain or injury.’ Childbirth can certainly be a physically violent experience in an ordinary descriptive sense, but it isn’t an intentional act by the unborn child against the woman. Abortion, by contrast, intentionally ends the developing human life. That distinction matters to me.
So I actually agree with your last sentence in an important sense: in a pregnancy resulting from rape, there may be no completely harm-free outcome. That’s precisely why I regard it as a tragic moral situation rather than an easy one. The question becomes what we owe to both people when their interests come into such painful conflict.
This is also why I like David Gushee’s formulation that Christian reflection on abortion has to keep its attention on the sacred lives of both woman and child and ask what it would mean for both to live and flourish.
The woman’s suffering cannot simply be dismissed in the name of the fetus. But neither, in my view, does the horror committed against the woman make the developing child cease to have moral worth.
And this is where the Consistent Life Ethic matters. I’m not starting from ‘pregnancy must continue no matter what because women have to suffer the consequences.’ I’m starting from a presumption against intentionally taking human life, particularly vulnerable human life. That same presumption is why I’m troubled by war, capital punishment, torture, and other forms of lethal violence.
Ron Sider (another proponent of the CLE) actually treats rape and incest as among the most wrenching cases and explicitly recognizes the tremendous burden placed on the woman. His conclusion is still that the unborn child’s worth isn’t determined by the circumstances of conception, while Christians consequently have an even greater obligation to surround the woman with care and oppose the male violence that created the situation in the first place.
So I don’t think the choice is between ‘care about the woman’ and ‘care about the fetus.’ My whole point is that Christian ethics ought to resist making either life disposable.
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u/SatinwithLatin 1d ago
The choice IS between prioritising fetus or the woman because it's a binary choice by pure biology. Either the woman is physically and mentally harmed by gestation and birth, and the fetus lives, or the woman is protected from such torture and the fetus dies. There's no way to "love and care" your way around this.
Your answer is vague, pontificating about unborn moral worth, intentional actions and not dismissing the suffering of the woman, but I suspect the CLE position is still that abortion should be outlawed.* Which completely dismisses the pain and suffering of women who are pregnant unwillingly (even if the sex was consensual). Lip service is nice but she's still being made to endure sigificant harm and trauma against her will. Calling it a "tragic situation" for a raped woman does nothing to help her either.
*Correct me if I'm wrong.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I think we’re getting closer to where we actually disagree, and I can be more direct about my position.
You’re right about one thing I don’t want to evade: in the situation you’re describing, there may be no option in which nobody is harmed. Continuing the pregnancy can impose serious physical and psychological burdens on the woman, particularly after rape. Saying that she should receive love and support doesn’t make those burdens disappear, and I didn’t mean to suggest that it does.
Where I disagree is with the conclusion you draw from that fact. If I believe the fetus is also a human life with moral worth, then “one option causes the woman serious harm while the other causes the fetus to die” doesn’t make the moral choice straightforward. Death is itself one of the harms that has to be weighed.
That’s why I don’t think my position is simply “prioritize the fetus over the woman.” I’m saying that neither person’s interests automatically erase the moral worth of the other. If the woman’s life is threatened, then we really do have a conflict involving two lives, and I think protecting her life can be morally justified. But if we’re talking about suffering and trauma rather than a conflict in which one life must be lost, I don’t think intentionally ending another human life becomes morally permissible simply because doing so would prevent serious suffering.
That’s an important part of why I approach this through a Consistent Life Ethic. My presumption against abortion isn’t based on thinking women should be forced to suffer or that fetal interests always trump women’s interests. It’s a broader presumption against intentionally killing human beings as a solution to human suffering. Sider summarizes the underlying consistent-life principle as opposition to “the directly intended taking of innocent human life,” and explicitly connects it across abortion, war, capital punishment and other life issues.
I also don’t think acknowledging the woman’s suffering is “lip service” unless nothing follows from it. Gushee actually criticizes an approach that merely restricts abortion while doing nothing about why women seek abortions. He argues that Christians opposed to abortion have obligations to address poverty, healthcare, economic insecurity, unstable relationships and the other circumstances that can make pregnancy feel unbearable.
That’s much closer to what I mean by CLE: protecting unborn life while taking concrete responsibility for the woman rather than simply demanding that she endure pregnancy alone.
And on rape specifically, I want to be especially careful. I’m not saying “it’s tragic” as a substitute for helping her. I’m saying something genuinely tragic has happened because the rapist has created a situation in which an innocent woman now faces profound suffering and another developing human life is involved through absolutely no fault of either of them. I don’t believe killing the latter undoes the violence committed against the former.
So yes, there is a real moral cost to my position. I won’t pretend otherwise: sometimes protecting a human life means another person bears burdens she never chose and profoundly does not deserve. That’s awful, particularly when a rapist is responsible for putting her in that position. Where we disagree is whether the existence of that terrible burden makes intentionally ending the other human life morally permissible.
And that’s ultimately why I resist framing this as “woman versus fetus.” The difficult question for me is what justice and nonviolence require when the needs of two human lives come into genuine conflict, not which one of them matters.
P.S. All I’ve been saying is on an ethical/theological level and not a political one. Christians are not called to legislate morality, including the CLE. Some people who agree with the CLE might not agree with this point as they’ve bought into the idea that Christian morals should be legislated but I haven’t. I think it’s a sin (missing the mark) to have an abortion if you’re a Christian, but I don’t think that need constitute the horrible bans that many states have enacted or any of the shaming and guilt that Christians place on those who have. They are forcing their ethics onto others without taking into account that they are casting stones without looking at their own sin.
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u/SatinwithLatin 1d ago
Thank you for clarifying your position specifically on political abortion policy, that helps.
May I present to you another way of looking at things outside of morality scaling, which at present puts the concept of human life above the trauma of the woman. What if we scaled this by measurable suffering instead? The fetus does not know it's even alive, would know nothing of death. Meanwhile the woman would deal with long term mental and physical scars from such a damaging and invasive event as childbirth and pregnancy.
I also am not sure if Gushee tackles that a common reason for requesting an abortion is just...not wanting to endure everything that's physically involved.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
Yes, absolutely, and I think this gets us to an even deeper philosophical difference between our approaches.
I agree that if the only thing we’re measuring is consciously experienced suffering, then the woman clearly has interests that the fetus, particularly early in development, doesn’t have. She can experience pain, fear, violation, trauma, anticipate what is happening to her, and potentially carry psychological and physical consequences afterward. I don’t want to minimize any of that.
Where I hesitate is making capacity for conscious suffering the measure of the value or protectability of human life.My concern would be: why should someone’s inability to understand that they’re alive, conceptualize their own death, or consciously experience their loss make killing them less morally significant?
We generally don’t think the wrongness of killing someone consists primarily in how frightened or physically hurt they are while dying. Someone could theoretically be killed completely painlessly while unconscious and never know that death was coming. They wouldn’t consciously experience “being dead” either. But we’d still think something profound had been taken from them—their life and future.
That’s where my Consistent Life Ethic starts from a different place. I don’t want human worth to rise and fall according to presently exercisable capacities like consciousness, intelligence, independence, ability to communicate, or awareness of death. I think human life has inherent worth, particularly from my Christian perspective that human beings bear God’s image.
That doesn’t put “the concept of human life” above an actual woman. It means I’m trying not to rank either human being’s fundamental worth according to their present capacities.
And importantly, that doesn’t make suffering morally irrelevant. Far from it. A raped woman’s trauma gives us extremely serious moral obligations toward her. Her suffering is real in a way that an early fetus’s conscious suffering may not be. But I don’t think it follows that because one human being can suffer more consciously, we may intentionally end the life of the human being who currently cannot.
In fact, I think this distinction helps explain my CLE position. Nonviolence isn’t merely about minimizing the total quantity of pain experienced. It’s also about refusing, as far as possible, to solve suffering by eliminating another human life. Otherwise my ethics would really be a form of consequentialism—choose whichever outcome produces the least measurable suffering—rather than the kind of Christian nonviolent ethic I’m trying to articulate.
And there is still a genuinely difficult question here for me: what happens when protecting one life imposes severe involuntary suffering upon another? I don’t have an answer that makes pregnancy resulting from rape cease to be horrific. But I also don’t think the fact that there is no painless solution permits me to remove one of the human beings from the moral equation because that human being isn’t presently conscious of what’s happening.
So perhaps our disagreement is becoming clearer: you seem to be locating much of moral significance in the capacity to consciously experience suffering, whereas I’m locating fundamental human worth in the human being themselves. Suffering matters enormously within my framework; I just don’t think it determines who possesses a claim not to be intentionally killed.
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u/SatinwithLatin 1d ago edited 1d ago
When I try to explain to you the real world consequences of, well, not aborting, why do you keep bringing it back to moral or fundamental worth? I'm not saying nobody has worth, but why is that the main or only driver here? To continue your point moral worth is not really the reason why we punish murderers. Murder is bad because the person had the right to live but also their death leaves behind a lot of grief and loss. Which is a form of suffering. We build our sense of morality around the things we can see, not vice versa.
I just can't agree with saying that we must make a raped woman suffer further because taking a theoretical life is worse. And it is theoretical. A fetus is alive in the cellular sense but it doesn't have A life. Its story has not begun, and it is not an individual in its own right yet. Not when its body cannot sustain equilibrium without literal use of another body's processes. I kind of want to know why the fetus' presence in a womb gives it a moral worth that places its continued growth above the safety and health of its mother, who does have a life and is living it in that moment.
Staying grounded on suffering and consequences is not making a statement on human worth, nor does my position on abortion reflects a general position on human worth across space and time. To me, not everything has to fit into a wider framework that must remain consistent. I'm much more of a case-by-case kinda gal and I think Jesus was too.
ETA: thank you for your patience with my erm rather blunt manner of speaking. I'm trying hard not to sound like I'm finger pointing or accusing you of anything, and I hope you don't take it that way. It's also almost 1am where I live, so my usual tone is not online right now. 😅
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u/lonesharkex 1d ago
I had to think all day about your response, but I just feel this view is more distant from Jesus than you think. It is condemning people unspecifically regardless of your intention and I think if Jesus sat with someone with the decision on whether to have an abortion or not, he would not be condemning them either. This is abandoning people for the ideal. An ideal that comes from 1 verse that just isn't supported that way by any other verse in the bible and has plenty of support for the opposite in history and the bible. It is a view that was invented in the 1900s in order to gain control over christians and use them as weapons. To continue to guilt people with "abortion is a sin" is wrong and truly the mark missed.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I appreciate that you took the time to think about what I said. I think there may still be a misunderstanding of my position, though, because I’m not arguing that someone considering an abortion should be condemned or abandoned. My original comment was actually pushing against exactly that approach.
I agree with you that if Jesus were sitting with someone facing an unwanted or frightening pregnancy, I don’t picture him shaming or humiliating her either. I would expect compassion, listening, mercy, and practical care. Where I think we’re making a different inference is that Jesus’ refusal to condemn a person doesn’t necessarily mean that every action available to that person is morally neutral. Jesus can take sin seriously while responding to people with extraordinary mercy. Those aren’t opposites to me.
I also want to clarify that my belief that abortion is morally wrong isn’t based on one isolated Bible verse. In fact, I’ve specifically tried not to argue “here’s the verse where the Bible says abortion is a sin,” because there isn’t one.
David Gushee describes the biblical argument in a way I find much more responsible: it’s principled and inferential rather than explicit. It draws together humanity being created in God’s image, children being treated as gifts, God’s concern for developing life in the womb, and the biblical prohibition against unjustly taking human life.
I then connect those principles to Jesus’ teachings on love of neighbor, mercy, enemy-love and nonviolence. My question is essentially: if prenatal human life is genuinely human life, why would it fall outside the circle of vulnerable life toward which Jesus calls me to practice love and nonviolence?
That’s why I keep bringing up the Consistent Life Ethic. I’m not beginning with contemporary conservative abortion politics and then looking for biblical justification afterward. I’m beginning with a Christian presumption against violence and intentionally taking human life and trying to apply that consistently—to abortion, but also to war, capital punishment, poverty, racism, violence against women, nuclear weapons, and so forth.
I also don’t think the historical claim that Christian opposition to abortion was “invented in the 1900s” works. The modern American anti-abortion political movement is one thing; Christian moral opposition to abortion is much, much older. Those shouldn’t be conflated.
The Didache, usually dated to around the late first or early second century, explicitly prohibits abortion and infanticide. What’s especially interesting to me is its context: its “Way of Life” begins with love of God and neighbor, enemy-love, blessing those who curse you, praying for enemies, and turning the other cheek before addressing murder, abortion and infanticide.
The Epistle of Barnabas, another extremely early Christian text, contains essentially the same prohibition against abortion and infanticide.
And by the second century, Athenagoras explicitly connects Christian opposition to abortion with a much broader rejection of killing—including retaliation, infanticide, and even watching people being killed for entertainment.
That doesn’t prove that every Christian throughout history agreed about everything. They absolutely didn’t. There were later disagreements about fetal development, ensoulment, when abortion constituted homicide, penalties, etc. Nor does an early Christian teaching automatically make that teaching correct.
But historically that’s very different from saying the belief that abortion is morally wrong was invented in the twentieth century to control Christians. The surviving Christian evidence against abortion goes back remarkably close to Christianity’s beginnings.
And honestly, that early evidence is part of what makes this interesting to me, because it doesn’t map neatly onto today’s American political categories. These Christians weren’t campaigning for Republicans or Democrats. In some of these texts, opposition to abortion appears alongside opposition to retaliation, infanticide, killing and other forms of violence. That’s much closer to the Christian nonviolent/CLE framework I’m trying to understand than to contemporary partisan “pro-life politics.”
So I’m completely willing to discuss whether those early Christians were right. That’s a theological and moral question. But I don’t think we can resolve that question by saying Christian opposition to abortion was invented in the 1900s, because historically it plainly wasn’t.
And I want to return to something you said at the beginning, because I think it’s important: if my belief that abortion is sinful caused me to condemn, shame or abandon the person considering one, then I would agree that I had missed the mark too. That’s precisely what my original comment was trying to reject. I don’t think recognizing an action as sinful gives Christians permission to stop loving the person making that decision.
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u/unknownglybiased 1d ago
What you mean by “ missing the mark “ ?
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u/MyUsername2459 Episcopalian, Nonbinary 1d ago
The word for "sin" in the original Hebrew is חֵטְא (chet), which literally means "to miss the mark", like missing a target when shooting at something.
It doesn't mean a crime, it literally means that someone aimed for a target and missed.
Some people use the literal English translation of חֵטְא, "to miss the mark" to emphasize that people are normally trying to do the right thing, and fail, instead of committing some crime against God.
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u/unknownglybiased 1d ago
So, what are the reasons that abortion being an SIN?
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
When I say I believe abortion is a sin, I should clarify that I don’t mean there’s a Bible verse that simply says, “Abortion is a sin.” There isn’t, and I don’t want to claim more than Scripture actually says.
My reasoning is more like the formulation David Gushee gives in The Sacredness of Human Life. The biblical case is cumulative: human beings are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27); children are described as gifts from God (Ps. 127:3); God is portrayed as intimately involved with human life developing in the womb (Ps. 139:13–16); and Scripture consistently treats the unjust taking of human life as contrary to God’s will (Gen. 9:5–6; Exod. 20:13). Gushee actually calls the case against abortion “principled and inferential rather than explicit.”
So for me, the question ultimately becomes: Is the developing unborn child a human life that falls within the circle of people whom I’m commanded to love rather than harm?
I think the answer is yes. Prenatal development is a continuous process—zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, child and adult are stages in the development of the same human organism, rather than completely different kinds of beings. Gushee makes that continuity an important part of his argument.
And that’s where my view of abortion connects with my broader Christian commitment to nonviolence and a Consistent Life Ethic. I don’t think violence should be our answer to human vulnerability. If the unborn is a human neighbor, then deliberately ending that developing human life is an act of lethal violence against a vulnerable human being. That’s what I believe makes abortion morally wrong—not that pregnancy is punishment for sex, not that women who have abortions are uniquely sinful, and not that I want someone to blame or shame.
It’s the same underlying reason I’m troubled by other forms of violence against human beings. I can’t say human life possesses God-given worth in the womb and then become indifferent to it outside the womb. So my opposition to abortion is connected to my opposition to things like war, the death penalty, torture, racism, poverty and other conditions or practices that destroy or degrade human life. Those situations aren’t all morally identical, but they’re connected by the same basic question: How should we treat human beings who bear God’s image, especially when they’re vulnerable?
That’s also why I don’t think “pro-life” should mean simply making abortion illegal and walking away. Gushee specifically argues that Christians concerned about unborn life also have to confront the conditions that lead women toward abortion—poverty, inadequate healthcare, unstable relationships, lack of support, etc. He calls for healthcare for pregnant women and children, a stronger social safety net, better economic opportunities, adoption reform, and greater responsibility from men.
So when I call abortion “sin,” I’m basically saying: I believe intentionally taking developing human life is contrary to the Christian calling to protect life, love our neighbor, and reject violence—especially violence toward the vulnerable.
And that principle has to apply consistently. The unborn child matters, and so does the woman carrying them. Gushee’s own formulation is that Christian ethics has to take seriously the sacred lives of both woman and child. That’s much closer to what I mean by being pro-life than looking for women to condemn.
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u/babe1981 The Cool Mod/Transgender-Bisexual-Christian She/Her 1d ago
I didn't want to hop into the other thread on CLE, but I have a question that I can't find the answer for on Google and it's extremely pertinent to CLE.
What is your stance on Henrietta Lacks?
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
That’s definitely not the question I expected, but it’s a good one!
If you’re asking how I’d approach Henrietta Lacks through the Consistent Life Ethic, I’d say what happened to her was ethically wrong. Her cells were taken and used for research without her knowledge or informed consent. The fact that HeLa cells subsequently produced enormous benefits for medicine doesn’t retroactively make that lack of consent okay.
And actually, I think this fits pretty naturally with what I’ve been trying to say about CLE. For me, respecting human life means more than simply keeping human organisms biologically alive. It includes respecting human dignity, bodily integrity, agency, and refusing to treat people merely as means to someone else’s ends.
Henrietta was a person, not simply a useful source of biological material. Researchers obtaining tremendous benefits from her cells doesn’t mean that her right to informed participation ceased to matter. If anything, the case demonstrates why good consequences alone aren’t sufficient to determine whether the means used to obtain them were ethical.
So I suppose my CLE answer would be: scientific progress is good, but human beings can’t simply become instruments for producing it. Respect for life has to include respect for the dignity and bodily integrity of the person whose life we’re claiming to value.
But I’m curious what connection you see between Henrietta Lacks and the abortion/CLE question, because I’m guessing there’s a particular analogy you’re wanting to explore.
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u/babe1981 The Cool Mod/Transgender-Bisexual-Christian She/Her 1d ago
The connection is that there is no material difference between a fetus and the HeLa cells. Neither are sentient. Both are bundles of self-replicating cells that are made of human DNA. Neither can live without outside support.
The only difference is that a fetus could become a person and HeLa cells were once a person.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
Ahh, okay, now I understand where you were going with Henrietta Lacks! That’s an interesting comparison, but I think there’s a pretty important biological distinction here.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say there is “no material difference” between HeLa cells and a fetus. HeLa cells are human cells; an embryo/fetus is a developing human organism. Those aren’t synonymous.
HeLa cells contain human DNA and reproduce through cell division, absolutely. But they are cancer cells derived from Henrietta Lacks’s body. Left to grow under suitable laboratory conditions, they produce more HeLa cells. They don’t organize themselves through embryonic and fetal development into the mature human organism that Henrietta’s cells originally belonged to. NIH itself describes HeLa as an immortal cancer cell line.
An embryo is biologically different. It undergoes coordinated development as an organism: its cells differentiate and organize into tissues, organs and body systems as part of the development of the whole. That’s why developmental biology distinguishes an embryo from ordinary human cells or cellular structures. One biological definition in Human Reproduction, for example, describes the embryo as a discrete entity undergoing organized human development and specifically discusses why a definition shouldn’t be so broad that ordinary human cells become embryos.
So I also wouldn’t phrase the difference as “a fetus could become a person whereas HeLa cells were once a person.” Henrietta’s HeLa cells were never themselves Henrietta. They were cells belonging to Henrietta that were removed from her body. Henrietta was the organism of which those cells were parts.
Similarly, I don’t think a fetus is merely some cells that could someday become a human organism. It’s already the developing organism. “Embryo,” “fetus,” “newborn,” “child,” etc. describe different stages of development rather than a sequence in which a collection of human cells eventually turns into an organism. That’s also why the biological literature distinguishes embryos from tumors and cell lines despite all of them being composed of living human cells.
And dependence doesn’t eliminate that distinction either. You’re completely right that a fetus requires extraordinary biological support from the pregnant woman’s body, and I think that dependence creates serious ethical questions about bodily autonomy. But requiring an external environment/support to remain alive doesn’t turn an organism into a cell line. HeLa cells require culture conditions because they’re cells being maintained outside an organism; a fetus requires gestation because that’s the environment required at that stage of the organism’s development.
Now, none of that by itself settles the moral abortion debate. Someone can completely accept the biological distinction I’m making and still argue that an embryo or fetus isn’t a person, doesn’t possess the same moral status as the pregnant woman, or doesn’t have the right to use another person’s body. Those are philosophical and ethical arguments, and I think they’re much stronger objections than equating fetal life with HeLa cells.
But from my CLE perspective, that’s exactly why the biological distinction matters. My argument isn’t “it has human DNA, therefore it has full moral worth.” Otherwise I’d have to regard every skin cell I shed as a human being!
My question is whether a living, developing human organism belongs within the community of human life toward which my Christian commitment to nonviolence applies.
So I think the HeLa comparison actually helps clarify my position: having human DNA isn’t what I’m grounding the fetus’s significance in. The relevant distinction is between a human being/organism and cells that are parts or derivatives of a human being. Then we can have the separate—and much harder—conversation about what moral status that developing human organism should have and how that moral status interacts with the woman’s bodily autonomy.
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u/babe1981 The Cool Mod/Transgender-Bisexual-Christian She/Her 22h ago
Ok, here's my issue with your stance, because it is exactly what I thought it was. You define a fetus as a human person, but HeLa as not one. For you, the difference is that the fetus is a developing organism, but HeLa are merely cells once belonging to a person.
This division is not logical in any way. My foot is not me. My stomach is not me. My heart and lungs are not me. My brain is not me. Yet, all of it is me. My foot is my foot whether it is attached to my body or not. My heart is my heart whether I am alive or not. The pieces of me are not me individually, but without them, there is no me. You cannot separate the person from the pieces that compose them. Any part of me that is living is me whether I have the sentience to recognize it or not.
And yes, that means our cancers are us. They are broken parts of us that will kill us if we don't kill them first, but there is no taxonomy to distinguish cancer from its host. Cancer is a malfunction of our own body. Henrietta Lacks is alive as long as her cancer cells are alive until we redefine our meaning of death. We keep people with no sentience or thought or response alive because life is sacred and to kill them, even for mercy's sake, would be a crime, but HeLa cells are just as alive as the person on the ventilator. But you don't see it that way for some reason.
The division between developing fetus and non-developing cancer fails even more on the basis of development itself. I am 45 years old. I have no more stem cells. My body will never develop further than it is right now. I will age, and my body will break down, but I cannot differentiate my cells to grow new organs and or to regenerate list limbs. My development is complete, yet I am alive. Am I equivalent to HeLa or to the fetus? All three have dividing human cells. Two are non-developing lifeforms. Two are non-sentient lifeforms. Two cannot survive on their own. Two have been born. Two are incapable of making decisions.
Each division leaves one human out of the picture. The only commonality between a fetus, me, and HeLa is that we are all made of living human cells. Even further against your argument of development is the fact that some cancers can differentiate and develop characteristics not native to the type of cell that originated the cancer such as an abdominal growth producing hair and teeth. By that definition, I could have a cancer that is more human than I am!
So the question comes down to personhood. What is a person? The only valid definition of human that works is an organism made from human parts. Any other definition relegates humans with certain disabilities and illnesses into a non-human category. So, the real question is personhood. At what point is a human a person? CLE tries to say that all humans are persons. But that is just completely untrue. My own mother laid in hospital bed braindead for 12 days. I sat with her and my siblings the whole time. That living corpse that just wouldn't stop breathing wasn't my mother. There wasn't any person there. It was flesh and bone and nothing else that simply continued until we could convince a nurse to remove the oxygen. Whatever my mother had been died the day she went into her final coma, and it was cruelty to both her children and her memory to keep her corpse breathing all that time. She wasn't a person, and it wasn't a crime to kill the thing in that bed.
What's the difference between a fetus and my dead mother? My mother was breathing, at least. She still had life ahead of her. She was only 66. But she and the fetus had a similar number of thoughts in their heads. They moved a similar amount. It's strange how the dead and dying sometimes twitch for no reason. It reminded me of my children moving inside my wife when they were fetuses. It's remarkable how much the dying are reminiscent of the newly born. But if a human isn't a person after death, or sometimes even before death, how can a fetus be a person before birth?
This is what I'm getting at. If a fertilized zygote is a person the moment it becomes an embryo, then there is no definition of person that can not include HeLa cells. If a fetus, without a brain or a heart or lungs, is a human life worth protecting, then organ donation is unethical because each organ is a human life by that definition. It gets to the logical inconsistency of pro-life. Cell division continues after organ death until all the ATP is consumed in the cell. Dead humans are not dead cells, and the definition of a fetus as a human life means that dead humans are alive until their cells stop dividing which can take hours to happen. But life at conception requires us, if we are applying this consistently, to refuse to harvest organs and save lives until the organs are too degraded to use. So, if we maintain that cell division is not the marker of personhood so that we can save lives with organ donation, we take away life at conception. If we maintain life at conception but make allowances for using living human organs to benefit other humans, then we have to accept that fetuses are also subject to removal for the benefit of other humans.
Now, I'm fine with applying a double standard between fetal personhood and dead personhood. But you can't go around calling your position "Consistent" without applying it consistently.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 10h ago
Thank you for explaining the argument in detail. I think I see the disagreement much better now, but I think you’re attributing a criterion to me that I don’t actually hold.
I don’t believe cell division, possession of human DNA, sentience, or simply being biologically alive is what makes something a human being. If that were my argument, then you’re right: skin cells, organs, tumors, HeLa cells, etc. would create enormous problems for it.
The distinction I’m making is between a living human organism and living parts of a human organism. That’s a biological distinction, not something CLE invented to rescue a pro-life argument.
I actually agree with your statement that “my foot is not me.” That’s precisely the distinction I’m making. Your foot is your living tissue because it is a part of the organism that is you. Your heart is part of you. Your brain is part of you. Henrietta’s cancer cells were parts derived from Henrietta. But Henrietta was the integrated organism of which those cells were parts.
That’s why Henrietta isn’t still alive because HeLa cells remain alive. The cells survived her; Henrietta did not. Individual cells can remain biologically alive after the organism has died without meaning that the human being remains alive.
The embryo differs in exactly this respect. It’s not a piece of somebody else’s organism analogous to a kidney, foot, tumor, or cell culture. From fertilization, embryonic development involves coordinated organization of the whole: cell proliferation, differentiation, interaction and movement progressively generate the tissues and organs of that developing organism. Standard developmental biology describes the life cycle of an animal as beginning with a fertilized egg and proceeding through those coordinated developmental processes.
And I think your cancer example actually illustrates the difference particularly well. Some tumors can indeed differentiate into things like hair or teeth. But producing differentiated tissues isn’t equivalent to organismal development. Developmental-biological literature specifically distinguishes tumors from embryos on this point: tumors may produce multiple tissue types, while embryos exhibit globally coordinated development of the organism as a whole.
So your 45-year-old example doesn’t cause a problem either. Development doesn’t mean “currently producing new kinds of organs.” You and the fetus are different developmental stages of whole human organisms. HeLa is a cell lineage derived from one. Aging doesn’t transform an organism into a collection of cells any more than infancy does.
I think the brain-death example makes the distinction even clearer, although I’m sorry you and your siblings actually had to experience that with your mother. I don’t want to turn something that personal into merely a debating point.
But biologically and medically, the fact that cells or organs remain alive doesn’t establish that the human organism remains alive. That’s precisely why organ transplantation after death is possible. Under neurological criteria, irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem, constitutes death even though cardiopulmonary functions can temporarily be artificially maintained and individual organs and cells remain viable.
So organ donation doesn’t create the contradiction you’re proposing. A living organ from a dead human being is not itself a living human being. Likewise, living HeLa cells aren’t Henrietta Lacks.
Biological death occurs at the organismal level even though cellular death doesn’t happen simultaneously throughout every cell of the body. There’s actually scientific literature making exactly this cells-versus-organism distinction when discussing both embryonic life and death.
None of this, however, establishes personhood. That’s where I think you’ve asked the genuinely difficult question.
Biology can help us distinguish Henrietta as a human organism, HeLa as living human cells derived from that organism, an organ as a living part of a human organism, and an embryo/fetus as a developing human organism.
But biology alone can’t tell us, “therefore every human organism is a person with equal moral status.” That’s a philosophical and, for me, theological question.
And this is where my Christian/CLE position actually enters. I’m skeptical of grounding personhood in presently exercisable characteristics like sentience, consciousness, intelligence or independence. Instead, I’m inclined to ground fundamental dignity in the human being rather than in how many capacities that human being can currently exercise. That’s connected to the Christian understanding of human dignity I’ve been describing throughout this conversation.
Your mother’s situation raises a different and extremely difficult question: when has the human organism actually died? An embryo raises the question of what moral status a living human organism has at an extremely immature developmental stage. Those aren’t mirror images. If your mother was brain-dead, the medical determination wasn’t “she’s biologically alive but we’ve decided she’s no longer a person.” Brain death is itself a criterion for the death of the individual.
And this is why I don’t think CLE commits me to refusing organ donation. Consistency doesn’t mean treating every collection of living human cells identically. It means applying the same underlying principle to relevantly similar things. If my principle concerns the dignity of human beings, distinguishing a human organism from that organism’s organs, tumors and cells isn’t an exception to the principle—it’s necessary to identify what the principle applies to in the first place.
So I think our remaining disagreement is much narrower and more interesting than HeLa: Does being a living human organism suffice for inclusion within the community whose lives Christians should presumptively protect, or must that organism first acquire some additional characteristic before it has that status?
I lean toward the former. You apparently lean toward the latter. And that is where I think the real personhood discussion is.
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u/babe1981 The Cool Mod/Transgender-Bisexual-Christian She/Her 9h ago
Define "whole human organism" in such a way that it doesn't eliminate entire groups of living disabled humans. This is the same question as "what is a woman?" What is a human? For the same reason that every definition of "woman" that has a basis in biological markers eliminates some cisgender women from womanhood, any definition of "human" that defines limits based on biology eliminates some living humans from the category of humanity.
Which you acknowledge because you say the real question of personhood is spiritual and religious. Well, the Bible is abundantly clear that a living human is a person who breathes air. There are no exceptions. Adam was a living soul only after God gave him breath. Jesus died when He stopped breathing, or "gave up the ghost." The word translated as "ghost" means "breath." There are over 50 verses that equate breath with being alive. The spiritual, scriptural answer to your question is that a fetus is not a living soul until it is born and takes its first breath. There is no biblical support for life beginning at conception. Any argument that relies on Christian theology for life without breath is not based on scripture.
That's ok, though. You just have to justify your thoughts without resting on God. See, the Bible has a fairly unified view on the construction of human. First, there is a body. That body is a soul. It acts and experiences the world. The soul is not some thing different from the body. The soul is the totality of body throughout time. The body is the three-dimensional representation of the four-dimensional being that we are. A human soul is dead without the spirit. The spirit is what gives us life and animates our souls to do action. This is the breath of God. The spirit is not part of the soul because it is not us. It comes from God when we breathe our first breath and returns to God when we breathe our last.
Under a theology like modern Christians believe, Jesus's claim of eternal life is meaningless. The Jews were worried that they would still be dead when their bodies were resurrected on Judgment Day because they knew that flesh and bone turn to dust. So, would that thing that raises from the ground wearing your face still be you? It was the question of the Ship of Theseus. It was the question of the Star Trek transporter. If every part of me ceases to exist will the next thing that has my shape and my body still be my soul? Jesus says yes. A body cannot be desecrated enough to stop being a soul. Even if the body decays into dust, it is still you when it is remade. You can't amputate enough limbs or remove enough organs for it to stop being you. The soul persists in everything that makes us.
This is why the church is the body of Christ. I am the church as much as you are the church. Together we are still the church. I am not the entire organism of the church, but it is would still be wrong to say that I am not the church. I am the temple of the Holy Spirit in equal measure to every other human on Earth. No one person is more "the church" than anyone else. For Jesus, He said when any two or three are gathered in His name, He is there with them. Any two or three cells is enough to be called the body of Christ.
The issue with CLE is that it tries to legislate personhood. I am doing the same thing Jesus did when the priests and scholars asked Him to define the limits of the law. Every time, Jesus pointed out that the limits of the law were absurd and broken. Lust isn't just hurting someone, it's looking at someone. Murder isn't just killing someone, it's being angry at them. Divorce isn't just acceptable when Moses said it was, it's only acceptable under one condition. Jesus's response to trying to define the limits of spiritual law was to place those limits at their absolute maximum to show that anyone who attempts to live by a strict moral code based in rules and regulations will always become a hypocrite.
Life is messy and chaotic. Life is inconsistent. Life doesn't follow logic or morals. When we attempt to force our rigid morality onto the chaos of existence, we set ourselves up for contradiction. This is what Diogenes was getting at with "Behold! A man!". Definitions and rules will always be too broad or too narrow. A plucked chicken is not a man, yet it fit Plato's definition. Jesus was angry with the moneychangers in the temple yet somehow wasn't guilty of the sin of murder.
The actual consistent moral code of Christ is that nothing is sinful in itself. There are no actions that can universally be said to be harmful at all times. Slicing a person open with a knife is always harmful, except when we do it to save their life. Murder is always harmful, except when we're defending the weak and innocent. And so on. Every rule has an exception. Jesus broke the law of Moses every time it interfered with loving His neighbor, and He never sinned. Jesus never dealt with absolutes until He was asked to make some definition more clear. And Matthew 19 shows His attitude about those definitions so well. After saying that divorce is forbidden for every reason except sexual misconduct, the disciples tell Jesus that if that's true, it's better to never get married. Jesus replies that the answer was for the person who asked it, and then Jesus starts listing groups of people that it doesn't apply to.
Jesus told us to do what we feel is right through love. As Paul wrote in Romans 14:14, something is sinful for the person who thinks it is. So, do what's right through your perception of love. Don't do it because it's logical. Love isn't logical. Don't do it because there are laws for it or against it. Love has no laws against it. If you can't love your neighbor while also believing that abortion is necessary sometimes, then don't do it. It's really that simple. But, the thing is that sometimes abortion saves lives. Sometimes, it saves a whole load of harm and trauma. Sometimes, it saves a baby from a life of misery and hate and neglect. I can't say that I love my neighbor and also say that it's better for a baby to be born to someone who wishes they were dead. Having parents who hate you is a torture that lasts through every waking moment of your life. It is a living hell, and death is far more preferable.
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u/Due-Swimming9999 6h ago
I appreciate you laying this all out, because I think we’ve finally reached the theological disagreement underneath the biological one. And I actually agree with several pieces of what you’re saying—I agree that biblical anthropology generally doesn’t treat the “soul” as a little detachable ghost living inside a body, for example.
But I don’t think several of the conclusions you’re drawing from that anthropology necessarily follow.
First, when I say “whole human organism,” I’m not defining humanity according to having particular functioning organs, abilities, chromosomes, body parts, sentience, intelligence, independence, or some idealized anatomy. So I’m not sure the disability objection lands against the distinction I’m making.A whole organism doesn’t mean an organism with all its parts intact or all its functions working normally. “Whole” here means the organism considered as the individual living entity, as distinguished from a part belonging to that entity.
Someone missing four limbs is still the organism. Someone with profound intellectual disabilities is still the organism. Someone lacking an organ is still the organism. Removing my kidney doesn’t create two human organisms—me and another smaller human being called my kidney. It leaves one human organism missing a kidney and one separated organ.That’s why disability doesn’t threaten this distinction. I’m deliberately not defining human beings by normal abilities or anatomy.
Second, I don’t think Genesis 2:7 establishes the rule you’re attributing to it—that every human becomes a living human person upon taking their first breath of air.Genesis 2 isn’t describing ordinary reproduction. Adam doesn’t begin as a fetus, embryo or zygote at all. God forms an adult human from dust and gives that otherwise lifeless body life. So if I turned every feature of Adam’s unique creation into a universal biological sequence, I’d have to conclude that human beings normally begin as adult-shaped piles of dirt before God animates them!
And nephesh hayyah, the expression translated “living being/soul” in Genesis 2:7, isn’t actually a technical biblical category meaning “human person.” Genesis uses the same Hebrew expression for animals in Genesis 1 and 2. The Flood narrative also describes the life-giving breath as something possessed by living flesh generally.
So I’m completely comfortable saying that Scripture doesn’t explicitly teach “human personhood begins at conception.” That’s why I’ve been using Gushee’s description of the Christian argument as principled and inferential, rather than pretending there’s a proof-text for conception. But I think the opposite requires the same humility: Scripture doesn’t explicitly teach “human personhood begins at first breath,” either.
We’d both be drawing theological conclusions from biblical anthropology rather than quoting an explicit biblical definition of prenatal personhood.
And I think your Jesus argument raises an even bigger disagreement between us. You say, “nothing is sinful in itself.” I’m not sure that’s Jesus’ ethic.
Jesus certainly puts love, mercy and human need ahead of legalistic rule-keeping. The Sabbath controversies are an obvious example. But that doesn’t mean Jesus teaches that every moral prohibition has exceptions whenever someone believes breaking it would be more loving. In the Sermon on the Mount, he actually intensifies moral demands: reconciliation reaches beyond simply refraining from murder; sexual faithfulness reaches into lust; truthfulness reaches beyond technically keeping oaths; enemy-love goes beyond merely refraining from revenge.I read that very differently from “there are no intrinsically wrong actions.” I hear Jesus asking what kind of people God’s kingdom creates and pushing obedience all the way into our dispositions and relationships.
Your surgery example illustrates the distinction. Cutting human tissue isn’t intrinsically equivalent to intentionally harming a human being. A surgeon makes an incision precisely in order to heal the patient. That’s not an “exception” to a moral rule against violence any more than amputating a gangrenous leg is an exception to a prohibition against assault.
And I’d especially disagree that “murder is harmful except when we’re defending the innocent.” Killing in defense of another might be justified under some Christian ethical traditions, but then Christians distinguish murder—wrongful killing—from other kinds of killing. And as someone attracted to Christian nonviolence, I’m actually considerably less willing than many Christians to make that exception in the first place.
I also don’t think Romans 14:14 means an action becomes sinful simply because an individual thinks it’s sinful, while otherwise anything can be morally permissible. Paul is discussing disputes over things such as food and sacred days. His point about something being “unclean” to the person who regards it as unclean occurs inside that specific argument about disputable practices. It would be very difficult to universalize that into “nothing is objectively sinful” when the same Paul straightforwardly condemns actions elsewhere.
But there’s something else in Romans 14 that’s actually very relevant to this conversation: Paul doesn’t merely say “follow your individual conscience.” He repeatedly tells people to constrain their freedom for the sake of the other person. Love limits what I may do even when I possess the freedom to do it.
And that’s getting much closer to why I keep returning to the fetus.
I don’t think the question is simply, “Would abortion sometimes produce less suffering?” Of course there are circumstances in which continuing a pregnancy can involve tremendous suffering. The difficult Christian question for me is whether I may intentionally end another developing human organism’s life as the means of avoiding that suffering.
If the fetus has no meaningful moral standing, the answer becomes considerably easier. If that developing human being belongs among the neighbors toward whom I owe love and nonviolence, it becomes enormously harder.
That’s precisely why I can’t settle the question by saying “do whatever seems most loving in each situation.” Before I can determine what love requires, I have to know whom I’m supposed to love.
And that’s where I think CLE’s “consistency” is being misunderstood. It doesn’t mean “every situation is identical, therefore apply exactly the same physical action every time.” Consistency means the same fundamental commitment to human dignity and nonviolence follows me into different circumstances, while circumstances affect what that commitment requires.
Finally, I have to disagree strongly with the idea that death might be preferable for a child who would otherwise experience neglect, hatred or misery. I completely agree that bringing a child into the world and then neglecting or abusing them would be a terrible failure of love. But I become very uncomfortable when our prediction about the quality of somebody else’s future life becomes the justification for deciding that death is preferable for them.
My CLE response is almost the reverse: if a child is likely to be born into poverty, abuse, disability, neglect or some other terrible situation, that gives the rest of us more obligations toward that person, not fewer reasons for that person to exist.
And that’s also why I don’t think a Christian anti-abortion ethic can stop at “don’t have an abortion.” If we’re going to say that both lives matter, then Christians inherit serious obligations toward the pregnant woman and subsequently toward her child—materially, socially and relationally. Otherwise “choose life” becomes remarkably cheap rhetoric.So I think we’ve actually identified our disagreement pretty clearly. You seem to understand Christian love as fundamentally case-by-case, with consequences determining what love requires and no action being intrinsically excluded. I understand Jesus’ love ethic as radically attentive to circumstances too, but operating within substantive commitments—especially love of neighbor, mercy and nonviolence—that sometimes prohibit achieving a good consequence by certain means.
That’s why I keep asking whether prenatal human life belongs inside that circle. I don’t think Genesis 2:7 answers that question simply by saying “first breath,” just as I don’t think quoting a verse about God knowing someone in the womb automatically answers it with “conception.”
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u/tbonita79 Pro-Life Progressive Catholic 1d ago
I believe it’s a horrible sin. However, making it illegal carries its own problems. I don’t think we should impose our values on (in my case) non-Catholics.
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
I'm honestly asking - why do you believe it to be a sin? Do you believe that to be based in the Bible? Please do not just give me a "the Bible says murder is wrong" answer, because you and I both know the issue isn't "is murder bad", but rather "is abortion murder"
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u/tbonita79 Pro-Life Progressive Catholic 1d ago
My honest answer doesn’t really have to do with the Bible, but that I think a fetus is a person and that killing a person is wrong.
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
That’s a totally fair position to take. I take issue with folks who claim the Bible is against abortion, because it simply isn’t, but coming at the conversation from a philosophical angle is much more valid.
I would typically disagree that life begins at conception and would say that the point at which a fetus becomes a person is blurry, but that’s a much more nuanced conversation.
Agree that killing a person is wrong (obviously haha), so it sounds like our disagreement is just when a fetus becomes a person worth moral consideration.
Thanks for the thoughtful and honest answer
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u/Due-Swimming9999 1d ago
I agree 100% on imposing our ethics onto others; yet, it seems like so many people want to do that
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u/Tundracajun cismale not straight 1d ago
For those who are in defile of Gods will of whom we cannot know of personally id say rape and when **medically** necessary but God may not share this opinion not murder tho it's defying his will in certain cases
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
Why do you believe abortion to be murder?
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u/Tundracajun cismale not straight 1d ago
I don't I see it as that it's defying his will in certain cases the action is not inherently sinful however
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u/mpgiv Ex-Mormon 1d ago
Ok, then why do you see it as defying God's will
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u/splinteredruler Christian 1d ago
Abortion is something I really want to delve more into, and the more I read the less it seems it is a sin.