Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Forty years ago, President Ronald Reagan appointed a National Sanctity of Human Life Day. He was specifically protesting the legalization of abortions in America. But he recognized that “to diminish the value of one category of human life is to diminish us all.”
Scripture requires us to be fully pro-life. The sixth commandment, which prohibits unjust killing, requires us to be “patient, peace-loving, gentle, merciful, and friendly” toward our neighbors, to “protect them from harm as much as we can, and to do good even to our enemies,” according to the Heidelberg Catechism (Q&A 107). Reagan was right: we have a “responsibility to guard with care the lives and freedoms of even the weakest of our fellow human beings.”
Pro-lifers can’t be selective. We must care for women in unexpected pregnancies and support adoption and foster care just as we oppose situations that put children in danger of abuse. We must support proper authorities in avenging the wrongful killing of God’s image bearers (Gen. 9:6) even as we protest the sometimes shoddy defense of death-row prisoners and careless military killing of civilians. We must be committed to “protecting and defending the innocent” (Westminster Larger Catechism 135) even in instances that challenge our preferred cultural narrative. And we should listen when critics accuse some Christians of being choosy advocates of human flourishing.
But we should also call out critics for their own inconsistency. Getting abortion wrong means that you are not a defender of life. If personhood is not sacred in the womb, it is sacred nowhere. Fetuses are unique humans (Ps. 139:13–16; Isa. 44:24; Luke 1:44). God knew Jeremiah before he was born (Jer. 1:5; see Gal. 1:15). And He imposed penalties for even unintentionally harming children in utero (Ex. 21:22–25).
All children are a heritage from the Lord (Ps. 127:3) even if not all births are equally happy. Some are inconvenient; it must have felt so for Israelites who became parents under a tyrant (Ex. 2:8). Some children will be born with complicating health issues; one of the greatest evangelists of Jesus’ day was born blind (John 9). Children are sometimes conceived through atrocious criminal acts. The Bible lays out strict penalties for such crimes without deprecating the child who might result (Deut. 22:25). Every human life, from conception, bears God’s image and presents an opportunity for faithful service to the Creator.
The pro-life position shouldn’t simply be the Christian position. It should be the humanitarian position. So let us be as unashamedly pro-life as God is (see Ezek. 33:11; 2 Peter 3:9). Abortion is but one awful example of the sin that separates us from God. But even our greatest sin is met by a greater gospel. God’s Son inhabited a human womb to save sinners by His sacrificial death. God wants us to choose life and to help others see why life is the best choice that they could make.