Abortion and the Value of Human Life, Part III

(a series of articles by Vicar Eric Phillips, Ebenezer Lutheran Church, Spring 2013)

In the previous columns, I’ve argued that the moral debate over abortion boils down to the question of whether human life is sacred, or just human personhood. Those who support a right to abortion-on-demand end up arguing the latter, that although a fetus is biologically human it is not yet a person, and therefore can be destroyed at will, without moral outrage. Those who seriously maintain the former, on the other hand, must conclude that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, and thus something that must be permitted only in those rare cases when it can be expected to prevent an equal or greater evil from occurring (e.g. the death of both the mother and the baby). In part II, then, I demonstrated from a few foundational biblical passages that the former is the position taught by the Christian faith. A human being is made in the image of God, and is transcendently valuable for that objective reason, before we consider all the wonderful ways in which this image manifests itself through the development of human personhood. But there’s more. If we continue looking at the biblical witness, we will see that even if we were to allow the morality of abortion to be judged on the basis of human personhood rather than human life, it would fail that test too. Continue reading →