New Testament scholar Richard Hays writes, “The Bible contains no texts about abortion.” Indeed, Scripture does not contain a passage that expressly speaks about abortion in a modern clinical sense. Even so, Scripture does speak to the reality of life in the womb, and it does require moral reasoning that forbids abortion.
To understand how we can reason morally about abortion, consider by analogy how we speak about God. We say that the Father, Son, and Spirit are included in the definition of the one God of Israel. In other words, the Bible’s framework explicitly includes Father, Son, and Spirit in the definition of God. So if we are pressed to answer the question of what the Father, Son, and Spirit are, we can justifiably say something like, “they are three persons” or “triune.” We thus say that the Bible teaches us about the doctrine of the Trinity.
Likewise, if Holy Scripture speaks in such a way that requires us to say abortion is morally wrong, then we can say that the Bible teaches that abortion is wrong. As I will argue, the Bible expressly speaks about God making life in the womb, and so I argue that we can say that the Bible teaches that abortion is morally wrong. This distinction matters, since we will encounter many people who will demand a single verse that teaches on abortion, but such a request does not correspond to the nature of writing, argument, or theology. The form of the question betrays an inability to understand how arguments work.
Imagine demanding that someone provide a single verse on the doctrine of God or of heaven and hell from Scripture. That request is impossible since we have the full canon of Scripture that deepens our view of both. No single verse defines the whole doctrine, and it cannot. Arguments take time, involve premises, have conclusions, and associations. When it comes to abortion, we need to look to the full scope of what the Scripture says about life, its origin, and its dignity to come to reason morally about abortion in accordance with Scripture.
This article aims to guide readers to reason morally from Scripture to know what the Bible says about abortion.
1. Argument
While I cannot provide a comprehensive guide to how Scripture speaks about life, in this article, I show some key passages from the Bible and Christian theology which show a consistent approach to the question of abortion. In short, Scripture forbids abortion because it destroys human life.
In longer form, Scripture, nature, and theological reflection show us the common sense conclusion that God makes human beings through human begetting; and as a consequence, abortion is morally wrong because it terminates what God has made through our begetting.
The word “beget” refers to the whole process of human procreation. The word “make” in this context refers to God’s creation of new life. Both words are important because Scripture, nature, and Christian theology distinguish begetting from making in order to define how the Father and Son relate to one another and to understand our status as creatures of God.
The technology that facilitates abortion terminates begotten life and rejects God’s making of new life. It is therefore morally wrong.
Abortion unmakes what God has made through human begetting.
With the argument explained, the rest of this article will explain its premises point by point to help readers reason morally about abortion.
2. God Makes in Human Begetting
The Bible speaks about God making and humans begetting. God makes humans through human begetting in the womb. That teaching is contained in Scripture. For this reason, we cannot terminate what God made through our begetting. Consider the following biblical passages that corroborate these claims.
In Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image.” The word “make” shows that God is our creator. In the act of procreation, Eve tells us that “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD” (Gen 4:1). The word “gotten” (a play on words with the name Cain in Hebrew) shows how God and humans work in procreation. However, the regular term for human procreation is “beget.”
While the word “beget” has in recent times fallen out of regular English use, the KJV Bible illustrates the point when it contrasted God who “created man” (Gen 5:1) with Adam who “begat a son” (Gen 5:3). The language of creation or making by God and begetting by Adam distinguish how God and his creatures relate in the act of procreation.
God makes. We beget.
Applied to pregnancy, David poetically describes how God makes life in the womb in Psalm 139:13–16:
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
David uses words like formed, knitted, made, and woven to describe what God does to make life in the womb.*
Other verses similarly affirm that God makes what is in the womb. Job, for example, tells us, “Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?” (Job 31:15; cf. Job 3:11).
Ecclesiastes 11:5 gives us insight into how God makes in the womb: “As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” And here Ecclesiastes shows that God did not merely breathe his spirit into Adam to make him a living creature (Gen 2:7), but God breathes life into every child born into this world by his Spirit.
However, Ecclesiastes 11:5 more literally translated from Hebrew less clearly defines the Spirit’s action in making within the womb. “As you do not know what the path of the Spirit is—how [the Spirit’s path is] the bones in the womb of a pregnant woman, you likewise do not know the work of Elohim who makes everything.”
The point here seems to be a comparison between the Spirit (or wind) whose path makes its way into the bones of a child in a pregnant woman and God’s making of everything. Both activities transcend our understanding. The word “Spirit” or ruach can also mean “wind” or “breath,” and it may be that wind here is meant given the phrase in which ruach appears: “the path of the ruach,” a phrase that feels similar to Genesis 3:8 in which the phrase “the ruach of the day” means evening breeze (see HALOT, 1198).
However, the text clearly tells us that God (Elohim) makes everything. Further, Ecclesiastes tells us that the bones in a pregnant womb interact with the seemingly invisible wind whose coming and goings are inscrutable to the average person. We can be reasonably sure that the Spirit who gave life to Adam (Gen 2:7) and who the Lord calls the one who “gives life” (John 6:63) plays an important role in making life in the womb.
3. God Knows Life in the Womb
Other passages in Scripture tell us that God knows living agents while they were in the womb. In a prophetic psalm in which David records Christ speaking to God, Jesus says, “from my mother’s womb you have been my God” (Ps 22:10). Similarly, God in Jeremiah 1:5 affirms: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
When David records Jesus saying, “from my mother’s womb you have been my God,” we can infer that the Lord Jesus was true life in Mary’s womb. Likewise, God is said to know Jeremiah before he was formed in the womb, which implies that he also knew him in the womb. Remember that Psalm 139:16 talked about the “unformed substance” in the womb; here Jeremiah may speak of a similar idea, noting that even before being formed into a substance that phenomenologically appears human, he remained known by God in what we might call an embryonic stage.
Obviously, Jeremiah did not live in a world with modern taxonomies of life in stages (fertilization > embryo > fetus, etc.). But we can reasonably infer comparisons to our common language for the sake of understanding.
That God makes in the womb and knows in the womb may underpin Mosaic legislation about hitting a pregnant woman in Exodus 21. If there is harm done to the child who would come out, then the attacker receives justice according to the dictate: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exod 21:24–25). The implication being that what is in the womb amounts to human life.
However, Exodus 21 does not expressly forbid abortion in the modern sense. The legal implications only apply to the mother when the child comes out of the womb (Exod 21:22). The law does not expressly mention harm done to the child within the womb. That said, it is possible that the child coming out of the womb was the easiest way to know if an assault on a woman ended a child’s life in the womb. In that case, Exodus 21 would provide strong evidence for the existence of human life in the womb and would thus forbid modern medical abortions.
To make this argument, we need to integrate Exodus 21 into the full scope of Scripture and within the Bible’s own moral framework. Only then can we make confident moral arguments from a place of robust moral reasoning.
4. Biblical Summary about Making, Begetting, and Life
In summary, the Bible regularly speaks about God making life in the womb. It does not expressly say that fetuses are human persons, nor does it describe pregnancy in a modern and scientific way. Yet these modern expressions of personhood and pregnancy could not appear in a text written before such language came into common use. The Bible uses common idioms and expressions of the ancient world.
For the most part, biblical authors describe the world as they experienced it. The sun sets, they say (e.g. Ecc 1:5). We say the same. Yet if we abstract what happens scientifically, then we can also say that the Earth makes one full turn every 24 hours while the sun remains at the center of our solar system. We move. The sun does not.
Even so, both statements are true. We speak from how we experience the world phenomenologically—if we want to use a fancy word. And the Bible speaks this way too. We should not expect it to use an artificial or technical idiom to explain things as modern science does through its calculations, which bypass the symbolic order of the world.
5. Christ was Christ in Mary’s Womb
With this Scriptural background in mind, we can turn to the New Testament for further teaching about the God who makes and gives life to all. And in particular, we need to start with the birth of Jesus Christ.
What the New Testament tells us about Christ is that he remained Christ even while in the womb of Mary. His persistent identity as the Son of God while being circumscribed in the womb of Mary shows that in the womb he had assumed a material substance. I will clarify what this means below, but first I will outline key Scriptural passages that prove the point.
The Word assumed flesh when the Spirit united divinity and humanity in the womb of Mary (John 1:1–3, 14; Luke 1:35; 2:21). After the Spirit fell upon Mary, she visited her pregnant relative, Elizabeth. That baby, John the Baptist, leaped in Elizabeth’s womb at the greeting of Mary: “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:41). Elizabeth calls pregnant Mary, “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43).
In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel told Joseph, “that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:20). Luke likewise makes the same claim (Luke 2:21). Conception occurred in the womb of Mary, and “that which is conceived” in her womb (ἐν γαστρὶ; Matt 1:18) is Christ. At no other moment did the Spirit fall upon Mary but in the act of conception.
The clump of cells in Mary’s womb was also the union of divinity and humanity, the Christ. The fetus in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy in the womb (Luke 1:41). Christ was always fully Christ. Divinity did not unite to Christ at 5 months or 9 months or just after birth. The Word did not adopt humanity, did not seize an already made humanity, but is the full union of divinity and humanity. Christ is one, not a fetus one day and then a divinized fetus the next.
Jesus himself tells us, “from my mother’s womb you have been my God” (Ps 22:10). If the Lord says as much, can we doubt it?
The doctrine of the Incarnation is that the Spirit united divinity and humanity and that Christ was always that union. For this reason, the church has worshipped the Word, singing in memory of Mary that she was theotokos—the mother of God who is the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:8). That glory of God, Christ, then invites us to become fully alive. As Irenaeus of Lyon said, “the glory of God is the human being fully alive.” In context, he meant Christ in whose image we are renewed.
The dogma of abortion gainsays the full humanity of Christ because it implies or argues that a fetus is a mere clump of cells, not a human life.
It is worth considering how American and Canadian courts have spoken about the rights of the unborn. Justice Harry Blackmun argued that a fetus only receives the rights of a person in the Fourth Amendment once it is viable—able to live on its own outside the womb (Roe v. Wade 1973). Justice Bertha Wilson did not even consider whether a fetus had the rights of “anyone” as defined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (R. v. Morgentaler 1988). This lack of consideration implies the non-personhood of a fetus on the part of Justice Wilson.
The judgments of these Justices in the United States and Canada imply that only a human person receives a right to life. In a US setting, Justice Blackmun implies that the right of a person to enjoy security “in their persons” does not apply to fetuses. Similar reasoning appears in Justice Wilson who simply did not consider whether a fetus had the rights of a human person.
Such arguments among those who believe abortion to be a moral good imply that a fetus is merely a clump of cells in a womb. It is not a human life or a human person. Such arguments applied to the Incarnation would imply that Christ in the womb was not a human life; that the Word united to an unviable clump of something; that in the womb Christ was not holding the universe together. None of this makes sense of the Incarnation, and it further breaches the teaching of the Scriptures. Christ was always a human life, and he was a divine Person from the moment the Spirit fell upon Mary.
In other words, given how the Bible talks about life in the womb and given how it talks about the one Lord Jesus Christ taking flesh to himself, we find ourselves bound to affirm real human life in the womb. But if that life is real human life, then we cannot simply use scientific language like embryo and fetus to ignore the ontological reality that whatever is in the womb is life, human life, made of God.
6. Earliest Christians Called Abortion Sin
Early Christians agreed that abortion ended life and resulted in a grievous sin. In the Greek and Roman world, abortion was normal. Christians contrasted their culture by forbidding abortion. For example, the Didache, a work of Christian catechism with roots back into the first century, names abortion as a sin and locates it in connection to the way of death—not life: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten” (Did. 2).
Before the New Testament was finished or at least before it was published widely, the earliest Christians named abortion as sin. They did not need the Bible to expressly say, “Thou shalt not abort.” They knew that the way of life preserved life since God makes life through human begetting.
While the Didache does not spell out its moral reasoning, we can infer that this comment on abortion fits within its presentation of two ways of being in the world: the way of life and the way of death. God makes life. Humans beget life, life which begins in the womb. Thus, we must preserve that life. Cutting off that life by terminating a pregnancy ends life. Hence, “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”
My point for bringing this up here is merely to point out that the teaching of Scripture, whether orally from the apostles or in written form at the earliest period, led Christians to see abortion as sinful. They did not require an express Bible verse because that is not how moral teaching works. They knew that God was the Lord and Giver of life. Hence, to terminate life in the womb that God made through human begetting amounted to murder.
Likewise, we reason morally as we reflect on the total message of the Bible. According to Scripture, God makes life through human begetting, and that life begins in the womb. For this reason, we must not destroy what God has made through human begetting. It not only terminates the life that God made but also frustrates the God-given purpose of procreation, namely, to produce life.
One could add to the Didache other early Christian writings, such as the Epistle of Barnabas or authors like Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Athenagoras, who illustrate how early Christians uniformly forbade abortion as a way of death.
7. Abortion Technology: Against Creed and Gospel
When we zoom out from the minutiae of biblical citation and the contingent facts of history, we can see how the doctrine of abortion militates against the Christian doctrine of God and Christ. Put another way, the technique of abortion contradicts the Nicene Creed and the mystery of the Gospel. The Didache’s word choice, “that which is begotten” (Did. 2), anticipates a key metaphor for understanding the Trinity on the basis of God’s created ordering of the universe.
7a. Abortion uses human techniques to terminate the begetting process and takes no account of God’s act of making human life.
According to Scripture and experience of the created order, humans are begotten by their parents. “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Gen 4:1; also Gen 5:3). While begotten of their parents, humans are also made of God. For example, God says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer 1:5). Psalm 139:14 says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” While our parents beget us, God makes us.
The word “begetting” refers to the whole process of procreation. It is an old word but an important word. This word “begotten” and its corollary “made” appear in the Nicene Creed because the Creed follows the pattern of sound words in Scripture and uses common sense observations about the created order. Christians thus used an everyday metaphor to describe how the Father and Son relate to each other. The Nicene Creed says the Son is “begotten, not made.”
By observing that humans beget children who are made of God, Christians thus applied this analogy to God (while removing the creaturely imperfections) to say that the Son is begotten of the Father, not made. Importantly, the Nicene Creed recounts an important Biblical doctrine by using the everyday analogy of how babies are begotten of humans and made of God.
By contrast, abortion uses human technique to terminate the begetting process and takes no account of God’s act of making human life. The technology used in abortion does not aim to cure a disease but to bring to an end the natural order of begetting and to obviate divine making.
The Nicene Creed, following Scripture and the created order, knows that humans beget children and these children are made of God. It is why they use the analogy to explain the divine begetting of the Son from the Father. The technique of abortion breaks down the dogma of the Trinity therefore by ignoring the natural order of begetting and making, which define how the Father and Son relate as the one God of Israel—through a relation of eternal begetting. The Father eternally begets the Son (not makes); the Son is eternally begotten of the Father (not made).
Additionally, the Creed calls the Father the “Maker of heaven and earth,” and of the Son, it says that “all things were made” through him. By affirming that the Father and Son are makers of heaven and earth, the Creed follows the Bible’s affirmations that Father and Son are the Creator. Further, it ensures that the Son is not made by its confession that the Father through the Son made all creatures.
By contrast, the technique of abortion ignores God’s making of life and so blasphemes the Creed’s affirmation that the Spirit is “the Lord and Giver of life” (2 Cor 3:17–18; John 6:63). During an abortion, we unmake life in the womb which the Father made through the Son and by the Spirit who is the Giver of life. It also disrespects the order of procreation through the act of parents begetting a child. We might say that abortion by implied argument is a heretical dogma.
7b. Abortion defaces the mystery of the Gospel by avoiding the gift of life, implied in the procreative act.
The technique of abortion enables human beings to bypass natural necessity. Human begetting points to man and woman visibly uniting through the act of sex. It represents two natural ends of marriage—procreation and fellowship.
Marriage is a mystery of Christ’s love for the church (Eph 5:32). The one flesh union of marriage, present in the act of sex (and other acts of marriage), symbolizes the unity Christ and the church have in the Holy Spirit: “we are members of his body” and “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Eph 5:30, 31). Through the one flesh union of marriage, children are begotten. Likewise, in the church, the Jerusalem above bears children (Gal 4:21–31; Isa 66:10–13).
Cyprian of Carthage and John Calvin reflected on the unique relation between God our Father and the church as our mother, stating, “You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the Church as your mother.” Whether one loves this particular formulation or not, we can at least point to the relationship between Christ and the church and marriage as one that naturally leads to productive implications (i.e., children). Hence, John speaks of Christians as children, young men, and fathers in the faith (1 John 2:12–14).
In contrast to this life-giving union, the technique of abortion evacuates the mystery of the Gospel by avoiding the gift of life, implied in the procreative act. The symbol of the Gospel becomes a symbol of union unto death not union unto life.
Not every medical technique contributes to the common good. While abortion in some cases prevents the loss of one life (e.g., ectopic pregnancy), its primary medical use is not curative. And even in such cases when abortion saves a life, it also terminates a life. It is not a net positive nor an obvious moral good. In most cases, abortion becomes an elective surgery (or more often an oral medication) whose purpose is not to cure an ailment but to terminate a fetus for convenience or family planning.
In such cases, it symbolizes the non-production of life and gainsays a primary picture of becoming “one flesh,” a symbol for Christ’s union with the church.
8. Human Personhood: Not Biology but Found in God’s Image
With these biblical and theological tools in hand, we can analyze a competing set of moral arguments found within modern legal theory. Recent legal discussions on abortion in the USA and Canada have centred on whether or not a fetus is a person. If a person is a person because of some quality like mental capability, brain formation, or a heartbeat, then they say that this fetus is a person, that is, a baby. Sometimes this qualitative definition goes so far as to say that a fetus is only viable once it leaves the womb, presumably making it a person on this point of view.
Christians should be careful when making such arguments since it implies that only healthy and normal fetuses are real persons. Further, it implies that what makes a fetus a human person is some ability or capacity within that person. In short, it makes some biological trait the defining feature of what it means to be a human person.
Scripture simply says, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Whatever else this means, it means that God created humans in his image. No reference is made to neo-cortical function or a heartbeat. The image of God in humans means we cannot slay another image-bearer, or else risk punishment for the evil of murder (Gen 9:6).
Early Christians intuited something similar by associating the image of God with the intellectual nature of humans or sometimes as their free will (will being intellectual as well). By intellectual, they meant humans had something non-biological, non-material, that connected them to God. As a complex whole of body-soul, humans are in God’s image by the very fact of having a human nature, which is something not exhausted by the body and materiality.
Some today criticize this view, incorrectly assuming that the word “intellectual” refers to some biological function of brain activity. It does not. Intellectual meant non-material. It was a fact of human nature, not something performed, enabled, or grown. It is given. And we see it not in the skin pigment of someone or in their biological growth per se. Rather, we see a person and know something deeper about them by some inner intuition—they are human persons.
Genesis 9:6 says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” God made “man” in his image. It is for this reason that one may not murder another human being. Man, which in this case assumes both male and female (Gen 1:27), was made in God’s image; that was given to them. It is not earned. We recognize it.
Humans are not the same as dogs, for example, because we have an intellectual nature; there is something beyond the mere stuff of our body that defines who we are. It is why when we die, our body remains here below, and we yet live as who we are. It is why we reunite with our resurrected body. Who we are persists beyond the mere warp and woof of earthly existence.
And it is this psychosomatic whole that is in the image of God. It is not the body versus the soul, but the whole is in God’s image. This helps us in our moral reasoning because we can safely put aside weak arguments for what a fetus is, as if a fetus only qualifies as a person if it has certain biological features. This qualitative account of humanity runs the risk of dehumanizing the disabled; and making the unique dignity of our bearing God’s image into something like a heartbeat.
9. Does the Bible Speak about Abortion?
We could marshal more biblical arguments. For example, the Bible regularly speaks about the widow and the destitute and how God loves them and how we should protect the weak and needy. A fetus, a child in the womb, is the definition of the weak and needy.
My argument above was a simpler one. God makes all human lives through human begetting. God’s making of such lives includes their life in the womb where God makes them and knows them. The Word took human life to himself by the Spirit in Mary’s womb. Christ was always Christ even in the womb. He did not become a viable life after his birth. For these reasons, abortion terminates life that God has made in the womb. It should be thus unthinkable to use abortion as a form of birth control or as the intentional ending of a life that God made.
The more specific the question becomes, however, the more difficult moral judgments become too. Ectopic pregnancies, pregnancies in which the mother may die if she goes full term, and more besides, require deep thinking. Yet the principles that Scripture and reason provide about life should guide us in practical moral reasoning. No matter how difficult the situation, we must start with the principle: to terminate a life that God has made is a grievous sin (Gen 9:6).
In this essay, I did not intend to engage in practical moral reasoning on the various types of abortions, but only to assert the general point: God makes human life in the womb through human begetting. We have no moral right to end that life; it is sinful to do so.
God breathes life into the womb. What God has made, we must not unmake.
From this position, we can begin to do the hard work of moral reasoning about abortion. And yes, we can say that the Bible forbids abortion because it terminates a life that God has made through human begetting.
Further Resources
“A brief history of abortion in Canada” by Wyatt Graham. This article will lay some groundwork for how Canada has thought about abortion legally in Canada.
“What Is Nestorianism? The Theotokos Debate Explained” by Wyatt Graham. This article will explain my reasoning for why Christ was made man in the womb of Mary from the very moment the Holy Spirit fell upon her.
“4 Patterns of Biblical Argument in the Nicene Creed” by Wyatt Graham. This article will explain why I made so much about the language of “made” and “begotten” within this article.
Notes
* It is worth noting that David also speaks about himself as an “unformed substance,” a term apparently referring to what we call an embryo. One can imagine calling the discharge of a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) in the ancient world an “unformed substance.” Likely, this is the kind of thing that David speaks about here. I make this point since in the history of reflection on abortion, Christians have sometimes distinguished formed from unformed life in the womb. That technical yet important distinction will be for another time.
