Abortion is not just a policy or ideological debate; it is a deeply personal and spiritual issue in our communities, congregations, and families. And the only way forward is to speak the truth in love and be the Good Samaritan Christ calls us to be to everyone we encounter, for we are all made in His image.
The desire to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, as abortion is often characterized, likely goes back as far as the first unwanted pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, practices of inducing abortion (and also infanticide) are evident in the historical records of many cultures from ancient times. The means of inducing abortion and public opinion on the subject have varied over time and place.
Expecting mothers have employed (or been subjected to) methods as diverse as strenuous exercises, high-risk activities, physical manipulations and brutalities, invasive procedures, and a variety of natural and artificial concoctions. Contemporary legalized practices are generally far more precise and sanitary than earlier practices or in places where abortion remains illegal. In many wealthy countries, the majority of abortions are now effected through pharmaceuticals.
Abortion
However precise, sanitary, and convenient legalized abortion practices may now be, induced abortion remains an act whose intent is to kill a baby in utero (pre-embryo, embryo, or fetus). This is a critical point to the moral evaluation of this act. As many definitions of induced abortion recognize, the aim of an act of abortion is not just to terminate a pregnancy but to terminate a pregnancy so that the baby in utero does not survive.
Three observations make this point clear. First, acts aimed at ending a pregnancy early while trying to save the life of the baby are common medical interventions when problems develop in late-stage pregnancies. These acts of terminating a pregnancy do not count, morally, legally, or medically, as acts of abortion even though some may involve a method also used in some abortions, such as induced labor. This is because these acts, though they terminate a pregnancy early, are not intended to cause the baby’s death but rather its survival.
Second, a moral distinction exists between abortion and a medical intervention to save the life of the mother, even in cases where the loss of a baby is a predictable outcome of the intervention. If an expecting mother is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, for example, she may need to undergo treatment that will undoubtedly result in the loss of her baby. Though this is the same outcome as an act of induced abortion, this cancer treatment does not count as an act of abortion precisely because the intervention is not administered for the purpose of preventing a live birth.
On the other hand, if an expecting mother pursued this treatment not because she had an aggressive form of cancer but because she knew it would be effective in terminating her pregnancy in such a way that her baby would not be able to survive, this would count as an act of induced abortion. The loss of her baby is no longer the tragic consequence of actions aimed at saving the mother’s life but is rather the intent of the procedure itself. Thus, what constitutes a particular act as an act of abortion is not the treatment itself but the intent to kill the baby in utero.
Abortion can be defined, therefore, as any act that intends to terminate a pregnancy so that the baby in utero does not survive. It is an intentional act of killing.
Image of God
The recently deceased MIT philosophy professor Judith Jarvis Thomson is quite clear about this in her seminal essay “A Defense of Abortion” (published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1973, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade). Morally, she argues, many abortions amount to little more than a woman’s declining to maintain an unwelcome intruder in her home. In this case, the unwelcome intruder is the unwanted child she is carrying, and the home is her womb. By declining to maintain her baby, she is removing necessary life support, and Thomson acknowledges that this is tantamount to killing the baby.
Strikingly, she argues that abortion in these cases is permissible even if we allow that the baby has an equal right to life as the mother or anyone else.
