Thoughts on Abortion, Life, and Intrinsic Human Value

In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. (John 1:4)

We live in a culture that celebrates death. This situation is the result of our culture's improper understanding of mankind's condition; our mistaken belief that we are the masters of our ultimate fate; our rejection of the concept of humanity having intrinsic worth and rights which are inherent to it.

Leftist political candidates proudly proclaim their support for the legalization of the barbaric practice of abortion. (Davis, 2024; Dovere, 2023; Gambino, 2021) When their opponents accuse them of supporting abortion even up until the point of birth, they call it a "mischaracterization," but they refuse to draw any line. They argue that there should not be a legal line. (Kessler, 2022) Some even argue that the "line" could be drawn after birth. (Saletan, 2012)

Men on both sides of our political spectrum support a person's so-called right to die; the right to commit suicide to avoid pain and suffering. There are eleven jurisdictions in America which have legal physician-assisted suicide. (WebMD, 2024) Canada is far ahead of the United States, and the consequences of the euthanasia legislation they have enacted in the Great White North are shocking. Canada has among the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world. In Canada, physician-assisted death is not just for the terminally ill. The disabled, the chronically ill, in some cases even the mentally ill qualify for MAID, or medical assistance in dying. (AP News, 2022)

Instead of working to protect human life we, as a culture, are actively working against it. The most vulnerable humans, those in the womb, those who need care at the end of their lives, or those who are debilitated due to some injury or disease are not safe from those on the godless Marxist political Left, or the godless corporate political Right.

Philosophers like Peter Singer argue that our worth comes not from our humanity, but from our personhood. Personhood, as Dr. Singer defines it, is not something with which one is born. To men like Dr. Singer, personhood is more like self-awareness. It is something that develops. And, until it does develop, men like Dr. Singer think that human beings have no rights. (Peter Singer on Personhood) We may, as Dr. Singer explains, have protections under the law as society would decide, but we have no intrinsic right to life, liberty, property, or anything else.

Unrestricted abortion on demand threatens the unborn. Only the desire of the mother, not the fact that the baby is a living human who inherently has a right to life, protects him. In America, it often fails to protect him. And the mothers who have been deluded into killing their unborn children are further encouraged to "shout their abortions" by the radical feminists, so that the gruesome practice can be further normalized in society. (Shout Your Abortion; About)

In a relativistic moral system such as this, where right and wrong are not fixed by God, the value of a human being changes relative to that human being's ability to adapt and survive in their environment. The value of a human being is, in such a system, determined through evolutionary mechanisms. People are not valuable simply because they are people in such a system.

There can be no intrinsic value to human life if the universe came into being spontaneously, and life evolved over time without a creator, as Stephen Hawking suggests in his book, "The Grand Design." In this scenario, there can be only natural selection and survival of the fittest. Those beings/organisms with the most beneficial traits have more value since they survive to propagate their genes. (Hawking and Mlodnov, The Grand Design) But they are not valuable simply because they are alive. The same applies equally to human beings.

In a relativistic moral system, your value is always measured relative to something else. That means your value can change. A person can be considered valuable, but if their circumstances change (i.e., they experience a decline in cognitive function, a change in employment, a decline in health due to injury or advancing age) it will diminish their value and absolve society from the moral burden of caring for them.

But that which God has created has value because God created it even in its fallen state. How much more has God demonstrated how much He values mankind by redeeming it through the blood of His Son Jesus, shed on the cross for the forgiveness of sin?

The Christian Church is often accused of being anti-science because of our belief in God's creation of the universe out of nothing over the course of six days as recounted in Genesis; because we do not consider abortion of unborn babies to suit the convenience of the already-born to be women's health care. But the Church is not anti-science. We are, instead, pro-human being. The Church is pro-life and anti-death. That is more than can be said for leftist American Democrats. They support allowing unrestricted access to abortion at any time during pregnancy, right up to the moment of birth. They support universal and rationed health care. They support euthanasia. They support all sorts of measures to reduce human population growth because of their devotion to the cult of radical environmentalism.

Men like Yuval Noah Harari of the World Economic Forum claim authority to remake western society and the world on the basis of might makes right. He believes the concept of rights are a fairy tale, just like God and religion. (No God & No Human Rights | Yuval Noah Harari) If God and human rights are a fairy tale, they can be ignored. Mr. Harari and Mr. Schwab may go about teaching the governments of the world how to remake themselves in the image of Marxist environmentalism without regard for the fictions of rights or religion.

It is, after all, a vision for the greater good.

In a universe where there is no God to define right and wrong, where an organism is considered valuable relative to its ability to adapt and survive in its environment; the only viable alternative is for "might" to make "right".

How do we respond to the situation in which we find ourselves? First, unlike secular society, we are honest about our condition. We believe what God says about mankind, and the whole creation: Life is more than just being physically alive. It is unity between man and God. (Naumann, 2023) That unity with God was severed when man fell into sin. Through Adam's sin in the Garden all men became sinful; mankind became subject to death. Mankind is powerless to make the world right, despite everything the Marxists claim and promise. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, however, man's unity with God has been restored.

This is why we fight death instead of embracing it as the secular world does. Death is not something good. We should not accept it as merely a part of the "circle of life". It is our enemy. But Christ has removed the sting of death. He now works this thing which Satan meant for our destruction, for our ultimate good. It was not supposed to be. It came into the world through the working of the devil, and man's will. Death certainly is not the solution to our problems of suffering and disease. That solution is the life that comes by being baptized into Christ, into His death, and into His resurrection:

"Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection." (Romans 6:3-5)

Even though we are all subject to physical death, for the Christian, death has been transformed into a portal through which we pass into life. The fear of God's wrath is what made death terrible. Since Christ has made atonement for sin, that fear disappears. Without having to fear God's wrath and punishment, the Christian can look at death as a slumber from which we will awaken at Christ's return and enter into eternal life. (Pieper, 1953)

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Bibliography

Davis, Susan. "Democratic Congressional Candidates Focus on Abortion in a Bid to Regain the House." NPR, January 22, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/22/1226160411/democratic-congressional-candidates-focus-on-abortion-in-a-bid-to-regain-the-house.

Dovere, Edward-Isaac. "Democrats Push Abortion Rights to the Ballot in 2024, Using an Old GOP Playbook | CNN Politics." CNN, April 7, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/politics/democrats-abortion-ballot-measures-2024/index.html.

Gambino, Lauren. "House Democrats Vote to Establish a Federal Right to Abortion." The Guardian, September 24, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/24/house-democrats-abortion-federal-right-vote.

Hawking, Stephen, Leonard Mlodnov. 2010. "The Grand Design." Audiobook. Audible.

Kessler, Glenn. "Analysis | The GOP Claim That Democrats Support Abortion 'up to Moment of Birth.'" Washington Post, September 22, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/.

Naumann, Rev. Edward. "Lectures on the Gospel of John." Chapter 1. September 17, 2023. St. Paul's Ev. Luth. Church. Brookfield, IL.

Pieper, Francis. 1953. "Christian Dogmatics." Vol. 3. Temporal Death. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House.

Saletan, William. "After-Birth Abortion: The Pro-Choice Case for Infanticide." Slate. March 12, 2012. https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/after-birth-adoption-the-pro-choice-case-for-infanticide.html.

Shout Your Abortion -- About. "Shout Your Abortion -- About". N.D. https://shoutyourabortion.com/about.

WebMD. "What to Know About Physician-Assisted Death," January 8, 2024. https://www.webmd.com/a-t-z-guides/what-to-know-physician-assisted-death.

YouTube. "No God & No Human Rights | Yuval Noah Harari," April 20, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8daz1pErD8.

YouTube. "Peter Singer on Personhood," December 6, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCNz95E-3Wg.

Does Life Really Matter?

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

Everywhere you look it seems people are talking about how life matters. Black Lives Matter claims that their entire existence is dedicated to proclaiming that the lives of black people matter, and shouldn’t be devalued by society. White people counter with, “All lives matter,” and the politicians, activists and Facebook fanatics scream at each other about which statement makes you a more patriotic American, and which makes you a racist. Black, blue, white, or all…is there really any evidence that American society, as a whole, thinks that any lives matter? American secular society seems to have adopted a culture which, if it doesn’t officially worship death, certainly seems to have befriended it, and uses it to achieve its own ends. Abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, violent crime, and terrorism are just several ways in which we worship at the altar of death, all the while giving lip-service to the idea that we think anyone’s life matters.

In 2012 the Centers for Disease Control records that there were 699,202 legal induced abortions in the US (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2016). This is a procedure, lauded by those on the secular political left as a constitutional right and ignored by the secular political right (if they could get away with it), which extinguishes a human life based on how convenient it is to those who would have to care for it. Abortion advocates say that women have the right to choose this “reproductive health option” since women have a right to do with their bodies as they please. Men tend to cop out on this issue, saying that they shouldn’t have an opinion, since women are the ones who have to carry the baby. I suspect, however, that a more accurate reason is that most men secretly support abortion on-demand as they benefit from it. With abortion on-demand sex is divorced from procreation, and men get all of the pleasure with none of the responsibility. All through the debate we know that abortion takes a human life, whether we’ll admit it or not. Do those lives matter?

Organizations such as the Hemlock society, Final Exit, Death with Dignity, and Compassion and Choices advocate the so-called “right to die.” These groups believe, in the words of the Hemlock Society of San Diego:

“…that every competent adult has the incontestable right to humankind’s ultimate civil and personal liberty – the right to die in a manner and at a time of their own choosing (Hemlock Society of San Diego n.d.).”

And, they say, since suicide is no longer a crime, it is logical that society shouldn’t punish those who assist those who wish to commit suicide. No matter what sort of gentile language they use one cannot escape the fact that they advocate murder. The grounds are simple – selfishness. I am in pain, so I should be allowed to kill myself. I want to die with dignity (whatever that means). I have a poor quality of life, so I should be able to kill myself. Those who are burdened with an elderly relative may empathize, but how long will it be before we start making these “compassionate” choices for those not-so-competent adults who just don’t have a good quality of life? 

According to Peter Singer, personhood is defined, in some capacity, by the ability to reason and self-awareness. He’s the chair bioethics at Princeton! How long before our selfish society accepts the premise, as it has with babies in the womb, that people are no longer people once they lose their mind, and can be killed for convenience? There are many in our societies who are working to see that, when people stop being convenient and productive, their lives stop mattering. But perhaps I’m trying too hard to make my case. It isn’t as though people are any different than they used to be. Ever since the Fall, mankind is completely self-centered and sinful. And, from that beginning man’s sinfulness has manifested as death. Since Cain killed Abel we have been killing each other and rationalizing it however we could. What we need to do is repent.

But, we can’t. We are, as the corporate confession says, “…by nature, sinful and unclean.” Left on our own, we fall back on that which we know and understand – killing and death. We hate God, and we who are governed by the sinful mind are enemies of God, and God cannot tolerate sin. Rather than toss humanity into the cosmic waste bin, however, God took on human flesh, and entered his creation in order to bear our sin and be our savior in the person of Jesus. So, ultimately, it’s Christ’s life that matters. He calls us by the Gospel, enlightens us with his gifts, and sanctifies and keeps us in the faith. By Jesus’ holy, precious blood, and his innocent suffering and death on the cross he bore not only the guilt of our sin but also its punishment – separation from God the Father, and death. Through his means of word and sacrament, by the working of the Holy Spirit, He grants us faith, repentance, and life-everlasting.

Works Cited

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reproductive Health. August 24, 2016. http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/ (accessed September 18, 2016).

Hemlock Society of San Diego. "Hemlock Society of San Diego." About. http://www.hemlocksocietysandiego.org/about.htm (accessed September 18, 2016).