Abortion

I've posted about abortion before, but I came across this and it gives some awesome points about the wrongness of abortion.  So I thought I'd take this opportunity to share an excerpt from a report presented to the General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1971. It's not exhaustive, but it provides a solid groundwork on the topic:     

As we search the Scriptures for God's will concerning abortion, we find that the whole abortion issue can be reduced to one question: Is the fetus in the womb of the mother a human life? If the answer is yes, then abortion for the sake of convenience is murder, and the Christian church has the obligation to teach its members to protect and nourish the life of the unborn child. The sixth commandment gives an absolute prohibition against murder (Exodus 20:13), and so murder is never, under any circumstances, to be regarded as a moral option.    

 Often supporters of abortion confuse the issue by pointing to the financial and emotional hardships that both mother and child will face if a pregnancy is carried to full term. Certainly, the pressing social hardships surrounding unwanted pregnancies are enormous, but if an unborn child is a human life, some way of treating the problem must be found other than licensing the hospitals and clinics of our nation to perform mass executions of unwanted children.     So is a fetus in the womb of the mother a human life? I believe the Bible answers with a resounding yes! Consider the following evidence:

 God relates in a personal way to the unborn child (Ps. 139:13-14; 51:5; Jer. 1:5; Luke 1:44). He does so because the child is created in his image.

1.  The Bible teaches that both conception and birth occur because of the sovereign rule of God (Gen. 21:1-2; 30:1-2; 1 Sam. 1:19-20; Job 31:15; 33:4; Ps. 100:3; 127:3). "It would be a willful act of defiance against the Creator intentionally to kill an unborn child whose conception is so intimately a divine as well as a human act."

1.  The Greek word for "child" in Luke 2:12 (brephos) is used in Luke 1:41, 44 to refer to John the Baptist while he was in his mother's womb. A Hebrew word for "child"(yeled) is used of the unborn in the mother's womb (Ex. 21:22).

1.  Theologian John Jefferson Davis points out that "the personal history of the Son of God on earth begins not when he was 'born of the Virgin Mary,' but when he was 'conceived by the Holy Spirit.' His human history, like ours, began at conception."

1. John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit even while he was in his mother's womb (Luke 1:15).

The Bible treats human life, from conception to death, as a continuing experience. To willfully terminate it for reasons of convenience is murder. Faithfulness to the Word of God demands that this truth be taught in the church of Jesus Christ.