ABORTION, THE BIBLE, AND THE MORAL ORDER

Does the Bible condemn abortion?  I realize I may be over my head when it comes to the interpretation of scripture.  But I have been troubled by comments that I heard recently regarding what the Bible has to say about the morality of abortion, so I felt compelled to write something.

What started this was that the staunchly anti-abortion Republican candidate in the recent Alabama senate race had been accused of sexual abuse of teenage girls when he was in his 30s.  Predictably, the Democratic candidate had stated that he was pro-choice.  One of the voters interviewed before the election stated that he would vote for an accused of pedophile over a man that he knew would approve the murder of millions of unborn children.  He added that he was a Christian and that the prohibition against abortion was “biblical.” Biblical?

I do not generally consider the Bible as authority for moral or ethical principles.  However, I believe that a substantial majority of evangelical Christians do and that they would agree with the interviewee that scripture condemns abortion.  So if there was scriptural support for a pro-life position, I wanted to find out what those bible passages were.  

I couldn’t find much.  Oh, sure, there’s the 6th commandment, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13 [NRSV]).  But that commandment is not specific as to what constitutes murder.   Surely the commandment did not forbid all killing, as the Old Testament is filled with accounts of battles orchestrated by God himself in which the Hebrews killed thousands of individuals from rival tribes.  And of course there are many rules in the Pentateuch declared by God that called for the death penalty for various infractions, such as incorrigible insubordination of one’s parents.  See Deuteronomy 21:18-21.

But that’s not really the issue.  The real question is whether there is scripture that defines or at least implies that human life begins at conception and that the taking of that life after conception would be equivalent to murder.  I couldn’t find any.

What I did find was language implying the opposite, that abortion is not murder.  The passage is found at Exodus 21:22-25.

When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.  [NRSV]

Based on my reading, what this passage says is that if during the course of a fight someone is harmed, then the penalty is to be an equivalent loss to the person responsible for the harm—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life, etc.  However, if all that happens during the fight is that a pregnant woman is caused to miscarry, then the penalty is not to be death.  Rather, it is to be a fine, based on what the court decides is appropriate.  In other words, causing a miscarriage is not the same as killing a human being, for which the penalty is death.  Is this not stating that a fetus does not have the same legal standing as a living person and is therefore not yet a human being? 

Am I missing something here?  I am willing to be schooled on how scripture treats the issue of abortion, but at least on an initial pass, I could not find scriptural support for a pro-life position.  One more thing:  I am not going to be impressed by poetic passages of scripture that talk about the womb in an indefinite sense, such as Psalm 139:13. 

Having said all that, as I pointed out above, as a skeptic I do not believe that scripture should be relied on as authority for any particular moral proposition.  Scripture may happen to provide good moral guidance. but it is not just because such guidance is stated in scripture but because the guidance stated happens to be good.

More generally, in my view, morality is a function of the relationships between individuals.  It deals with how we treat one another.  It is not proper to say that a rule of conduct is moral simply because one's deity has declared that it should be obeyed.  Rather, the moral status of behavior should be based on an evaluation of the impact that the behavior has on the welfare of our fellow humans.  Thoughtful individuals can disagree about whether behavior is or is not moral in the sense that they can disagree about whether such behavior is beneficial to the human condition.  But that should be the basis for judging the behavior or the rule of conduct underlying it, not because it is a prescription for conduct attributed to a deity.


© 2017 John M. Phillips