Your abortion was not murder, a biblical defense

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I used to have an abundance of pro-life blog posts on here. I took them down because I no longer think my male opinion carries even the weight of electrons on this blog.

I do consider myself pro-life, not just pro-birth, and believe the church and the government should support not only pregnant mothers but post-natal mothers and children. Please see my post from last year. "policy proposal: pay pregnant women and at home parents". If you are an evangelical woman who has had or is considering an abortion and if wracked with guilt, I'd like to offer a minority report on the biblical exemption for abortion.

We start with Exodus 21. The first eleven verses fall into the category I've written about many times here under the label, "not everything biblical is Christian", meaning these slave laws are awful and not Christ-like at all. Starting at verse 12 though we get to the capital crimes. Again, I'm pro-life so I don't think a Christ follower should be in support of capital punishment either, so I also think these punishments are not christian either. Ironically, kidnapping is a capital crime yet those Western slave holders who were fine with verses 1-11, managed to skip over the equal wickedness of kidnapping of Africans or of whipping your slave to death, but I digress. But when the reader gets to verse 22, the death penalty is not something applicable to causing a miscarriage, AKA, an abortion. The woman's health is the only concern of the text.

Why is that?

I believe it has to do with the other origin story of humanity in Genesis 2. God took dirt and breathed into it and the man came alive. Breath and spirit are the same words in Hebrew and Greek, the languages of the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. Without breath there is no spirit. Without spirit there is no breath. Without breath, we are dirt. It's true at the end of our lives and it's true at our conception. Being knit together in the womb as the 139th Psalm says as the same as having clay being formed into Adam. Without breath, the biblical writers thought we were not human. According to the biblical writer's view of the world, abortion was not murder. Murder is the intentional removal of God's breath from God's creature in the biblical writings. This is why my pro-life stance makes me a pacifist as well. But your abortion did not take God's breath, God's spirit away from a fellow human. Without breath, your fetus did not have the spirit of God.


I'm prolife for all who breathe, who carry the spirit of God. I am not pro-abortion, but I am totally pro-pre and post natal motherhood support. I do not consider my pro-life beliefs based on my religious upbringing to be the standard for anyone else, thus making me part of the pro-choice camp. I'm not even evangelical/fundamentalist anymore, although I still know my Bible inside and out. Dear reader, you may not have the ability to leave your conservative religious community to live out your truth publicly, but I hope this short essay will give you comfort in God's love and understanding of you and your situation.



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