Regarding the special case of abortion, in which freedom of choice by one party seems to involve doing harm to another, some of you justifiably ask how I can ignore that. Here also I can support freedom of conscience because I do not believe that murder is actually happening, and here is why. (And please either read this to the end, or skip to the last paragraph, to see an extremely important closing argument.)
Remember the simple Christian belief that the body is not the same thing as the person? A body is only a person when a spirit is dwelling in it. I think all Christians can agree that when a person dies, death comes when the spirit departs from the body. We still may show the body reverential respect, as during a funeral, but a father might also say to a child, “That’s not really Grandpa up there. That’s only Grandpa’s body. Grandpa himself is in heaven with Jesus now.” The spirit has gone, and what is left is not a person, but only a reminder of a person.
However, in this case “Grandpa” is dead, so the illustration serves no purpose, right? Well, follow along with me, and now consider the case of a person in a hospital bed who has suffered what doctors call “brain death.” The heart is beating. The lungs are breathing. The internal organs are all working. The body is alive. But the person is no longer there because the spirit is not there. A fully-functional body is not the only thing needed for personhood. So a fully-functioning body inside a womb might not yet be a person. Is it?
It is true that some religious authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, have declared that life begins at the moment of conception. But I am free to search the Scriptures for myself to see whether this is true. And I find that the Bible does not anywhere state the exact moment that life begins. It does say in Psalm 139 that God knows us even from our mother’s womb, but remember that it also says God knew us from before the foundations of the world. God knew in advance about every thing and every person from the moment that He created the universe. He knew each of us, and chose each of us, before the world was ever created, not just from our mother’s womb. In fact, Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.” If I came to be at the moment of conception, these verses say that God knew me before I was conceived. So I don’t see Psalm 139 as defining that personhood begins at conception. Many people believe that before birth a body is being prepared for a person, but that person’s spirit does not enter that body until birth. Let’s consider a common “child’s explanation” which goes something like this:
Somewhere in heaven right now there is an angel waiting to be born as a human. (I know that this is wrong theology; angels and humans are different. But let it go for a moment and just look at the point of the myth.) When that baby is born, the angel slides down from heaven and enters into the baby, and now the baby becomes a person.
As I said, that is incorrect theology. Jesus said that when people die, they become like the angels in heaven. He never said that they turn into angels. Still, the fable does contain one useful element: the fable explains that a baby becomes a person at birth. Before birth, it is a body being prepared to become a person. But as far as the Bible itself is concerned, it simply does not clearly say either way. On the one hand you have the hint in Psalm 139 that an unborn baby might be a person. On the other hand, Numbers chapter 3 hints that even babies don’t count until they are at least a month old, since the Israelites are told to number the Levites by counting every male who was one month old or above. Newborns were not to be counted. Of course, neither were females, but even the males were counted only if they were at least a month old. Why? I don’t know. Oh, I can guess, and I can even make my guess sound persuasive. But it would still be only a guess without any absolute proof from the Bible. And that means that I should follow my own conscience as far as I and my wife are concerned, while letting other people follow their conscience, even if they believe differently than I do.
Now, before you get too angry at that argument, consider the fact that even a writer for The Baptist Press had this to say about the Roe v. Wade ruling, in an editorial published in January of 1973: “. . . if the state laws are now made to conform to the Supreme Court ruling, the decision to obtain an abortion or to bring pregnancy to full term can now be a matter of conscience and deliberate choice rather than one compelled by law. Religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” [Emphasis added. ] Southern Baptists may have changed their official position since then, but I am free to think that they got it right the first time, which I do.