Crucial Reasons Why Abortion Is Evil

It is impossible to escape moral judgments. Even in our post-modern, increasingly secular society, where many believe all truth is relative, we cannot escape making moral judgments. Words loaded with moral meaning appear in the headlines repeatedly. Reporters write about the “redemption” of Tiger Woods or about the evil of school or church shootings and bombings.

Abortion comes down to a moral question. Is it right that any woman has the absolute right to choose to preserve or to kill the life of her child? It is no secret that we are killing children. The pro-abortion movement agreed to that reality a long time ago, and even now is promoting infanticide. Anyone who would say otherwise is being dishonest with the facts.

With those thoughts in mind, here are several crucial reasons why abortion is evil. (My list is not exhaustive.)

1. It destroys the crown jewel of God’s creation, marring His image. God clearly states that, unlike the rest of creation, we are made in His image (the Imago Dei; Genesis 1:26-27). It is for this reason that God demands life for a life when we shed innocent blood (Genesis 9:5-6). When we murder an unborn baby, we destroy God’s divine, intricately woven knitting process of life (Psalm 139:13-16). This is evil.

2. It perverts the beautiful design and purpose of women. God repeatedly paints the act of procreation as a divine blessing (Genesis 1:22, 28; 9:1,7; 17:20; 28:3; 48:4; 1 Samuel 1; Psalm 127:3-5; 128:3; Luke 1; 1 Timothy 2:15). Though all of us, both men and women, experience the effects of a sin-cursed world in work and childbirth (Genesis 3:16-19), God still promises blessing in spite of the pain. It is evil to suggest otherwise.

3. It demands men forfeit their responsibility. “No uterus, no opinion” is the popular slogan used to shame men into silence. However, consider this Twitter post from Lila Rose.

“Ah,” you say, “she has bought into the ideology of white, male oppression. She doesn’t even know it!” Let’s once again turn the tables and expose the fallacy. If you will not listen to the men, and if you will not listen to the women, will you listen to the children? Will you listen to the countless testimonies of children who survived failed abortion attempts? Some live without limbs, some live with life-long disabilities, but they all survived as people made in the image of God. They are people worthy of life and worthy of respect. Will those, who claim “experience” as the ultimate trump card, listen to those who truly can speak from experience?

We cannot dismiss an argument simply because we assume someone speaks from a “hidden motive” (power-hungry males or brain-washed females). I am greatly indebted to Neil Shevi’s insights on this point. How can we discern motives in our sin-cursed world? “By their fruits you will know them,” Jesus said (Matthew 7:16, 20). The fruit of being “pro-choice” is murder. The fruit of women’s health organizations like Planned Parenthood is murder. What evidence do we have? Our evidence is the blood of millions of babies crying out from the ground (Genesis 4:10-11). Men, for the love of the unborn and for the love of your wives, forsake evil and choose life.

4. It targets the disabled and minorities. Margaret Sanger, the racist founder of Planned Parenthood, focused on exterminating specific groups of “degenerate” people within the black population and other groups. Just so I am not accused of being inaccurate, I need to clarify her racism took a back seat to her ruthless secularism. She wanted to eliminate supposed burdens to society, whether they were white or black. Her racism then led her to include large numbers of black people in this category.

But here is where Christianity infuses life-saving truth. Remember the Imago Dei? Every person is made in the image of God. Margaret Sanger’s opinion, or anyone else’s opinion, of who is “degenerate” and who is not does not matter. Every unborn child has equal value because every God-given life has equal value. As the country of Iceland teaches us, the womb is a very, very dangerous place for a baby with Down syndrome. In our society, still racked with the sin of racism, it is a very, very dangerous place for minority babies.

Haven’t we been here before? Haven’t we heard of the word “eugenics” in school somewhere? The selective slaughtering of infants in the womb based on man’s subjective standard is wrong. Christians, of all people, must speak out against the evil of abortion. Our warning cries, or our inexplicable silence, will forever stand in the history books as a testimony for or against Christ’s little ones. Will we stand against evil?

5. It is not an act of ignorance. As I said above, we all know that we are killing children. The “right” of a woman to choose now extends to the realms of infanticide. This is evil.

6. It exalts the self. We are sacrificing children on the altar of self-autonomy (Ezekiel 16:20-21; 20:31; 23:37). Yet God’s law applies equally to all people, genders, and races. All bear his image, the woman with the womb and the baby in the womb. If we claim that a woman is self-autonomous, and can thus choose (or be coerced) to have her child murdered in the womb, then we must extend that argument to others. We have no answer for the rapist’s violations or the serial murder’s violence.

“Choice” is a dangerous privilege. We all have “choices” available to us, but not all choices are equally valid or morally permissible. When it comes to the murder of the unborn, personal autonomy must bow to human sanctity. In the Bible, the book of Judges reveals what it looks like when people do what they want. It repeats this phrase,

In those days there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Judges 17:6 (see Judges 18:1; 19:1; 21:25)

Judges records some of the most graphic, disgusting, reprehensible, and oppressive stories of human depravity in all the Bible. Left to ourselves, we will destroy ourselves. This is evil.

7. It lies about reality. The abortion movement purposefully packages itself as a champion for “women’s health.” “Health care services” replaces murder, “fetus” replaces the infant, and what was once supposed to be “safe, legal and rare” now must have open access on college campuses at the expense of taxpayer money. This is evil.

8. It wipes out current and future generations. Since the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973, Americans have aborted over 50 million babies. Fifty million! Most of us can’t wrap our heads around that number. Here’s a staggering comparison that sobered me. Consider the populations of our 9 largest U.S. cities—New York (8.6 million), Los Angeles (4 million), Chicago (2.7 million), Houston (2.4 million), Phoenix (1.7 million), Philadelphia (1.6 million), San Antonio (1.6 million), San Diego (1.5 million), and Dallas (1.4 million). Now double that amount and you would have enough city-space to hold all the unborn we have slain in the last 46 years. 50 million lives in our generation will never walk among us because of abortion. Every day that number grows larger. We are now actively murdering the next generation. This is evil.

9. It devalues life. Before President George H.W. Bush entered his political career, he served as a U.S. Navy pilot in World War II. The Japanese marveled that, after his plane was shot down, the U.S. Navy sent a rescue submarine into dangerous waters to save one American. We can measure the character of a culture by how much it values a single life. Abortion has devalued life in America, and this is evil.

10. It promotes the culture of death. Physician assisted suicide among the elderly and infanticide, along with abortion, create a ruthless culture of death. The next logical step after devaluing life is to embrace the culture of death. This may be our future, and this is evil.

11. It persecutes the godly. Countless multitudes of godly Christians have been imprisoned and fined for their efforts to oppose the evil of abortion (for an example, see Randy Alcorn’s story, Part 1 and Part 2). This is evil.

Abortion clearly fits in the category of evil. Yet, thank goodness, God can take what others intend for evil against us and use it for good (Genesis 50:20). We need to pray that God would take the evil of abortion and use it for our good and His glory. We need to ask ourselves, “How am I confronting the evil of abortion in a way that God can use for His glory?”

Cameron Pollock currently serves as assistant pastor of youth and music at First Baptist Church of Lebanon, PA. He blogs at Worship as a Way of Life. We publish his material by permission.