The Sanctity of Human Life
PETER W. TEAGUE
Saturday, January 22, 2022: the 49th anniversary of the controversial landmark Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, making abortion on demand legal in all 50 states. This infamous decision opened the door to what has been termed the American Holocaust, wherein over 63 million infants yet unborn have perished in the United States.
In 2019, one year alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported about 630,000 abortions in the United States. The report also showed about 18 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. ended in abortion. Your eyes may glaze over when you hear such numbers, but when we cite statistics, it’s important we bear in mind each number is a human life. That is to say, in 2019, 630,000 unborn children suffered dreadful pain in their mother’s womb and lost their basic human rights endowed by God to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That computes to over 3,300 babies a day who lose their life; every 30 seconds, one unsuspecting human life is destroyed. The number of children aborted each year nearly equals the number of American deaths in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars combined.
No matter what statistic you read, it is too many.
Since Roe v. Wade, it is legal in the United States to have an abortion through the ninth month of pregnancy. This is mind-boggling, considering what we now know about the development of a baby at 16 weeks:
The body is fully formed, the fingers and toes have fingerprints and nails.
Baby is about 5 inches long and weighs about 3 ounces, about the size of a large avocado.
The baby is moving about: may grasp for the umbilical cord, suck its thumb, and is capable of making facial expressions and kicking at the amniotic sac.
The heart and circulatory system and the urinary tract are fully functioning, and the blood is pumping through their tiny veins.
The baby is inhaling and exhaling the amniotic fluid through the lungs.
The eyes are in the proper position, and the baby can see straight ahead and blink his/her eyelids.
The genitals have formed. In the case of a girl, the uterus has already developed, and the ovaries are in the proper place.
Despite the evidence that the life inside a woman’s womb is a fully developing human being, pro-abortion activists continue to propagate the idea that abortion is primarily a matter of sexual and reproductive health and rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) goes so far as to provide a “handy reference guide” with the following “quick facts” should the subject of abortion come up at your dinner table:
Abortion is overwhelmingly safe
The right to abortion is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
Abortion is common. One in four women who are able to get pregnant will have an abortion at some point.
Abortion is essential health care, a constitutional right, and a human right.
These dehumanizing claims are picked up and repeated over and over by the media and have become the widely accepted narrative surrounding abortion. So I would just like to take a moment to briefly respond to each of these talking points.
First, abortion is overwhelmingly safe.
In their book, Unsafe, Americans United for Life researchers investigate the reality of actual conditions in abortion businesses. Their documented findings report more than 300 facilities in 39 states were cited for more than 2,400 health and safety deficiencies between 2008 and 2020, including hundreds of significant violations of state laws intended to ensure health and safety of the patient. Complications from abortion exist, including mental health issues, damage to reproductive organs, incomplete removal of the remains of the aborted baby, thrombotic embolisms, cardiac or cardiovascular events that can lead to death.
This claim to safety is a feeble attempt to soften the brutal reality of abortion: No matter how safe a procedure or abortion facility might be, every abortion ends with an empty womb and the death of an unborn child. Any procedure that destroys life cannot be considered safe. By definition, abortion is always fatal for at least one party involved.
Secondly: The right to abortion is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
The Guttmacher Institute reports that if Roe is overturned or fundamentally weakened, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion. The Pew Forum reports currently, 59 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39 percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases. That is hardly overwhelming support.
Third: Abortion is common. One in four women who are able to get pregnant will have an abortion at some point.
This is part of their agenda to normalize the practice of abortion and incorporate it into the fabric of our lives. When any behavior or activity becomes commonplace in our culture, however evil it may be, it becomes easier and easier to accept in our collective soul.
Fourth: Abortion is essential health care, a constitutional right, and a human right.
Women seeking abortions overwhelmingly report they are not doing so for “healthcare” reasons. In a 2013 survey, only 6 percent cited any concern for their own health among the reasons for the abortion.
Most abortions are chosen for reasons related to factors such as finances or personal relationships. Many fear the baby would interfere with education or career, or that the baby would make it difficult to care for other dependent children. Most abortions are not done to save the life of a mother.
Framing the debate as a concern for human rights engenders support, but ironically, this same concern is not afforded to the infants who are aborted each year. Even when abortion supporters acknowledge a fetus is a human life with human rights, the baby’s rights end when they threaten the mother’s rights. As one supporter writes, “…the complicated reality in which we live is that all life is not equal… [A] fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss.” Once we acknowledge that the unborn are human beings, the question of their right to live should be settled, regardless of how or when they were conceived.
As to constitutional right, Roe erroneously concludes that the word ‘person’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the unborn, therefore the guarantees of equal protection and due process are not extended to pre-born persons. In so doing, the Court overturned laws protecting human life in all fifty states and nullified the will of an American democratic majority that recognized pre-born human children as worthy of legal protection.
This is a crucial issue in the abortion controversy. Is a pre-born baby a person? The Roe decision ruled a fetus under three months as not viable – unable to exist on its own - a nonperson.
Not everyone agrees, nor does the evidence support this conclusion. The University of Pennsylvania, the Mayo Clinic (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and eight ob-gyn text books agree that life begins at conception. And thanks to ultrasound technology, people are changing their minds about life within the womb.
“Probably nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about the fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something that I have an easy answer on how to cure.”-- Harrison Hickman, pollster for the National Abortion Rights Action League.
The late Dr. Noel Smith had this to say about the person/nonperson argument:
“If a woman is pregnant, it is because life is developing into a person in her womb. If the life of a person is not developing in her womb, she is not pregnant.
The first three months of pregnancy is as much an integral part of the person as the last six months. Without the first three months, there can be no last six months. What is it the doctors and nurses are destroying when they are performing an abortion on a woman? It is life. Human life.”
A denominational board of social concerns, bowing to the pressure of today’s “liberated” sexual attitudes, calls the fetus “tissue with potentiality.” But “fetus” is just Latin for “baby.”
Like Nazi Germany with the Jews, this word play is a conscious effort to depersonalize and dehumanize unborn babies, to semantically destroy them before physically destroying them.
Abortion is masked in euphemism. Some refer to the fetus as P.O.C., “product of conception.” Others call babies biological accidents.
Is that all it is?
When Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote the Supreme Court’s January 1973 decision, he said that a person’s philosophy, experiences, religious training, and attitudes toward life and the family will influence and color one’s thinking and conclusions concerning abortion.
But that should not be so! Any decision, regardless of how wise or how foolish, how logical or illogical, based on man’s reasoning alone is likely to be wrong.
Consider the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857. Dred Scott was a slave of an army surgeon who sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived in a free state and a free territory for a prolonged period of time. Finally, after eleven years, his case reached the Supreme Court.
The verdict was a bombshell. In part, the Court ruled that as a black man, Scott was excluded from United States citizenship and could not, therefore, bring suit. According to the opinion of the Court, African-Americans had not been part of the "sovereign people" who made the Constitution.
The Supreme Court is to be respected, but even the highest court in the land can get it wrong when they act on reasoning alone.
The Declaration of Independence provides the philosophical foundation upon which our nation is founded. It eloquently states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The right to “Life” is purposely listed first, because without life, no other rights have meaning. We cannot long survive as a free nation when some citizens have the power to decide whether other citizens or classes of citizens are fit to live.
We cannot diminish the value of any category of human life without diminishing the value of all human life.
Almost 50 years later, abortion continues to be on the hot burner culturally, politically and legislatively. In 2021, over 20 states passed almost 100 pro-life laws and resolutions. Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization, calls this past year “the worst year for abortion rights in almost half a century.” The Texas Heartbeat Act, which limits abortions after the baby’s heartbeat is detectable, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is poised to limit and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, have presented their cases before the Supreme Court and currently wait a decision sometime in 2022. Protests as well as prayer vigils were happening in the hundreds of thousands as these cases went before the court. This is a battle that will not go away.
But is this a battle only to be fought legislatively? Are the political, cultural and intellectual elites the only deciding voices? I ask you today, have you personally dealt with the sanctity and dignity of all human life from conception to its natural end?
With so many voices from our country’s highest courts to the conversations at your dinner table, we sense the confusion of our times. As Steve Nichols writes, “We are awash in a sea of moral uncertainty and relativist ethics…You could say we lost our moral compass.” But God has given us His Word, which is forever and firmly fixed in the heavens (Psalm 119:89), forever establishing and guiding us in His paths of righteousness. God is the source of all truth and according to His Word, He holds all life to be sacred. So let our faith and the word of God as revealed through the Bible be our guide.
Scripture:
Genesis 1:26-31
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created Him; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
God saw all that he had made and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Psalm 139: 13-16
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
These verses tell us that God formed that child in a mother’s womb, and that child is the subject and object of God’s love and concern. This is a person—made in the image of God. Listen to Jeremiah 1:5:
Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Psalm 127:3
Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him.
Isaiah 49:1, 5
Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I was born the Lord called me; from my birth He has made mention of my name. And now the Lord says—he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength.
Job 33:4
The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
Job 31:15
(Speaking of his manservant and maidservant) Did not He who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?
Matthew 18:6-7
But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. “Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!”
Four Logical Facts that Emerge from the Scriptures: (should the subject ever arise at your dinner table)
First: God sets apart human life as unique and valuable since it bears His image.
Second: Because this is true, God commands that all human life be preserved and protected.
English writer Malcom Muggeridge said, “…However low it flickers or fiercely burns, it is still a Divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives ever so humane and enlightened.”
Third: Human life begins within the womb, where God personally and sovereignly superintends the development and maturation of the fetus before birth.
Fourth: Since it is God’s will that every child’s life be protected after birth, it is certainly His will that such protection apply to the child in his or her prenatal state.
Proverbs 16:17 says God hates the shedding of innocent blood! Who is more innocent than an unborn child?
When the Virgin Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth with the news of her supernatural pregnancy, Luke 1:44 says that the baby leaped for joy in Elizabeth’s womb. The Greek word “brephos” for “baby” can mean “unborn child, embryo, fetus, a newborn child, an infant, a babe.”
No distinction is made in the Greek New Testament between an unborn baby and a newborn; only one term is used.
Luke doesn’t write “tissue with potential, a product of conception, or a biological accident,” but a baby.
The very same word used elsewhere in Scripture referring to infants and young children.
Fetus is a modern, technical term for life in the womb; God calls that life a baby, already known, loved, and cared for by Him.
It’s been 49 years since the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion on demand throughout the full nine months of pregnancy. Has the church done enough? Have I done enough?
We need to pray.
Know the facts. So many voices spin facts and stories to serve their own agenda.
Know what God says about the sanctity and dignity of all life from conception to its natural end.
Be active in the fight. Become involved in your church’s outreach to women in crisis pregnancies. Support, pray for and become active in pro-life organizations helping women with unplanned pregnancies to bring their child to life. Be active with compassion and compelled by love.
Stand firm. The first chapter in Exodus contains the record of two midwives who refused to obey the Egyptian king’s command to kill all baby boys born to Hebrew women. In so doing, Moses was born and lived to lead God’s people out of captivity. The midwives feared God more than they feared man. God help us from this day on to take a stand!
Never, never will we desist till we . . . extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic [slavery], of which our posterity, looking back to the history of those enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonor to this country.
—William Wilberforce, 1791 speech, House of Commons
*Peter W. Teague serves on the IACE Board of Directors. Following more than two decades of service as president of Lancaster Bible College, he was named president emeritus.