Abortion Position

Thoughts on Abortion

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Chris Jamison

08/14/2001

Being anti-abortion isn’t about imposing my Christian will on you, it’s about calling sin sin and murder murder. Abortion is the deliberate ending of a human life, just as if pulling a trigger.

I’ll grant you there can be mitigating circumstances in abortion just as in murder (as in ‘justifiable homicide’). I’m not trying to argue that point. But let’s not gloss over or euphemize what is going on: a living human is being killed.

I don’t believe Christians are ever called on to actually prevent (physically) a non-believer from committing sin. Jesus says ‘evil must come, but woe to them through whom it comes’*. We are called to honor God’s law above man’s. But that (honoring) would apply if the government were forcing us to have an abortion. In this case, we are not being forced into an activity against God’s will. The government is allowing people to choose to perform an activity against God’s will. We are biblically called * to respect and obey government authority, since they get their authority from God.

We are called to proclaim the Gospel * and to rebuke our brothers [and sisters] who are heading to sin*. But we are not called to interfere in the actions of someone determined to commit a sin. Especially if that sin is legal under the government in authority. Note I do not advocate the position that ‘just because something is legal, that makes it moral’. I choose not to commit abortion because I believe it to be wrong. But that doesn’t make it right for me to disallow someone else to commit abortion.

Of course, we can always vote to make abortion illegal, but until we can make it so, we must honor our country’s laws and focus on ministering to the hurt souls. The consequences of abortion are between God and the involved parties. We are not here to pass judgment*.

I imagine this essay disappoints many people since I offer no real resolution of the abortion problem. That’s because abortion isn’t the big problem. Being outside the Father’s will is the big problem. Let’s focus on staying in God’s will and let God handle the details.

We may be called by God out of our comfort zone, but we are never called to leave God’s will. I’m afraid that some Christians, in an effort to pull a wayward soul back into God’s will, venture a little too far out of it themselves (I am thinking here of those who think it righteous to bomb clinics, etc).

03/12/2002

Half a year of perspective after writing this yields not much improvement. I’m not happy with the ending – I need to summarize better. This was the product of a brain dump one morning; written in a single shot. So it’s not so much a coherent argument as an expression of my feeling.

* biblical references (NIV):

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