Jamin Bradley

Abortion is an incredibly divisive issue, and it’s typically only talked about in extremes. In this post, I’d like to assist the church in thinking a little more widely and clearly on this important topic.

(1) Like many in the church, I understand that all life is sacred. Every human being is made in the image of God, and when we take care of the image of God in a fetus, we take care of Jesus. But a true pro-life ethic is bigger than this. We are also taking care of Jesus when we take care of the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, and the rest of the least of these. It’s unfair that politics force us to pick and choose which policies will care for Jesus, but that is the case. If I vote for Trump, I might get more abortion laws, but I also get a complete disdain for the stranger among me as they are labeled as rapists, murderers, and pet-eaters. Broken dynamics like this are going to drive some Christians, like me, to look somewhere else for pro-life policies.

(2) To help us have better conversations, we need to further recognize that sometimes abortion is pro-life. If a mother is in a situation where she and her baby are both going to die, abortion becomes the only pro-life solution there is. This is a painstaking decision, but in some cases, there is either abortion to protect the image of God in a person or there’s simply death. There are sketchy grey areas in this topic. If abortion is fully illegal and that’s the end of the story, then we are sometimes promoting death instead of life.

(3) Christians have to stop calling (and viewing) people as baby-murderers. I agree that a fetus is a person, but most pro-choice people do not. Sometimes, it’s helpful to judge people’s actions by their understanding. God considered Noah to be blameless for his generation, which implies that God judged Noah by his cultural context and the thinking provided him. Likewise, Jesus asked God to forgive the people who hung him on a cross, acknowledging that they didn’t know what they were doing.

(4) We have to fight for abortion differently than we do because only 4% of people getting abortions are doing so because they don’t want the baby. The biggest reasons Americans get abortions are because they aren’t financially ready (40%), they have problems with their partners ( 31%), they want to focus on their other children (29%), and they’re afraid they can’t give the baby a good life (12%). As it ends up, it’s the other pro-life policies that I care about that will actually help stop abortions from happening. Christians wanna chop abortion down with a lawnmower. The statistics prove that we need to get to the root of the problem and pull it out of the ground.

While abortion is a political issue, it’s also our issue. If we do a good job of loving the image of God in the people around us, it will bear fruit in loving the unborn. Care for Jesus in the least of these around you, and you should see a decrease in abortion.