Personhood of the Unborn

The question the appropriateness of legislating Christian morality in a non-Christian, secular society such as ours.  What is happening instead,  however,   non-Christian morality is being patently legislated upon Christians.   A vivid example is abortion on-demand, which is and has been for quite a while now the law of our land.  Abortion on-demand is morally, biblically, sociologically and scientifically wrong. It is an affront to God's law (“Thou shalt not murder”) and, from a human rights standpoint, a violation of the right to life of pre-born children.  

 What drives my view on this?  Three things:

   ·   First and foremost is my biblical worldview:

Psalm 139

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully

and wonderfully made. 

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

¹⁵My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

¹⁶ Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. 

In your book were written all the days

that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

·   Secondly, scientifically we know that a human being’s unique genetic code is established at the moment of conception; therefore, conception is both reasonably and scientifically the beginning of an individual person. (What the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision functionally did was declare the unborn child not a person.) 

·   Finally, sociologically the abortion issue is enmeshed in the half-century old sexual revolution and the resulting liberalization of sexuality.  This has been the major contributor to the deterioration of the indispensable building block of any healthy society which is the healthy, intact, nuclear family.  It seems to me that God knew what He was doing when He established marriage, family and His boundaries around human sexuality. 

Simply stated, the value and sacredness of the life of the unborn child needs to be recognized in the decision-making on the termination of a pregnancy.  None of this negates the rights of the mother, but, at least for me, places it all in a Godly, scientific and sociologically healthy perspective. Christians, like everyone else, have a voice in asserting this and helping to chart a morally proper direction for this country on abortion.  We, as a church, need to not be silent on this issue.  Our bishops and many in the ACNA have definitely not been.

By the way, I struggle with this strange notion of “independent viability” of the unborn child as a definition of personhood.  That could equally be applied to when a child is weened, or even later when they can provide food and shelter for themselves.  This makes a strange argument!