It is an interesting exercise to ask a bunch of individuals what they think is currently essentially the most common reason for human mortality. Generally, people provide you with causes resembling cancer, heart disease, or malnutrition. Almost nobody ever comes up with the right answer, which is actually abortion.
According to the Worldometer database, greater than 44.6 million abortions were performed on this planet last 12 months. Given that every of those abortions would have resulted in a death, which means abortion dwarfs all the opposite explanation why human beings died last 12 months.
For example, the second leading type of death – communicable diseases – killed 12.9 million people, cancer killed 8.2 million people, 4.9 million people died of causes related to smoking, 2.4 million people died of alcohol misuse, 1.6 million people died attributable to HIV or AIDS, 1.3 million people died in traffic accidents, 1 million people died due to suicide, and 17,000 people died of hunger.
Also, in accordance with Worldometer, the whole variety of deaths attributable to COVID since 2020 has been 6.9 million.
To put the figures one other way, what the statistics tell us that within the last 12 months some 40% of human deaths were attributable to abortion and overall, over six times more people died due to abortion last 12 months than have thus far died in the complete Covid pandemic since 2020.
Given these figures, and on condition that abortion is a very preventable type of death, one might expect that there could be a worldwide campaign to stop abortion, just as there are worldwide campaigns to stop deaths by communicable diseases, cancer and hunger. In fact, nevertheless, the alternative is true. Although there are bodies that campaign against abortion (most notably the Roman Catholic Church), the bulk view amongst each governments and non-governmental bodies alike is that abortion is something that must be supported.
We can see this, as an example, if we take a look at what is claimed at the web site of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations body liable for healthcare issues. The WHO’s website totally ignores abortion as a reason for death and quite the opposite argues that abortion is an integral a part of the availability of healthcare.
The website declares:
“Access to the very best attainable standard of health, including sexual and reproductive health, is a core human right. The ability to determine if and when to have children, and access to secure, timely, reasonably priced, respectful and person-centred abortion care, including information and post-abortion care, helps to safeguard the health and well-being of girls, girls, their families and their communities.
“Health is a human right, and abortion care is health care. Promoting and protecting access to quality abortion care is important to realize a world where everyone seems to be capable of access the very best standards of sexual and reproductive health services, and reach their full potential.”
What you is not going to find anywhere on the WHO site is any discussion of the indisputable fact that abortion implies that tens of tens of millions of individuals every 12 months won’t ever find a way to succeed in their full potential because they died before they were born. What the WHO supports, even when it doesn’t say so, is a trade-off, the deaths of tens of millions of the unborn as a way to achieve a greater life for individuals who have been born.
In ethics on the whole this sort of trade-off is thought to be unacceptable. For example, it’s thought to be immoral and illegal for folks to kill their children once they’ve been born, even when the parents’ life could be improved because of this. The killing of innocent life (and unborn children are most definitely innocent life) is sort of universally thought to be morally fallacious, full stop.
Why, then, is there such support for abortion? There are three arguments which are normally recommend as to why abortion must be thought to be an exception to the ban on taking innocent life.
The first argument is that an unborn child isn’t actually a separate human being. It is a component of a girl’s body, and a girl has the suitable to determine what she chooses to do along with her own body. The problem with this argument is that we all know medically that a foetus is actually a separate being from its mother.
As one obstetric nurse puts it: “It’s the placenta and umbilical cord which separate the mother from the infant and prove that the foetus was never a part of its mother’s body … The placenta and umbilical cord exist precisely because the infant has a unique and separate circulatory system from the mother and their blood must not intermingle. If something happens, resembling a traumatic injury, that causes their blood to combine, it will possibly cause serious complications. If the foetus weren’t a separate human being but were only a part of its mother’s body, it could not need a placenta and umbilical cord to separate them. It could simply grow inside one among her body cavities like a tumour with none barriers between the 2 to guard each of them.”
The second argument is that the unborn child could have a separate biological existence, however it isn’t a human person since it lacks essential qualities of personhood, resembling self-awareness and self-determination. As the Baptist scholar Francis Beckwith writes in his article ‘Abortion, Bioethics and Personhood’, defenders of this position hold that: “… once a human being, whether born or unborn, acquires a certain function or functions—whether it’s brain waves, rationality, sentience, etc.—it’s then and only then that an individual actually exists. Those who defend these personhood criteria typically make a distinction between ‘being a human’ and ‘being an individual.’ They argue that although foetuses are members of the species homo sapiens, and in that sense are human, they aren’t truly individuals until they fulfil a selected set of personhood criteria.”
However, as Beckwith goes on to argue, this definition of personhood when it comes to the performance of certain function is an inadequate definition of what makes a human being an individual: “Although functional definitions of personhood may tell us some conditions which are sufficient to say that a being is an individual, they aren’t adequate in revealing to us all of the conditions which are sufficient for a selected being to be called an individual. For example, when a human being is asleep, unconscious, and temporarily comatose, she isn’t functioning as an individual as defined by some personhood criteria. Nevertheless, most individuals would reject the notion that a human being isn’t an individual while in any of those states.”
As he goes on to say, the important thing query isn’t whether someone is currently exercising one among the functions that constitute personal existence, but whether or not they are a being that has the natural capability to accomplish that: “what’s crucial morally is the being of an individual, not his or her functioning. A human person doesn’t come into existence when human function arises, but reasonably, a human person is an entity who has the natural inherent capability to present rise to human functions, whether or not those functions are ever attained. And for the reason that unborn human being has this natural inherent capability from the moment it comes into existence, she is an individual so long as she exists.”
The third argument is that even when the unborn child is an individual and so abortion does involve the taking of a human life, this may be justified because a foetus doesn’t possess the identical rights as the lady desiring an abortion. As Mary Williams puts it: “a foetus is usually a human life without having the identical rights as the lady in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is true for her circumstances and her health should routinely trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity within her. Always.”
The problem with this argument is that it’s an ethic of raw power (‘she’s the boss’). A girl has autonomy of motion whereas a foetus doesn’t. According to this argument, a girl has the suitable to finish the lifetime of the kid if that’s what is true for her. The difficulty is that the ‘subsequently’ doesn’t follow. Just because I can end one other person’s life, and it could advantage me to accomplish that, doesn’t mean that I even have the suitable to finish it. For example, it could not be right for me to kill someone to realize an inheritance even when that person was incapacitated due to illness or injury and subsequently couldn’t prevent me from doing so.
Because these arguments don’t work, what follows is that now we have to treat the unborn child as an individual created, like all other individuals, by God in his image and likeness (see Psalm 139:13-18, Genesis 1:26-27) and abortion as an act of unjustified killing in breach of the commandment ‘You shall not kill’ (Exodus 20:13).
What this implies is that Christians should be prepared to rise up and say that abortion is morally fallacious. However, Christians cannot stop there. There are three other things they need to do.
First, they’ve to know the terrible pressures, each social and private, that lead women to consider that abortion is the very best option available to them and do all that they’ll to stop or alleviate them.
Secondly, they need to make other options available. As Nancy Pearcey notes, “the early Christians went beyond simply condemning abortion to providing alternatives – rescuing and adopting children who’ve been abandoned.” Translated into modern-day terms which means Christians should be able to support a mother to bring up her child herself if that is what she wants and is capable of do, or to take steps to be sure that the kid is adopted by a loving family.
Thirdly, they need to support women who’ve had an abortion, a lot of whom may feel terrible regret or guilt over what they’ve done, and to clarify to them that despite what they’ve done God in Christ forgives them and desires to present them a recent start with him. Moreover, although their babies aren’t any longer on this world, they’re secure within the arms of God and in due time they may find a way to be reunited with them in the enjoyment of God’s everlasting kingdom.
