Science and technology are to-day putting tools into our hands with which we are not only manipulating nature, but manipulating man - his body, his emotions, his mind and his reproductive processes. As a result, we are confronted with moral problems our forefathers never had to face, like the birth of test-tube babies, and cloning (a technique for reproducing, by non-sexual means, human beings who have identical genetic codes); and some of the problems they did face, like abortion, are becoming more complicated through the development of medical techniques. We are on the threshold of a world in which human beings may be made to order in any quantity - their sex, their intelligence, their physical and behavioural characteristics all specified in advance - without the need for sexual coupling, without even needing to be nurtured from conception to birth in a mother's womb. We are not quite at that stage yet, but our progress toward it is startlingly rapid.

The progress in these areas is changing our way of life quite radically: it is enlarging dramatically the scope of our ability to influence our fellows; it is also threatening the foundation structures of our life in society, like marriage and the family. What becomes of the family when a young woman may bear a child, without male intervention, to her best friend's great-grandfather by means of artificial insemination with his frozen seed?

The changes we face raise questions even more fundamental than that. When you can manipulate a person's pain and pleasure centres, and even his very powers of perception, by bio-chemical means, you are faced with the question "What is the true nature of man?" If we can manufacture him to any specification we please, what specification shall we choose, and why? And who shall do the choosing?

As always, change presents its most disturbing challenge to faith - and to morals.
To faith: have we taken our life in this world out of God's hands so that there is no-one left we can trust to keep it on the rails?
To morals: what is right and what is wrong in this perplexing whirlpool of new and only half-understood possibilities?

There are no texts in the Bible to tell us whether cloning, for example, is good, bad or indifferent; the question has never arisen before to-day. How shall we find our way?

With these sorts of questions in mind we shall examine some of the moral questions Christians have to face to-day, like abortion, in vitro fertilisation, artificial insemination by a donor, homosexuality and the occult, because they are being debated all over the world.

We may not find such an exercise very much to our taste; it is impossible to remove the offence from some at least of the material with which we must deal, but we have to be clear what it is we are talking about, and to achieve that, language has to be precise; it is no use making what is already a confusing task more confusing by being mealy-mouthed about it. Life is not all nice, and to ignore or neglect its nasty bits when they bear as heavily upon our lives as they do to-day (and they will bear more heavily as time goes on) is simply to bury our heads in the sand. Neither the prophets of the Old Testament nor the Apostles of the New were afraid to address God's people quite explicitly on unpleasant issues like prostitution, homosexuality and child sacrifice, to name only a few; and neither should we. It is a grievous thing to muzzle God's Voice by a cowardly silence.

Our young people - and even our children - simply cannot ignore these things, and we have an obligation to supply them with some Christian input to help guide them. Sexual options, like homosexuality and lesbianism, bi-sexuality and group sex, are already being pressed upon them, whether we like it or not; abortion and in vitro fertilisation, artificial insemination by a donor and surrogate motherhood, are being pressed upon our sons and daughters as real choices, and nothing we think or say or do will make these realities go away. When the Rev. Stewart Robinson preached on some of these issues in his church in Blackburn, Victoria, he took advice from a member of his congregation whether he should risk offending some in his congregation by explaining precisely what abortion and IVF involves; the answer he received was, "For goodness' sake, yes; my children in primary school are coming home and telling me about it!"

We may feel secure in our beliefs ... until our own daughter informs us that she is contemplating an abortion, it may be. Then suddenly everything looks very different, and we are desperate to know how as Christians we should respond to a situation which is now confronting us in our own living rooms. None of us is magically immune from the pressure of unpleasant things merely because we are Christians. The time to get understanding in these areas, therefore, is before they happen, not after ... when personal involvement clouds the issue with such very strong and confusing emotions. We must do preventive medicine. It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, as the Chinese proverb says.

Moreover, since these issues bear directly on what we believe about God and man we simply have to front up to them.

The practise of abortion has assumed huge social proportions. In the United States, abortions are running at the rate of about 1.5 million every year - almost a third of all pregnancies. In fact that is three times the number of combat deaths sustained among U.S. troops in the whole of the second world war. There are more fœtal casualties in Australian clinics and hospitals to-day than there are deaths on our roads.

I aim to suggest relevant Biblical guidelines so we may come at some understanding of the will of God in these areas. Three questions we must address because the answers to them are vital to our understanding of the whole issue.

1. What are we actually doing when we perform an abortion?
2. What is the status of the unborn baby ... the foetus?
3. What does the Bible say that will help us?

I - WHAT IS ABORTION?

It is important first to be quite clear what it is we are talking about. What actually happens when a baby is aborted? How is it done?

Abortion is an act whereby the unborn child is destroyed in the womb and then removed or allowed to be stillborn, or removed from the mother's womb and encouraged thereafter to die. Broadly speaking there are six methods that may be used.

1. Suction

The first is suction, which may be used up to the twelfth week of pregnancy. A tube attached to a powerful suction apparatus (a sort of surgical vacuum cleaner) is inserted into the uterus and the foetus with its placenta is quite simply torn apart limb from limb, and deposited in a jar as so much mangled tissue. The child is, to all intents and purposes, lynched.

2. Dilatation and Curettage

The cervix, or the neck of the uterus, is enlarged so that a curette, a sort of knife-edged spoon, can be inserted and the inner walls of the uterus scraped clean of the foetus embedded in them. The foetus is cut to pieces by this method. Afterwards, the pieces have to be reassembled to make sure that no bits, tiny arms or legs etc., have been missed and remain in the womb where they can cause bleeding or infection. This method, too, may be used only up to the twelfth week; after that it is judged to be unsafe.

These two methods, suction and dilatation and curettage, are by far the most commonly used.

3. Dilatation and Evacuation

A further development of Dilatation and Curettage which can be used up to twenty weeks. Prostaglandins are administered to dilate the cervix; the foetus can then be dismembered and withdrawn.

4. Prostaglandin Chemical Abortion

This is the newest method which in Australia at any rate is gaining ground, in part because it can be used much later in the pregnancy than other methods. It is the injection into the uterus, either by means of a needle through the abdomen or of a tube through the cervix, of chemical substances which produce intense contractions of the uterus, forcibly expelling the growing baby. Normally, because a very premature delivery has been enforced, it will be dead at birth, or it will die very shortly afterwards. If not, the baby is deliberately neglected after it has been born to ensure that it does die, usually of suffocation.

The side effects on the mother, which may be as severe as cardiac arrest, are not yet fully established.

5. Saline Amniocentesis

Salt-poisoning, in other words. By the 16th week of a pregnancy, enough fluid has built up in the amniotic sac - the water-filled cocoon in which the baby grows - to be able to inject salt or glucose solutions into it by means of a large needle inserted through the mother's abdominal wall and the wall of the womb. The baby is poisoned thereby and should die in the womb within an hour. Within a day or two the mother will go into labour and deliver a dead child - an ugly one, too, because its skin has been burned off by the process.

In Australia, this method is on the way out, though in the States it ranks second behind suction abortion.

6. Hysterotomy

This becomes possible after the 14th week. It is the surgical removal of the baby from the mother's womb, like a Cæsarean Section. The infant is brought out alive, but then deliberately neglected so that it will die. There have been cases - I find this almost unbelievable - where the child has stubbornly refused to die, and drastic means have had to be adopted to ensure that it does. This, mercifully, is a method not much used in Australia any more.

7. Dilation and Extraction (D&X) Late Term Abortion

In 1996 the D&X method was propounded Dr David Grundman, the medical doctor of Planned Parenthood Australia, a procedure which can be performed on unborn babies any time between the 13th and 32nd week of pregnancy, and which Dr Grundman applauds because there is "no chance of delivering a live baby." The birth canal is dilated and the baby turned. The abortionist delivers the baby feet first, leaving the head still inside the birth canal. Scissors are inserted into the base of the skull of the live baby and spread to enlarge the hole. The brains are then sucked out with a suction catheter. If this procedure were undertaken after the baby had been fully extracted, of course, it would be regarded as culpable homicide; the doctor would be legally required to do all he can to save the child. In the U.S. the state of Ohio became the first to outlaw the procedure because of "the pain and cruelty experienced by the child.

There may be variations of these six basic methods of abortion (RU486, a method not sanctioned in Australia, uses anti-progesterone to initiate a spontaneous miscarriage); but whatever variations there may be, nothing can take away from the bare, hard facts of the matter: the foetus is destroyed by calculated violence, poisoned to death, or ruthlessly neglected in a way that would invite criminal charges if it happened later in the child's life. There is nothing "nice" or "natural" or "clean" about any of it. And whilst pro-abortionists tell us that it is such a well-understood and controlled practice now, performed with the aid of local or general anæsthetic, that it need occasion no anxiety, and that the risks are minimal, this is simply not true.

The physical risks to the mother are two:
1. Infection which may lead to permanent infertility, or
2. Damage to the uterus so that it has to be surgically removed by hysterectomy. Either way the mother's ability to bear children is comprehensively ended.

The psychological risks, especially those connected with guilt, may be prolonged and severe. "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" is an old proverb we may adapt to: "Abort in haste and repent at leisure." Doctors in Brisbane have told me that these after-effects are not uncommon.

Those are the facts. That is what we are talking about. There is no way in the world you can pretty them up. Abortion is the killing of unborn babies by deliberate violence or calculated cruelty.

II - THE PRINCIPLE at the CENTRE - THE STATUS of the FŒTUS

We may well ask, "How, in the name of all that's decent, are people ever persuaded that there's nothing wrong with it?"

The answer to that lies in the attitude they adopt to the foetus itself. It is not regarded as being truly human. "We're not destroying a human life," the abortionist tells us; "all we're doing is to remove a lump of jelly, a blob of tissue. The foetus is merely a growth in the mother's womb, and may be removed the way a tooth or a tumour is removed."

This raises the basic, vital issue - whether the foetus is to be regarded as a human being. If it is, abortion is murder; if it is not, abortion is merely surgery.

On this one question, the morality of abortion fundamentally rests. It is the question we must chiefly address, therefore.

1. To deal with a lesser point first, one consequence of the notion that the embryo is merely a bit of tissue which is not yet human is the argument many women put forward to justify abortion, to the effect that they have the right to decide what they may do with their own body. "It's my body, so it's my choice," they say; "No-one has the right to dictate to me what I may or may not do with my own body."

The fact is that from the moment of conception, the foetus is not a part of the woman's body. It has a genotype wholly distinct from the mother's from the very instant of conception, and the whole process of gestation, from ovulation to birth, is a sort of prolonged "Expulsion Programme," the thrust of which is the entire physical independence of the developed child. The medical facts are so well established that any woman who uses that excuse for an abortion is proclaiming to the world that she is either stupid or ignorant.

2. The bigger issue is the one debated more often, namely, "When does the embryo become a human person?"

WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE FŒTUS?

Is there a point up to which the human embryo is only a bit of tissue, but from that point on, is to be regarded as a human being? If so, when does that magic moment come? When the infant's heart-beat can sustain its life? When it has a sufficiently developed brain to support self- consciousness? When its growth is far enough advanced for it to survive outside the womb? Or are we to regard it as truly human right "from the off", from the moment of conception itself? And if so, why? ... on what grounds? At what point does the distinctively human life of this child become viable?

Let me go right to what I believe the answer to be. It is not an answer I expect unbelievers to be persuaded by, but I do expect Christians to be; and I think it is absolute and decisive.

Everything depends, I believe, on where you look for the answer.

Many Christians are looking to medical science to supply it. They expect medical research to come up with a final solution to the question, "At what point does human-ness appear." But medical science, even when it is Christians who do it, can't ever supply that answer. And the reason? Medical science cannot go beyond the biological component of embryonic and foetal growth. By definition, no science - which is the study of phenomena - can ever go past phenomena. That means it can never go beyond the boundaries of material (or physical) reality. But the nature of man cannot be defined in purely material terms. He is more than flesh and blood. The nature of man is that he is spirit as well as flesh. And of the two - flesh and spirit - the spirit is prior.

The question to be asked therefore is, "When does the embryo have a spirit?" That is far more to the point than the question, "When does he have a brain?" The embryo's spiritual viability matters more than his merely physical viability.

And here is where the Bible does have the answer we are looking for. The question is: "When does a creature have this quality of spirit? What gives it to him? What is it that makes us a spirit, and not a mere animal organism? What bestows this spiritual quality on us?"

And the answer is - God. Quite simply. For the Christian, there can be no argument about that. Do we live because we are given life by God, or do we not?... do we believe that the life in us is God-created life, or not? And if we do, what sort of life is it that God creates in us? And when?

The answers are plainly given in the Scriptures passages noted at the beginning of this chapter.

"Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," God says to Jeremiah.

"My frame was not hidden from Thee when I was being fashioned in secret ... Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in Thy book were written all the days that were ordained for me when as yet there was not one of them!"

These passages do not refer only to Jeremiah and the psalmist. They express a conviction about the way God regards us all. (If they apply only to the "elect" then we are left with the monstrous notion that only the elect, from birth, have souls!)

A person is a person when GOD so regards him, not when scientists so regard him. If God addresses me, then I am up and running as a human being; when God addresses me, then I am up and running as a human being. Martin Luther used to say, "That man is immortal to whom God speaks, whether in wrath or in mercy." God calls us into being by addressing us, by holding us in being before His face. It is by the exercise of His creative power in the going forth of His Word, and by that alone, that all things come into being - whether it be the stars in their courses or infants in their mothers' wombs. He speaks ... and all things come to be.

You and I have specifically "human being," fundamentally because God conveys that status to us - it is by God's activity, not by biological process merely, that human beings come into existence as human beings, as spirits. It is God who makes us so - not 'nature.' And the Scriptures are not in any doubt at all that that moment has already occurred when conception occurs in the womb.

When therefore we abort a human life, we are hostile in intent toward the will of God for that human life: God has summoned it into life - we are intent on denying it life. We cannot do that except as we defy God. (See Note 1 below)

That is the bottom line in the whole argument.

III - PROBLEMS at the CIRCUMFERENCE : Questions of Compassion

But I have to add a rider to that. It leads many Christians to say that whenever we procure an abortion, we are "playing God."

I am not persuaded by some of the argument that runs along those lines. "We have no right to play God with human life," they say: "to decide who shall live and who shall not. When we do that we arrogate to ourselves a prerogative that belongs only to God." I have sympathy with the argument - I am wholly in accord with the sentiment expressed by it. But it is not strictly true. There are circumstances in which God Himself has made it quite clear that we are at liberty to take human life. "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." (Genesis 9.6) The death penalty for first degree murder has divine sanction, I believe. So it is not strictly true to say that you "play God" whenever you take a human life, regardless of the circumstances.

There are times - or so I understand the Bible - as in holy wars, or capital punishment, when by taking human life, you do not play God: rather you obey Him. That raises other issues, to be sure, which I do not stop to argue now, but I say it because there may well be grounds on which abortion may sometimes be justified. I have not sounded the note of compassion yet, because for the sake of clarity I have tried to keep the discussion so far clinical and succinct. "Critical" abortions are surely justified: that is to say, abortions performed because without them mother or child or both will surely die, as in the case, for example, where a pregnancy is proceeding in the fallopian tubes.

But there are other areas that shade away from those central exception cases, and it is by no means easy to know where to draw the line. It does have to be drawn, though; doctors actually have to draw it. While the rest of us indulge the luxury of arguing about it, they have actually to do it. If a child is going to be born a brainless monster, what should a doctor do? "Not a hard decision," you say? ... then what about a severe spina bifida case? I thank God I am not a doctor and find myself having to decide such issues in real life. I would not presume to stand in judgment on any doctor who chose to abort a child in such circumstances. He needs my sympathy, not my criticism. Have compassion on our doctors, and pray for them. I have a great deal of sympathy, too, with those who would justify abortion following incest or rape ... though I have to say I am not fully persuaded about it.

The decision is usually made on the grounds of the quality of life the child may enjoy or be condemned to endure. But tragically, it seems to me, we are on shaky ground when we try to decide the issue by the quality of life the child, if allowed to live, will enjoy ... tragically, I say, because the decision can be heart-rending. But I seriously question whether we have the means to determine at what point a life falls below a permissible level of "quality" and when it rises above it. John Stott cites a discussion between two doctors. Said one, "About the termination of a pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic, the mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, and the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?" The reply was given quite unhesitatingly: "I'd have terminated the pregnancy." "Then," said the other, "you'd have murdered Beethoven."

Hidden in the very attitude of compassion is a serpent's nest. The serpent's nest is this: if, out of compassion for the possible fate of the unborn, you can destroy a handicapped child before birth, what is to prevent you doing it after birth? And if you can do that, you open a Pandora's Box of simply frightful possibilities ... you can start killing off all sorts of people because for one reason or another somebody happens to regard them as in some way inadequate. As one spina bifida adult, Alison Davis, said, "I can think of few concepts more terrifying than saying that certain people are better off dead, and may therefore be killed for their own good."

What is it that gives quality to life? ... the apparatus we have to live it with? ... or the love we find in it, and bring to it?

But understand this, and understand it well. If we say on these grounds that we have no right to deny life to the handi-apped, then we lay upon ourselves a moral obligation to support them. It is sheer humbug to pontificate self-righteously that we should not deny them life ... and then, when we have insisted they live, do nothing to make their life bearable and meaningful. We must accept the consequences of our decision. If our stand condemns some to live, and we do nothing to give their lives quality, then we are hypocrites. I am glad that my Brisbane congregation had a ministry to handicapped children in the Montrose Crippled Children's home. And for such reasons I served for five years as Chaplain to the Ida Darwin School and Hospital in Cambridge for the physically and mentally handicapped.

IV - THE WIDER CONTEXT

There is a yet wider dimension to the whole issue of abortion which is often neglected. We tend to stand up close to the problem and argue its fine points at close quarters. Certainly we have to do that. But we need also to stand back from it some-what and see it in a wider context.

That wider context is sex, love and the family.

We are dealing here with the question of birth - of the entry into life of new human beings ... and that is what sex, love and the family are all about. As Christians we must address the bigger question: "What way did God intend these things to go together?" The making of a child is not a matter of a half-hour's sexual pleasure. It is a matter of twenty years of constant and responsible nurture of the life we thereby launch into existence. That is why in the Christian understanding of sex, there is no way it can be enjoyed rightly except by a couple who are committed to one another so truly and dependably that together, they accept full responsibility for all the possible consequences of their action. Failure to do so is simply a failure of love. To indulge sexual activity without a willingness for the long term consequences of it is irresponsibility of the most loveless, selfish, and brainless kind.

But if that is true of the birth of children, how much more true must it be of the termination of their birth. There are consequences to that, too, that must be faced by those who undertake it. And that means that
... if abortion is a course that cannot be embarked upon out of love, and
... if it cannot be infused with love, and
... if its consequences cannot be sustained by love,
... then in the final analysis it is an inhuman, a godless, and a wicked thing to do.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Would you consider abortion in the following four situations?

1. There's a preacher and wife who are very, very poor. They already have 14 children. Now she finds out she's pregnant with her 15th. They're living in tremendous poverty. Considering their poverty and the excessive world population, would you consider recommending she get an abortion?

2. The father is sick with sniffles, the mother has TB. They have four children. The 1st is blind, the 2nd is dead, the 3rd is deaf and the 4th has TB. She finds she's pregnant again. Given the extreme situation, would you consider recommending abortion?

3. A white man raped a 13 year old black girl and got her pregnant. If you were her parents, would you consider recommending abortion?

4. A teenage girl is pregnant. She is not married. Her fiancee is not the father of the baby, and he's very upset. Would you consider recommending abortion?

 ___________________________ANSWERS_________________________

If you have answered "yes" in any of these situations:

In the first case, you have just killed John Wesley, one of the great evangelists of the 19th century.
In the second case, you have just killed Beethoven.
In the third case, you have killed Ethel Waters, the great black gospel singer.
If you said yes to the fourth case, you have just declared the murder of Jesus Christ!

Note 1:
To the question, "What then is the case with all the miscarriages women have had, and the aborted babies that have been destroyed?" my answer would very simply be, "I think heaven will be peopled with many "fœtal spirits made perfect." Hebrews 12:23

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