Abortion
The upcoming Presidential election has put the topic of abortion back on the front burner for many people. Recently on my Facebook page I put that I was praying about the upcoming election and asking God for discernment about whom to vote for in November. I was immediately sent a question – how could you even think of voting for a person who supports abortion? I am not a one issue voter, but having said that, abortion is a very important moral and religious question in this upcoming election. Roe v. Wade is possibly on the line. The Supreme Court is on the line.
What are your views on Abortion? Will your view on this one issue impact your voting in November? Does Bristol Palin’s pregnancy enter into your thinking at all?
Here are some Scriptures to think about as you reply to this post.
If there is no major injury to the woman or the baby – there is still a fine – but if there is serious injury – and abortion would be a serious injury – there would be like kind toward the offender.
Exodus 21:22-25 – 22 “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
Before Jeremiah was even conceived God had a plan for his life. The Scriptures suggest that God has a plan for all of us – even before we are conceived. How many times have we thwarted God’s plan by aborting a child?
Jeremiah 1:5 – Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
I know this is a heated subject for some – keep your thoughts honest yet not inflammatory. Show your heart’s concern without challenging another person’s or parties’ faith or beliefs.
Ray McDonald's Blog 
Which of the following would you consider aborting? Their circumstances meet the secular requirements for sure.1. There’s a preacher and wife who are very, very, poor. They already have 14 kids. 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 syphilis, the mother has TB. They have 4 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 she got pregnant. If you were her parents, would you consider recommending abortion?4. A teenage girl is pregnant. She’s 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 and the founder of the Methodist Church.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!
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Abortion is murder. We know that. The sin is between God and the sinner. I think we know that as well. There is only One who can judge. I disagree with those who say they could never vote for Barack Obama because he “supports abortion.” I don’t believe he supports it. I believe what he said was that he has no right to impose his own religious beliefs about when life begins on others who have different beliefs. I don’t believe Barack Obama supports abortion, I believe he trusts in the free will that God gave each one of us knowing that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and hoping that through being our brothers and sisters’ keepers we might love them enough to help them avoid these bad choices called sin.I think Barack Obama has the right approach because no one but God has the right to judge our decisions. As Christians, I believe it is our duty to make it so safe and comforting for a mother to have an unexpected or unwanted child that she chooses life and not death. We are blessed in our family with a child because his mother, our niece, chose life and not death for him. As soon as we knew of his existence, we called our niece and told her if she was considering adoption, to please consider us. I had always wanted four children–two boys and two girls. We didn’t know what gender Isaiah would be, but God chose to bless us and perfect our family. I tell this story as an encouragement for women who are facing hard choices, for parents-in-waiting thinking about adoption, and for those thinking about the vote in November. God gave each of us a free will to make these choices. That doesn’t make each choice morally right, but it also doesn’t allow us to be judge and jury. I can truly say that I wouldn’t consider aborting any of the children you mentioned in your comment. But that’s me. I have a personal relationship with Christ, I’m blessed with the means to care for a child, a husband to help raise it, a supportive family, etc. The decision is not always so simple to the woman who considers and may unfortunately have an abortion. Even she can be restored to Christ and God may use her to prevent other deaths in the future.I’m off my soapbox now….I think! :-)By the way, I think McCain’s a good person on the whole, too. The question is, what vision will each candidate present to the American people and which candidate will engender the environment in his administration that will lead our great nation to higher heights?
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I firstly find it ironic that the party/ideology who usually wants less government in the lives of citizens wants to then have government tell people what to do. and vice-versa for the other party/ideology. If the two parties would just switch their views on such a topic, it’d make being a democrat much easier. LOL but I digress.I don’t think the last comment addresses the breadth of the abortion issue. I’m glad it talked about rape. But there was none that talked about a pregnancy that would injure the mother. But then you could point to Jabez ;DI, personally am Pro-Choice in that I think the government shouldn’t have a say on what one does, but I am Pro-Life in that I believe Psalm 139:16 and how God sees our unformed bodies and knows us.I think that if God gave us choice from the beginning, then no man or human institution should take that choice away but put things in place that points us in the right direction. I’d write out my practical solution but I have to save it for my own Presidential Election come 2036 LOL but I can talk about it privately.It’s a big topic, but it’s too early for me to decide if I’ll change my vote just because of it. I know that I’d rather vote independent or write-in than jump blue to red though 😀
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I think it boils down to when you think a life is a life.For me, I believe God new us in the womb, after all, that is what he said. This means we have a soul… IN the womb.That being said, why is it not the lawmakers job to enforce murder inside the womb, but is is their job to enforce it outside the womb.If a soul dies, murder has been committed and the practice of this needs to be stopped.Brad Albert
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I feel that abortion is murder. It is ironic that, when I am pregnant, I am “having a baby”, but abortion supporters talk about ending an “unwanted pregnancy” when someone is considering an abortion. I have seen pictures of children shortly after conception, and they look like miniature human beings. By the time some of these girls are aborting their babies, the heartbeat can already be heard!I feel that abortion is just a “convenience” to try to hide a person’s sin from society. Because, as my dad said to me a long time ago, “You can go out and have sex all you want. When the guy’s done, he just has to pull his pants up and no one knows what he’s been up to; when the girl’s done, she wears it out in front of her for 9 months for everyone to see and everyone knows what she has been doing.”
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As one who has seen those beating heartbeats two weeks after conception, I must say life begins at conception. As other posters have mentioned, the Bible says God knew us before we were born, knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. If we believe the government has an obligation to protect people in general (military, police, fire/rescue, building codes, product safety, laws regarding criminal behavior from theft to assault to murder, welfare, child protection, traffic laws, food safety, etc.) how can we not protect those who are absolutely the most vulnerable? Would you tell someone, “I personally wouldn’t drink and drive, but I won’t tell you not to?” Or “Killing someone over a pair of shoes is wrong, but who am I to tell you so”?I recognize that the issues faced by a girl or woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy are complex. Does that make killing someone ELSE correct? The only exception I can see is if the LIFE of the mother is in danger. “Health” is too broadly defined for me to accept that as an excuse. And for rape and incest, as horrific as those are, for what other crime to we kill the children of the perpetrator?But being pro-life involves much more than just declaring abortion to be wrong. How do we encourage a girl or woman to allow her baby to live? How do we influence people’s choices earlier in the process prevent such unwanted pregnancies to begin with? How do we care for the poor and weak who are already born?When it comes to voting, we must weigh all of a candidate’s views, and decide where our conscience leads us. I cannot agree with Barack Obama’s refusal to put any limitations on abortion. I have great respect for Sarah Palin’s examples of living what she believes. But what about other issues? I don’t know whether it’s the government’s responsibility to feed the poor where churches fail to do so. Do we choose rule of law or leniency with illegal immigrants (and can’t we find a way to blend those)? It would be much easier to BE a one-issue voter!Molly Holloway
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I'm Pro-choice. With that said, I'm not going to argue about the responses to the initial questions raised or against the word of the Bible. But Ive always viewed the reproduction process in that any two heterosexual persons have the ability to create a new life. But without those two persons being committed in a loving long-term plan to be reasonable child rearing individuals, I then question the benefit of producing offspring. In such a scenario, it takes a "loving, supportive, & yes in this life, a better than average financial village" to raise an offspring to prosper. I'm sure life is full of wonderful stories of persons who have far exceeded from that in which they were created from, on the same page I suspect there is large volume of tragedy and life-long generational not-so-wonderful stories as well. I'm being bluntly honest here, I'm not as grateful of life in general, even for my own life, so I've always viewed things from the perspective that, yes I'm here now, but if I weren't I wouldn't have known otherwise. Then again I have not reproduced life myself, which may well give me a different perspective.JTG
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By last comment I meant the “Choose which one to abort” comment. Not Nicole’s comment. I agreed with that 100%. I will loosely take Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into consideration only because McCain and Palin don’t support school sex-ed programs and only supports abstinence only education.Another topic which if handled correctly would make the abortion issue easier to deal with.
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May I suggest that the discussion shouldn’t center on what we think, what we feel or what we have experienced. It must revolve around what the Bible says on this issue.If we do not stay with the Bible on this issue, we will not stay on it in other issues. The truths of the Bible are primary and go before our feelings, thought or experience.Are there Biblical passages that suggest we can abort life? Or that life isn’t until birth? Or anything that supports abortion?
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If I may add one more comment on experience… Before I became a Christian I had an abortion when I was 16. If it weren’t so readily available and my science teacher weren’t so ready to tell me where to go to get one, I am absolutely sure this tragedy would not have happened. Is it really such a great idea to leave this education up to a group of people who are overwelmingly liberal? I sure wish the government would have made the decision so that at the tender age of 16 I wouldn’t have had to.
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> Are there Biblical passages that > suggest we can abort life? Meaning after birth? A claim with a Biblical basis can be made for capital punishment, but not for abortion.> Or that life isn't until birth? > Or anything that supports abortion?None whatsoever.We can not let the most pro-abortion candidate ever, Barack Obama, become president. It is up to us as Christians to see to it that he does not. (I am hardly a single issue voter and this is certainly not the only reason we must vote against him).
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I don’t think the Exodus 22 verse is describing abortion. It states if two men are fighting and they hurt a pregnant woman. The main person being hurt is the woman. Amplified and KJV read similarly saying “if the woman miscarries and there are no further injuries [then they will be fined]” meaning the miscarriage isn’t the bigger deal. The woman’s life is. The men can only get fined for the miscarriage. If the woman dies, the men die. Ecclesiastes 6:3 talks about the man who has 100 kids but is not happy. It says a stillborn child is better off than he. We could say “That means change your perspective on life” or it could mean a stillborn is better off than a child that is born into an unloving home or an unloving orphanage or given to unloving foster care/adoption? I think since it’s harder to accept we don’t consider it.I’d like to think that Jesus Christ is the hope and response to Ecclesiastes thus man then has purpose and so does unborn life. However, there are no explicit commands against abortion which is why the debate continues.I think the only verse that merits anti-abortion is Psalm 139. If we believe that all life is knit together by God Himself and everyone is born sinful/purposeless, but has the chance to find hope in Jesus (A Wesleyan view) then of course abortion is wrong. But just like some Christians believe (5-Point Calvinists I think), there are only so many destined for heaven and the rest destined for hell, someone could then ask, “What’s the point?” and we’re back to Eccl.I however believe all can receive the grace of Christ. [If I’m lacking on my Wesleyan v Calvinist theology, I’d love correction]
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