Abortion as Murder

Let's call it a 'Decalogue Rule'

Since the term 'Absolute Rule' as something different to a blanket rule has been hijacked and made to mean 'blanket rule' I need a new word for a rule that brooks no disobedience where it applies, but may not apply in every conceivable situation. So let's try this one: the Ten Commandments are commonly known as the Decalogue (Ten Words) – so I'll coin the tern “Decalogue Rule” and I will start with our current project of applying “No Murdering” to abortion begin to work out how a Decalogue Rule operates.

Looking at the Decalogue Rule: No Murdering.

First what is its extent as far life-forms are concerned

To put it another way, are we forbidden from killing any and every form of life.

No! Definitely not. Even a quick reading of the first dozen chapters of Genesis leaves no room for doubt that the big moral divide is between humans and animals. By chapter 9 this has crystallised into :

“The beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air … will be food for you.

So we humans are not out of step with the rest of the natural world in this regard. We too can kill animals for food.

Genesis 9 also institutes a ceremonial pouring out of the blood of animals killed for food – it seems to be a simple but dramatic acknowledgement that the animal's life belongs to God and the hunter or herdsman has only killed “under licence” so to speak.

I believe this 'licence to kill' regarding animals extends beyond food to what is necessary for our beneficial management of the earth – exterminating locusts, rodents and feral pests for instance. But I shall not pursue that here.

Secondly what is the extent as far as human life is concerned?

Once we have established that 'No Murdering' is about killing humans, the next logical step is to establish which humans.

The passage quoted from Genesis 9 continues “ … Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God has God made man.”

So in contrast to the situation with animals, no licence is given for one human being to terminate the life of another whose continued existence is inconvenient. God reserves that permission to himself. So serious is God about not giving humans licence to wantonly kill other humans that he orders the death penalty (a killing that then is specifically “licensed”) for murderers.

To me this seems to say that all life belongs to God, who alone has the absolute moral right to kill. Humans are permitted to kill animals “under licence”. Humans are precisely not licensed to kill each other at at will.

Us humans being what we are, we will naturally want to reduce this scope. We will be happy for it to prohibit killing “one of us” but not “one of them”. “No murdering other members of our tribe; but members of the next tribe are fair game”. “No murdering people of our religion; but killing heretics and unbelievers is OK (or even a sacred duty)”. “Look after your comrades, but death to the aristocrats” and so forth.

So a Nazi SS trooper might have said “Jews are sub-human so this is not murder” as he herded whole families into the gas chambers. But ironically, the Nazi regime – the very epitome of evil - was still sufficiently aware that they really had committed murder to try to obliterate all evidence of their death camps.

Uncle Tom's Cabin made its readers empathise with black slaves as human beings. Once that mental jump had been made our treatment of them appeared before us for precisely what it was.

My point is that historically the human tendency has been to try to excuse a whole swath of killings by claiming that the human life in question falls outside the scope of the command. It was always a lie and one later generations generally scornfully condemned.

In the abortion debate this particular evasion of the command has been at the forefront.

Academic pro-abortion moralists tried to get away from “human” to some qualification like “person-hood”. “A foetus is undoubtedly at all stages human but it is not, in the moral sense, a person” they said. Indeed one noted philosopher was quite happy to advocate killing unwanted children on a similar pretext. This whole line of argument was never more than a poor ruse by so-called philosophers who while posing as fearless thinkers were really only propagandists for the mores of their social group.

In my earlier works I engaged with their arguments as though they were worthy of serious debate. Not now. I see now that heir ideas were and are just pathetic excuses for the bad morals of their group.

Pro-abortion polemicists of the more populist variety consistently play the “its my body” card to imply the life they are terminating is not a human life. Once again one only has to stop shouting this mantra and think for a moment to see the inescapable truth that it is complete rubbish! Of course it is a human life – with DNA from a mother and a father what else could it be. And since the whole point of abortion is to avoid giving birth to a live baby it is utterly perverse to claim it is only “my body”.

A foetus is human rather than animal therefore killing a foetus is within the extent of this Decalogue Rule

Thirdly, does the Rule prohibit killing in all situations

.

No. The rule does not prohibit killing in all circumstances. We dealt with this in an earlier post, but to re-cap:

Capital punishment is specifically exempt.

War is in general specifically exempt. Killing your enemy in battle was never considered murder.

Protection of self or loved ones from real threat of death. eg. Killing a thief is murder; but killing the intruder during a home invasion in the darkness is not. (Exodus 22.2)

So in the case where an abortion is necessary to save the mother's life the answer is simply that this is a situation where taking human life is not prohibited.

Fourthly, is there a roughly similar situation the Rule is specifically declared to cover

The paradigm case is set out in Exodus 21:14, where after excluding accidental killing the text cites “... but if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately” as murder. This would seem to cover the most common case of modern abortion. However to be certain let us look further.

We would not expect to find direct reference to modern abortion practice. The reason is blindingly obvious once you think about it: children were immensely valued. Think about the conversations recorded between Abram and God about Abram's longing for a child. Or Rachel's desperation at being childless. An outstanding one is Tamar, widowed without children she resorts to pretending to be a prostitute to get pregnant by dead husbands' father and he declares “She is more righteous than I”. Having children was hugely important.

Socially children were important, economically they werevital – there was no social service – if you did not have children to support you in your old age you starved. Killing one's unborn child would have been so absurd as to be totally incomprehensible in Biblical times. Even prostitutes valued their children – remember Solomon's display of wisdom settling a case where two prostitutes each claimed the same baby as theirs.

So to make anything of an absence of rulings about abortion as we know it in the Bible would be so stupid as to be simply perverse.

But were there predicaments or actions which we could legitimately use by inference? Indeed yes. Here are just two examples:

1. King David after he committed adultery with Bathsheeba. The problem was that she became pregnant. Her husband Uriah was away at the war against the Ammonites.

David tried recalling Uriah on a pretext and scheming to get him to go home and have sex with his wife so the child could be passed off as his and the adultery concealed.

When that failed David had Uriah placed in the most dangerous position in an attack so that he was conveniently killed by the enemy.

We know what God thought about this because the Bible records the prophet Nathan confronting David.

2 Samuel 12 records Nathan's beguiling story to David about a rich man taking the pet lamb of a poor man …. when David's anger is engaged and he bursts out: “This man deserves to die!” Nathan springs his trap with: “You are the man!” …. “You killed Uriah with the sword of the Ammonites”

David was in a position of even greater temptation than most women seeking abortions. The child was going cause him great political damage by exposing his adultery as well as placing Bathsheeba at great risk. Many men were dying in the war, why not this one in particular? All David's problems would go away.

The “why not” was because it was murder.

In actual fact it did not make David's problems go away – it multiplied them – and three thousand years later we are still talking about his crime. We should pause and consider that while many women seek an abortion thinking it will make their problems go away they may be just as mistaken as David was about the solution to his problems.

2. Human Sacrifices. This was part of Ancient Near East culture, but was not meant to be part of the religion of ancient Israel. However it did creep into popular worship – particularly of the pagan god Molech. The parallel to abortion is that children were being killed on the supposition that this was necessary for economic benefit – perhaps in people's distorted thinking even necessary for survival by ensuring abundant crops. We should not forget that the common people lived very close to the prospect of starvation if crops failed.

So the supposed benefits of sacrificing children to Molech were every bit as great if not greater than the supposed benefits of the vast majority of modern abortions.

Jeremiah 7:20ff “The people of Judah have done great evil in my eyes, declares the Lord … They have built the high places of Topheth in the valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire – something I did not command nor did it enter my mind!”

2 Kings 23:10 “(King Josiah) desecrated Topheth, which was in the valley of Ben Hinnom so that no-one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.”

Child sacrifices are condemned by the Bible, and condemned for their own evilness as well as being part of pagan practices. If anyone tries to get around this by maintaining that the condemnation is just of a pagan practice one could say of modern abortion practice that it too is part of the forbidden worship of idols – in our case we are sacrificing our unborn children to the idols and false gods of our culture!

Conclusion:

If we leave aside the tiny proportion of abortions where there is real risk to the mothers life – because in that case taking another human life to save hers is justified; If we also leave aside the “hard cases” because there is at least argument for making an exception; we are left with this:

over 96% of current abortions are what the Bible calls “murder”.

As I wrote at the beginning of this section, the only reason I dare say this is because I can put it side-by-side with a message of redemption!

There is redemption, there is forgiveness, there is healing, there is an antidote for guilt, there are new beginnings.

BUT

there is also the moral necessity to warn people against taking this path.

THAT

is precisely where modern moralists, radical feminists, and preachers who care more for what people think than what God thinks of them, have failed the women and men our our time