Faced with the issues of abortion and euthanasia, explain how a Christian might respond.

        Overall most Christians see every infant as a precious gift from God and one in need of protection and nourishment and faced with abortion would prefer to offer love and support as Christ showed to the ill and defenceless when He was on earth, rather than to help terminate the life. A girl could have her baby adopted if she was not able to look after it and that would bring great joy to a childless couple or she could give it up for fostering until she was able to look after it herself. With time the mother could change her mind and with Christian help and encouragement might want to keep her baby.

Christians respond negatively to the subject of euthanasia also as they feel that people terminally ill and suffering deserve to be loved and cared for with patience and tolerance rather than to be assisted to die. Voluntary euthanasia is classed as a criminal act in the United Kingdom and is therefore against the law. A person assisting voluntary euthanasia may be charged as an accessory to murder.

        Many Christians see euthanasia as murder or assisted murder. As life is a gift from God, only god has the right to take it away. When Christ was on earth, He performed many miracles like healing lepers, paralytics and the blind. Since then many people have been healed through the power of faith and prayer and as long as a person is alive there is the hope of a cure.

        The Catholic Church accepts that when death is inevitable,

“It is permitted in conscience to take the decision to refuse forms of treatment that would only secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life, so long as the normal care due to the sick person in similar cases is not interrupted.”

Roman Catholics may not give anything to deliberately cause the death of a patient but they accept that some drugs hasten death as a side effect but this is not the primary purpose. The Anglican and Methodist Churches also see the deliberate taking of life as wrong and stress the need for improved medical care and love.

Other Christians, however, believe that people in pain and whose suffering cannot be ended should be helped to die if they so wish. This would both end the patient’s suffering and the suffering of the family watching a loved one suffer. Others feel that everyone should be allowed to die with dignity before they become too ill to look after themselves. Others claim that Christ showed compassion to the sick and dying and that voluntary euthanasia is compassionate. Christ taught people “to love their neighbour as themselves” and some feel that helping the terminally ill or someone with a poor quality of life is showing love.

Nevertheless, most Christians believe that caring for life is more in keeping with their Christian principles than destroying it so they would respond negatively when faced with either abortion or euthanasia and show love to the less fortunate be it an infant in the womb or a terminally ill person. Most Christians believe in the commandment-“Thou shall not kill.”