The Lord said to me, ‘I chose you before I gave you life, and before you were born I selected you to be a prophet to the nations.”
This seems to suggest, as did the last quote, that God decides the fate of the child before it is born, abortion would prevent the child from fulfilling its potential. This would be fundamentally wrong and would not have any justification, in performing an abortion, a doctor may unwittingly be ending the life of a famous prophet before it has even begun; something which anyone would have to agree is not a good thing.
The Catholic Church holds the view that abortion is wrong. They believe that to justify the killing of an unborn child one would also have to justify the killing of any human being given the same set of circumstances. A foetus has as much right to live as anyone else.
There are many Christians who would disagree with this view; they would say that the unborn child has the right to live, and that it is preferable that they be allowed to do so. They would not, however, see this right as being all important. They believe that there are circumstances in which terminating an unborn foetus is justified. This is demonstrated by the official stance of the Church of England, from their Board of Social Responsibility Report 1984,
Although the foetus is to be specially respected and protected, nonetheless, the life of the foetus is not absolutely sacrosanct if it endangers the life of the mother”
The anti abortionists using many of the arguments given above contest this view, that the life of the mother is more important than that of the unborn child. The foetus is a human being and so to have an abortion simply to save the mother’s life would be to make a decision to kill one person for the sake of another. This is the sort of decision that only God can make.
The people who agreed with abortion in certain circumstances would argue against the view that the foetus is as much a life as the mother. Most arguing that the foetus can only be considered a life after the ‘turning’, the time when it would be able to survive without its mother. This is a very strong argument, before the turning, there is no way that the child can be considered as a life in its own right, it is totally dependent on its mother for even the most basic of needs such as oxygen and food. It has no way to get these things for itself so the argument is that, until this point in time, the child and the mother must both be considered as one. They also argue that the mother’s life can be seen as more important, this is because she has the ability to survive independently of the child whilst it would undoubtedly die if it was to be separated from her.
The argument about whether or not the foetus is a life in its own right before the moment of the turning is not one that can decide the question of whether or not abortion is justified. Even if the view that the foetus before this moment is not a human life and therefore not as important as its mother is accepted, there is still a potential life there, something which can, in time, become a human being. The argument about the turning is that this life is entirely dependent upon the survival and health of the mother. It is fundamentally wrong to put the life of the foetus above the things that have been there to allow it to survive just because it will not be dependent upon them after the time of birth. This argument seems to be overwhelming and is, in my opinion, a justification for a Christian to have an abortion on the grounds that her health or her life would be seriously threatened by continuing the pregnancy for the full term. Of course, the argument about having an abortion because of the woman’s health does not involve the question of the moment of turning, the baby will have passed the time of turning by the time it is in a state to threaten the mother’s health and still survive itself. The life of the child is no longer dependent on that of its mother, but it once was, and the mother is a fully developed human being who already has her own personality. It seems wrong to endanger the mother’s life, upon which the foetus was once entirely dependent to allow the child to survive.
Another circumstance in which some people attempt to justify abortion
So, the Christian view on the sanctity of life makes it difficult for a believer to justify an abortion, it would probably mean that they would be reluctant to have an abortion but there are certain circumstances in which the action could be justified.