WATCH: The Key Question Every Person Must Answer on Abortion
Similarly, then, when it comes to abortion, the real question is not whether a woman has a choice, but whether that woman actually has a human being that God recognizes as a valuable person in her womb. If so, then a moral duty to honor life supersedes the personal hardship that might come due to pregnancy.
Choosing to terminate innocent life is by definition choosing to murder. Indeed, the primary issue in the debate over abortion is the identity of the unborn. Listen to Gregory Koukl describe a little girl named Rachel, a daughter of a family friend:
Rachel is two months old, but she is still six weeks away from being a full-term baby. She was born prematurely at 24 weeks, in the middle of her mother’s second trimester. On the day of her birth Rachel weighed one pound, nine ounces, but dropped to just under a pound soon after. She was so small she could rest in the palm of her daddy’s hand. She was a tiny, living, human person.
Heroic measures were taken to save this child’s life. Why? Because we have an obligation to protect, nurture and care for other humans who would die without our help—especially little children. Rachel was a vulnerable and valuable human being.
But get this … if a doctor came into the hospital room and, instead of caring for Rachel, took the life of this little girl as she lay quietly nursing at her mother’s breast, it would be homicide.
However, if this same little girl—the very same Rachel—was inches away resting inside her mother’s womb, she could be legally killed by abortion.
To any reasonable person, this makes absolutely no sense. Abortion is utterly ludicrous if this is a child in the womb.
Everything—everything!—revolves around what is happening in a mother’s womb, and Scripture is clear: That womb contains a person being formed in the image of God. Any distinction between the unborn and a person (or a human and a person, for that matter) is both artificial and unbiblical.
God recognizes the unborn as a person and designs the unborn for life from the moment of conception. While our culture is continually pushing against this idea, it is not possible to believe the Bible and deny that the unborn are persons.
And once followers of Christ accept this, we can no longer sit idly by while people are mercilessly murdered in their mothers’ wombs.
Dr. David Platt serves as President of the IMB, one of the world’s largest missions organizations, and Founder of local church resource ministry Radical. He’s been lead pastor of The Church at Brook Hills since 2006. He and his wife Heather raise their four children in Birmingham, Alabama.
Excerpt from Counter Culture by David Platt. © 2015. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. and Reprinted from Bound4LIFE. All rights reserved.
