Abortion in the Bible: Abortion and the Bible Series - Part 2

            Is there abortion in the Bible? Yes. There are instances of intentional, and accidental, killing of children in the womb. Because of how instructive some of these are scriptures are, I will share them with you.

Two very interesting passages that relate to abortion are when two righteous men cursed their beginnings, because of the difficulty of their lives. Job, who is famous for the suffering he endured, lamented the day he was conceived, and that he was not stillborn. He wished he could have avoided all of the suffering that he had to live through (Job 3:3, 16; 10:18-19). Perhaps many people today decide to have abortions to spare their baby’s a sad existence. It is important to know, Job’s story does not end with his lament! It was not Job’s portion to stay in his misery. The book ends with Job blessed with twice as much as he lost in all of his affliction. Thankfully, it was not Job’s decision whether he was to be born or not. We do not know the future. We do not know God’s plans for our lives or the lives of our children, but we can trust that his plans for us are good. Jesus taught that God is a good Father who values us and takes care of us (Matthew 6:34).

Another person who cursed the day they were born is Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet who endured much persecution, hardship, and heartache. In a very dark moment, Jeremiah actually cursed the man who announced his birth, rather than killing him in the womb! (Jeremiah 20:14-18). However, despite the difficulty of Jeremiah’s life, we know that would have been a tragedy. At the very beginning of the book of Jeremiah, God told him, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). Why did God reassure Jeremiah with these words? Because when God called Jeremiah, he did not feel worthy of his calling! God was intimately involved in forming Jeremiah in his mother’s womb, and God is intimately involved in the formation of every baby in their mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-14). We do not know what purpose God has for our children, and we may imagine our children are not worthy of God’s call upon their lives, but he has a purpose for them, and it is always a tragedy when anyone’s destiny is extinguished. Thank God Job was born, thank God Jeremiah was born, thank God for the birth of our own children.

Most of the other instances of abortion in the Bible are very violent to both the baby and the mother. They use the phrase, ‘pregnant women ripped open’ (2 Kings 8:12; 15:16; Hosea 13:16; Amos 1:14). In Amos 1:14, God announces he will judge the Ammonites because they have ripped open the pregnant women of their neighbor, Gilead, for the purpose of enlarging their own territory. That is, they wanted their own children could have more land, so they killed their neighbor’s unborn babies! This sounds frighteningly similar to the motivation presented by abortion funders. They want to increase access to abortion for the purpose of population control (I plan to dedicate a different blog post to that subject). God brings judgement against people and nations who commit violence, even specifically abortion, for their own benefit, no matter how it is justified.

One more important passage about abortion is a law given to the people of Israel for how to deal with a situation where an abortion is committed unintentionally against someone’s pregnant wife (Exodus 21:22-25). The scenario is presented of two people fighting who happen to strike a pregnant mother in the belly so that she gives birth prematurely. If the mother and child are alright, then the one who struck them must pay a fine. But if there is harm to the mother or child, then the one responsible shall pay, “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus 21:24-25). We see here that even for unintentional abortion (never mind intentional abortion), the Bible treats it as a capital offense. This is because God values babies in the womb as much as babies outside the womb.