Adding onto the “Christian and Abortion Series” -
Lately a lot of Christians have been coming out and saying they’re pro-choice, declaring they’re not necessarily for abortion, but they are for the right of the woman to choose. I want to look at some of the arguments for this and argue why a Christian simply cannot be pro-Choice:
1) “We have no right to tell a woman what to do with her own body.”
This argument has been dealt with already in another post I made concerning abortion. I argued:
This way of thinking assumes too much – it assumes that we can do whatever we want to our bodies without having a communal consequence. However, there are times where what I do to my body will inevitably affect those around me (i.e. if I inject myself with an airborne disease, because it will harm those around me I do not have the right to do such a thing). Almost everyone would argue that if we take an action against our body that negatively affects others, that action shouldn’t be taken.
In this case, the child in the womb is ontologically separate from the mother, though reliant. That is to say, the child really isn’t part of the mother’s body. The mother plays host to the body. If a guest comes into your house, eats your food, drinks your water, and sleeps in your bed, does that guest belong to you? Of course not – the guest, though reliant upon you, is not a part of who you are.
The counter to the above argument is that the baby, especially early on, is made up of cells provided by the mother. This is true, but completely irrelevant. No female can spontaneously produce a child without any fertilization from a male. This means that the baby isn’t entirely made up of the mother’s cells, which would seem to indicate that the child in the womb isn’t really part of the mother’s body (in the same way an arm, heart, or lung is part of the mother’s body).
All of this means that the child growing within the mother is really a body inside a body and not just an extension of the mother’s body. It contains foreign matter (via sperm) that is not natural to the mother’s body. If that is true, an abortion is an act that is taken out on the mother’s body that severely affects the child (through death). This would mean that abortion is highly immoral since it is a selfish action that harms an innocent party.
In short, a baby simply isn’t a part or an extension of the mother’s body, but instead a separate being that is reliant upon the mother.
In light of this, though we might not have a right to tell a woman what to do with her own body, we do have a right to tell her what to do with her body when her actions affect a living human being.
