Two Midwives Who Feared God
More than three thousand years ago, two women in Egypt received an order from the most powerful man in the world. Their names were Shiphrah and Puah, and they served as midwives to the Hebrew women. Pharaoh’s instruction was simple and chilling: when a Hebrew boy is born, kill him.
“But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.”
— Exodus 1:17
Two women with no political power, no army, and no legal standing looked at a decree from the throne and concluded that the lives of those baby boys belonged to God, not to Pharaoh. They did not lead a revolt. They simply refused to take part in killing children, and God honored them for it.
Every generation has to decide whether it will fear God or obey Pharaoh. Ours faces that decision on the question of abortion.
Abortion takes an innocent human life. That conviction rests on two witnesses that agree with one another: the testimony of science and the testimony of Scripture.1 Neither one requires exaggeration. The truth is weighty enough on its own.
What Does Science Say About When Life Begins?
The first question in this debate is not a religious one. It is biological: What is the unborn child?
Embryology answers plainly. The standard medical textbook on human development, used in medical schools for decades, states that human development begins at fertilization, when a sperm and an egg fuse to form a single cell called a zygote.2 At that moment a new organism exists. It has its own complete genetic code, distinct from both mother and father. It is alive, it is growing, and it is human. Left unharmed, it will move through every stage of life the rest of us have passed through: embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, teenager, adult.
This is not a fringe position held by a handful of religious scientists. In a study published in 2021, researcher Steven Jacobs surveyed more than 5,500 biologists from over a thousand academic institutions around the world. Ninety-six percent affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization.3 Most of those biologists described themselves as politically liberal and pro-choice. They were not answering as activists. They were answering as scientists.
Jacobs himself notes that this biological fact does not, by itself, settle the moral question.4 He is right, and his observation clarifies the whole debate. Science can tell us what the unborn child is. It cannot tell us whether we may take that life. For that answer we must turn to the One who gives life.
Made in His Image: What the Bible Says About Human Life
Scripture answers that question at its very foundation.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
— Genesis 1:27
Of everything God made, only humanity bears His image. God set human life apart from every other living thing, and He gives that image as His reason for forbidding murder:
“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”
— Genesis 9:6
The image of God is not something a person earns by reaching a certain size or developmental milestone. God bestows it on human beings because they are human. A person does not become an image-bearer at birth. A person bears God’s image because God created him, and that creative work begins long before the first breath.
This is why God commanded, “Thou shalt not kill,”5 and why Solomon lists “hands that shed innocent blood” among the things the Lord hates.6 No life is more innocent than the life of a child in the womb. That child has wronged no one.
The Witness of the Psalms
The Psalms were Israel’s songbook and prayer book. Again and again the psalmists speak of life before birth, and they speak of it in the most personal terms. They do not describe tissue or potential. They say me.
Psalm 139: Seen Before Formed
“For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”
— Psalm 139:13–16
This is the clearest Old Testament window into God’s relationship with the unborn. David does not say God was preparing a body that would one day become David. He says God covered me in my mother’s womb. The person and the developing body are one and the same.
Two details deserve attention. First, the phrase “curiously wrought” describes skilled needlework, the same craftsmanship Scripture uses for the embroidered hanging at the door of the tabernacle.7 God wove David together with the care of a master artisan. Second, the words “my substance, yet being unperfect” translate a single Hebrew word that appears nowhere else in the Old Testament. The standard lexicons render it “embryo.”8 Before David’s body was fully formed, God’s eyes were already on him, and his days were already written in God’s book.
If God looks at the embryo and sees David, we have no right to see anything less.
Psalm 51: A Person from Conception
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
— Psalm 51:5
David’s prayer of repentance is not primarily about the unborn. He is confessing the depth of human sinfulness, a nature he has carried from the very beginning. But notice how he describes that beginning. He traces his own identity back to conception: in sin did my mother conceive me. He does not say she conceived something that later became him. The same man who sinned with Bathsheba existed at conception.9
Psalm 22: The Messiah in the Womb
“But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.”
— Psalm 22:9–10
Psalm 22 is a Messianic psalm. Jesus quoted its opening line from the cross.10 Read in that light, these verses carry remarkable weight. In His humanity, the Messiah’s trust in God did not begin at His birth in Bethlehem. “Thou art my God from my mother’s belly.” Before the Child ever drew breath, God held Him, kept Him, and claimed Him.
Psalm 71: Upheld from the Womb
“By thee have I been holden up from the womb: thou art he that took me out of my mother’s bowels: my praise shall be continually of thee.”
— Psalm 71:6
Psalm 71 is the prayer of an aging believer looking back over a lifetime of God’s faithfulness. When he traces that faithfulness to its beginning, he does not start at his birth. He starts in the womb. God did not begin caring for him on the day he entered the world. God was already holding him up.
Psalm 127: A Heritage, Not a Burden
“Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”
— Psalm 127:3
Our culture often speaks of an unplanned pregnancy as a problem to be managed. Scripture speaks of the fruit of the womb as a gift from God’s own hand. A heritage is something of value entrusted to you. That is how God describes children, and Scripture makes no exception for children whose timing was inconvenient.
Psalm 106: Innocent Blood
“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood.”
— Psalm 106:37–38
Psalm 106 recounts Israel’s history of unfaithfulness, and this is one of its darkest moments. The nations around Israel offered children to their gods, and Israel joined them. This passage is not a suggestion that a frightened young woman in a clinic is consciously worshipping a pagan deity. She is not. But the psalm reveals how God views the deliberate taking of children’s lives for the sake of something we value more. He calls it “innocent blood,” and He says it pollutes the land. In the ancient world, children were sacrificed for the promise of prosperity or security. Every culture must ask what it is willing to sacrifice its children for.
Luke’s Witness
The New Testament adds its own testimony, and much of it comes from a physician.
Luke, whom Paul called “the beloved physician,”11 wrote the most detailed account of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus. When Mary, newly pregnant, visits her cousin Elisabeth, something remarkable happens:
“And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost.”
— Luke 1:41
The word Luke uses for “babe” is the same word he uses a chapter later, when the angel tells the shepherds, “Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”12 Luke describes the child in Elisabeth’s womb and the Child in the manger with the same word. The inspired physician saw no difference in kind between a baby before birth and a baby after it.
There is more. Elisabeth explains what happened: “The babe leaped in my womb for joy.”13 Joy is not a reflex. Joy is the response of a person. And the angel Gabriel had already told Zacharias that his son “shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb.”14
For those of us who believe in the infilling of the Holy Ghost, this verse should stop us in our tracks. God poured out His Spirit upon a child who had not yet been born. The Spirit of God does not fill tissue. He fills people.
God Manifest in the Flesh
The strongest argument of all may be the one we celebrate every December.
“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.”
— 1 Timothy 3:16
When did God become manifest in the flesh? Not at Bethlehem. The angel told Joseph, “That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.”15 Gabriel told Mary, “Thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.”16 The Incarnation began at conception. From that moment, the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in the Child forming in Mary’s womb.17
When Mary hurried to see Elisabeth, she was in the earliest weeks of her pregnancy.18 By any medical measure, the Child she carried was an embryo. Yet Elisabeth, filled with the Holy Ghost, greeted her as “the mother of my Lord.”19 The embryo in Mary’s womb was the Lord.
If God Himself chose to enter human life as an embryo, then no Christian can look at an embryo and call it nothing. The Incarnation does not merely permit us to value unborn life. It compels us to.
The Ancient War on the Seed
From the first pages of Scripture, a pattern emerges. Immediately after the Fall, God announced enmity between the serpent and the woman, “between thy seed and her seed,” and promised that her seed would one day crush the serpent’s head.20 From that moment, the enemy of God has waged war against the promised seed, and again and again that war has fallen on children.
It fell on the Hebrew infants in Egypt. When the midwives refused to cooperate, Pharaoh widened his decree: “Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river.”21 Centuries later, Stephen described how Pharaoh forced Israel to cast out their “young children” so they would not live, and Luke recorded his words using the same word he used for the babe in Elisabeth’s womb.22 Yet out of that river God drew Moses, the deliverer who would lead His people out of bondage.
It fell again on the infants of Bethlehem. When Herod learned that the King of the Jews had been born, he “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.”23 Matthew connects that grief to Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted.24 Yet God preserved the Child, and a Deliverer greater than Moses came up out of Egypt.25
John saw the same conflict in heavenly vision: a dragon standing before a woman about to give birth, “for to devour her child as soon as it was born.”26
The pattern is unmistakable. The enemy has always targeted the most defenseless members of the human family, because he hates the image of God they carry and the purposes of God they represent. Moses and Christ escaped those decrees by the hand of God. Countless others did not. Every child lost to abortion is a life God formed, a purpose God wrote in His book, and a person who was never allowed to fulfill it.
But the pattern has a second thread. Wherever Pharaoh issues a decree, God raises up people who fear Him more than they fear the throne. Shiphrah and Puah. Moses’ mother, who hid her son for three months.27 Joseph, who rose in the night and carried the Child to safety.28 The church must decide which thread it will belong to.
Defending the Defenseless
Scripture does not merely forbid the shedding of innocent blood. It commands God’s people to stand between the vulnerable and those who would harm them.
“Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
— Proverbs 31:8–9
The “dumb” here are those who cannot speak for themselves. No one in our society is more literally voiceless than a child in the womb. That child cannot plead its own case, hire an attorney, or cast a vote. If anyone is going to open their mouth on that child’s behalf, it will have to be us.
Solomon presses the point further:
“If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?”
— Proverbs 24:11–12
“We knew it not” is no defense before God. In an age of ultrasound and embryology textbooks, it is not even a plausible one.
This theme runs throughout Scripture. The psalmist commands, “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.”29 Isaiah calls God’s people to “relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”30 And Jesus Himself warned, “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones.”31
Defending the defenseless has two sides, and the church must take both seriously. James tells us that pure religion includes visiting “the fatherless and widows in their affliction.”32 In Scripture’s world, the fatherless and the widow were those left without protection or provision. Many women facing an unplanned pregnancy fit that description exactly. They are frightened, they are often alone, and many have been abandoned by the very man who should be standing beside them.
A church that opposes abortion but offers no help to the mother has done only half its duty. If we urge a young woman to choose life, we must be ready to walk with her through the pregnancy, the delivery, and the years that follow. That may mean supporting a local pregnancy resource center, opening our homes, mentoring young mothers, or encouraging adoption and foster care within our own congregations. Defending the child and loving the mother are not competing priorities. They are one calling.
Answering Common Pro-Choice Arguments
Every serious argument has to face its strongest challenges. These are the ones raised most often.
“Numbers 5 Describes a God-Ordained Abortion”
This objection has gained traction in recent years, so it deserves a careful answer. Numbers 5:11–31 describes a ritual for a wife whose husband suspected her of adultery without proof. The priest gave her holy water mixed with dust from the tabernacle floor to drink. If she was guilty, the curse would fall on her. If she was innocent, she would be cleared.
The claim is that this ritual was designed to cause a miscarriage. But read the passage as it stands:
“...and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.”
— Numbers 5:27–28
Three observations answer the objection.
First, the text does not say the woman is pregnant. The passage does not mention a child at all. The objection depends on a pregnancy the text never describes.
Second, the “miscarriage” reading comes largely from a single modern translation. The 2011 edition of the New International Version rendered the curse as “her womb will miscarry,” a change from its own 1984 edition. When WORLD magazine checked thirty-nine English translations, only two described the curse as a miscarriage, and a member of the NIV’s own translation committee conceded that “miscarry” may not be the best rendering.33 The Hebrew speaks of a swelling belly and a falling thigh, and verse 28 supplies the contrast: the innocent woman “shall conceive seed.” The natural reading is that the guilty woman would be left unable to bear children, not that a child would be destroyed.34
Third, even if one granted the miscarriage reading, the passage would still not support abortion. This was not a woman choosing to end a pregnancy. It was God Himself rendering judgment in a specific covenant setting. God alone holds authority over life and death: “I kill, and I make alive.”35 That God may take a life in judgment has never meant that human beings may take life on their own authority. God sent the flood, but no one would argue that this gives us the right to drown our neighbor.
“Exodus 21 Shows the Unborn Are Worth Less”
“If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life.”
— Exodus 21:22–23
Some read “her fruit depart from her” as a miscarriage. Since the penalty is only a fine, the argument goes, the law must regard the unborn child as less than a full person.
But the Hebrew phrase reads literally, “her children come out.” The verb is the ordinary word for coming forth, used elsewhere of live birth, and the noun is the ordinary word for a child. Hebrew had a distinct word for a miscarried or stillborn child, and Moses did not use it here.36 The most natural reading is a premature birth. If mother and child are unharmed, the man pays a fine. If any mischief follows, to either one, the penalty is life for life.
Read that way, the passage does not lower the value of the unborn child. It raises it. A man who caused the death of a child in the womb, even unintentionally, faced the same penalty as one who took any other life. And even on the miscarriage reading, the passage addresses an accidental injury during a fight. It says nothing that would permit the deliberate taking of a child’s life.
“Life Begins at First Breath”
This argument appeals to Genesis 2:7, where God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Since Adam became a living soul when he received breath, the argument goes, so does every human being.
But Adam’s creation was a one-time event. God formed him from the dust as a full-grown man. He was never conceived or carried in a womb. Nothing in Genesis presents his creation as the pattern for every birth that followed, and Scripture describes no one after him receiving life that way. The verse also speaks of God breathing into Adam, not of Adam taking his first breath.
Meanwhile, Scripture describes unborn children as persons long before their first breath: Jacob and Esau struggling in Rebekah’s womb,37 John leaping for joy, David seen by God as an embryo. And biologically, the unborn child is already receiving oxygen and already alive. The first breath marks a change in how a baby receives oxygen, not the beginning of the baby’s life.
“My Body, My Choice”
The bodily autonomy argument is the most common one in our culture: a woman has the right to decide what happens to her own body.
That principle is true as far as it goes. But abortion does not involve only one body. The child in the womb has a different genetic code, often a different blood type, and sometimes a different sex from the mother. The child is not part of her body. The child is a separate human being living within it.
Philosopher Stephen Schwarz offered a simple way to think this through, which Scott Klusendorf later popularized with the acronym SLED.38 An unborn child differs from you and me in only four ways:
• Size. The unborn child is smaller. But a toddler is smaller than an adult, and no one considers him less human.
• Level of development. The unborn child is less developed. But so is a six-year-old compared with a sixteen-year-old.
• Environment. The unborn child is inside the womb rather than outside it. But where you are has no bearing on who you are. A few inches of travel down the birth canal does not change a child’s nature.
• Degree of dependency. The unborn child depends on the mother to survive. But newborns are entirely dependent too, as are many elderly and disabled people whom we would never consider less valuable.
None of these differences changes what the child is. And for the believer, the question is settled at a deeper level still. “Ye are not your own,” Paul wrote, “for ye are bought with a price.”39 The Christian does not hold absolute ownership even over his own body. Still less does any of us hold ownership over someone else’s.
“What About Rape?”
This is the hardest question in the debate, and it should never be answered lightly. Rape is a horrific crime. A woman who has suffered it deserves compassion, protection, justice, and every resource the church can give her. Anyone who answers this question without feeling its weight has not understood it.
I have wrestled with this question deeply, and there is no easy answer. But if abortion is the taking of a human life, then the circumstances of a child’s conception do not change the nature of the child. The child conceived in violence is still innocent. God’s law spoke directly to this principle: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”40 The guilt belongs to the man who committed the crime, not to the child.
Ryan Bomberger knows this truth from the inside. His mother conceived him through rape. She chose to carry him to term, and he was adopted into a Christian family who raised him alongside twelve siblings, most of them adopted as well. Today he is a husband, a father, and co-founder of the Radiance Foundation, a ministry devoted to the value of every human life. He describes himself as “conceived in rape but adopted in love.” In his work with women who conceived through rape, he has found that they share one thing in common: the child is the only redemptive part of what they endured.41
A pregnancy conceived in violence does not erase the violence. But ending the child’s life does not erase it either. It only adds a second victim to the first.
“What About the Life of the Mother?”
In rare cases, continuing a pregnancy would cost the mother her life. The most common is an ectopic pregnancy, in which the baby implants outside the womb, usually in a fallopian tube. In those cases the child cannot survive, and without treatment the mother is likely to die as well. Treating an ectopic pregnancy is not an elective abortion. It saves the only life that can be saved, and there is no moral quandary in it.
These cases are genuinely rare, and they are not the circumstances behind most abortions.42 They should never be used as cover for the practice as a whole.
What the Early Church Taught About Abortion
Some assume that Christian opposition to abortion is a recent political development. It is not. The early church spoke to this issue almost immediately.
The Didache, one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, likely written near the end of the first century, lists the commands of “the way of life.” Among them: “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is begotten.”43 The Epistle of Barnabas, written around the same period, says essentially the same thing.44 In a Roman world where abortion and the abandonment of infants were common, the first Christians were known for refusing both.
That conviction carried through the centuries. In the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor executed for resisting the Nazis, wrote that destroying the embryo in the womb violates the right to live that God has given to that life. Debating whether we are already dealing with a human being, he said, only confuses the issue, because God plainly intended to create one. His verdict: “And this is nothing but murder.”45 Yet Bonhoeffer also wrote with pastoral tenderness, recognizing that many who make this decision act out of despair, and that the community around them often bears a share of the guilt.
Within the Oneness Pentecostal movement, the United Pentecostal Church International formally opposed legalized abortion in 1974 and reaffirmed its opposition in 1988, grounding that position in Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:13–16, and Luke’s account of Mary being with child from conception. The same resolution committed its churches to minister with compassion to those who have had abortions.46
Born Again
When God chose language for the greatest work He does in a human soul, He chose birth. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”47 Nicodemus heard those words and immediately thought of the womb: “Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?”48 Jesus answered by pointing him to a birth “of water and of the Spirit.”49
God does not borrow language He holds cheap. He named His greatest work after birth because birth, and the life that comes before it, is precious to Him.
The parallel runs deeper than a single word. Peter says we are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God.”50 The new life begins the way physical life begins, with a seed. It is real from the moment that seed takes hold, long before anyone else can see it. A few verses later Peter calls new believers “newborn babes,” using the same word Luke used for the child who leaped in Elisabeth’s womb.51
That means every one of us who has been born again was once the embryo.52
Remember the earliest days of your walk with God. Your faith was small. Your understanding was undeveloped. You lived in a hostile environment, still surrounded by the world you had just left. You were entirely dependent on God to keep you alive. By every measure the world uses to decide whose life matters, you did not qualify.
God did not look at what you were and decide you were not worth carrying.
He carried you. Through Isaiah He describes His people as those “borne by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb,” and He promises, “even to hoar hairs will I carry you.”53 When Ezekiel pictured Israel as a newborn abandoned in an open field, where no eye pitied her, God passed by and spoke one word over that helpless child: “Live.”54 And Paul assures us that “he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it.”55 God does not abandon the life He begins.
That is the gospel in the shape of a womb. “When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.”56 God did not wait for us to become strong, developed, independent, or valuable. He loved us at our smallest.
A church that was carried when it was helpless cannot turn away from the helpless. Paul described his own ministry in the language of labor: “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.”57 The church knows what it is to carry a life that is not yet fully formed. We do it every time we disciple a new believer. We, of all people, should recognize the worth of a life still being formed in the womb.
A Word to the Wounded: Forgiveness After Abortion
Some who read this article have had an abortion. Others have encouraged one, paid for one, or performed one. If that is you, I want to speak to you directly, as a pastor.
You may have read every word above with a heavy heart. You may have carried that decision silently for years. I will not pretend that what happened was nothing, and I suspect you would not want me to. But hear this just as clearly: there is no sin the blood of Jesus cannot wash away.
David, the same man who wrote of being known in the womb, committed adultery and arranged a man’s death. When Nathan confronted him, David confessed, and God put away his sin.58 Paul called himself the chief of sinners. He had persecuted the church, yet he obtained mercy.59 Writing to the Corinthians, Paul listed sins that would shut people out of the kingdom of God, and then he wrote these words: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”60
God’s answer to sin has always been repentance and forgiveness. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”61 Through repentance, baptism in Jesus’ name, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, the gospel offers not only pardon but a new life.62 That is what it means to be born again. God does not patch up the old life; He begins a new one, and He carries it from its very first moment. And for the believer who has already come to God, His promise stands: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”63
Many grieving parents have also found comfort in David’s words about his infant son who died: “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” Scripture does not answer every question we might ask about children who die before birth, but it gives us every reason to entrust them to the mercy of a righteous and loving God.64
If you are carrying this burden, please do not carry it alone. Talk to your pastor. Let the church be what Christ called it to be: a place where the wounded find healing. The same truth that convicts is the truth that restores.
God Dealt Well with the Midwives
We began in Egypt with two women who were ordered to kill children and refused. Scripture records what happened next:
“Therefore God dealt well with the midwives: and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses.”
— Exodus 1:20–21
Shiphrah and Puah could not overturn Pharaoh’s decree. They could not stop the river. What they could do was refuse to participate, protect the lives within their reach, and trust God with the outcome. And God gave them households of their own.65
That is still the calling of the church. We may not be able to change every law or reach every clinic. But we can open our mouths for those who cannot speak, stand with mothers who are frightened and alone, and offer the forgiveness of Christ to those who carry the weight of past choices. And we can refuse to call anything less than human what God has called “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The God who covered you in your mother’s womb is the same God who is forming every child conceived today. He sees each one. He has written their days in His book. May His church have the courage of the midwives to fear God more than Pharaoh, and the compassion of Christ to love both the mother and the child.
Endnotes
1. Deuteronomy 19:15: “at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.” The verse governs legal testimony in Israel; it is applied here as a principle, not offered as exegesis of the passage.
2. Keith L. Moore, T. V. N. Persaud, and Mark G. Torchia, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 11th ed. (Elsevier, 2020), 11. Earlier editions carry the same statement; the 7th edition (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2003), 2, also describes birth as a dramatic event within a developmental continuum that begins at fertilization.
3. Steven Andrew Jacobs, “The Scientific Consensus on When a Human’s Life Begins,” Issues in Law & Medicine 36, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 221–233. Of 5,577 biologists from 1,058 academic institutions, 5,337 (96 percent) affirmed the view that a human’s life begins at fertilization. Respondents’ self-identification (89 percent liberal, 85 percent pro-choice, 63 percent non-religious) is reported in “Researcher Attacked over Study Showing 96% of Biologists Believe Life Begins at Conception,” The Christian Post; see also Steven Andrew Jacobs, “I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn’t Popular,” Quillette, October 16, 2019.
4. Steven Andrew Jacobs, “Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’” (working paper, July 25, 2018), https://ssrn.com/abstract=3211703. Jacobs writes that the descriptive biological finding does not by itself entail a normative conclusion about legal protection.
5. Exodus 20:13. The Hebrew verb rāṣaḥ denotes unlawful killing, that is, murder, rather than every taking of life. That is why the same law that forbids it also prescribes capital punishment.
6. Proverbs 6:16–17.
7. The Hebrew verb rāqam (Psalm 139:15, “curiously wrought”) describes embroidery or variegated needlework. The same root describes the embroiderer’s work on the hanging for the door of the tabernacle, “wrought with needlework” (Exodus 26:36).
8. Hebrew gōlem (Psalm 139:16) occurs only here in the Old Testament. Brown-Driver-Briggs defines it as “embryo, fetus.” The KJV’s “my substance, yet being unperfect” captures the sense of something not yet fully formed.
9. Psalm 51:5 is a confession of inherited sinfulness, not a statement about prenatal development. The point drawn here, that David locates the beginning of his personal existence at conception, is an inference from the verse’s language rather than its main teaching.
10. Matthew 27:46; compare Psalm 22:1.
11. Colossians 4:14.
12. Luke 2:12. The Greek word in both Luke 1:41 and 2:12 is brephos. It occurs eight times in the Textus Receptus (Luke 1:41, 44; 2:12, 16; 18:15; Acts 7:19; 2 Timothy 3:15; 1 Peter 2:2). Joseph Henry Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament lists two senses: an unborn child (Luke 1:41, 44) and a newborn infant (Luke 2:12, 16), citing classical Greek usage of the word for offspring still in the womb.
13. Luke 1:44.
14. Luke 1:15.
15. Matthew 1:20.
16. Luke 1:31.
17. Colossians 2:9: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” See also John 1:14.
18. Luke 1:39 says Mary went “with haste” to Elisabeth after the annunciation. Luke 1:36 places Elisabeth in her sixth month at that time, and 1:56 notes that Mary stayed about three months, apparently until John’s birth. Mary’s pregnancy was therefore at its earliest stage during the visit. The precise number of days is an inference; the text does not state it.
19. Luke 1:43.
20. Genesis 3:15.
21. Exodus 1:22.
22. Acts 7:19. The word translated “young children” is brephos, the same word used of the unborn John in Luke 1:41, 44 (see the note on Luke 2:12 above).
23. Matthew 2:16.
24. Matthew 2:17–18, quoting Jeremiah 31:15.
25. Matthew 2:15, quoting Hosea 11:1. On Christ as worthy of more glory than Moses, see Hebrews 3:3.
26. Revelation 12:4. The pattern traced in this section, the enemy’s hostility toward the promised seed falling upon children, reads recurring biblical narratives in light of Genesis 3:15. It is offered as typology that illuminates New Testament fulfillment, not as an independent basis for doctrine.
27. Exodus 2:2; Hebrews 11:23.
28. Matthew 2:14.
29. Psalm 82:3–4.
30. Isaiah 1:17.
31. Matthew 18:10. In context Jesus speaks of children and of humble believers who are like them (Matthew 18:1–6). Applying the verse to the unborn extends its principle rather than stating its direct subject.
32. James 1:27.
33. “Translation Abuse,” WORLD, https://wng.org/articles/translation-abuse-1617296756. The 2011 NIV renders Numbers 5:27 “her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry.” The 1984 NIV, together with the KJV, NKJV, ESV, and most other versions, follows the Hebrew more literally. Bruce Waltke, a member of the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation, acknowledged to WORLD that “miscarry” may not be the best translation.
34. The Hebrew reads literally that her beṭen (“belly”) will swell and her yārēk (“thigh”) will nāpal (“fall”). “Thigh” is widely understood as a euphemism for the reproductive organs, which is why many interpreters read the curse as sterility or a disorder of the womb. Verse 28’s promise that the innocent woman “shall conceive seed” supports reading the curse as the loss of fertility.
35. Deuteronomy 32:39.
36. The Hebrew is weyāṣeʾû yelādêhā, literally “and her children come out.” The verb yāṣāʾ is the common word for going or coming forth and is used of live birth (e.g., Genesis 25:25–26). The noun yeled is the ordinary word for a child. Where the Old Testament refers to a miscarriage or stillbirth, it uses the noun nēpel (Job 3:16; Psalm 58:8; Ecclesiastes 6:3). Many commentators nonetheless read Exodus 21:22 as a miscarriage, and the question is genuinely debated; on either reading, the case concerns accidental injury, not intentional killing. See Ron du Preez, “The Fetus in Biblical Law,” Ministry, September 1992; Greg Koukl, “What Exodus 21:22 Says about Abortion,” Stand to Reason, February 4, 2013.
37. Genesis 25:22.
38. Stephen D. Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1990); Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
39. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20.
40. Deuteronomy 24:16; compare Ezekiel 18:20.
41. Nancy Flory, “Man Conceived in Rape and Loved Through Adoption Says ‘Every Life Has God-Given Purpose,’” The Stream, January 13, 2022; Natalie Hoefer, “Speaker Conceived in Rape Says ‘No Child Is Unwanted’ at Annual Right to Life Dinner,” The Criterion, October 23, 2020. Bomberger tells his full story in his autobiography, Should Have Been Aborted.
42. Lawrence B. Finer et al., “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 37, no. 3 (2005): 110–118.
43. Didache 2:2. On the dating and context of the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas, see Michael J. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982).
44. Epistle of Barnabas 19:5, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 1, 148.
45. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 175–176.
46. United Pentecostal Church International, “Abortion,” position paper adopted by the General Conference in 1974 and 1988, https://upci.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Abortion.pdf.
47. John 3:3.
48. John 3:4.
49. John 3:5. On the new birth of water and Spirit, compare Acts 2:38.
50. 1 Peter 1:23.
51. 1 Peter 2:2. The word for “babes” is brephos, the same word used of the unborn John in Luke 1:41, 44 and of the newborn Christ in Luke 2:12, 16. One word in the Textus Receptus thus spans the unborn child, the newborn Savior, and the new believer.
52. Jesus sets the first birth and the new birth side by side in John 3:3–6. The correspondence drawn in this section between the unborn child and the newly born believer is typological: the physical pattern of conception, gestation, and birth illuminates the spiritual reality of the new birth. It is offered to illuminate New Testament truth, not to establish doctrine independently.
53. Isaiah 46:3–4.
54. Ezekiel 16:4–6. The passage is an allegory of Israel’s origins and of God’s covenant mercy toward a people who had nothing to commend them.
55. Philippians 1:6.
56. Romans 5:6.
57. Galatians 4:19.
58. 2 Samuel 12:13.
59. 1 Timothy 1:13–15.
60. 1 Corinthians 6:9–11.
61. 1 John 1:9.
62. Acts 2:38.
63. Romans 8:1.
64. 2 Samuel 12:23. David’s son died after birth. Extending the comfort of this verse to children lost before birth is an inference from the character of God and from Scripture’s treatment of the unborn as persons, not a direct statement of the text.
65. Exodus 1:21. “He made them houses” means God gave the midwives households and families of their own, the very blessing of children they had protected for others.
