Human life is created at conception. When a baby is conceived, God intends the child to be born. For a baby to die between conception and birth is unnatural, aberrant, and a wrenching departure from God’s created order. This is what many conservatives in Congress are arguing as the Senate debates a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks.
The word “conceived” is used some 24 times in the New King James Version Bible to refer to the conception of a child. In every instance, the conceived child is finally born. According to the biblical narrative, this is the proper pattern—conception results in birth.
“He slept with Hagar, and she conceived . . . So Hagar bore Abram a son.”
“She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son . . .”
“Again she conceived, and when she gave birth to a son . . .”
“She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son . . .”
“Rachel’s servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son . . .”
“Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son . . .”
“So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son . . .”
“She conceived and gave birth to three sons and two daughters . . .”
“The woman conceived and sent word to David . . . she became his wife and bore him a son . . .”
“I went to the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son . . .”
“So he married Gomer . . . and she conceived and bore him a son.”
“Gomer conceived again and gave birth to a daughter.”
Genesis 16:4, (NIV)
God intended the womb to be a sanctuary where human life might be wonderfully and secretly fashioned by His hand (cf. Ps. 139:13–16). He never meant it to be a place of death.
In fact, the Bible pictures conception without birth as a sign of divine judgment. Consider Hosea 9:14—“Give them, O Lord—what will You give? Give them a miscarrying womb . . .”
Even Hosea’s prophetic voice fails as he tries to think of a judgment terrible enough to repay the sin of the Ephraimites. Flushed with anger, he finally prays that God would cause their children to die in their mother’s wombs.
It would, of course, be wrong to tell a couple suffering miscarriage that the cause was God’s judgment upon them. Terrible things happen to innocents in this broken world. The point of this Scripture is that such loss is mournful, something they know full well. More than anyone, they understand how abominable it is to kill an unborn child; it is high-handed rebellion against the glory and creative authority of God.
Modern society has carved a moral chasm between conception and live birth. Legal maneuvering in America has led to the declaration of unborn children as categorically different from those actually born. In essence, all legal rights to life are rendered void in the period between conception and birth.
Until the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban of “partial-birth abortion” in 2007, it is estimated by groups such as the National Right to Life that the chilling procedure killed some 3 to 5,000 babies every year in the United States alone. The murder of a human child is always a shocking and brutal act, but few things on earth could be as barbaric as the killing of a baby at the very moment of birth.
Indignant at his failure to suppress the Israelites, Pharaoh was driven to the most inhuman method imaginable of subduing them—the brutal murder at birth of all their male children. To carry out this gruesome execution, the king summoned the Jews’ midwives. The word “birthstools” in Pharaoh’s command has evoked some discussion.
The clearest meaning of the word ha obnayim is the piece of stone on which a woman sat during childbirth. However, the word may also be a euphemism for the birth canal itself.
Pharaoh’s command could quite naturally be taken as, “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and see the child in the birth canal, if it is a boy, kill him.”
On either reading, the king’s vicious directive was to kill the boys as soon as possible and blame the death on some complication of childbirth. The midwives’ excuse to Pharaoh is telling: they could not kill the babies as he wanted because they had not arrived in time for the births. The king was too cowardly to rip the children from their mothers’ arms. Instead, he wanted their lives destroyed in secret, before they had even emerged entirely from the birth canal.
The freedom to kill the unborn at will is defined as a parental right. Scripture allows no such right, and the church must fiercely oppose it wherever it exists in the world.
The church must never be silenced in the face of such barbarism. God’s people must denounce the uncanny human ability to smother the fear of God with a lust for convenience. The Word of God speaks out in defense of the unborn. So must the church!
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Greg Gilbert is the senior pastor of Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He is a contributor to the New King James Version Unapologetic Study Bible, due out from Thomas Nelson publishers Nov. 7, and from which this article was excerpted.