How Can Christian Organizations Support Abortion?

Recently, Lucy Gilbert at The Daily Signal, an online home for The Heritage Foundation, reported that since Roe v. Wade was overturned, several Christian non-profit organizations have begun to support legal abortion while never having supported abortion in the past. Christians and Non-Christians alike might ask; How can legitimate Christian organizations ever support abortion? This is what we will discuss in this post.

To have a full understanding of Roe v. Wade and the support it had from Christians in the early 1970s one needs to dig a little to see that there was a large contingent of Christians and "Jesus Freaks" back then who wanted legal, safe, and available abortion in the United States. Many people today have no idea that this was the case. Many Christians at that time thought God had demonstrated, in the scriptures, that a baby conceived in sin could be aborted, one could even say should be aborted, due to the fact it was a result of sin.

The justification for what is today considered an extreme position for a Christian was indeed from the scriptures specifically from the Bible story of King David. David, the great king, saw Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop and became infatuated with her. Despite her being married to Uriah, one of David's loyal soldiers, he pursued her and they committed adultery.

Bathsheba later became pregnant, leading David to orchestrate Uriah's placement in a vulnerable position on the battlefield, resulting in his death. After Uriah's death, David married Bathsheba. However, the Lord was displeased with David's actions. The child born to David and Bathsheba became seriously ill. Despite David's fervent prayers and fasting, God allowed the baby to die. This tragic event was a consequence of David's choices and the divine judgment that followed. It's a powerful and morally complex story in the book of 2nd Samuel in the Old Testament.

The thought of these 70s Christians was that obviously, God was fine with the baby dying because of the many sins that resulted in its conception, illness, and death. Easily allowing these believers to expand this far beyond adultery to include other sexual sins; rape, incest, and fornication to name a few.  So there you have it, biblical justification for the question; how can Christian Organizations support abortion?

We would be remiss not to give a quick explanation as to why Christians today might not agree with that position. In the 80s Christianity went through many changes one of which was a deeper understanding of forgiveness. A very simplistic way to describe the differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is to say that people who lived under the Old Testament lived under the consequences of their sins. In contrast, people who lived under the New Testament lived under the concept of having been forgiven of their sins. Enlightened by the concept of forgiveness of sin, Old Testament scriptures were considered in a different light. In the book of Jeremiah, we see God telling the prophet  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”. In the 80s and through to today it has become the predominant belief that not only does God know a person in the womb but that God has a purpose for their lives. It's a more holistic approach when considering the rightness or the wrongness of abortion. Yet even today we can see different Christians seeing God's will for their lives differently.

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