Listening to Science and Scripture (Part 1)

(This is Part 1 in our series, Why are Catholics and Evangelicals Pro-Life?)

Amid the culture wars raging across the western world today, one of the things that everyone notices is that Catholic and Evangelical Christians can be counted among the strongest supporters of the Pro-Life, anti-abortion movement. Why is this so? Why do such seemingly opposite forms of Christianity find common cause on this issue?

Well, first of all, those who have been reading this website, or who have been involved in Catholic-Evangelical ecumenism, will already know what the Catholic and Evangelical churches have discovered: that they are not such “opposite” forms of Christianity after all.

In addition, the common ground that we share of devotion to the love of Jesus Christ, submission to God’s general revelation of Himself to the world through creation, and respect for the trustworthy authority of Holy Scripture — all three of these things point together in the same direction for us on this important issue.

The Compassion of Christ

Anyone who has read the gospels in the New Testament will be well aware that Jesus of Nazareth had a special concern for the plight of the poor and the sick, and for the most innocent and helpless human beings. It is the foundation of one of His most well-known sayings: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Mt 25:40). It is the reason why He healed the leper by the roadside, and the man born blind, and the reason He raised up from death the daughter of Jairus, and the son of the widow of Nain. It is the reason why He told his disciples to let the children come to Him for a blessing, "for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 19:14).

Above all, He pointed to His miracles of compassion for the innocent and helpless as the sign that the Kingdom of God was dawning on the world through His ministry:

And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and He went to the synagogue, as His custom was, on the Sabbath day. And He stood up to read; and there was given to Him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." (Lk 4:16-21)

And when the [messengers from John the Baptist] had come to [Jesus], they said "John the Baptist sent us to You saying, 'are you He who is to come, or shall we look for another?'" In that hour He cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind He bestowed sight. And He answered them, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at Me." (Lk 7:20-23)

Surely, there cannot be a more innocent and helpless form of human life than an unborn child in the first home of the human race: a mother's womb. That’s the first reason why both Catholics and Evangelicals support the protection of the lives of unborn children: because we believe that they must be right near the top of the list of our Savior’s concern and compassion.

Science Indicates …

That human life truly begins at conception is no longer a matter of personal religious opinion, but is strongly suggested by pre-natal scientific research. From the moment of conception the fetus is clearly a unique, individual human life. She is "unique" because the unborn child is distinct from her mother, father, and all other living things, having her own special and complete genetic fingerprint. She is an "individual" because even from the moment of conception, she carries out spontaneous actions independent of her mother (e.g., the self-organization of her cells, and sending out chemical signals to her mother's body so that the latter will prepare the uterine wall for implantation; she can even have a different blood-type than her mother). She is "human" because she has a distinctly human genotype (meaning that she cannot naturally develop into a being of any other species). And she is clearly "alive." A unique, individual human life — that is surely what we mean by "a human being," isn’t it? If she is not a human being, what kind of "being" is she?

National Campus Life Network put it this way in one of its pamphlets:

In other words, from conception, she has everything necessary to proceed through the full series of human developmental stages, changing only in her appearance, not in her inherent human nature. Like you and I, all she needs is proper nutrition and a proper environment.

And that development proceeds rapidly. Evidence from pre-natal research now shows that from only seven to nine weeks after conception the unborn child already has a heartbeat and brainwaves, and can feel pleasure and pain. The child even looks like a tiny human being at that stage. In this child, all the genetic potentials given to her right from the beginning are unfolding in their natural sequence.

Scripture Implies …

Of course, Catholic and Protestant Christians did not have to wait for all the scientific evidence to come in before having good grounds for their traditional belief that an unborn child is a human being in the first stages of its growth, an "I" and a "me." It is implicitly taught in the Bible. Psalm 139 shows that personal pronouns are appropriate to apply to us even from before we were born, when we were being fashioned in our mother's womb:

For Thou didst form my inward parts,

thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise thee for thou art fearful and wonderful.

wonderful are thy works!

Thou knowest me right well;

my frame was not hidden from thee,

when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.

Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;

In thy book were written, every one of them,

The days were formed for me,

When as yet there was none of them. (Ps 139: 13-16, cf. Jer 1:5)

Indeed, the New Testament uses the word brephos (child) whenever it speaks of both Jesus and John the Baptist before their birth (Lk 1:41, 2:5). Jesus himself, when teaching about the dangers that pregnant women will face at the fall of Jerusalem, addresses them with the words “you and your children within you” (Lk 19:44).

According to Jesus Christ and the Bible, therefore, the unborn is not just a lump of "fetal tissue," but a "child." That is why the deliberate killing of unborn children has been universally opposed from the earliest days of the Church, by unanimous consent of the Fathers and the saints. Even when the ancient Christian thinkers disagreed among themselves about the moment when the unborn child receives its spiritual soul from the Creator, they still held that abortion is a direct violation of the Creator's manifest intention to bring a new human being into the world.

Next Time: Unborn Children are “Non-Persons” — and other Fallacies

Robert Stackpole, STD

©The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017