From the Bible’s perspective, abortion is seen as an unjustified interference in God’s sacred role in the womb.
When abortion occurs, it involves not only the termination of a pregnancy, but also the termination of the very work of God in the womb.
The important part of the abortion argument is to show that God attributes the same characteristics to the unborn in the womb as to a person out of the womb. In other words, Scripture must indicate a continuity of personal identity when describing the unborn. And it does.
Examples of where the Bible uses conception and birth interchangeably include Job 3:3, which states, “Let the day perish on which I was to be born, and the night which said, ‘A boy is conceived’ “. This poetic passage employs what is called synonymous parallelism, in which the second line of poetry restates the first one, essentially saying the same thing in different language. This type of parallelism suggests that the child who was “born” and the child who was “conceived” are considered the same person. In fact, the terms “born” and “conceived” are used interchangeably here, suggesting that a person is in view at both conception and birth.
What was present at birth was considered equivalent to what was present at conception. This is strengthened by the use of the term “boy” in the second half of the verse, which speaks of conception. The woman did not conceive a thing or a piece of tissue, but a “boy,” a person. The Hebrew term for “boy,” geber, is also used in other parts of the Old Testament to refer to a man (Ex. 10:11; Deut. 22:5; Judges 5:30). Thus, in the same sense that an adult man is a person, the individual conceived in Job 3:3 is a person.
Other passages that seem to use conception and birth interchangeably include Jeremiah 1:5, where God says, “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.” Here it seems clear that God had a relationship with and an intimate knowledge of Jeremiah in the same way he did when Jeremiah was an adult and engaged in his prophetic ministry. In the womb he was called to be a prophet, something that was commonly done with other prophets when they were adults. That is, there is more to this text than the simple parallel between conception and birth. It also describes God knowing the unborn in the same way he knows a child or an adult, thereby attributing something characteristic of adults to the unborn.
A similar text occurs in Isaiah 49:1, which states, “Before I was born the LORD called me [literally, “from the womb the LORD called me”]; from my birth he has made mention of my name.” Again the parallel suggests that conception and birth are used interchangeably, but the text adds to this the idea that the person in question was both called and named prior to birth, indicative of a personal interest that parallels the interest God takes in adults.
Perhaps the clearest indication that the unborn are objects of God’s knowledge may be found in Psalm 139:13-16, which clearly shows that God is intimately involved in forming the unborn child and cultivating an intimate knowledge of that child.
Psalm 139:13-16 describes the intimate involvement of God in the formation of the unborn. From a Christian worldview, this should be sufficient to discourage abortion, since it interrupts the sovereign work of God in the womb. However, the psalm further teaches a continuity of personal identity from the earliest points of pregnancy forward. Some raise the objection that Psalm 139 speaks only of the development of a person in the womb, not of the fact that what is in the womb is indeed a person. However, these texts suggest that in the womb from conception is a person with potential for development, not merely some being that will develop into a person at some point in the gestational process. These texts, particularly Psalm 139, strongly suggest a continuity of personal identity that runs from conception to adulthood.
Two other passages highlight this continuity of personal identity. Psalm 51:5 says, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” Here David is confessing not only his sins of adultery with Bathsheba and premeditated murder of her husband, Uriah the Hittite (see 2 Sam. 11-12), but also his innate inclination to sin. This is a characteristic shared by all people, and David’s claim is that he possessed it from the point of conception. Thus the inherent inclination to sin is attributed both to adult persons and the unborn. Using synonymous parallelism similar to that in Job 3:3, David appears to treat birth and conception as practically interchangeable terms. Finally, the Greek term for “baby,” bréphos, is applied to a child still in the womb in Luke 1:41-44 as well as to the newborn baby Jesus in Luke 2:16.
AMR
