If You Are a Christian But Pro-Choice
You are likely here if you believe
- The Bible doesn’t explicitly prohibit abortion, so it is a matter of personal conscience before God.
- Abortion is a difficult moral question, and imposing your views through law is theocratic — contrary to how Jesus himself engaged the culture.
- Care for women’s economic realities, their suffering, and their dignity is also a pro-life concern, and supporting access to abortion in hard cases is part of caring for the vulnerable.
- Trusted voices in your tradition — PC(USA), certain mainline denominations, progressive theologians like Jim Wallis — have concluded that abortion is not a settled Christian matter.
- Criminalizing abortion would harm the most vulnerable women and reflects punitive thinking, not the mercy Jesus modeled.
The question your position cannot answer
Psalm 139:13–16 has God actively forming the person in the womb — “you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” This is not the language of potentiality. It is the language of personal identity. The subject is “me.” Jeremiah 1:5 is more explicit still: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” God’s knowing and consecrating precede formation. The preborn person exists as an object of divine address.
Exodus 21:22–25 extends civil law into the womb. When a pregnant woman is struck and her child is born prematurely, if there is serious injury — to either the woman or the child — the lex talionis applies: “life for life, eye for eye.” The Hebrew text applies equal-protection law to the unborn child as a person. In Luke 1:41, when Mary greets Elizabeth, John leaps in the womb — and Luke uses the word βρέφος (brephos), the same Greek word he uses for the infant lying in the manger at Luke 2:12. Scripture does not distinguish personhood by location.
The question your position cannot answer is this: if personhood begins at some point after conception, what is the exegetical basis for that threshold? These texts do not suggest it. They consistently treat preborn life as bearing the image of God from the moment of formation. The progressive Christian hermeneutic that treats abortion as an open question must explain why these texts mean something other than what they plainly say.
The “personal conscience” move deserves a direct answer. Conscience can bind — but it cannot override what Scripture has settled. Treating a matter Scripture addresses as a private opinion is not Christian humility; it is what the corpus calls congregational pietism: the retreat from objective moral obligation into subjective religious preference. Paul calls this “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18), not charity toward those who disagree.
Read in this order
-
Theological Foundations — start here because everything else rides on anthropology. The image of God, the incarnation, and why the gospel is the only true answer to the culture of death. If abortion is sin, only those entrusted with the gospel can push back the darkness.
-
Biblical, Not Secular — the authority question. Scripture governs the movement, not polling, not cultural consensus, not denominational committee votes. “Duty is ours, results belong to God.” Isaiah 10 and Romans 3:8 are here.
-
Abolitionism 101 — once the theological foundation is set, this names what a faithful response looks like. Short. Do not skip it.
-
No Exceptions — the most concrete test. If the preborn bear the image of God, exceptions do not survive contact with that claim. This is where theological conviction meets law.
The specific objection the corpus answers
“Scripture doesn’t explicitly mention abortion.”
Correct — and Scripture also does not use the word “slavery” in the condemnatory sense that nineteenth-century abolitionists employed. The question is never whether the English word appears. The question is whether Scripture identifies preborn life as image-bearing human life. Psalm 139:13–16, Jeremiah 1:5, and Luke 1:41 answer that question without ambiguity. What Scripture settles, it settles. Read Theological Foundations and Biblical, Not Secular.
When you’ve read these
If Scripture has reclaimed ground your tradition ceded, you are no longer a pro-choice Christian — you are an abolitionist who grew up being told the Bible was silent on this.
It is not.