Sit down at church this weekend and take a look around you. The odds are good that someone nearby has had an abortion—and the odds are even better that, having had an abortion, they feel utterly unable to talk about it with a single one of their fellow believers.
One new poll found that 43% of the women surveyed were regularly attending church at the time they underwent an abortion. That same poll found that only 7% of that group discussed the abortion with anyone who went to church with them.
We know what it’s like to suffer silently in the pews of a church, unable and unwilling to talk about a past abortion. It’s excruciating, and lonesome. We tried for 17 years to keep silent—and thank God we failed, ultimately, to do so.
This silence around abortion isn’t just destroying preborn children. It’s destroying the mothers and fathers who are prevented from receiving the freedom and repentance and healing that the Lord wants for them. The church is where we can gather to support, inform and encourage each other—and where God’s Word and Spirit can heal us.
So it’s time to break that silence.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” we read in Hosea 4:6. Christians need to know what abortion is, what Christian teaching on the sanctity of preborn life is and—just as important—that abortion is not an unforgivable sin.
Most Christians just don’t hear much about abortion from their church leadership and communities—and if they do, it’s often an isolated sermon. Christians, even regular churchgoers, hold mixed and equivocal beliefs on when life begins.
But forgiveness of sins begins with repentance, and repentance requires understanding of the sin itself. Churches need to make clear the horrific nature of abortion and its moral ramifications, stripped of all euphemism.
Life begins at conception. Abortion doesn’t “terminate a pregnancy,” it kills a child. Every life is a gift, and a sacred one at that. Every person bears the image of God. Abortion isn’t a matter of “choice,” but a matter of life and death.
And what’s more, scientific insight proves that a child in the womb is a living human person. Heartbeats can be heard at just six weeks. We see fingers and toes at just 10 weeks. Nearly all internal organs are formed by 12 weeks. These children termed “fetuses” by those who wish to minimize their dignity are recognizably human, and recognizably alive long before the end of the first trimester.
But this first trimester, this miraculous unfolding and growing of new life, is the time in which 91% of abortions occur.
