Abortion is not merely a political controversy. It is the outward symptom of a deeper disease—a clash of worldviews about what it means to be human, what it means to suffer, and what it means to be free. For decades, public debate has circled slogans like “my body, my choice” and “women’s rights,” but these are surface expressions of assumptions buried far deeper. To expose the foundation is to discover that abortion is not primarily a question of medical ethics but of theology—whether or not man belongs to himself.
A worldview is like an operating system for the soul: the invisible code that governs how a person interprets life. Every moral conclusion—about sex, justice, money, or life itself—emerges from prior convictions about reality, truth, and God. Those who see abortion as a moral right and those who see it as a moral evil are not simply arguing policy. They are beginning from utterly different visions of humanity.
This essay examines the presuppositions that make abortion seem reasonable to the modern mind—and demonstrates how each collapses under the weight of its own logic and under the light of divine revelation. It is not an attack on individuals but an analysis of ideas. Christians must learn to reason from the top down—from truth about God and man—rather than from the slogans of a culture that has forgotten both.
The Deification of the Self: “My Body, My Choice”
The central creed of the secular mind is autonomy—the belief that the individual self is the highest authority. Freedom is redefined as self-ownership, and the good life is measured by the ability to act without restraint.
But this is not a new creed. It is the same whisper heard in Eden: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5). In other words, you decide what is good and what is evil.
Modern abortion advocacy rests entirely upon this presupposition. The unborn child may be alive, perhaps even human, but the mother’s sovereignty is treated as absolute. Her body, her will, her definition of life—nothing outside the self can claim jurisdiction.
Yet this belief carries its own contradiction. If the individual’s autonomy is absolute, then the child’s autonomy must also be absolute. The mother’s freedom to choose cannot logically include the right to annihilate another’s freedom to live. Secularism here devours itself.
The biblical worldview corrects this error by reminding us that autonomy is never ultimate. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:
You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
Freedom, in Scripture, is not the ability to act without limits but the power to live within the limits ordained by the Creator. The self that makes itself God eventually becomes enslaved to sin and guilt. The self that acknowledges God becomes truly free.
The False Anthropology: Measuring Human Worth by Utility
The second presupposition beneath abortion culture is functionalism—the idea that a person’s worth depends on what he or she can do: think, feel, contribute, or choose. The unborn child, lacking consciousness or independence, is labeled “potential life.”
This utilitarian view of humanity has ancient roots in paganism. The Greeks exposed unwanted infants; the Romans left the weak to die. Only the Judeo-Christian revelation taught that every human being bears the image of God (Genesis 1:27). That single truth overturned the cruelty of the ancient world and laid the foundation for Western notions of equality.
When a culture forgets the Imago Dei, it begins again to rank lives by usefulness. The unborn, the elderly, the disabled—all become expendable in the calculus of convenience. Philosopher Peter Singer, consistent with secular logic, has argued that newborn infants are not yet “persons” because they lack self-awareness. He is not an aberration but a mirror, showing secular humanism its true face.
Scripture demolishes this arithmetic of worth. God does not love man because he is strong or useful; He loves because He made man to bear His image. As the psalmist says in Psalm 139:13-14:
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
To measure worth by capacity is to invite tyranny. To affirm worth by creation is to defend justice.
The Idol of Comfort: Redefining Suffering as the Greatest Evil
A third belief sustaining abortion culture is that suffering is the supreme wrong. Modern humanitarianism, detached from any transcendent purpose, treats pain as meaningless and therefore intolerable. “Better not to be born than to suffer” sounds compassionate, but it hides despair—a view of life with no redemptive horizon.
From that lens, abortion becomes a preventive mercy: sparing a child from poverty, disability, or neglect. But the logic is self-defeating. If the absence of suffering justifies killing, then compassion collapses into cruelty. Why stop at the womb? Why not end the lives of those who suffer now?
The biblical view turns this logic upside down. Suffering is real and grievous, but not purposeless. Paul writes in Romans 5:3-4:
We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
The Christian worldview doesn’t glorify pain; it redeems it. God weaves even affliction into His good purposes. To destroy life to prevent pain is to deny both the sovereignty and the goodness of God. What the secularist sees as tragedy, the believer sees as the crucible in which faith is refined.
The Myth of Evolving Morality: When Society Becomes the Lawgiver
Another hidden assumption is moral relativism—the conviction that right and wrong evolve with culture. Legalization and majority opinion become moral north stars. “If it’s legal, it must be acceptable.”
But history mocks that confidence. Slavery was once legal; genocide often proceeds with bureaucratic efficiency. When morality is untethered from divine command, law degenerates into the will of the powerful.
The Apostle Paul explains in Romans 2:15 that God’s moral law is not invented but imprinted:
They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.
Every human conscience recognizes the wrongness of killing the innocent; it must be trained into denial. A people that measures justice by consensus will one day discover that consensus has no conscience.
The Calculus of Convenience: Population Control and Social Efficiency
The fifth presupposition cloaks itself in pragmatism: the belief that some lives are too costly to sustain. Advocates of population control and “family planning” often argue that abortion relieves economic burdens or reduces crime. It is the modern echo of the ancient eugenic dream—that society can be purified through selective elimination.
The rationale sounds clinical but masks a chilling premise: that people are liabilities, not gifts. Once that assumption takes hold, human beings are tallied like numbers on a balance sheet. The poor, the disabled, the unwanted become “problems to solve.”
God’s Word gives no license for such arithmetic. He calls children blessings in Psalm 127:3, not burdens:
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
A culture that treats its children as threats rather than treasures stands on the brink of moral bankruptcy. To view life as a cost to manage is to forget that every life is a miracle to steward.
The Misuse of Science: Confusing Description with Definition
Science, properly understood, tells us what is—it describes the mechanisms of development and genetics. But it cannot answer why life is valuable. Yet many appeal to science to draw moral lines: personhood begins at viability, or at the first heartbeat, or at the emergence of brain waves. These thresholds are arbitrary; they shift as technology advances.
Biology already affirms what moral intuition has long known: life begins at conception—a new, genetically distinct human organism exists. The question is not biological but philosophical: Should that life be protected? And science has no metric for moral worth.
When moral meaning is stripped from life, even facts become pliable. The culture that insists “follow the science” in physics ignores it in biology when truth collides with desire.
The Christian Refutation: Humanity in the Image of God
At this point the secular edifice collapses. Each presupposition—autonomy, utility, comfort, relativism, pragmatism, scientism—crumbles because it severs humanity from its Creator. The only worldview that can sustain the sanctity of life is the one grounded in the Imago Dei as reflected in Genesis 1:26-27.
Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
And let them have dominion…’ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
To be made in God’s image is to possess intrinsic worth that no circumstance can erase. It is not conferred by the state, earned by achievement, or withdrawn by suffering. Every human life—child in the womb, addict in the alley, elder in the nursing home—reflects the Creator’s glory.
This truth not only forbids abortion; it restores dignity to the repentant. The grace of Christ reaches even those who have participated in abortion. The gospel does not end with condemnation but with redemption, as explained in 1 John 1:9:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
The church’s message to a broken culture is not merely “stop killing” but “come to life.” Forgiveness is real, and new creation is possible.
Conclusion: Two Competing Creeds
Behind every defense of abortion stands the creed of human sovereignty:
- Man is the measure.
- Suffering must be eliminated.
- Law evolves.
- Science defines worth.
Behind every defense of life stands the creed of divine sovereignty:
- God is the Creator.
- Suffering can be redeemed.
- Law is grounded in His character.
- Life bears His image.
Only one of these creeds can sustain a civilization that honors justice and mercy. The other ends, inevitably, in despair. The modern world imagines that rejecting God makes it compassionate and free. In truth, it makes it cruel and confused.
To defend life, then, is not merely to oppose abortion; it is to proclaim the truth about man—that he is not an accident, not a burden, not a resource, but a reflection of the living God.
S.D.G.,
Robert Sparkman
MMXXV
rob@christiannewsjunkie.com
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