For Advent: Life Begins in the Womb

Life Begins in the Womb

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5, ESV)

Every Christian living in the United States is confronted with a question. Is abortion permissible? Abortion is lawful. Many people consider it a viable alternative to an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. Many of the people who espouse such a belief are intelligent and appear to be well informed. Regardless of a person's social status or level of education, that person is still subject to truth. Truth is objective. God's Word is truth. Therefore, God's Word is objectively true.

Christians of all denominations consider what view to take regarding abortion. The Bible could not possibly be clearer. The following is written in the Bible in the book of Psalms, “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. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. (Psalms 139:13-14, ESV)

Whether examined in parts or as a whole, the bible is clear. Most American Christians, however, are immature in their faith and consequently they are less likely to consider scripture authoritative on its own merit. For those Christians who seek a second opinion, the secular medical community provides clear evidence that a human embryo is also a human life.

The secular medical community wholly agrees on the first stages of human development. A human life begins with conception in the womb of the mother. The sex cell from the father joins with the sex cell from the mother. Twenty-three chromosomes of the paternal sperm fuse with Twenty-three chromosomes of the maternal egg. The exact moment in which this occurs is the point of conception. The total process of fertilization only takes about twenty-four hours.

Amazingly, the embryo that is formed from such a union is neither exactly representative of the mother or the father. The resulting life, formed of that amalgamation, has the intrinsic ability to become a fully independent human being. The embryo, in the early hours of development, has every piece of information needed to produce a fully functioning person. If it is merely a “blob” of unanimated cells, why does the medical community not refer to it as such? Is a sapling a tree?

Beginning is defined as, “to come into existence, arise, to have a starting point.” (Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary) All things that are in existence, in the materiel world, have a starting point. All human beings are things, which exist in the materiel world. It is a rational and reasonable conclusion then, that all human beings have a starting point.

The medical community recognizes and validates the efforts of infertile couples to conceive children. It is commonly accepted that in order to have a child, one must first conceive an embryo. The above stated method of the joining of two sex cells is the method in which such an activity is performed. By direct implication that same medical community, which is filled with very well educated and knowledgeable people, is communicating that in the same way a sapling is a tree, so too, an embryo is a child.

Legalized abortion has far-reaching and dramatic social implication. As has been shown, God's message is clear concerning abortion. Abortion is murder. Christians are commanded not to commit murder. Any society that accepts murder as a method of convenience is a culture of death. Respect for life is fundamental to social growth and significance.

Early American Colonists William Penn said, “The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends.” (12,000 Inspirational Quotes, 272) A society that considers life a gift from a benevolent creator can be appropriately termed a culture of life. A Christian person has an obligation to advance a culture of life in their personal behavior, conduct with other peoples, and in what they teach their children.

“Christian parents must teach their children to value life as sacred, and to repudiate a pragmatic and relativistic ethic that can so casually disregard the value of the life of the developing child in the mother's womb. we should teach them to be horrified by such logic as, “Well having a baby now would really crimp my lifestyle and put me behind in the career advancement plans I had laid out for myself.” (How & When to Tell Your Kids About Sex, 247)

While the global implications that abortion has on society are deep and far-reaching, they can be easily dismissed as non-relative to an individual person. By contrast, the impact that abortion has on an individual cannot easily be callously disregarded.

Every person associated with a specific abortion is affected. The mother is typically the most directly affected person, while the father, family and friends are affected as well.

Norma L. McCorvey is a healthy Christian woman. In the present day, she is an activist who speaks out against legalized, willful abortion. She was once Jane Roe of Roe versus Wade, the court case that gave abortionists legitimacy to perform the monstrous act of abortion.

“After over 28 years of guilt-induced drug binges and various jobs in abortion clinics in an attempt to justify her involvement in the legalization of abortion, Norma McCorvey did the unthinkable. As the former “poster-girl” for abortion who, in the words of a friend, “jumped off of the poster and into the arms of Christ,” Norma truly began to live her life over, and today seeks to tell the world the truth about abortion. (Roe v. Life, 2)

The belief that is propounded by various pro-abortion groups or individuals says, “Abortion is a safe medical procedure. It is a woman's right. It will not harm you physically or emotionally,” is a lie.

Reportedly, as many as Ninety-one percent of women who have an abortion suffer from a condition known as post abortion trauma. (Diane S. Drew) This is a condition, which always leads to self-doubt, severe depression, and can sometimes even lead to suicide.

A Christian person has only one reasonable conclusion to make. Abortion is the snuffing out of a newly fashioned life. Abortion has very little to do with the brutal rhetoric of a “woman's right to choose.”

It is logically, morally, and ethically incoherent for a Christian to teach, encourage, or practice abortion. God is the loving creator of all life, Christians love God as their creator, and therefore Christians must respect the life that their creator has inspired.

by Christopher D. Surber

Works Cited:

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Crossway Publishing 2002.
http://www.gnpcb.org/home/esv

Brookes M, Zietman, "Clinical Embryology A Color Atlas and Text", 1998, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida

Stanton L. & Brenna B. Jones, "How & When to Tell Your Kids About Sex", NAVPRESS, Colorado Springs Colorado

Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm

Frank S Mead, Twelve Thousand Inspirational Quotes, Federal Street Press, Springfield Massachusetts, 2000

Norma McCorvey, Roe v. Life, ATS, Ro No More, Garland Texas, 2003
http://www.roenomore.org

Diane S. Drew, The Standard. 1992
http://dianedew.com/trauma.htm

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you”

If you define “Life” as the physical body, then yes, life begins at conception. However I define “Life” not by the physical, but by the “spirit” that manifests the physical. That spirit exists even prior to entering the womb. The zygote would not form if it were not for the presence of the spirit.

Nothing, not even an atomic bomb dropped on a person’s head can destroy the soul or spirit. But sin sure can shackle it for a long period of time.

That spirit exists even when the physical body is gone. When it departs from the body, physical life ends. Memories are not stored in the physical body. They are stored in the soul or spirit in a very specific pattern and then anchored in the physical body. Memories of life experiences exist long after the physical is gone. Since the soul or spirit manifests the physical body, wounds to the soul also harm the physical body. However, wounds to the physical body do not necessarily harm the soul. It is our conscious response to the physical harm that creates the wound in the soul. This is why Jesus asked for forgiveness for those who persecuted Him as they knew not what they were doing.

The question becomes, where does the soul exist when it releases from the physical body. That depends upon the status of the soul. My father’s mansion has many rooms but many are off limits to those who carry sin as they cannot pass through the doorway to enter the rooms.

Imagine your soul as a hot air balloon and sin is the ballast that keeps it on the ground. There are no stairs or elevators. The only way you can reach the top floor is to both let go of your ballast and reach to God to lift you up.

This is my understanding based upon my own experience of dying and returning to reconnect to my physical body... reluctantly!

Grateful2God --- and Grateful2U!

You said it all!

I love your tagline, by the way. That's the very line of the Tantum Ergo I love the best. Especially the two words "sensuum defectui" --- when the senses fail.

A little off-subject, but at the same time right on it: an amazing and humbling demonstration of how the senses fail. This is an optical illusion I found on Discoverymagazine:

And here's their explanation:

Blue green spiral illusion You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. Huh?
I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. In the two squares displayed below, the one on the left is colored using the same color from the blue spiral, and on the right using the green spiral.

...........green and blue squares..
Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue.
The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the "blue" spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the "green" one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:

Blue green spirals zoom
See? The orange stripes go through the "green" spiral but not the "blue" one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color. If you still don’t believe me, concentrate on the edges of the colored spirals. Where the green hits the magenta it looks bluer to me, and where the blue hits the orange it looks greener. Amazing.
The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.
This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear.

Things are not as they appear!

And that related to my tagline...

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