The Christian View of Abortion

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“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you, Jeremiah 1:5.”

From 1973-12008, there have been 53, 310,843 abortions executed in the US since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973). The total number of legal abortions today is more than 1.2 million per year (National Right to Life, 2011).

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit unanimously upheld the conviction of Richard James Smith, Sr., under Georgia's "feticide" statute. Smith argued that the law conflicted with Roe v. Wade, but the court rejected this assertion as "without merit." The court held: "The proposition that Smith relies upon in Roe v. Wade -- that an unborn child is not a "person" within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment -- is simply immaterial in the present context to whether a state can prohibit the destruction of a fetus, Smith v. Newsome, 815 F.2d 1386 (11th Cir. 1987). Related state supreme court decision: Brinkley v. State, 322 S.E.2d 49 (Ga. 1984) (vagueness/due process challenge)” (NRLC, 2007).

The logic behind making it a separate crime to kill a fetus and yet okay to murder millions of fetuses is a rather hard logic to follow. The law was passed in Roe v. Wade allowing for the killing of a fetus (abortion) in 1973. Later President George Bush signed into law the bill called the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004” which made it a crime to cause the death of a fetus (White House, 2004). The conundrum is that they are both laws.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary an abortion is “an artificially induced termination of a pregnancy for the purpose of destroying an embryo or fetus. The word feticide is defined as, 1....

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.... Abney (Eds.), Criminal law (11th ed., pp. 253-254). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Moore, K. L. (1988). Essentials of human embryology. Retrieved July 21, 2011, from http://www.princeton.edu/~profile/articles/embryoquotes2.html

National Right to Life (2011, January). Abortion statistics United States data and trends. Retrieved July 21, 2011, from http://https://www.nrlc.org/FS03_AbortionInTheUS.pdf

NRLC (2007, November). Constitutional challenges to state unborn victims (fetal homicide) Laws. Retrieved July 21, 2011, from http://www.nrlc.org/unborn_victims/statechallenges.html

VIABLE. (2009). In B. A. Garner (Ed.), Black's law dictionary (9th Ed.). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.

White House (2004, April). President Bush signs unborn victims of violence act of 2004. Retrieved July 21, 2011, from http://georgebush-whitehouse.archives.gov/index.html

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