There was a time in the not too distant past when the majority of Protestant Christians, including those who called themselves evangelical, did not consider the point at which a fertilized ovum or developing embryo or fetus becomes a human being to be clearly defined, indisputable, and settled for all time.
There was a time when different viewpoints were accepted and respected and did not serve as a litmus test to determine who was a “real” Christian. A time when many evangelicals thought that the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision might be considered a good and compassionate ruling as it overturned the varied restrictive abortion laws
of the states that so often drove desperate women to seek out illegal, unsafe, “back-alley” abortions.
Instead, declared the court, the constitutional guarantee of privacy leaves it up to a woman, her doctor, and her own moral agency to make decisions about terminating a pregnancy.
Religion historian Randall Balmer in his book, Thy Kingdom Come, writes that Rev.W. A. Criswell, a well known fundamentalist Baptist pastor who was at one time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressed his approval of the Supreme Court decision in these words: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
And Dudley, in his book cited earlier, quotes a Dallas Theological Seminary professor who wrote a 1968 article for Christianity Today claiming that “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed,” basing his argument on Exodus 21:22-24. Other conservative Christian theologians made similar arguments.
Randall Balmer reminds us that two years before the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that called on Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
Or consider this quotation from a 1973 book on sex education in the Christian home by an evangelical author and commissioned by a conservative evangelical publisher who had asked Dr. James Dobson (yes, that James Dobson) to write the foreword. In the book’s section on abortion, which objectively informed the reader of both the physiological and legal aspects (including the Supreme Court ruling that had just passed), there appeared this nonjudgmental paragraph:
“There are sharp differences among Christians with regard to abortion. Some consider it murder; others say the operation might be an act of mercy. Some believe that the soul enters the fetus at conception. Others feel that the zygote (fertilized ovum) is just a cell that may become a potential human being but is not yet one at the moment, and hence its removal is not ‘murder.’ The Bible is silent on the subject, although some Christians believe Exodus 21:22, 23 may indicate a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being, since inflicting an injury on a pregnant women which resulted in its loss was to be punished by a fine rather than by death, under the ‘life for life’ law.”
