We don’t need to be high-IQ scientists to know that life begins in the womb. The Bible is clear about this. Among many passages, Psalm 139 stands out:

¹³For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. ¹⁴I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. ¹⁵My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; ¹⁶Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them. ¹⁷How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! ¹⁸If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You.

Notice that with God, this is not just academic but personal. His thoughts toward us are precious—to Him and to us. Like David, I am overwhelmed when considering what God thinks about me! He sees me as a masterpiece of His artistry, and I am the magnum opus of His creation. And so it is with all human beings; indeed, we are created in His image (Gen. 1:27). Those are precious thoughts.

Furthermore, killing a human being without a just cause is an affront to the One who created us. Immediately after the Noahic flood, God gave a foundational command for the new world order:

“Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man. As for you, be fruitful and multiply; populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” (Gen. 9:6–7)

Unborn children are not just a political issue, nor is defending the yet-to-be-born a self-righteous imposition of unfeeling assertions. They are marvelous creations of God, far superior to humankind’s greatest inventions. Nowhere does the Scripture justify a mother’s choice to kill her yet-to-be-born child created in God’s image. Arguing that a woman has the singular, exclusive, and justified right to choose to abort her unborn child requires the unthinkable sacrifice of morality, decency, and reasonableness.

By analogy, denying the existence of God forces atheists to concoct a far-fetched explanation for the origin and design of the cosmos, much less the presence of intelligent, moral human beings. The theories are incredibly absurd, on the face of it. So also with the abortion rights crowd. They are forced to devise arbitrary divisions of pregnancy into three trimesters, each assigned various limitations or “rights” to the fetus. There is no scientific basis for such thinking.

Since all would agree that killing a baby or a child is unquestionably wrong, the unborn must be called a “fetus.” Abortion proponents become enraged when we insist on calling the unborn a child or baby. They scream “foul” when confronted with in utero photos or images of aborted babies. They are forced, by their prior commitment to “women’s rights,” to choose to accuse us of hate.

The issue is wrongly framed in this way: as long as the fetus is inside the mother, then the woman’s right to abort is an implicitly personal decision which is hers and hers alone since it is her body. The child is not yet an independent human entity but part of the mother’s body. Why can anyone deny her the right to cut off part of her body if she so wishes? However, the child is a distinct human being created in God’s image. The child is temporarily incubated in his or her temporary home (the womb) until he or she can live outside of the womb. The only differences are the stages of growth and the level of dependency on the mother. This growth and dependence continue for many years after the transition from the womb (what we call birth). Abortionists have devised completely arbitrary means of determining when a child gains the rights of a human being, and thus protection by such laws as “thou shalt not kill.”

One wonders to what extent abortion supporters would go to hold on to the so-call right to abort. Suppose God were to somehow tell them personally that the unborn were genuinely human beings. Would they flat out say, “No God”? I can almost hear a reverberating hysterical chorus: “If the God of the Bible says no to abortion, then I refuse to believe in such a God. My right to choose is more important to me than my belief in the existence of God.”