GotQuestions.org: If aborted babies go to heaven, why is abortion wrong?
We who defend
the sanctity of life sometimes
face questions similar to this: “Why do you say abortion is wrong, if babies go
to heaven when they die?” That question often has a follow-up: “Aborted
children never have a chance to grow up and reject Jesus; thus, by your own
reasoning, abortion fills heaven and keeps people out of hell. Isn’t that a
good thing?”
Considering abortion as mercifully sending babies to
heaven is an invalid option for Christians for several reasons. First, if we
believe that heaven and hell are real, then we have to believe that there is a
God. And, if there’s a God, we need to care what He’s said on the subject of
abortion. By that measure alone, we cannot justify killing the unborn, an
action that God expressly forbids (Leviticus 20:1–5; 2 Kings 24:2–4). God
commands us not to commit murder (Exodus 20:13), He knows
the child before birth (Jeremiah 1:5),
and, in the Mosaic Law, He prescribed punishment for killing an unborn child (Exodus 21:22–25). Abortion
is never an act of mercy; it is always an act of shedding innocent blood
(see Proverbs
6:16–17).
So, the first reason that we reject the
idea of a mercy-motivated abortion is fairly simple: because God said not to
kill. Regardless of what else we may think, God told us that killing the
innocent is wrong. Period. Just as with a parent-child relationship, the only
thing we ultimately need to know is that the Father has said, “No.”
The second reason that abortion cannot
be justified as a merciful act is that we are not absolutely sure
what happens to those who die before they are born. We have many good reasons
to think they’ll be in heaven, but we don’t have explicit biblical proof. So we
can’t definitively say that aborting a soul will rescue it from hell. We dare
not take such an awful risk with the souls of other people.
With both of those reasons in mind, we
can pose a useful statement: “God didn’t just kill Cain before he sinned.” That
fact doesn’t tell us exactly why we should not abort a child for mercy’s sake,
but it does tell us that God does not see killing to prevent sin as a viable
option.
A third reason that we cannot justify
abortion on the basis that it sends babies to heaven involves eternal rewards.
An aborted child has been denied the chance to serve God in this life and gain
rewards for heaven. A child killed in the womb is being denied the chance to
honor God in this world and earn rewards in the world to come. The chance to
serve God is one of the things abortion steals from a human being.
Logically, the attitude that abortion
is merciful in that it sends babies straight to heaven would lead us to kill
all children, unborn or not. After all, if it really is “better” for them to be
dead, then we should do them the favor of killing them and sending them to a
better place. Anyone who takes seriously the idea that babies in the womb should
be killed to send them to heaven would logically have to favor the killing of
every single child who is—in his opinion—under the age of accountability.
Following the same rationale, he’d also be inclined to kill other believers to
prevent them from sinning any more before they get to heaven.
Given that God is a God of logic, and
given that He specifically tells us to protect the weak and innocent (Proverbs 31:8–9), to have
children (Genesis 1:28), and to see
them as a blessing (Psalm 127:4–5),
we can’t justify abortion on any moral grounds whatsoever. Abortion is
the murder of the unborn, and
we can’t mitigate the heinous nature of the act by injecting some perverse
sense of human “mercy” into the equation.
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