Is There Such a Thing as a Purely Secular Argument Against Abortion?

The following is my response to some questions raised in a recent email. A portion of the initial email is included below. My response follows.

...Ever since I've tried to understand [the crucifixion] I have failed. If it was god who "sent his son" and god who "forgave the sins": why couldn't he just forgive the sins without the carnage in the middle? Why does christianitly seem to need a human sacrafice to appease it's God? It is common in many religions, but seems to contradict a lot of Christianity's values.

Thirdly and most importantly, The pro-life issue. I have come up with a way to summarize how I see it. I recognize that human life is special compared to other animals, it is acceptable to kill fish for food, but unthinkable to kill people for food. But the foetus possesses none of the aspects of "humanity" which make us special, it lacks language, art, and science. It can also be inferred with reasonable confidence from this and other evidence that it lacks abstract thought, and self awareness. Hands and feet do not command special treatment, monkeys have hands, and so do dolls. So why should we treat it with all the "special" rights of a human when it has none of the special attributes which deserve these rights? I don't see how anyone can have a truly secular justification against abortion. Unless you also give cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, fish, lab rats, vermin rats, sick dogs and lame horses, the same "right to life". Those who are against abortion but still kill animals (who in many ways are far more like a person than a foetus is) draw much of their logic (weather they admit it or not) from the Christian scociety they were raised in. I am very keen to know of anyone who does have a purely secular argument for the pro-life cause, can you give me some contact details, web-links, or references on this please?

Thanks for your follow up... more good questions. The "carnage" of the gospel is certainly disturbing, but it can't be avoided. The Bible tells us in Hebrews 9:2 that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins" and, in Romans 6:23, that "the wages of sin is death". The perfect moral character of God mandates that He act in ways which are consistent with that character. A righteous judge can't just let the guilty go free. Any judge who so acted would cease to be a good judge. It is no different with God. He is bound by His own perfection. The tension is this. How God be both righteous and merciful? The answer comes at the cross where God not only justifies those who put their faith in HIm, but also justifies His own grace. This is how the apostle Paul puts it.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. -- Romans 3:23-26

If God only showed mercy, without also satisfying the just requirement of the law, He would neither be good nor righteous. That is why redemption is such a messy thing. That is why Jesus had to die.

Next Question.

Almost all of the reasoning on the Abort73 website is "secular". It isn't until the final section that the Bible even comes into play. The basic argument is simple, really. As you've noted (and apparently agree with), our society recognizes a qualitative distinction between human beings and all other animals. You can eat cows, you can't eat people. Therefore, since human embryos and fetuses are demonstrably, irrefutably, genetically-distinct human beings from the moment of conception, abortion is unjust. It kills an innocent human being, and that is something that virtually all men and women condemn, no matter where they place their faith. But here's where it gets tricky. At the end of the day, there is no "purely secular" way to condemn abortion (or anything else), because there is no purely secular way to make a moral distinction between people and animals. This nation, and the whole of the western world, wasn't established on evolutionary, secular reasoning, but rather on the biblical notion that human life is sacred because all men are created equal and in the very image of God. That's our starting point, and even though our nation has almost completely abandoned the biblical notion of creation, the ideology which holds that human beings have more value than other animals has largely remained, at least in the mainstream.

The difficulty that every humanist must face is this. How can they establish the value of human life, which is the basis for all individual human rights, if they believe that human beings are just the latest evolutionary link in a giant cosmic accident? If you throw out biblical rationale, what is it that sets human beings apart? You've rightly identified a few things... language, art, science, abstract thought and self awareness, but I think you've put the cart before the horse. The possession of these attributes is not what makes something human. They are merely characteristics that are unique to human beings, but we all manifest these attributes in varying degrees. I can only speak one language. Am I less human than someone who speaks five? Or is my two-year-old daughter less human than I am because her vocabulary is not as vast? Are the more-disabled less human than the less-disabled because they can't grasp biology or physics as well? We can have no assurance that newborn babies are able to appreciate art or contemplate their existence, but that doesn't make them non human. They're just at a different place developmentally and that's why it's so dangerous to try and set up subjective, unmeasurable criteria for deciding if someone is qualified enough to be a human being. Such thinking can be genocidal.

So long as society values and protects human life, it is very easy to make a case against abortion without appealing to the Bible, but it must be understood that the primary reason that society as a whole does value human life is because of the influence of the Bible. In that sense, you can't escape it. The main difference between human beings and all the other animals on the planet is not mechanical, it's moral. For whatever reason, God chose to make humans in His own image, He gave us the freedom to rebel against Him, but through Christ, He's also provided a means of restoration for all who will renounce their rebellion and cling to Him as Lord of their life. I know that's a lot to think about, but I pray it makes sense.