Last week in church we read from John chapter 3, in which Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again of water and the Spirit.” Of course, being born again presupposes being born the first time.

Yet the Minnesota Department of Health reports that in 2021, 10,136 babies were not born the first time. 4,942 women cited the reason, “Does not want children at this time” (p. 19).

But is this personal preference really a sufficient reason for abortion?

Peter Singer, a respected professor of ethics at Princeton University, says the preference, “Does not want children at this time,” is not only sufficient before birth but continues to be sufficient after birth. Neither the fetus nor the child up to age three is sufficiently developed to have a preference overriding the mother’s preference.

If, like me, you recoil in horror at that suggestion, then, like me, you agree the mother's preference is simply an insufficient reason for abortion.

We have to resolve what the unborn are because that determines what we can do with them.

Indeed, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade recognized the definition of what the unborn are as the hinge on which the whole argument turns.

In oral argument on October 11, 1972, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward asked, “And the basic constitutional question initially is whether or not an unborn fetus is a person, isn’t it? . . . It’s critical to this case, is it not?” And Texas Asst Attorney General Robert Flowers answered, “Yes, sir it is.” And the published majority opinion that followed wrote, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, [Jane Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment.”

So what then is a “person”? Ask a room of one hundred people and you’ll get a variety of answers: a heartbeat, the ability to feel pain, a certain of level of capability, a certain level of autonomy, a viable birth, a rational consciousness, self-awareness. There are a lot of different things people think makes up personhood.

And that’s exactly the problem. Wherever the line for personhood is, it can’t be subjective. We are either a person or not; and that definition must be the same for everyone, otherwise we are discriminating based on a guess.

Imagine you are driving home one night in the autumn and it’s dark and it’s raining. You see a coat in the road and you’re pretty sure there’s just a whole lot of leaves smushed up in the coat. Can you run it over? What if you are wrong and inside that coat is someone who has fallen down unconscious on the road? You can’t take an action that might kill a person simply because it is your preference to take that action. That isn’t just an opinion about the issue of abortion. It is a principle underlying hundreds, maybe thousands, of American public safety laws. “Does not want children at this time” is certainly an insufficient reason when life is potentially on the line.

The only line in the sand on the definition of person that we have at this time is the one science has given us—a new human being comes into existence at conception. At the moment of fertilization a genetically distinct, biologically living, unique, whole thing comes into existence. Ethnicity, gender, hair color, eye color, and more are all determined in that moment. And that new human being looks and acts exactly like a human being of that age is supposed to look and act, just as newborns and toddlers and preschoolers and adults look and act their ages. We simply cannot separate the definition of “human being” from “person.” All are created equal.

There are, sadly, times Christians may experience abortions; either natural ones called miscarriages or man-made ones in situations where things have gone horribly wrong. But they are never elective based on the preference of the moment. Thank God he has given you both your first birth in the flesh and your second birth in the Spirit. Whatever decisions you’ve made in the past, when you were dead in your sins, God made you alive with Christ (Col 2:13). And that life will continue to eternity.