ABORTION

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INTRODUCTION

The abortion is a subject of great debate, since the absolute acceptance by individuals and the legalization in some nations, to the absolute rejection, even to risk of the life of the mother.

The oath of Hippocrates says: “To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death. Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.”

The Declaration of Geneva (1948) establishes: “I will maintain extreme respect by the human life from the moment of the conception”.

It is subject of debate, because it includes legal aspects, theological, ethical, social and personal. It has a strong emotional impact, being connected with the mysteries of the sexuality and the reproduction.

But the Christians must not evade our responsibility to contribute with a Biblical position, sustained in the Christian ethics and that responds effectively faced the advance of this serious social problem.

There are two reasons to do it:

· First: Because the abortion is related to the sovereignty of God and the sacred character of the human life. God is only giver of the life and only He can take it.

· Second: Because the abortion is against Biblical Doctrine of the human life, because we know that from the moment of the conception, already is a human life. In the First International Conference about the Abortion (Washington, D.C., 1967) it was declared: “We did not find any point in the time between the union of the sperm and the ovum and the birth of the boy in who it is possible to be denied that one is a human life”.

BIBLICAL FOUNDATION

There are three important truths against the abortion, declared in Psalm 139: The human being is a creation of God. “For You have possessed my inward parts; You have covered me in my mother's womb.” (verse 13). The conception is the decisive moment that begins to the human life. The extraordinary process of embryonic growth is work of the creative capacity of God. And the life as the death are divine prerogatives, nonhuman.

There is a continuity between the embryonic life and the adult life of the human. The writer of the psalm is in the present an adult, but he looks the past and he is located in the time in which not yet he had been born. He uses he himself personal pronouns “me” and “my”, because he knows that during his life before and after birth he is the same person. There are four enunciated stages of his life in Psalm 139:

· First:

You have searched me and have known me” (verse 1). This is equivalent to the past.

· Second:

“and are acquainted with all my ways” (verse 3). Here he speaks in present time.

· Third:

“Your right hand shall hold me” (verse 10). Here it is equivalent to the future.

· Fourth:

“You have covered me in my mother's womb” (verse 13). Here he speaks of his before birth stage.

In each stage, he talks about himself like “me” or “my”. He is the same person in his mother’s womb, in the childhood, youth and present age.

There is a personal relation between God and the author of the psalm. God created him, and now He sustains him, knows him, loves him and maintains him (verses 1-6); he never leaves him (verses 7-12). And more than a reciprocal relation, we can understand that it is a pact of grace that God initiated and that maintains to us. God loved us since before we could respond to him consciously, in our intrauterine life. Therefore, that shows like people to us is not the fact that we know God, on the contrary, who He knows us. What means this? That each of us WAS PERSON since our respective mothers’ womb, because God already knew us and He loved us. Is the fetus a formation in the body of the mother? No. Is he a creature with possibility of becoming human? No. What is then? He is a human life that, immature still, has the potentiality to grow until the fullness of the human individuality that ALREADY HE HAS.

This sense of continuity of the personal human life, product of the grace of God, is expressed in the following passages of the Bible: Job 31:15; Psalm 119:73; Ecclesiastes 11:5; Psalm 22:9 - 10; 71:6; Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 49:1, 5; 46:3 - 4.

Luke uses the Greek word “Brefos” to talk about the creature who leaped in the womb of Elizabeth faced the greeting of Maria (Luke 1:41), and is even the same word who he uses to talk about to new born (Luke 2:12), and to the children who they brought Jesus so that he blessed them (Luke 18:15). The fetus and the child are totally human.

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