Heidelcast 87: God’s Holy Law (10)—You Shall Not Murder (pt 2)

After the last episode it occurred to me that there is an obvious question that I should have addressed under the 6th commandment: abortion, the termination of a human life in the womb. Since 1973 no fewer than 50 million human beings have lost their lives due to abortion. That’s not an exaggerated number. Even Politifact agrees. 50 million, that’s more than the population of CA, WY, NE, KS combined. Imagine four American states utterly vacant. Since 1973 Americans have killed as many people as were killed during World War II. It is a widespread practice. It is legal but is it right? Is it murder, a violation of the 6th commandment, a violation of the moral law? Sometimes, when concerns are expressed about abortion, it’s made to seem as if it’s some fundamentalist crusade or fascist operation to squash freedom but one need not be a fundamentalist Christian to oppose abortion. Throughout human history even pagans have made it illegal.  Further, though Scripture does not address abortion expressly, at least not undoubtedly, there is Scriptural teaching about the value of human life and the protections due to humans as image bearers. In this episode we’ll consider historic Christian teaching and some of the reasons people use to justify abortion.

Here’s episode 87:

The series on the moral law begins with episode 77.

Here are all the episodes.

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One comment

  1. Thailand, as an officially Theravada Buddhist country, is anti-abortion. In Taiwan, liberalization of abortion rights was opposed as vociferously by the Mahayana Buddhist Sangha as by Christians. In Mainland China, there were instances of public health officers killed in rural areas over forced abortions.

    The unhappy fact is that thanks to a morally bankrupt bunch of judges, the only capital crime in a lot of American jurisdictions is simply being inconvenient to the irresponsible–and for this crime you can be executed in extremely brutal ways without the slightest recourse to due process.

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