Let the Babies Come to Me

We believe in a Savior who raises the dead: this is why the church is the one place on earth that can speak plainly about abortion without collapsing into despair.

Jeremiah 1:15: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart…”
Psalm 139:13: "For you created my inmost being you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

There are anniversaries that arrive like a bell tolling in the distance, dates that don’t just mark time, but expose what we’ve become. January 22nd is one of those dates in the United States. It was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that helped embed abortion into American law and imagination for almost fifty years. And even though Dobbs (decided June 24, 2022) overturned Roe, it didn’t end abortion. It didn’t even end the argument. It simply moved the battlefield and, in some ways, clarified the deeper conflict. This is no longer merely a political discussion but a discussion of the concept of personhood.

Christians have been talking about abortion for a long time, but we don’t always realize how early. The church wasn’t dragged into this by modern politics. As my colleague, Adam Francisco, recently pointed out in a Thinking Fellows episode on abortion, in the second century, the Didache names abortion for what it is and forbids it. Justin Martyr and Athenagoras (early defenders of Christianity writing to Roman authorities) pointed out something almost painfully simple: Christians were not the murderers; Christians were the ones rescuing exposed infants, gathering discarded children, taking them into their homes, feeding them, and raising them. Christians weren’t merely “against” something. They were “for” someone.

That’s worth remembering, because our public debates tend to flatten everything into slogans and tribal identities. But this is one of the greatest moral wounds in the West, and we will not heal it with euphemisms or with outrage alone.

Listen to the language we’re trained to use: “choice,” “reproductive freedom,” “healthcare,” “termination,” “products of conception.” Even “morning-after pill” is a linguistic trick, as if the act is a simple reset button after a “wild night,” and not the deliberate ending of a life. Words can be used to tell the truth, or to soften it until it disappears. That softening is not accidental. It’s how a society learns to live with something it could not bear to name honestly.

If a million people were killed every year by any other means, we would have wall-to-wall coverage and political panic. We would demand someone be held accountable. We would treat it like the moral earthquake it is. Yet abortion can take hundreds of thousands of lives annually (maybe up to one million in the US alone) [1] and still be wrapped in the language of normalcy.

Christians must resist the temptation to speak the culture’s euphemisms simply because they’re the common vocabulary. We are not helped by pretending the act is less severe than it is. Abortion is the intentional ending of a human life in its earliest and most dependent stage.

So yes, Christians call abortion murder, not because we enjoy the word, but because we believe it ends a human life. Location does not change nature. A child in the womb is not a different species of being than a child in a crib. Science can tell you an unborn child is human, with his or her own DNA, own developmental trajectory, and often even his or her own blood type. The question is not whether the child in the womb is a human life. The question is whether we will treat that human life as if it has value and protection, or as if it is disposable when inconvenient.

And that question reveals something else that has quietly shifted. The old cultural defense was “It’s not really a baby.” But we all know how unstable that claim is. Our culture talks about “babies in the womb” when we’re watching animal documentaries or sharing ultrasound photos in a wanted pregnancy. The same society that swoons over “animal babies” can turn around and call a human baby a “clump of cells” when the pregnancy is unwanted.

So why are we here? Why is this so persistent? Partly because we’re not just dealing with a policy debate. We’re dealing with two different moral universes.

For many, the controlling principle is bodily autonomy: the idea that the highest good is self-determination, and the self is sovereign. But there’s a problem: pregnancy involves more than one body. When you gently push, when you say, “This is not merely your body; there is another human life here,” the argument often doesn’t get answered. It gets dismissed. Because the conflict isn’t about evidence; it’s about worship. One vision says the self is ultimate. The Christian vision says God is ultimate, and therefore human life (even inconvenient human life) is not ours to discard.

Some have tried to justify abortion more “philosophically” by admitting the unborn is human but claiming it is not yet a “person.” That argument has a history, and it leads to grim consistency. If personhood depends on certain capacities such as preferences, sentience, or self-awareness, then the protection of the very young, the disabled, and the elderly becomes negotiable. The logic doesn’t stop at birth. It never has. That’s why the church has also historically stood against euthanasia: because once you decide that some humans are “less persons” than others, you have not escaped paganism; you have simply modernized it.

And paganism is a helpful word here, not as a slur, but as diagnosis. In a pagan moral universe, children are often the price paid for adult flourishing. Call it child sacrifice if you like, but the pattern is ancient: eliminate the vulnerable so the strong can keep their lifestyle uninterrupted. When the leading reasons given for abortion include “I don’t want a child,” financial strain, instability with the partner, or interference with education and career, you can see the shape of the idol; an idol that’s not merely sex, but control. An idol built on the false promise that life can be curated: kept clean, kept manageable, kept on schedule.

And to be honest, Christians have sometimes absorbed that same schedule. Here’s where we must stop talking only about “them” and start confessing what’s closer to home. Many of the justifications for abortion align uncomfortably well with the language of success we’ve allowed to seep into our own homes and churches: “Don’t let marriage derail your plans.” “Don’t have kids until you’re financially stable.” “Get established first.” None of those concerns are meaningless. But when they become ultimate, they form an anti-family catechism, one that trains people to see children as threats to fulfillment rather than gifts received in faith.

We can, and should, fight legally for the protection of the unborn. The law is good when it restrains harm. But the church is not merely a political lobby. The church is the place where sinners are told the truth and then given Christ.

Which means we must speak in two distinct ways, depending on who is in front of us. There are those who still need the law in its sharpness on this matter. Abortion is the destruction of a neighbor, not a private lifestyle preference.

But there are also those who carry this sin like a stone in the chest. A woman may have had an abortion ten years ago, and never spoken of it. She may be sitting quietly in a pew, outwardly composed, inwardly haunted because the law is already written on the heart. The late-night hours do their own preaching.

To that person, the church offers Jesus Christ—crucified and risen, for even the end of their unborn child. That is the pastoral center. Christ’s death and resurrection are sufficient for murderers. This is more than mere sentimentality; it’s the gospel. In Christ, guilt is not managed but endured; and sin is not excused, it is forgiven. The old is buried with him, and the new is raised with him. We believe in a Savior who raises the dead: this is why the church is the one place on earth that can speak plainly about abortion without collapsing into despair.

If we want to be credible in our stance concerning life, we need more than denunciation. We need to be the people who help. That means churches that quietly support crisis pregnancies with money, housing, childcare, rides to doctor appointments, etc. Churches should honor adoption and foster care not as “someone else’s calling,” but as a normal Christian response to children in need. Churches should resist the state’s suspicion of Christian morality by simply continuing to do what Christians have always done: taking in the vulnerable at a personal cost.

It also means we must talk differently about sex, not with prudish silence, but with joyful honesty. Sex within marriage is a good gift, not a dirty secret. Our children should not learn the “sexual worldview” from the internet while the church whispers and blushes. Teach them that sex is powerful, beautiful, and risky (especially outside of marriage) because it binds people, because it can create life, because it can connect you to another person forever through a child. Tell them the truth: married life is not the end of romance; it is the proper home for it. If our culture sells them the myth that freedom is consequence-free pleasure, the church must sell them something better: love that is committed, joy that is protected, and a family life that is worth sacrificing for.

This won’t solve everything, but it will put us back into the posture Christians have always needed: not merely condemning death but practicing life.

Because in the end, the church’s response to abortion is a crucified Christ and an empty tomb, preached into a world that kills its children and then pretends it didn’t. It is the courage to tell the truth, and the tenderness to bind up the broken. It is repentance where we have adopted the world’s priorities. It is forgiveness for those crushed by shame. And it is a renewed commitment to speak and live as if human life, born and unborn, really matters.

Our reality is that we have been given a Savior who did not turn away from our worst, and who still says, even here: “Come to me.”

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Let the Babies Come to Me