Top Ten Reasons to Allow Abortion

This being a Christian blog, I’m sure that title will catch some people’s attention. But, before you tune out…whether your pro-choice or pro-life…please hear me out.

I am not going to get into a list of biblical reasons for or against this practice. Nor will I simply assert my position on it without, hopefully, providing adequate justification for why I believe what I do regarding the objective moral value regarding the practice of abortion.


 What I am going to do, or at least attempt to do, is go through a list of the ten most common reasons that I have heard people use to advocate for abortion. I will go into each argument in a separate post and share my thoughts on that particular argument. From there, I will leave it to you to determine if my perspective comports with the reality that we all live in.

First, before we get into it, let me make sure to set some sort of foundation. I mentioned above that I will be referring to what I believe to be the objective moral quality or attributes of abortion. By “objective” I am referring to the moral value of abortion as an attribute of the practice itself. This means that the moral value, I will argue, has nothing whatsoever to do with how any particular individual, group, society or culture feels about it.

Rather than spend too much time on that, I’ll refer you to a previous post I did on Objective Morality which will hopefully help you better understand how and why I believe such morality to be a property of the thing itself and not a function of what any person (or people) thinks about it.

Another thing I want to set up is with regards to the potential feedback that I may get during this series of posts claiming that I am “intolerant.” Again, rather than spend a lot of time making the distinction between respectful disagreement and intolerance, I will refer you to another post. This one just recently was written by Jonathan Morrow (co-author of Is God Just a Human Invention with Sean McDowell) on the subject of tolerance.

With all that said, the last thing I wanted to do was give you a list of the ten most common reasons that I have come across for allowing abortions. I invite you to leave your comment below if  you feel that any other reasons should be addressed and perhaps I can include those somewhere in this series.

The arguments I most often hear in favor of abortion are as follows:

1. The pregnancy was the result of rape or incest
2. The child will not survive the birth or will die shortly after birth
3. The child will have a physical or mental deformity or handicap
4. The mother will be unable to provide a decent quality of life for the child
5. The mother is too young (i.e. high-school) and having a child will likely be a major setback and ultimately ruin her life as well as the child’s
6. The mother may resent the child, which would result in the child growing up unwanted and / or unloved
7. If we make abortion illegal, women will resort to unsafe, unsanitary “back-alley” methods of abortion
8. A woman should be able to make choices with regards to her own body
9. The father is pressuring the mother to terminate the pregnancy
10. The mother’s life is in jeopardy as well as the child’s (if the mother dies, the baby dies, too)

As you can see, I’ve got my work cut out for me. Some of these arguments have given many people a good deal of anxiety as they try to make their way through what may seem like a moral mine-field. This, I believe, is made worse due to the intense emotions that are typically involved in discussions on this topic.

Though this series, I will do my very best to leave emotional reasons for or against abortion out of it. I do not have any desire to make any straw man arguments. Therefore, if you feel that I am misrepresenting a particular point of view, please bring that to my attention politely and respectfully.

In closing, I’d just like to say that I hope this series will help you to think through his topic and these arguments in order to have a clear and consistent believe about the subject. I recognize that there is a great deal of emotional baggage with this topic and am hopeful that we can navigate through that with “gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)

Grace, love and peace.