Dennis Di Mauro has written a helpful book entitled A Love for Life[1] which explores the history of the abortion issue within the Christian Church. A full review of the book on this website will be forthcoming. In a particularly helpful appendix to the book Di Mauro draws together in one place the Abortion related resolutions or doctrinal positions of the major North American Christian Church bodies.

One striking similarity that emerges when one reads through the statements of those churches which allow for the moral acceptance of legal abortion is the concern that abortion has a “tragic dimension[2]” and that every effort should be made to reduce the number of abortions.

Perhaps it is a failing on my part, but I have never understood what is so tragic about the abortion procedure that these churches believe that its frequency should be reduced. If one believes that abortion is the ending of a human life, then a reduction in the number of abortions makes sense. If you don’t believe that abortion ends a human life, then what difference does it make how many are performed. The most common abortion procedure is a one-day outpatient affair that in many states doesn’t even require parental permission for a minor. I think that the position of these pro-choice churches is a tacit admission that the rhetoric of abortion being a anything other than the ending of a human life falls short.[3]

What disappoints me most about pro-choice churches like the United Church of Christ and the Episcopalian Church is that they have been at the forefront of social justice on behalf of society’s most poor and vulnerable. And yet on this one issue they have chosen to side with the “individual consciences” of those who have the power over life and death, at the expense of God’s most vulnerable who are entirely dependant on the care of others. That, in my view, is abortion’s true “tragic dimension.”