The women of The View discussed abortion. It looked like the so-called pro-life Democrat, Sunny Hostin, might actually take an anti-abortion position. While claiming that Democrats should take the moral high ground against Republicans because “the most important things to [Jesus] were justice and mercy, so real biblical sort of perspectives are saving the earth, welcoming strangers, taking care of the poor.”

Whoopi Goldberg interrupted with, “What if you’re not a Christian?” We’ll come back to Whoopi’s question in a moment.

Hostin’s “pro-life” position is nothing of the sort. She repeated herself:

Christians get caught up on the abortion issue, but if you really are a faithful person, if you really are a follower of the Bible and a follower of Jesus, again, the most important issues are justice and mercy. The most important issues are caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, caring for our Earth.

If abortion kills a human being, then it is the essence of “justice and mercy.” Isn’t it possible to be opposed to killing unborn children and “caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, caring for our Earth”?

People who oppose abortion also believe that caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, caring for our Earth are also biblical commands. The disagreement comes on how we are to do these things. Jesus never proposed setting up government programs to help the poor. In fact, government programs have made poverty worse.

Hostin is like so many people who say, “while I don’t believe in abortion, other people have their choices.” In fact, this is exactly what she said when Joy Behar asked, “If you were in the position to vote pro or con Roe v. Wade, you would say leave it, right?”

Hostin is “pro-life” in word only, thus, not pro-life at all. Following her “logic,” someone who is for “caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, caring for our Earth” could say the same thing. “While I believe in caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, and caring for our Earth, other people have their choices.”

The Bible has something to say about this type of thinking:

What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself (James 2:14-17).

The audience cheered when Whoopi Goldberg said the following:

Here’s the thing. If you believe that abortion is morally wrong, then you never have to have one. The law doesn’t say you have to have an abortion. The law says if you feel you need to, we are not going to stand in your way. And that is how the law should read.

If we’re talking about getting a tattoo or some sort of plastic surgery, then I would agree. But if the unborn baby is actually a baby, then such a cavalier attitude is downright evil. Let’s apply her dismissal of abortion to the subject of slavery:

Here’s the thing. If you believe that slavery is morally wrong, then you never have to have one. The law doesn’t say you have to have a slave. The law says if you feel you need to have a slave, we are not going to stand in your way. And that is how the law should read.

It all comes down to what’s being aborted and what’s a slave. If the unborn baby is a human being, then opposition to abortion should be the same as opposition to slavery. The law did not say that a person had to have slaves. It only said that it was legal to own slaves.

What none of the ladies on The View were willing to answer was by what standard do we make moral decisions.

Whoopi said, “What if you’re not a Christian?” I wonder if she would have asked Martin Luther King, Jr. this question when he rooted his ant-segregationist arguments in the ethics of Jesus and the Bible.

In his 1957 sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” King based on Jesus’ words in one of the most famous passages from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:43-48):

[I]t’s significant that he does not say, “Like your enemy.” Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Love your enemy.” This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

In the same message, King said, “We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.”

But “what if I’m not a Christian?” What if I’m an evolutionist who believes in survival of the fittest? What if I believe, based on evolution, that some races are more superior than others? Maybe I’m a follower of Aristotle who believed there is a “natural order” for slavery.

Of all the ideas churned up during the early tumultuous years of American history, none had a more dramatic application than the attempts made to apply to the natives there the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery: that one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue free of manual labour.1

It’s all very logical given materialistic assumptions about the cosmos and the place that evolved biological units have in it. In the end, without a Christ-centered worldview, there is no way to account for morality.

What does the Bible say about the status of the unborn child? Jacob and Esau “struggled” in their mother’s womb (Gen. 25:22). Struggling implies consciousness and an act of the will.

Legal status is given to the unborn child in Exodus 21:22-25. The text literally reads, “So that her children come out.” The NASB first translated verse 22 as “so that she has a miscarriage” and had a marginal note that read, “Lit. her children come out.” In a subsequent edition, the translators translated it, “she gives birth prematurely” while still adding the marginal note, “lit her children come out.”

The Hebrew verb yatza, “go out,” when used alone, as it is in Exodus 21:22-25, refers to a live birth, not a miscarriage (Gen. 25:25, 26; 38:28-30; Jer. 1:5; 20:18). The Hebrew term yeled is used in Exodus 21:22 and means “child,” including a newborn child.

While in his mother’s womb, John the Baptist leaped for joy in response to Mary’s greeting about her pregnancy (Luke 1:39-45; cf. 1:36). And we haven’t even looked at medical evidence like 3D imaging.

1. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), 12-13. [↩]