Abortion is not murder. It is not sin. To believe that abortion is murder is to deny God’s infinity. Creation goes on and on, and the soul is immortal. It will come back at the next available opportunity, perhaps to the same mother who chose to end a pregnancy.

The arguments used to categorize abortion as murder are based upon shallow understanding of spiritual truth. Truth is, the child chooses the parents, and the soul already knows beforehand whether the mother will abort or give birth, and what the general circumstances of childhood will be like. The information is easily available in the spirit realm.

The scriptures used to portray abortion as murder say that God is aware of us from the time we are in the womb. True. From long before birth, and long after we die, we are all seen by the eye of creation. Just because we’re born doesn’t mean it all began at that moment, or at conception, yet that’s the thinking behind the religious arguments about abortion and reproduction in general. If the soul is eternal, it originated before the body and will continue after the body perishes.

A soul might choose a life that’s going to end in abortion or miscarriage for the opportunity to experience brief connection with the mother and her surroundings. Tickets to Earth are in demand out there in the spiritual universe, where we originate, and all opportunities are precious for soul growth. Abortion is, in a sense, a wasted opportunity, but viewed from the spirit side it is not a hate-filled act like walking into a church and gunning down a doctor who performs abortions. That’s murder.

Akin to murder is inciting people to it. The killer in Kansas predicts more attacks around the country, alluding to a nationwide plot. Like the mullahs in the Middle East inciting their people to violence, in America we have preachers spewing hate and followers carrying out their edicts. We have politicians who benefit from inciting conflict and media that parrot these false arguments and present a simplistic view of reality, sometimes joining in the call to violence.

“What applies to one but not to all” hypocrisy is why the two sides in the abortion debate are so far apart. The pro-choice crowd refuses to acknowledge that some truths are spiritual, and the pro-life crowd denies any truth but their narrow religious interpretation of it. Abortion opponents, supposedly defending the sanctity of life, are hypocrites if they support execution, because we know that 10% of death row inmates have been exonerated by DNA evidence, and Spirit calls for every life to be given every opportunity at redemption. Pro-life means all life, including species other than human, yet it is appallingly prevalent among the devoutly religious in America to support wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—like in Iraq—and conservative policies that favor the rich over the poor, denying opportunities to the least-fortunate among us. Jesus would be ashamed of followers who claim to know him but apparently learned nothing from the example of his life. For crying out loud, the man was unjustly executed!

Abortion will continue to be a fact of life, same as it has been for thousands—if not ten of thousands—of years, whether or not it is legal. The writers of the Bible were well aware of the practice, and despite taking a thousand years (or so) to create 66 books, they said nothing explicitly against voluntarily terminating a pregnancy. Deformed babies were regularly abandoned to die, and slavery was legal and accepted. We shouldn’t be seeking the opinions of people 3,000 years before our time about a medical procedure.

The Old Testament scriptures that speak for unlimited fertility must also be put into context. Back then every new person contributed to family and country in essential ways. It was good policy to tell people to procreate, same as it was to restrict them from eating shellfish (which when prepared improperly can be deadly). The 40 years that Moses spent with the Israelites in the desert was enough time to spawn three generations of warriors, and they set off under Joshua to conquer a homeland. The world today is already bulging at the seams with people. Contraception and abortion are means to limit population growth. People who deny the necessity are blinded by their own beliefs, stymieing progress and preventing agreement.

Abortion opponents presume that the soul originates at conception, but
This post was inspired by a recent debate with my mother, who is ardently against abortion. When she could not counter all of my arguments, she fell back on the old stand-by:

“Well, you know, my father told me that I should just have an abortion when I was pregnant with you.”

That line used to bother me because it made me wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been born in this body. Would I have ever existed? But as my spirituality and understanding of truth have deepened, I remembered my mother’s first pregnancy. She was only 16, maybe 17, when she conceived a little girl. My soul visited mom in the womb, knowing that the pregnancy would end in miscarriage. It was a chance to bond and get ready for our lives together. About a year later she conceived again, this time a boy, and that body possessed the attributes I needed to make it through life.

Some people will argue that I cannot possibly remember being in the womb, but to those people I ask, how do you know? If you were a lion born in the zoo, all you would know of the world is the zoo. But step outside the walls and a much larger world becomes apparent. Same with spiritual truth. Sometimes what we are taught early in life becomes limiting later on when what we learn conflicts with what we think we know. My knowledge of the Bible and early lessons as a Christian put a cage around my reason, and any information that came from outside was rejected when it conflicted with the world I knew—the very limited perspective of inside the zoo. Discovering the outside world freed me from the cage, and now the lion is on the loose.

I replied to mom that if she’d aborted me, I would’ve come back when she was ready. She didn’t like that answer. To her, abortion will always be murder. Some lions choose to remain in the cage, and that’s their choice. However, it doesn’t make them correct.