Blanket Immunity for Mothers Is Neither Mercy nor Justice
Christianity Today recently published an op-ed, “Save the Unborn, Yes. Don’t Punish Their Mothers,” arguing against equal-protection laws that would apply homicide statutes to the unborn and allow prosecution of women for abortion. Its author, Clarke Forsythe, is senior counsel at Americans United for Life, a pro-life group whose mission is to “advance the human right to life in culture, law, and policy.” Here he writes against equal protection for the very children that mission claims to defend.
The piece advances two claims. First, that American law before Roe rarely punished women, so prosecution today is unwarranted. Second, that Scripture gives no warrant for it: no Old Testament statute charged a woman with abortion, Exodus 21:22 concerns an assault, and appeals to “biblical justice” therefore stand on nothing. Both claims need to be answered.
History Is Not Destiny
I agree with the author on the historical record. Women have not, as a rule, been prosecuted for obtaining an abortion or inducing one themselves. In all my reading I have found only a handful of cases in which a woman was charged, convicted, and served jail time.
But history does not settle the moral question. Slavery was once legally protected in America. Racial segregation was later upheld by law. If historical practice were enough to decide what should remain legally permissible, those systems would have been nearly impossible to dismantle. History can instruct us. It cannot bind us to the errors of our ancestors. Their unrighteous arrangements are theirs. The duty to establish just laws that protect the preborn is ours.
Exodus 21 Is Not a “Born Alive” Statute
The article then turns to Scripture and treats Exodus 21 as if it were a complete law of abortion. It is not.
The text reads:
“If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is a serious injury, you are to take a life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Exodus 21:22–24, NIV)
The author is right that the passage concerns harm that befalls a pregnant woman during a fight. It is a case law about accidental injury and the adjudication that follows. That is where the sound reading ends.
What the article does next is poor hermeneutics. It takes a later common-law category—the “born alive rule”—and reads it back into Moses as if that were the meaning of the text. The born-alive rule holds that an infant must be born alive to count as a homicide victim under common law. If a child is born alive after prenatal injury and later dies of that injury, the death may be treated as homicide. The rule is concerned with legal recognition “after birth.” It says nothing about who the child is “in the womb.”
Exodus 21 is not that rule. The passage assumes something dreadful has already happened: a pregnant woman has been struck through no fault of her own and has given birth prematurely. The law then tells Israel how to adjudicate the harm. It is not a treatise on elective abortion. It does not define the preborn child as a non-person. It does not grant mothers a standing exemption from justice. To treat it as if it did is to start with a modern legal category, impose it on an ancient text, and then announce what the text “cannot” mean.
The real questions are simpler. Is the child in the womb a person whom Scripture recognizes as deserving the protection of justice? And does Scripture exempt any class of killer from that justice?
The Child Is a Person
Scripture answers the first question without hesitation. God knits a person together in the womb (Psalm 139:13). Job curses the night that announced a man was conceived (Job 3:3). David confesses sin from conception (Psalm 51:5). Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps at Mary’s greeting (Luke 1:44).
Science agrees with what Scripture asserts. A new, distinct, living human being, with his or her own DNA, begins at fertilization. Every human being, from conception to death, is made in the image of God. That is why human life is precious. That is why God forbids the unjust killing of human beings.
Murder Has No Exempt Class
The sixth commandment forbids the murder of the innocent. Scripture nowhere carves out a special class of innocents who may be killed without consequence. The Old Testament is not silent on the taking of life, especially innocent life (Genesis 9:6; Leviticus 24:17; Exodus 21:12–14; Numbers 35:30–31). Exodus warns: have nothing to do with a false charge, and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for the Lord will not acquit the guilty. Proverbs 6:16–17 lists among the things the Lord hates “hands that shed innocent blood.” Justice is to be executed fairly, without partiality (Deuteronomy 1:17; Romans 13:4).
If the child is a person, and murder is murder, then no one holds a standing exemption from justice—not even a mother.
The Old Testament often teaches by case. If a man uncovers a pit and an ox or donkey falls into it, he must make restitution (Exodus 21:33–34). Israel was told to put a parapet around the roof so no one would fall and die. The point is not the ox, the donkey, or the roof. The point is that life is costly and we are liable when we fail to protect it. There is no case study in Scripture of a mother aborting her child. That silence does not mean Scripture has nothing to say. It means we apply the principles already given.
“You shall not murder.” The “you” is personal. It means you and me. There is no special category of people licensed to murder. Scripture gives no season in which justice may be postponed. Blanket immunity for a class—specifically mothers—is neither mercy nor justice. It is a grave evil for the child and a grave evil for the mother. A society that looks away is not innocent. The community that refused to punish those who gave their children to Molech was held guilty with the parents (Leviticus 20:2–5).
Scripture cannot contradict itself. Either it condemns murder and requires justice now, for the good of the victim and of society (Ecclesiastes 8:11; Psalm 101:8; Romans 13:4), or it does not. It cannot be both A and not-A at the same time.
The question Christianity Today never asked is the only one that matters: if the child in the womb is a neighbor made in the image of God, by what authority do we refuse that child the protection of the law?
