Answering objections

Faithful Christians raise honest questions about what this site argues. They deserve honest answers, not slogans. Each objection below is stated in its strongest form, as a thoughtful believer would put it. Several are not errors but half-truths: things rightly felt, drawn to a wrong conclusion. Fuller treatments are in the treatises — especially Answers to Common Objections, the full version of this page.

“Is this not just Roman Catholic teaching?”

No. It was the unbroken teaching of the whole church, East and West, for nineteen centuries. The Reformers held it as firmly as anyone. Calvin and the Westminster divines applied the sixth commandment to the child in the womb. The first major Christian communion to permit contraception in any circumstance was the Church of England, at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, and even then a substantial number of its own bishops voted against. What is novel is not this position. It is the position most of us inherited without noticing.

“This isn’t a gospel issue.”

The sanctity of life is not the gospel itself. The gospel is Christ crucified and risen, and salvation by grace through faith alone. We would resist anyone who made this a test of saving faith.

But the gospel calls people to repent (Mark 1:15), and repentance means turning from sin. If taking innocent life is sin, it falls squarely within what the gospel calls us to turn from. How can people repent of what they have never been told is sin? To call this “not a gospel issue” as a reason for silence confuses the gospel’s foundation with its fruit.

“We don’t want to put people off the gospel.”

The instinct is a good one. But consider whether Jesus modelled it. When the rich young ruler turned away sorrowful, Jesus did not soften the demand (Mark 10:21–22). At Pentecost Peter said “this Jesus, whom you crucified” (Acts 2:23, 36), and that hard word cut to the heart, and three thousand were saved. Faithfulness is the standard, not comfort, and not numbers.

“Babies who die go to heaven anyway.”

Many evangelicals hold that hope, citing David’s confidence about his dead child (2 Samuel 12:23). We share it. But notice what the objection quietly does: it turns a comfort into a permission. By the same reasoning, no one should ever have stopped any killer of children. A hoped-for mercy toward the victim can never license the act that made him a victim.

“What about rape, or a threat to the mother’s life?”

These weigh most heavily on a tender conscience, and they deserve care.

On the mother’s life: no condition requires the direct, intentional killing of an unborn child to save his mother. Ectopic pregnancy, the most cited case, illustrates the distinction. By the time it is found the child has very often already died; where he has not, treatment seeks to preserve every life that can be preserved. The intent is never the child’s death. That is morally distinct from a procedure whose very aim is the child’s death.

On rape: rape is a monstrous evil deserving the full weight of justice against the perpetrator. But the child is innocent, and “children shall not be put to death because of their fathers” (Deuteronomy 24:16). Abortion cannot un-rape a woman. She needs love, protection, justice, and lasting care, not a second act of violence against the one wholly innocent person in the account.

“We accept small risks to life all the time. Why is this different?”

Driving is a system built to protect life, not merely one that tolerates risk. Speed limits, licences, inspections, a conscious driver able to brake, and an investigation when someone dies. The whole structure rests on the premise that a lost life demands an answer.

The contraceptive mechanism at issue has none of this. No one is at the wheel. If it ends a life there is no record, no investigation, no accountability, because there is no way even to know it happened. This is where Deuteronomy 22:8 speaks. God commanded a parapet on every roof “that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house”, not because a fall was likely but because it was possible and would be fatal. Driving already has its parapet. This does not, and no safeguard can be added after the method is in use. The only parapet available is not to use a method that carries the mechanism.

“The odds are too small to matter.”

Two answers, and the second matters more.

First, scale. About one in three women of childbearing age in the UK use a hormonal method or an intrauterine device.[1] A tiny per-woman risk, spread across millions of women and many years, is not a tiny number of lives. We offer that as illustration, not as a measured statistic, since the true rate is unknown and unmeasurable.

Second, and decisively: rarity settles frequency, not morality. A mechanism that ends a life only occasionally still ends a life every time it operates. We would not defend any other action that killed an innocent person “only rarely”.

“I used these methods for years and never saw anything.”

At the stage when this mechanism would operate, six to twelve days after fertilisation, the embryo is around a tenth of a millimetre, smaller than a full stop, invisible. Lost against a thinned womb lining, he is indistinguishable from an ordinary period. Seeing nothing is exactly what the mechanism, if it operates, would predict. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance” (Psalm 139:16). God sees what is invisible to us.

“Surely my doctor would have told me.”

Your doctor is not deceiving you. He is telling you the truth as his profession has defined it. The definition has a history.

In America, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists redefined the terms. Its 1965 bulletin: “Conception is the implantation of a fertilized ovum.” Its 1972 update: “Conception is the implantation of the blastocyst. It is not synonymous with fertilization.”[2] No embryological discovery drove the change. At a 1959 Planned Parenthood symposium, Dr Bent Boving observed that whether a method was seen as preventing conception or destroying a pregnancy might turn on “something so simple as a prudent habit of speech”.[3] A habit of speech, not a finding.

In the UK the line was drawn by the courts. In 2000 the Government confirmed in Parliament that emergency contraception works before implantation and so before a pregnancy is legally established.[4] In 2002 the High Court settled it: there is no established pregnancy, and so no miscarriage, before implantation.[5] Follow the consequence. A child lost before implantation is legally the loss of nothing that must be counted or disclosed. Even the duty of informed consent under Montgomery cannot reach it, because in law there is no “risk to a pregnancy” to disclose.[6] The definition is the problem, not the man behind the counter.

“Aren’t the health bodies the experts?”

Respect genuine expertise. But notice where the experts have a stake. The bodies most often cited to reassure us are frequently the same institutions that manufacture, sell, provide, or advocate for these products, and for abortion itself.

Their own leadership has conceded what turns on the definition. In 1981 the then-President of ACOG told a US Senate committee that if life were defined in law from fertilisation, the IUD and low-dose pill “could be considered as abortifacients and therefore declared illegal”.[7] And credentialed physicians do dissent: pro-life obstetricians and gynaecologists decline to prescribe certain methods on exactly these grounds.[8] This is not laypeople versus experts. It is experts disagreeing, and one side has something riding on the answer.

“You’re called to this. Not everyone is.”

God gives different callings, but some commands bind every Christian. “Seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17). “Open your mouth for the mute” (Proverbs 31:8). “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). The abolition of the slave trade needed Wilberforce in Parliament, Wesley and Newton in the pulpit, and countless ordinary Christians in prayer and boycott. This is not a specialised ministry for a few. It is basic Christian faithfulness, distributed across many hands.

“What if I lose my job?”

The cost is not imaginary and we will not pretend otherwise. But Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). The Hebrew midwives feared God more than Pharaoh, refused to kill the baby boys, and were blessed for it (Exodus 1:17–21). God may deliver us from the cost or sustain us through it. The searching question is the one we will one day answer before Christ: did we keep silent about the killing of the innocent for fear of a complaint?

“I will devastate the women in my church.”

This fear does you credit, and it should shape how and when you speak. Prepare gentle, confidential care before ever raising the matter publicly. But weigh the alternative. If you say nothing, they continue unknowing, or they learn one day from someone far less careful and far less kind, with no shepherd beside them. Truth told tenderly comes with Christ attached: the full and free cleansing of one who “acted ignorantly in unbelief” and “received mercy” (1 Timothy 1:13, 16). To withhold the truth to spare them is to leave them alone with it later. Love does not do that.

“Haven’t recent studies shown these methods don’t prevent implantation?”

This is the most important objection to answer honestly, because our credibility rests on claiming no more than the evidence allows. In one place the evidence has genuinely moved.

For the levonorgestrel morning-after pill, it has moved against part of the popular pro-life case. In December 2022 the American regulator agreed to remove the implantation language from Plan B’s label; the current position of the FDA and FIGO is that it works mainly by delaying ovulation and is not shown to prevent implantation.[9] We say so plainly, and we do not rest the argument on the morning-after pill.

Two things have not moved, and they are enough. The copper coil’s post-fertilisation action is not disputed: the NHS states it works in part by stopping a fertilised egg from implanting, and the clinical guideline for its emergency use relies on that mechanism.[10] And the official product information for combined pills and the hormonal coil continues to list changes to the womb lining that reduce the likelihood of implantation.[11] The mechanism is not a pro-life inference the science has overtaken. It remains the makers’ own stated account.

The children in question cannot raise these objections, or any others, on their own behalf. That is precisely why the rest of us must not hide behind them.

Sources

1. Cea-Soriano L. et al., “Use of prescription contraceptive methods in the UK general population: a primary care study”, BJOG (2014). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24118863/
2. ACOG Terminology Bulletins 1965 and 1972, as documented in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (2012). https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)02223-X/fulltext
3. Bent Boving, in Mechanisms Concerned with Conception, ed. C. G. Hartman (Pergamon Press, 1963), 386; symposium of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Population Council, 1959.
4. Hansard, House of Commons written answer, 19 July 2000. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2000-07-19/debates/3654034a-014e-4ccf-921b-fef2a919d49a/EmergencyContraception
5. R (Smeaton) v Secretary of State for Health [2002] EWHC 610 (Admin). https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2002/610.html
6. Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11. https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2015/11.html
7. Testimony of the President of ACOG, US Senate “Human Life Bill” hearings, 1981; recorded by the Guttmacher Institute. https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2005/05/implications-defining-when-woman-pregnant
8. American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. https://aaplog.org/
9. FDA Plan B One-Step decisional memorandum (December 2022); FIGO, “Mechanism of action of levonorgestrel emergency contraception”. https://www.figo.org/mechanism-action-emergency-contraception
10. NHS, “Intrauterine device (IUD)”. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/iud-coil/
11. Manufacturers’ Summaries of Product Characteristics, UK electronic medicines compendium. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version.