Notre Dame professor advocates for abortion

The University of Notre Dame is coming under fire for appointing a professor who publicly supports abortion to lead the Catholic school’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. This professor calls pro-life advocacy “violence against women,” which is unfortunately not unusual these days.

However, since I am not a Catholic and have no investment in Notre Dame, I nearly passed the story over as just another unfortunate “sign of the times.” But then I read that the professor in question and a co-author claim:

Almost 90 percent of abortions occur during the first ten weeks of pregnancy when there are no babies or fetuses. There are only blastocysts or embryos so tiny that they are too small to be seen on an abdominal ultrasound.

This is a position to which I must respond today, because it is perhaps the most pervasive and effective argument for abortion in our secularized and confused culture.

“Why did you bring me out from the womb?”

Let’s begin with a question: Did you know that there was a person in the Bible who wished he had been aborted?

In Job 10, Job says to God: “Why did you bring me out from the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had seen me and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave” (vv. 18–19). His suffering was so severe that he wished he had never been born into his life in this broken world.

But note: Job clearly believed that he was a “me” in the womb prior to birth and that, if he had been aborted, he would have retained his personal identity and agency as he was “carried from the womb to the grave.”

In any context outside the normalization of elective abortion, how could he think otherwise?

“A human being in its own right”

Step back from the political and cultural maelstrom of this issue for a moment and ask yourself: Has any “fetus” conceived in a human womb ever come to term as anything other than a human? If not, how can the fetus be anything but human?

You might say with the Notre Dame professor that a fetus is not yet a human, but how is this logical? It has not yet developed all the physical capacities of a typical human, but left unaborted, it will. Its size is no more relevant to its biological identity before birth than it is after birth. A fetus cannot sustain itself outside the womb, but neither can a newborn infant.

In fact, at the moment of conception, what the professor calls “blastocysts or embryos” possess all 46 human chromosomes and can develop only into a human being. They are complete as well—nothing will be added except the growth and development of what exists from the moment of conception. At twelve weeks, the unborn baby is only about two inches long, but every organ of the human body is clearly in place.

Theologian Karl Barth noted:

The embryo has its own autonomy, its own brain, its own nervous system, its own blood circulation. If its life is affected by that of the mother, it also affects hers. It can have its own illnesses in which the mother has no part. Conversely, it may be quite healthy even though the mother is seriously ill. It may die while the mother continues to live. It may also continue to live after its mother’s death, and be eventually saved by a timely operation on her dead body. In short, it is a human being in its own right.

Visiting the Children’s Memorial in Jerusalem

And so, once again, scientific facts support biblical truth, in this case David’s proclamation to God, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13–14).

This is not merely a partisan battle or ideological debate. It is about far more than university faculty hiring practices and erroneous scientific assertions.

The stakes could not be higher, since the cause is life itself.

I pray for the day when America sees pro-abortion advocacy for the abhorrent regime it is. Just as we see slavery as a tragic part of our past, I pray that one day we will see elective abortion in the same way. If we are grieved at the holocaust of six million Jews (and we passionately should be), should we not grieve at the holocaust of ten times more babies through abortion?

Every time I visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, I make my way through the Children’s Memorial dedicated to the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis. As I walk slowly through its darkened halls, see the images of these precious children projected on its walls, and hear their names slowly intoned, I leave with tear-filled eyes and a grieving heart.

And I think of all the babies lost to abortion in my country and plead for God’s mercy and for an end to this horror.

Will you join me today?