Thinking Through Abortion & Divorce

A few weeks back, the Gospel reading in my church was from Mark chapter 10 where the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus on the question of divorce. My pastor said that in that culture, divorce was expected. Which is sad on its own but even more so when you realize that this was Israel, God's people! It got me thinking about divorce today, especially in the Church, God's body. Don't worry, you'll see why abortion is included in a little bit.

*These are my thoughts and opinions that I have come to after thinking about these issues for a while. I'm offering things for consideration and have no training or official capacity to speak to real cases.

When Christians talk about changing things so that divorce is almost unheard of, inevitably the argument is raised, "but what about abuse? Do you mean that women and children should stay in an abusive home?" When it comes to abortion, the questions of rape or the health of the mother are raised as reasons why we need to keep abortion.

The are arguments from the most rare examples! If most divorces were because of abuse, we would be talking about the problem of abuse and working to fix that. If most abortions were from rape or to save mothers' lives, we'd be working on a rape issue or working to fix whatever is making mothers' health so perilous. Clearly these are not the common reasons for divorce and abortion. Let's look at each situation individually.

Abuse
I'm not a counselor or anything so these are just my thoughts. I have no training behind what I'm going to say and this is more directed to people outside the abusive situation than the person in it. Obviously, abuse breaks God's heart. It is not what He wants and He does not want His children in such a situation. The Church needs to be involved in these cases. We need to be getting the woman and any children to safety. We need to be seeing if there is hope of healing and reconciliation and, if there is, we need to not just leave the couple be after "everything is good" again. We need to be a support going forward. Men need to hold one another accountable. The Church needs to be teaching men how to be good husbands and fathers.

Outside of the Church, this gets murkier, because you can't hold someone accountable to something they don't believe in. But I know that the lives of the abused women and children are precious to God and at the bare minimum, we are called to help them.

Baring abuse, I don't believe divorce should happen. I have seen marriages firsthand that many people would say are "unhappy" and yet the couple has been married for decades. I know that you don't have control over your spouse if the choose to leave, but I do not believe a divorce just happens overnight either.

You might be saying, "Sarah, you're not married. You can't possibly know what you're talking about. You don't know how hard marriage is." You're right, I don't know firsthand. But I've seen some hard marriages firsthand as I observe marriages around me and I know what people can and have overcome. There is very little that cannot be fixed. I will say though, that without Christ, it becomes a lot more challenging.

Rape
I cannot even imagine how horrible this situation must be. I have the utmost compassion for a women who experiences rape and ends up pregnant. But I don't want her to compound her pain by having an abortion. Two wrongs don't make a right. The pain of rape was forced upon her without her consent, but the pain of abortion can be avoided.
Some questions to consider:

• why does the child deserve to die because of someone else's actions?
• what if the baby is the blessing and gift in a horrible situation?
• what if this infant is the redemption of a really bad thing?

And if the mother cannot or does not want to keep and raise this child, she can always put it up for adoption. If the Church came alongside and walked with the women in this situation, maybe more would feel like they could keep their baby.

Health Of The Mother
My thought and question to consider is this - aren't parents (mothers) supposed to give their lives for their children? I know there could be other considerations that make this really  hard, and I am not a parent, but what I hear from parents who lose children to accidents or illness is that they wish they could have taken their child's place.

Another thing to ponder is, what if the doctors are wrong? What if mother and baby are both fine? I cannot tell you how many stories I've heard where doctors predicted a child would die at birth or shortly after. Or someone would not make it to some age. Or that a child would be born with some problem that they didn't have. They make mistakes and they sometimes get things wrong.


When it comes to situations such as abuse, rape, and a mother's life in danger, there are no easy answers. There is no "one size fits all" answers either. Each case would need to be individually evaluated. We want a cut and dried rule that we can hold up and say "yes" or "no" to each case but that's not how this works.

So here is the question back to people who say what about abuse/rape/mother's health. Let's only allow divorce for abuse and only allow abortion for rape and the mother's health. How's that? I'm pretty confident they won't take that compromise. Why not? Because those aren't their real concerns. Divorce and abortion comes out of our selfish human natures where we only think about ourselves, what makes us happy, what we want. And that is something that no law can change. Only Christ, working through the Holy Spirit in our hearts, can change our selfish habits.