Opinion | Why Christians — and Republicans — Might Want to Reconsider the Premise that ‘Life Begins at Conception’

In 2004, I stood in a voting booth trying to convince myself that I should vote for John Kerry over George W. Bush. As a youth pastor at a Southern California megachurch, voting Democrat was nearly unthinkable. Despite my reasoning that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were leading to the deaths of innocent people and that more support for the poor, for single parents and for education all seemed to align with Jesus’ message, my spiritual elders always repeated the same refrain back to me:

“Abortion is murder.”

The belief that abortion is murder is founded on the premise that life begins at conception. That premise drove my evangelical politics as a zealous young convert, and it continues to motivate millions of Americans when they go to vote in local, state and national elections. It is also the foundation of the recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that classifies frozen embryos created during IVF as human persons.

Chief Justice Tom Parker’s opinion in the case, which draws on the Bible, Christian manifestos, theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the Reformer John Calvin, is an openly theological document. Parker argues that since life starts at conception, humans, especially lawmakers and judges, are called to implement policies and make decisions that will protect the sanctity of human life, whether in utero or outside it.

So it’s easy to think that the premise that life begins at conception is a timeless theological component of Christian belief. But it’s not.

The idea that life begins at conception is neither a unanimous belief in the history of Christianity, nor a classic American Protestant doctrine. When Parker writes about protecting the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, he is not carrying on a longstanding Protestant theological tradition by basing his decision on stalwarts of American evangelicalism like Cotton Mather or John Wesley or Jonathan Edwards. Those Protestant forefathers were more likely to believe that abortion, while inadvisable, was not murder until the “quickening” of the child — when the mother feels it move — somewhere near 18 weeks of the pregnancy.

Instead, Parker is repeating a political mantra concocted by Republican operatives in the late 20th century in a successful effort to create a conservative Catholic-Protestant voting bloc capable of taking over the GOP — and implementing their religious-political vision throughout the country.

In fact, within the lifetimes of many of today’s evangelical Christian believers, their churches either supported abortion rights or were neutral on it. In the 1960s and 1970s, Southern Baptists and other historically conservative Protestant denominations held that abortion was not only permissible, but also should be left to individual choice. In 1968, a group of evangelical leaders from a variety of denominations wrote in a document titled “A Protestant Affirmation on the Control of Human Reproduction” that they could not agree whether or not abortion is sinful outright, but they could agree “about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances.” They even argued that "the preservation of fetal life ... may have to be abandoned to maintain full and secure family life.”

A few years later in 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a joint resolution calling for Southern Baptists "to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother."

This resolution was in accord with Baptist views on abortion at the time. As the Baptist Press, a news service affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in 2015:

The famed evangelical theologian Norman Geisler put it in the clearest terms in the 1971 and 1975 versions of his work Christian Ethics: “The embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.”

It’s not Protestants, but Catholics in the United States who, as a religious community, have opposed abortion forcefully going back to the 19th century, and it is in Catholicism that we find the view that life begins at conception. Starting with an 1869 document called Apostolicae Sedis, Pope Pius IX declared the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy.

Yet, prior to 1869, there were varying approaches to abortion and the understanding of when life begins even within the Catholic Church. (And to this day there are many Catholics who, in disagreement with their Church, advocate for reproductive choice.) There are certainly church documents and early church theologians who argued that abortion is infanticide because life begins when the embryo is conceived. However, there were also forceful and influential voices that argued fetuses did not become persons until they were “ensouled,” or when God gave the developing fetus its soul, and therefore its life. This was the view of St. Augustine, the most important theological source in early and medieval Western Christendom. In his commentary on Exodus, Augustine argues that “abortion of an unformed fetus is not murder, because the fetus is not yet ensouled, that is, not yet a human being, and that abortion of an unformed fetus is therefore a less serious offense than abortion of a formed and ensouled fetus.”

More examples abound. There are Irish “saints” who performed abortions in circumstances of rape and fornication, and who considered it, in some cases, a less serious offense than oral sex. And then there is Thomas Aquinas, the most influential Catholic voice of the medieval period, a thinker whose work continues to shape Catholic theology today. According to scholar David Albert Jones, Aquinas believed that “the body was formed gradually through the power transmitted by the male seed but the spiritual soul was directly created by God when the body was ready to receive it. Thus the embryo was believed to live at first the life of a plant, then the life of a simple animal, and only after all its organs, including the brain, had been formed, was it given, by the direct and creative act of God, an immortal spiritual soul.”

Conservative Catholic and Protestant theologians will argue either that contrary to these passages, other works by Augustine and Aquinas reveal a belief that life begins at conception, or that these theological giants were simply wrong on this issue. But this is the point exactly: There is a widespread and nuanced theological debate about the beginning of life in the history of Christianity. The idea that life begins at conception is far from a universally agreed upon matter of historical Christian doctrine. When viewed in the long history of the Christian tradition, it is actually a minority opinion.

So how did conservative Protestants, including evangelicals and charismatics like Parker, join with conservative Catholics to become the vanguard of anti-abortion politics in the United States? Why is Parker justifying the notion that frozen embryos are human beings by claiming, unequivocally, that life begins at conception?

The Protestant-Catholic coalition on abortion formed in the 1970s, when a group of conservative political operatives, known then as the New Right, organized to colonize the GOP, and they joined forces with evangelical ministers, eventually known as the Religious Right, in order to retake the country for the white Christians they represented. Historian Seth Dowland argues that to do that, they tapped into anxiety stirred by changing sexual mores and the role of women. In the late 1970s, he has written, abortion fit into “a political philosophy that connected defense of the ‘traditional family’ with opposition to abortion, feminism and gay rights. Christian Right leaders defined traditional families as those with two heterosexual parents, with the husband as the head and, preferably, the primary breadwinner.” Even though this family structure was never archetypal in American history, “the image of a working father, a stay-at home mother, and well-scrubbed children carried significant appeal among conservatives in the wake of the 1960s.”

“Family values'' became a rallying cry for evangelicals, Catholics and other Christian conservatives who wanted to reconstruct the American social order on the basis of patriarchal, heterosexual and monogamous marriages. “If America is to return to original greatness," stated Jerry Falwell, one of the most prominent leaders of the Religious Right, "we must ... support the traditional monogamous family as the only acceptable form."

Some of the new Religious Right, including Falwell, had a racial motivation for their political activities, seeking to protect tax benefits for “segregation academies” that didn’t admit Black students. But as Randall Balmer has previously argued in POLITICO Magazine, the operatives found that complaints about government intrusion into religious schools and universities didn’t motivate evangelicals to go to the polls. But after leafleting several churches 1978, they discovered that abortion could. In the following years, abortion gave “Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right a ‘respectable’ issue, opposition to abortion, one that would energize white evangelicals.”

When it came to respectability politics, what the leaders of the Religious Right understood is that reducing abortion to murder by claiming that life begins at conception would provide them with an almost unassailable high ground in debates not just about reproductive rights, but also women’s independence, family structures and the stability of the American social order. It was also a way to form an unlikely but powerful alliance between conservative Protestants and the Catholics they had persecuted for so long.

The Alabama Supreme Court decision is a logical outcome of this alliance — a post-Roe advance into ever more restrictive forms of government intrusion on personal choice. The Catholic church has been going down this road since 1869. By defining life as beginning at conception and maintaining that the purpose of sex is reproduction, Catholic theology demands opposition to IVF and birth control. So it’s no accident that now that Roe v. Wade has fallen, Protestants like Parker are pushing ever more restrictive approaches to reproductive rights along the same lines as the doctrines of their Catholic counterparts. This represents what scholar Megan Goodwin calls the “Catholicization” of American sexual morality. It’s thus no surprise that some non-Catholic anti-abortion activists have now their sights set on contraception.

There’s one more way that defining life as beginning at conception is useful politically — it provides a moral argument that overrides all other issues. I know because I was once a soldier in this conflict. As an evangelical convert in the 1990s, I became a one-issue voter. Despite thinking that John Kerry would be a better president for everyone, I voted for George W. Bush because I couldn’t stomach the idea of contributing to a “holocaust” of the unborn. The premise that life begins at conception provides Christians a license to prioritize “unborn lives” over almost all others.

There is no denying the political utility of the idea that life begins at conception. Since the 1970s, it has served to unite many Protestants and Catholics in a reproductive alliance bent on protecting the “sanctity of life” that has also provided millions of base voters for the Republican Party.

However, since the fall of Roe, it is clear that the logic of the movement is headed in a direction that will cause problems both theologically and politically. Once they understand the implications for IVF, birth control and even on abortions in extenuating circumstances, many Protestants, including evangelicals and charismatics, might want to reconsider whether they really want to make the theological case for extending personhood to embryos. Catholic theology not only insists that life begins at conception but also outlaws reproductive technologies, birth control and the death penalty. Up until this point in history, many Protestants haven’t been willing to go there — are they now?

In that light, Parker’s blatantly Christian nationalist opinion in the IVF case may have a silver lining: It reveals the limits and cracks in both the theology and jurisprudence founded on the idea that life begins at conception — and points to the decline of its broad political usefulness.