Abortion Regret

Dear Angela,

Thank you for writing to me, and I am very sorry about your distress. I hope that the Lord can use some of what I write here to bring you some measure of comfort. I do know that the comfort is there, and so my prayer is that the Spirit will crack open the words for you.

From what my cousin tells me, you had an abortion while still in high school, two years before you were converted to Christ. At the time of the abortion, you were an ardent defender of the “pro-choice” position, and didn’t feel at all bad about it. You were all in. All of that started to turn around after you became a Christian, but somewhat gradually, nothing too deep. You got married to a good Christian man five years ago, and you have two kids now. About six months ago, you had to go up to the university for something, and saw one of those graphic pro-life displays at the booth of an activist student group. And as my cousin put it, that “really messed you up.” Do I have it about right? Since that time, you have had a couple of bouts with black depression, and the rest of the time you have spent grappling with a nagging sense of ongoing guilt. Is that about it?

Some of what I write you have no doubt heard before, but I think it will be best to simply walk through this as methodically as I can, from the beginning.

The place to begin is with the doctrine of sin. A natural mistake is often made whenever we try to deal with severe guilt. What we do is try to soften the guilt by softening the sin. This can be done by many different means, but they all aim at the same object, which is to lessen the pain you feel by lessening your responsibility for the sin through various excuses and explanations. “My boyfriend pressured me.” “I was only seventeen.” “My biology teacher taught us it was just a cluster of cells.” And whatever truth there might be in these explanations, at the end of the day what you are left with is the problem of what to do with the sin. There were things about the life growing within you that you did know at the time, or really ought to have known. You acknowledge those things now, fully, but now is too late. That son or daughter is now dead, and cannot be brought back. What can you possibly do with this sort of regret?

The prophet Jeremiah spoke directly to our tendency to soften it. “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Like a child who fell off his bicycle and has a nasty scrape on his knee, with a lot of dirt and gravel in it, we don’t want mom to use a soapy washcloth on it. We would much prefer to do it ourselves and dab around the edges. But however natural a move this might feel to us, at the end it always comes down to “peace where there is no peace.”

The way out is actually in the other direction, however counterintuitive this might seem. In order to truly rest in the fact that God has really forgiven you, it is necessary to know what the forgiveness is for, exactly. In this case, you are wrestling with the fact that the rhetoric of the pro-lifers is not “just rhetoric.” In other words, you are coming to grips with the fact that if abortion really is murder, then it follows (necessarily) that you are a murderer.

It is not surprising that the flesh recoils from this kind of description because it does not fit with the carefully curated image of ourselves that we like to keep and maintain. Not only does the flesh recoil from this, but a good portion of the pro-life establishment does also. They want to cast the whole thing as an enterprise where the child and the mother are somehow twin victims, and that the only villain in the piece is some designated representative of the patriarchy—the abortionist, or a bullying boyfriend, someone like that. Yes, that brand of feminism really has crept into the pro-life movement.

But in the biblical world and life view, women are sinners, just like the men are, and women need forgiveness, just like the men do. When we try to sidestep this reality, what we are doing is cutting women off from the forgiveness that Christ offers them. This leaves them alone with their own thoughts at 2 in the morning, and the end result there is that they usually turn to little makeshift anodyne christs—antidepressants, wine, therapy, whatever. Because we have decided to flatter women instead of ministering to them, we have in effect abandoned that part of the flock to wolves. The wolves have not been slow in coming.

But as you are thinking through this, the comeback is obvious. Yes, God forgives sins, that’s His job, but this was a huge sin. Didn’t you just say that it was murder? And you can’t stop thinking about those posters. But small views of sin will at the end of the day bring us to small views of grace. We don’t need a great God to handle our tiny sins. But we do need a great and gracious God to deal with the mess that we actually are.

When you seek God’s forgiveness for a murder, knowing it to have been a murder, you are on the threshold of true forgiveness and freedom. You are also on the threshold of a great deal of love for Jesus Christ. Which of the two will love him the most? You will.

It is very easy to sing hymns like Amazing Grace, a hymn with lines in it like “that saved a wretch like me,” but it is also easy to just roll with it like that is just “hymn talk.” But then one day it strikes us . . . “oh, like wretch wretch.” It is a commonplace that John Newton had been a slave trader before his conversion, but we need to exercise the imagination, and think how debauched a sailor in those circumstances could get. And he really was a true moral mess. As Newton himself described it: “I was capable of anything; I had not the least fear of God before my eyes, nor (so far as I remember) the least sensibility of conscience.”

And what did Jesus say about quisling tax collectors and street-walking whores? He said that they were going to get into the kingdom before the painted theologians made it. The riff-raff knew they had a problem, and the scribes and scribblers didn’t know they had a problem.

So the very best thing we can do is acknowledge that our sin was very great, far greater than we can even imagine. But what we should not be able to imagine is any sin that is greater than Christ. As the great Puritan Richard Sibbes once put it, “There is more mercy in Christ than there is sin in you.” There never was a despondent sinner that Christ wanted to save, but then gave up on the enterprise because the sins that had been committed were just too much for Him to deal with. That is not how any of this works.

Christ is opposed to sin, obviously, but He is not opposed to it the way negative 3 is opposed to 3. He is opposed to sin the way fire is opposed to stubble. He is opposed to sin the way light is opposed to darkness.

So this means you have just one task before you. Recognize your sin, name it accurately, confess it while using the biblical name for it, which is murder, and seek God’s forgiveness, in the name of Jesus Christ. Troubling thoughts will try to bluster you, saying that this was a horrendous sin. Yes, and Jesus died a horrendous death, and by that death He obtained full and complete satisfaction, and He did it for people just like you.

Refusing to receive that forgiveness entirely is not humility . . . it is another sin, a separate sin, and a very grievous one. Take care that you only confess this sin of abortion to Him in this way just once. Apply the blood of Christ to this sin one time, and then be done. You are to be done because you are in fact forgiven. You only need to do this once because He promised to forgive you (1 John 1:9). Going back to Him repeatedly for forgiveness is actually unbelief.

“Yes, but this was a murder. The child is dead.” True, but the child will be raised to life eternal. The child is in God’s hands, and so are you. The murder itself cannot be undone, but the wisdom of God far surpasses our own. He used one murderer to write most of the Book of Psalms, and another one to write the majority of the New Testament. To pretend that you and your children are out of God’s gracious reach is actually putting on airs. Receive your forgiveness, trust Him fully, and all will be well.

And having received the forgiveness of Christ, thank Him for it, and walk into the remainder of your Christian life with your head up. Remember that God is good, all the time.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson