Roe v. Wade Abortion and Mormonism Part 1

Unprepared to engage Mormon missionaries when they knock on your door? Perhaps the book of Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the Body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism.

I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. We begin today with a presidential proclamation designating Sunday, January 22nd, 1984, as National Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. Reagan also issued a proclamation annually thereafter designating sanctity of human life day to be the closest Sunday to the original January 22nd date. And of course, January 22nd is the date when Roe versus Wade actually became law. Making abortion legal in the United States. This Sunday is sanctity of human life day. And so we wanted to talk about this issue in the context of Mormonism, because it is an emotional issue. We don't deny that. Both Eric and myself have very strong convictions when it comes to the subject of abortion.

And I thought it would be pertinent, given the fact that this Sunday is sanctity of human life Sunday, that we just remind you of what this has done in our country over the past several years. According to the United Nations report, however, and this came out in 2013, only nine countries in the world have a higher reported abortion rate than the United States. These would include Bulgaria, Cuba, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, Sweden and Ukraine. Do you see a pattern in those countries at all, Eric? I would say that the countries listed here seem to be pretty much secularized. And that could certainly be a reason for the high abortion rates in these countries.

The question is, why the United States, when we have such a Judeo-Christian heritage, why are we so close to these other countries? One of the things is I think we are a throwaway society. And so anything that is considered to be inconvenient is easily distanced in people's minds as it's okay if it helps you to be a better person. And unfortunately, people forget just what the unborn are. I'm reading an article here from Abort73.com, and this is where I'm getting some of these statistics. And it mentions in 2017, the highest percentage of pregnancies were aborted in the District of Columbia, 37%. Now, this is where my emotions really get up there, because when you look at the District of Columbia has a very high black population, the highest percentage of pregnancies were aborted in the District of Columbia, 37%. And so this is why I guess I find it so inconsistent when people tell me about Black Lives Matter.

And I'm not talking about the Marxist organization, I'm just talking about the phrase. If you really believe that black lives matter, this should bother you, but yet you find it doesn't seem to bother a lot of people in that camp. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an abortion surveillance report, and according to that report, black women make up 14% of the childbearing population, and yet 36%, more than a third of all abortions were obtained by black women. At a ratio of 474 abortions per 1,000 live births, black women have the highest ratio of any group in our country. Now, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers itself to be a pro-life religious organization, and I would argue that probably many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do hold two pro-life positions. Are they consistent?

Not in all cases. In fact, I even have an article on our website titled, Abortion and LDS Inconsistency, and you can find that on our website at MRM.org. But there was an article that was in the Salt Lake Tribune. It was posted back in March of 2020, and it was written by a man by the name of Brian Wangsgard.

Now, Brian Wangsgard is not a doctor, doesn't, as far as I know, have any expertise in this field. He writes an article, Why Latter-day Saints Should Support a Woman's Right to Choose. The problem I see, Eric, in this article is that this is a clear case, in my opinion, of bad theology leading to bad conclusions, and even bad actions if you carry out what he's suggesting to fruition. We harp on that issue all the time, that theology matters, and this is one of the reasons why we feel theology matters.

If you have bad theology, it can very easily lead you in a direction that's not only incorrect, but even destructive towards another individual. And Brian Wangsgard, I think, in this article proves that point perfectly, and so we want to go through some of the things that Mr. Wangsgard said and point this out in why we have a problem with this. What does he say in the beginning of this article? He writes, No one should be more supportive of a woman's right to make choices about her own body than members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Let me stop you there. First of all, here, we don't have really a doctrinal problem. We have a problem with terms, and we have a problem with science in this opening paragraph, when he says, No one should be supportive of a woman's right to make choices about her own body. Based on what he's just said, we would agree that nobody should tell a woman what she should do with her own body. But the problem is with abortion. This is one of the worst arguments that I've ever heard pro-abortionists make. It's my body, my choice. It's not your body. In fact, in half of the cases, the sex of the one who is going to be aborted isn't even female. So it's not the woman's body.

So this argument is wrong to begin with. He goes on and writes, Choice is ingrained in a church doctrine through the eternal principle of free agency. The plan of salvation describes a pre-earth life where individual eternal spirit children of God exercised their agency and chose to come to earth and inhabit physical bodies with which they proved themselves through trials. Here, they remain free to choose.

At death, the spirits leave behind their bodies and continue to live eternally with the expectation of one day being reunited with glorified versions of their physical bodies. He goes on and says, Official church policy on abortion is to oppose it except in cases of forcible rape or incest, serious threats to the life or health of the mother, or severe fetal defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth, because exceptions allow for carefully considered circumstances where the abortion is evidently considered a rational choice, not a sin. The position of the church suggests that abortion per se is not an absolute wrong.

Now he's correct. The Mormon Church does have exceptions for this, and he lists some of them right here. These are found in an official church manual. But let's look at what it says here. Official church policy on abortion is to oppose it except in cases of forcible rape or incest.

My question would be in rebuttal to this. Since when does the sin of a third party affect the life of another party, in this case the unborn? Why should the baby be killed because of the sin of some person who forcibly raped the mother? I don't see the consistency there.

And again, it goes back to this point. This is not the woman's body that we're really talking about here, though tragic as rape is, it is a horrible violation of a woman. But let's try to be consistent here. Just because the child was conceived by a forcible rape, does that necessarily mean that child should die for the crime of this other individual? We don't do that in any other aspect of law in our country. Nobody is held responsible for the sins of another party.

You are responsible for your own actions. And so this argument, I think, is a horrible argument for those who are in favor of abortion to use. Serious threats to the life or health of the mother or severe fetal defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. Now, Eric, you and I both know of cases of women who were told not to have their child because the child would have defects, and yet that didn't happen. Yeah, I mean, my own grandmother was told in 1930 that she should not have had my father, that they wanted to abort the fetus that she had. That was my father because that she possibly might die.

My grandmother was so stubborn and said no, she never had any other children, but my dad was born a healthy seven-pound baby boy. Mr. Wang's guard goes on to say, because exceptions allow for carefully considered circumstances where the abortion is evidently considered a rational choice. Well, I think I made a pretty good case showing that killing a child because of a forcible rape is not really a rational choice. There's a lot of problems with that position.

The one that I think is probably the most heart-wrenching is the serious threats to the life or health of the mother. And yeah, I agree. That's a horrible decision to be made in that kind of a case. Now, when it comes to my wife and I, we talked about this and had a decision if something like this was to happen.

Would I expect everyone to follow my course in that? No, I probably wouldn't, but this was a decision that we made. Let God take care of it. Put it in God's hands. I think the same point being made with the severe fetal defects. There is such a thing as a natural abortion, and so if the child is not going to survive beyond birth, what right do you have to take it when, in the nature of things, that that baby was not going to survive anyway? He goes on and writes, doctrinally, the spirit and physical body joined together constitute a living soul, a human being. Abortion opponents often state a belief that a spirit joins the physical body before birth, perhaps at conception, first fetal heart beat, viability, or some other point.

All suppositions. However, Latter-day Saint scripture seems to support the idea that entry occurs with a successful birth, at which time a living soul is created, suggesting that an embryo or fetus is not a yet complete human being. In both the Temple Endowment and the Pearl of Great Price, quote, the gods formed man from the dust of the earth, and he says, think physical body, and took his spirit, that is, this person's spirit, and put it into him, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, end quote, and that comes from the book of Abraham, chapter 5, verse 7. Now, Latter-day Saints believe that they have modern-day prophets to guide them, to explain what they believe their scriptures are saying to the membership. I wonder what Mr. Wangsgard would do with this statement by Sixth President Joseph F. Smith, who in 1916 wrote, it is just as much murder to destroy life before as it is after birth, although man-made laws may not consider it, but there is one, and that's a capital one, who does take notice, and his justice and judgment is sure. Does it sound like Mr. Wangsgard's position in this paragraph that you just read concurs with what Sixth President of the Church Joseph F. Smith said, it is just as much murder to destroy life before as it is after birth? It doesn't sound to me like Joseph F. Smith is agreeing with what Mr. Wangsgard is saying, but yet, Mr. Wangsgard is using Mormon scripture to try to support his position. Didn't Joseph F. Smith have that same scripture? How come he's not seeing it the same way? Tomorrow we're going to continue looking at this article titled, Why Latter-day Saints Should Support a Woman's Right to Choose, written by a man by the name of Brian Wangsgard. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.