Answers to Common Objections

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

Faithful brothers and sisters will raise honest questions about what this series argues, and they deserve honest answers rather than slogans. This treatise gathers the objections we have most often heard and answers each in turn. We offer them not to win arguments but to remove obstacles, so that the truth might be received where it is true and tested where it is doubted.

A word on how to read what follows. We have tried to state each objection in its strongest and most sympathetic form, as a thoughtful believer would actually put it, and not as a straw man. Several of these objections are not errors at all but half-truths — things rightly felt that have been drawn to a wrong conclusion — and where that is so we say it plainly. An objection met fairly is worth more to a searching conscience than ten met cheaply.

Objections about the teaching itself

1. “Is this not just Roman Catholic teaching?”

No. It was the unbroken teaching of the whole church, East and West, for nineteen centuries, and the Reformers held it as firmly as anyone. Calvin, and the Westminster divines, applied the sixth commandment to the child in the womb, and the confessions our own Presbyterian and Baptist forebears subscribed defined marriage partly by “the increase of mankind” (see the treatises on the Witness of the Church and on Marriage). The first major Christian communion to permit contraception in any circumstance was the Church of England, at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, and even then the resolution passed against the votes of a substantial number of its own bishops. What is novel here is not the position set out in this series. It is the position most of us inherited without noticing.

2. “This isn’t a gospel issue.”

You are right that the sanctity of life is not the gospel itself. The gospel is the good news that Christ died for our sins and rose again, and that we are saved by grace through faith alone, not by our record on any moral question. We would resist anyone who made this a fourth mark of a true church or a test of saving faith.

But the gospel calls men to repent and believe (Mark 1:15), and repentance means turning from sin as the Spirit reveals it. If the taking of innocent life is sin — and it is, a violation of the sixth commandment — then it falls squarely within what the gospel calls us to turn from. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), and the Great Commission is to make disciples, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded” (Matthew 28:20). How can people repent of what they have never been told is sin? How can the church be a place of healing if it never names the wound? To call this “not a gospel issue” as a reason for silence is to confuse the gospel’s foundation with its fruit, and to deny our members the very cleansing Christ died to give.

3. “We don’t want to offend people or put them off the gospel.”

The instinct behind this is a good one — a genuine care for souls and a fear of raising needless barriers. But consider whether Jesus modelled it. When the rich young ruler turned away sorrowful, Jesus did not chase him or soften the demand (Mark 10:21–22). When many disciples found His teaching hard and left, He did not backtrack but turned to the twelve: “Do you want to go away as well?” (John 6:60–67). At Pentecost Peter told the crowd plainly, “this Jesus, whom you crucified” (Acts 2:23, 36) — and that hard word, far from driving them off, “cut to the heart” and three thousand were saved. The gospel is itself an offence to the natural man (1 Corinthians 1:18, 23). Our calling is to speak the truth in love and to trust the Spirit with the result, for God is sovereign over the harvest. Faithfulness is the standard, not comfort, and not numbers.

4. “Babies who die go to heaven anyway, don’t they?”

Many evangelicals hold the hope that infants who die are received into God’s mercy, often citing David’s confidence that he would go to his dead child (2 Samuel 12:23) and Christ’s welcome of the little ones (Matthew 19:14). We share that hope and would not take it from any grieving parent. But notice what this objection quietly does: it turns a comfort into a permission. By the same reasoning, no one should ever have stopped any murderer of children, since the children “are in heaven now.” Stated so baldly the thought is abhorrent — and yet it is exactly the reasoning used to excuse silence here. A hoped-for mercy toward the victim can never license the act that made him a victim. Christ warned that it would be better to be drowned with a millstone than to cause one little one to stumble (Matthew 18:6); what then of taking a little one’s life? We dare not build a permission on the back of God’s mercy.

Objections about the hard cases

5. “What about rape, or a threat to the mother’s life?”

These are the cases that weigh most heavily on a tender conscience, and they deserve a careful answer rather than a dismissive one.

On the life of the mother: there is no condition that requires the direct, intentional killing of an unborn child to save his mother. The most cited example, ectopic pregnancy, actually illustrates the distinction. An ectopic pregnancy is one implanted in an abnormal location, usually the fallopian tube; by the time it is found the child has very often already died, and the danger is that a rupturing tube will kill the mother. Removing an ectopic pregnancy to save the mother’s life is not an abortion in the moral sense: it is the removal of an already-deceased child, or, in the rarer case of one still living, care that seeks to preserve life as long as possible before the tube fails. The intent is never to kill but to save the life that can be saved. This is morally distinct from an act designed and intended to end a living child’s life — as treatment that unintentionally harms a child (say, chemotherapy for a pregnant mother) differs from a procedure whose very aim is the child’s death.

On rape: we must first name the evil plainly. Rape is a monstrous violation, and it deserves our strongest condemnation and the full weight of justice against the perpetrator. But the child conceived is an innocent party, and Scripture is clear that “children shall not be put to death because of their fathers” (Deuteronomy 24:16). Abortion cannot un-rape a woman or heal her trauma, and the evidence is that it more often compounds her suffering than relieves it. She needs love, protection, justice, and lasting care — not a second act of violence against the one wholly innocent person in the account. Such cases are, in any event, a tiny fraction of abortions, and we must not let rare tragedies be made the lever by which the vast majority, done for other reasons, are justified. The answer to profound suffering is never the killing of the innocent.

Objections about probability and risk

6. “We accept small risks to life all the time — speed limits, cars, everyday dangers. Why is this different?”

Because driving is a system built to protect life, not merely one that tolerates risk. Speed limits fall near schools. Drivers are licensed, tested, and insured; cars are inspected and built with safety systems; and at every moment a conscious person is at the wheel, able to brake or swerve. When something goes wrong it is investigated and someone is answerable — dangerous driving, causing death by negligence, and so on. The whole structure rests on the premise that a lost life demands an answer.

The contraceptive mechanism at issue has none of this. Once the pill is taken or the device fitted, no one is “at the wheel.” If the post-fertilisation mechanism ends a life there is no test, no investigation, no record, no accountability, and no justice — because there is no way even to know it happened. This is exactly where Deuteronomy 22:8 speaks: God commanded a parapet on every roof, “that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it” — not because a fatal fall was likely, but because it was possible and would be fatal. Driving already has its parapet, in licensing, limits, and accountability. This does not, and worse, once the method is in use no safeguard can be added afterward to protect the child. The only parapet available is not to use a method that carries the mechanism at all.

7. “But the odds are so small as to be meaningless.”

Two answers, and the second matters more than the first.

First, on the scale: estimates that a single woman would need decades of use before her personal odds became significant answer a question about one woman. They say nothing about how often the event occurs across a population. Consider the population at issue. In the United Kingdom, about one in three women of childbearing age — on the order of several million at any given time — currently use a hormonal method or an intrauterine device.[1][2] As an illustration of scale only, if one applies to a population of that kind even a very small per-cycle probability, the resulting annual number of lost embryos is not small but large. We offer that as illustration, not as a measured statistic, since the true per-cycle rate is unknown and, as this series argues, unmeasurable. But the direction of it is sound: a “tiny” per-woman risk, spread across millions of women and many years, is not a tiny number of lives.

Second, and decisively: rarity settles frequency, not morality. A mechanism that ends a life only occasionally still ends a life every time it operates. We do not reason this way about any other life. We would not defend an action that killed an innocent person “only rarely.” The infrequency of a death is no part of the question whether we may knowingly risk causing it.

8. “I used contraceptives for years and never saw a baby expelled.”

At the stage when an abortifacient mechanism would prevent implantation — roughly six to twelve days after fertilisation — the embryo is around a tenth of a millimetre in size, no larger than a full stop on this page, and invisible to the naked eye. When such an embryo fails to implant because the womb lining has been thinned, it is lost in what appears to be an ordinary period, entirely indistinguishable from normal bleeding. The absence of anything to see is exactly what the mechanism, if it operates, would predict; it is not evidence that nothing happened. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance” (Psalm 139:16): God sees what is invisible to us. Cain thought Abel’s murder unseen, yet the blood cried out from the ground (Genesis 4:10). The point is not to accuse but to explain why “I never saw anything” cannot function as the reassurance it feels like.

Objections about authority and expertise

9. “Surely my doctor would have told me.”

Your doctor almost certainly is not deceiving you. He is telling you the truth as his profession has defined it. But the definition itself has a history most prescribers have never examined, and once it is seen, the reason nothing reaches you across the counter becomes clear — and the fault is not the man behind it.

The history is documented. In America, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists redefined the terms. Its 1965 terminology bulletin stated, “Conception is the implantation of a fertilized ovum,” and its 1972 update, “Conception is the implantation of the blastocyst. It is not synonymous with fertilization.”[3] No new embryological discovery drove the change; a later peer-reviewed survey found the obstetric profession itself still divided, with only a minority personally holding that pregnancy begins at implantation.[3] The candid account of why is on the record. At a 1959 Planned Parenthood and Population Council symposium, Dr Bent Boving observed that whether a method was regarded as preventing conception or as destroying an established pregnancy might turn on “something so simple as a prudent habit of speech.”[4] A habit of speech, not a finding.

In the United Kingdom the same line was drawn, not by Parliament but by the courts, and this is the decisive point for a British reader. No UK statute has ever defined “pregnancy” or “conception.” In 2000 the Government confirmed in Parliament that “emergency contraception pills work before implantation and so before a pregnancy has been established,” recalling that the Attorney-General had advised in 1983 that doctors would not be prosecuted for preventing implantation by the morning-after pill or an IUD.[5] In 2002 the High Court settled the legal meaning: “miscarriage today means the termination of an established pregnancy, and there is no established pregnancy prior to implantation. There is no miscarriage if a fertilised egg is lost prior to implantation.”[6] The House of Commons Library states it plainly: abortion means “the termination of an established pregnancy,” where “established” is “taken to mean that the embryo has implanted in the uterus.”[7]

Follow the consequence. In UK law a child lost before implantation is not a lost pregnancy, so it is not an abortion, and so it is legally the loss of nothing that must be counted or disclosed. This even reaches the duty of consent. Since Montgomery v Lanarkshire (2015), a doctor must disclose the “material risks” a reasonable patient would want to know — but because a pre-implantation loss is not, in law, the loss of a pregnancy at all, there is no “risk to a pregnancy” for the clinician to disclose, and the professional counselling guidance does not list one.[8] So a fact stated openly in the manufacturer’s own licensing documents can nonetheless never reach you across the counter. The definition is the problem, not the man behind it. Everyone in the chain is, in good conscience, describing something that has been defined so as not to count.

10. “Aren’t the doctors and health bodies the experts here? Who are we to second-guess them?”

We should respect genuine expertise, and we do. But we should also notice where the experts have a stake. The bodies most often cited to reassure us that these methods are “not abortifacient” are frequently the same institutions that manufacture, sell, provide, or advocate for these products, and for abortion itself. Their data on how the drugs affect sperm or ovulation may be perfectly sound; their conclusion about what to call the residual effect is not coming from a neutral source.

That is not speculation about motive; their own leadership has said as much. In 1981, testifying to a United States Senate committee against a bill that would have defined life as beginning at fertilisation, the then-President of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists acknowledged that under such a definition the IUD and low-dose oral contraceptive pill “could be considered as abortifacients and therefore declared illegal.”[10] He was resisting the definition, but he conceded exactly what turns on it. And credentialed physicians do dissent: pro-life obstetricians and gynaecologists decline to prescribe certain methods on exactly these grounds.[9] This is not a case of laypeople versus experts. It is a case of experts disagreeing — and the question worth asking is which of them has something riding on the answer.

It is worth adding that the promise made for wider contraceptive access, that it would reduce abortion, has not held. In England and Wales contraception is free at the point of use, yet abortion numbers have risen to record highs (see the treatise on Abortion in the United Kingdom), and research from the Guttmacher Institute — an organisation founded by a former president of Planned Parenthood, and no enemy of contraception — found that about half of abortion patients had used a contraceptive method in the very month they conceived.[11] Whatever contraception has achieved, it has not been the thing it was promised to achieve. Indeed, the leading figures of the birth-control movement founded the very organisations — Planned Parenthood in America, Marie Stopes International (now MSI Reproductive Choices) in Britain — that became the world’s largest providers of abortion.[12] The “expert” institutions reassuring us are, in several cases, the direct heirs of that movement.

Objections about calling and cost

11. “Each of us has our own calling. You’re called to this, but not everyone is.”

God does give different gifts and callings (1 Corinthians 12:4–7), and not every member will make this a public ministry. But some commands bind every Christian, whatever their particular calling: “seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17); “Open your mouth for the mute… defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8–9); “rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11); “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31). The question is not whether every Christian is called to care about the sanctity of life — all are — but how each fulfils that calling in his own sphere. The abolition of the slave trade needed Wilberforce in Parliament, Wesley and Newton in the pulpit, More in publishing, and countless ordinary Christians in prayer and boycott. Here too: parents can raise children who love life, pastors can equip their churches, members can support mothers under pressure, and all can pray and speak where they are. This is not a specialised ministry for a few. It is basic Christian faithfulness, distributed across many hands.

12. “What if people complain, or I lose my job?”

This is the most understandable fear of all, because it touches our families and our livelihoods, and we will not pretend the cost is imaginary. Yet Jesus said, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Paul did not count his life dear to himself if only he might finish his ministry (Acts 20:24). We remember the Hebrew midwives, who feared God more than Pharaoh, refused to kill the baby boys, and were blessed by God for it (Exodus 1:17–21). We remember, too, that Wesley opposed a legal and profitable slave trade at no advantage to himself, and that Spurgeon let his sermons be burned across the American South rather than soften his witness — the cost was real and they paid it. God knows how to preserve those who are in trial; He may deliver us from the cost or sustain us through it, but He will not abandon us, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). The searching question is the one we will one day answer: will we stand before Christ and explain that we kept silent about the killing of the innocent for fear of a complaint or the loss of a post — or will we hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant”?

13. “I will devastate the women in my church.”

This fear does you credit, and it must not be brushed aside — it should shape how and when you speak, which is why this series asks you to prepare gentle, confidential care before ever raising the matter from the pulpit (see the treatise on the Responsibility of Shepherds). Some will indeed grieve, and they must be met with the gospel and not with a lecture. But weigh the alternative honestly. If you say nothing, they continue unknowing. Or they learn one day from someone far less careful and far less kind than you, with no shepherd beside them when it lands. Truth told tenderly, by a man who loves them and has made ready to walk with them, is not the same thing as condemnation — and it is the only version of this news that comes with Christ attached, offering not only the weight of what may have been done in ignorance but the full and free cleansing of one who “acted ignorantly in unbelief” and yet “received mercy” (1 Timothy 1:13, 16). To withhold the truth in order to spare them is, in the end, to leave them alone with it later. Love does not do that.

An objection about the state of the evidence

14. “Haven’t recent studies shown these methods don’t prevent implantation after all?”

This is the most important objection to answer honestly, because our whole credibility rests on not claiming more than the evidence allows, and here the evidence has genuinely moved in one place.

For the levonorgestrel morning-after pill specifically, it has moved against part of the popular pro-life case. The manufacturer of Plan B petitioned to remove the implantation language from its label, and in December 2022 the American regulator agreed; the current position of the FDA and of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) is that levonorgestrel emergency contraception works mainly by delaying ovulation and is not shown to prevent implantation.[14] An honest advocate must say so, and we do. We therefore do not rest the argument on the morning-after pill, and anyone who does is building on sand a critic can rightly wash away.

But two things have not moved, and they are enough. First, the copper intrauterine device. Its post-fertilisation action is not disputed and has not been withdrawn: the NHS states it works in part by “stopping a fertilised egg from implanting,“[12] and the FSRH clinical guideline licenses it as emergency contraception up to five days after intercourse — a window in which fertilisation may already have occurred — stating that “if fertilisation does occur, the local endometrial inflammatory reaction resulting from the presence of the Cu-IUD prevents implantation.” So in that use, preventing implantation is not a rare side effect but part of the basis of the product’s effectiveness. Second, the product information for other hormonal methods. The official summaries for combined pills and for the hormonal intrauterine system continue to list, among the ways they work, changes to the lining of the womb that reduce the likelihood of implantation.[13] So the post-fertilisation mechanism is not a pro-life inference that the science has overtaken; for the copper coil and for these labelled methods it remains the makers’ own stated account. The morning-after pill was never the strongest ground, and we have let it go without weakening the case, because the case never needed it.

A closing word

Not every reader will be persuaded by every answer above, and we do not ask for that. We ask only that each objection be weighed on its merits rather than used as a door quietly closed. Where we have answered rightly, receive it; where you think we have answered poorly, test it against Scripture and tell us so, for we would rather be corrected than be wrong. What we cannot recommend is the one course none of these objections finally justifies: to look away. The children in question cannot raise these objections, or any others, on their own behalf. That is precisely why the rest of us must not hide behind them.

References

1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Contraceptive Use by Method — order-of-magnitude figures for worldwide contraceptive use. https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/ (The per-cycle arithmetic in objection 7 is offered as illustration only, not as a measured statistic.)
2. Cea-Soriano L. et al., “Use of prescription contraceptive methods in the UK general population: a primary care study,” BJOG (2014): among 194,054 UK women aged 12 to 49, current use of hormonal methods plus the IUD/IUS totalled roughly 34.5% — about one in three. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24118863/
3. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Committee on Terminology bulletins of 1965 (“Conception is the implantation of a fertilized ovum”) and 1972 (“Conception is the implantation of the blastocyst. It is not synonymous with fertilization”), as documented in the peer-reviewed survey in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (2012), which confirms ACOG has defined pregnancy as beginning at implantation since 1965 and that the obstetric profession remains divided on the point. https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)02223-X/fulltext
4. Bent Boving, in Mechanisms Concerned with Conception, ed. C. G. Hartman (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963), 386, from a symposium held by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Population Council, 1959.
5. Yvette Cooper MP (Health Minister), House of Commons written answer on Emergency Contraception, Hansard, 19 July 2000: “Emergency contraception pills work before implantation and so before a pregnancy has been established,” recalling the Attorney-General’s 1983 advice that medical practitioners would not be prosecuted for preventing implantation by the morning-after pill or an IUD. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2000-07-19/debates/3654034a-014e-4ccf-921b-fef2a919d49a/EmergencyContraception
6. R (Smeaton) v Secretary of State for Health [2002] EWHC 610 (Admin), per Mr Justice Munby, 18 April 2002: “miscarriage today means the termination of an established pregnancy, and there is no established pregnancy prior to implantation. There is no miscarriage if a fertilised egg is lost prior to implantation.” https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2002/610.html
7. House of Commons Library Briefing SN04309, “Abortion law” (17 December 2009): “Abortion is the commonly used term for the termination of an established pregnancy, where ‘established’ is taken to mean that the embryo has implanted in the uterus.” https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04309/SN04309.pdf
8. Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, establishing the “material risks” standard of informed consent. Because pre-implantation loss is not legally the loss of an established pregnancy, it does not arise as a “risk to a pregnancy” requiring disclosure under this test. https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2015/11.html
9. American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), committee opinions on hormonal contraception and intrauterine devices — representing licensed OB-GYNs who decline to prescribe certain methods on post-fertilisation grounds. https://aaplog.org/
10. Testimony of the President of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (George Ryan) to the US Senate “Human Life Bill” hearings, 1981, acknowledging that the IUD and low-dose oral contraceptive pill “could be considered as abortifacients and therefore declared illegal” if life were defined in law from fertilisation; recorded in the Guttmacher Institute’s own account. https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2005/05/implications-defining-when-woman-pregnant
11. Guttmacher Institute, “About Half of U.S. Abortion Patients Report Using Contraception in the Month They Became Pregnant” (2018); underlying study R. K. Jones & J. Jerman, “Reported contraceptive use in the month of becoming pregnant among U.S. abortion patients in 2000 and 2014,” Contraception (2018). US data. https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2018/about-half-us-abortion-patients-report-using-contraception-month-they-became
12. NHS, “Intrauterine device (IUD)”: the copper coil works in part by “stopping a fertilised egg from implanting”; licensed as emergency contraception up to 120 hours after intercourse. On the birth-control movement’s founders and their institutions, see Planned Parenthood’s own history (https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history) and The Christian Post on the renaming of Marie Stopes International (https://www.christianpost.com/news/marie-stopes-international-changes-name-over-activists-eugenics-support.html). NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/iud-coil/
13. Manufacturers’ Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC) for combined oral contraceptives (e.g. Microgynon 30, “the rendering of the endometrium unreceptive to implantation”) and the levonorgestrel intrauterine system (Mirena, “prevention of proliferation of the endometrium”), published on the UK electronic medicines compendium. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc
14. FDA Plan B One-Step decisional memorandum (December 2022) and the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), “Mechanism of action of levonorgestrel emergency contraception,” stating that levonorgestrel emergency contraception acts mainly by inhibiting or delaying ovulation and is not shown to prevent implantation. https://www.figo.org/mechanism-action-emergency-contraception ; https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2022/021998Orig1s005SumR.pdf

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version.

A note on sources. Where an objection turns on a matter of fact we have given a source; where it turns on Scripture we have given the text; and where a figure is illustrative rather than measured — as with the population arithmetic under objection 7 — we have said so rather than dress an illustration as a statistic. The Guttmacher figure under objection 10 is United States data, cited because it is the most careful study of its kind; we have not assumed it transfers unchanged to the United Kingdom. Objection 14 is included precisely because our discipline requires us to state where the evidence has moved against part of the popular case, and to rest the argument only on what remains admitted and unchanged.