Evangelicals and Abortion Debates in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s: Back to the Bible
Why were evangelicals slower than Catholics to join the pro-life cause? Historians have sometimes argued that it was because evangelicals were unconcerned about abortion in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But actually, there was a lot more discussion of abortion among evangelicals during this period than some have assumed.
In Abortion and the Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade,” historian Daniel K. Williams traces some of these conversations and reconstructs evangelicals’ theological analysis of abortion. Though evangelicals were concerned about the campaign to legalize abortion during the years immediately before Roe, they could not agree on a cohesive theological and political framework for the issue. This excerpt from Abortion and the Churches examines evangelical debates on abortion from 1967 to 1971, a time period when more than a dozen states liberalized their abortion laws.
This excerpt from Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade (2025) is published with permission of University of Notre Dame Press.
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In 1967, three states—Colorado, California, and North Carolina—became the first in the nation to legalize “therapeutic” abortion, which usually meant a doctor-advised abortion in a case of rape or incest, dangers to a woman’s health, or suspected fetal deformity. Leaders in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) reacted with a swift condemnation of these liberalization measures. The Baptist Bible Tribune (the newspaper of the Baptist Bible Fellowship, an association of fundamentalist independent Baptist churches to which Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, belonged) called abortion “mass murder” in September 1967. “There is no difference between murder of life in the womb and murder of life in the crib,” the Baptist Bible Tribune editor, Noel Smith, declared. He held out little hope that this trend could be stopped. “This country being what it is today, there is no doubt that we are going to become a nation of scientific mass murder, a nation of murderers and murderesses,” he wrote. “And there is no doubt that an outraged Holy God is going to judge us – now, down here on this earth.”
Most evangelicals did not follow the fundamentalists or conservative Lutherans in taking such an absolutist position. Evangelicals still viewed abortion as morally problematic, but the Bible said nothing directly about abortion, they realized. Less than a decade removed from their movement’s change of mind on contraception, they did not want to make the same mistake with abortion that they had made with birth control; they did not want to declare that a matter on which the Bible was silent was inherently sinful.
For evangelicals who thought that the New Testament offered no clear guidance on abortion, the Old Testament passages that related to the subject offered little additional clarity. Exodus 21:22-25—the passage that Jewish rabbinical scholars had used for centuries to argue for the permissibility of abortion in some cases—was a favorite of evangelicals who believed that the Catholic absolutist position of opposition to all abortions was too strict, but they had to concede that the passage was obscure.
A few evangelicals used Genesis 2:7 (the verse from the Genesis creation account that said, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”) to argue that human life began only at birth, when a baby took its first breath. This appears to have been the view of the conservative Southern Baptist president W. A. Criswell, and although most evangelicals rejected this interpretation, it was popular among some Baptists who believed it reflected the most literal reading of the scriptural text.
This interpretation was based on the premise that full human personhood began only when God created a soul or spirit within a person at some point subsequent to the formation of a physical body. When exactly ensoulment occurred had been a topic of debate among medieval scholastics and early modern Catholic theologians. While many had placed this moment at some point after conception, they had not generally placed it as late as the moment of birth. But to at least a few Bible-believing Baptists, this appeared to be what Genesis 2:7 implied—and if that was the case, it was hard to get too upset about abortion, at least in cases when it was not connected to sexual sin.
But a significant number of evangelical theologians (including some who were Baptist) rejected the idea that ensoulment occurred subsequent to the formation of a body. Twentieth-century neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth rejected the view that the human body could exist without the soul or spirit or that the soul or spirit would exist apart from the body. Evangelicals who accepted the idea that the body, soul, and spirit were inseparably connected for eternity and that one could not destroy the body without destroying the image of God found it easy to imagine that the human body was of incomparable worth even in its embryonic form. One could never say that a human body—even a human body that was a zygote or an embryo—lacked a soul or that it was not an image-bearer of God.
This was the view of John Warwick Montgomery, a Lutheran theologian and apologist who was a leading evangelical pro-life voice in the late 1960s. In Montgomery’s view, the question of when a human body began to exist could be answered by science. The zygote that formed at the moment of conception had a unique chromosomal identity that was distinct from either of its parents, and if its growth was not interrupted, it would continue to develop into an embryo, a fetus, and then a newborn baby. The existence and development of the human body therefore began at conception—and if the body existed at that moment, so did the soul. True, the zygote could not yet do anything, but humans were valuable not because of what they could do but because of who they were in relation to God—a relationship that began at the moment that “God brought about his psycho-physical [that is, soul-body] existence in the miracle of conception.” “For the biblical writers, personhood in the most genuine sense begins no later than conception,” Montgomery wrote. “Subsequent human acts illustrate this personhood, they do not create it.”
Even some evangelicals who believed that the moment ensoulment likely occurred after conception did not think that Genesis 2:7 taught that it could be identified so precisely with the point at which an infant took its first breath outside the womb. The mainstream evangelical theological position in the late 1960s was that Scripture did not say exactly when or how ensoulment took place. Most evangelicals who took this position believed that this uncertainty should lead to greater caution about taking life at its earliest embryonic stages rather than less.
Kenneth Kantzer, a dean at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, declared that even if “Scripture may not tell us how to recognize the functions of a truly human and immortal soul,” this did not mean that one was free to abort an embryo or fetus. “From conception, the fetus is of immeasurable value because of its potential humanity.” What gave the fetus worth was not primarily the fact that it had a soul at a particular moment in time, but rather the fact that it was, at the very least, “potential human life in process of becoming a human being.” Whether or not the fetus had a soul at a particular moment of gestation, one must assume that it was God’s purpose for that particular fetus to develop into a full human being, and that God’s purpose alone was enough to give infinite worth to the developing person in embryonic form. People did not have the right to terminate the development of an image-bearer of God, because the creation of such an image-bearer was God’s work, not theirs. The fetus belonged to God, not to either of its parents. “Scripture does teach us that a human fetus is of immeasurable value because of its potential, in spite of the fact that it is not yet fully human,” Kantzer wrote. “And Scripture demands, accordingly, that the human fetus be treated as of such immeasurable value by man.”
Most evangelicals in the late 1960s seem to have taken a view similar to Kantzer’s: Even if ensoulment did not begin at conception, and even if a fetus was not a full human person, it was clear from scripture that the fetus was a potential human created by God for an eternal destiny, and destroying it was therefore a grave evil in most instances. With this theology, one could theoretically support the availability of abortion for a few carefully defined medical reasons, but elective abortion would be a bridge too far.
However, some evangelicals (like John Warwick Montgomery) thought they could go even further and say that the fetus was not only “potential” life in the process of formation but an actual ensouled human person from the moment of conception. In addition to arguing that scripture did not teach that the creation of the soul was separate from the creation of the body, they also argued that there were several scriptures that suggested that fetuses in the womb were full human persons who were capable of being filled with the Holy Spirit or bearing the guilt of sin.
The gospel of Luke’s description of the preborn John the Baptist’s behavior offered especially compelling evidence of fetal personhood, they thought. In Luke 1:15, John the Baptist’s father is told by an angel that the son that his wife will conceive will “be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb” (KJV). It seems clear from the larger context of the narrative that the phrase referred to fetal movement at the end of the second trimester of pregnancy which John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, interpreted as a sign that her unborn baby was praising the preborn Christ. “As soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy,” Elizabeth told Mary (Luke 1:44, KJV).
For some evangelicals, this verse alone was enough to clinch the argument for fetal personhood, because the Greek word translated “babe” or “baby” was the same word (brephos) that was used for newborn babies and young children elsewhere in scripture. Luke, it seemed, did not make any differentiation between a second-trimester fetus and an infant or young child; both were capable of being filled with the Spirit, both were capable of experiencing joy, both were capable of acknowledging Jesus, and, most importantly, both were designated with the same Greek word, which suggested to these evangelicals that they had the same ontological value. And if Luke, the inspired gospel writer, made no differentiation between human life before and after birth, evangelicals who believed in biblical inerrancy should not either, they argued.
