Is the Bible pro-abortion? Some pro-choice advocates try to argue it is, citing a law in Numbers 5:11-31 and claiming it prescribes abortion as a punishment for adultery. Jimmy Akin explains why that’s incorrect.
Transcript:
Caller: I’m a pro-life devout Catholic and I have a tendency to try to defend the faith with non-pro-life people, and someone came back at me and said that there was a prescription in the Old Testament under Numbers 5:11-31 that says that abortion is okay. I wanted to know if you could elaborate on that a little bit more? What gives the pro-abortion people the…using the scripture as though it is a prescription for abortion?
Jimmy Akin: To really know why a pro-abortion person would cite this passage, you’d have to ask the individual pro-abortion person, because if the answer is gonna vary from one pro-abortion person to another. I can’t claim to speak for them all, but I can at least briefly comment on I think where the mistakes get made.
So if you look in Numbers chapter five, we have a law that deals with what happens if a husband becomes suspicious that his wife has been committing adultery. And this is a law that is based on the cultural conditions at the time and the the state of development that the Israelites had achieved, and they were still in some ways fairly primitive in terms of their walk with God. They’d only just begun walking with God and so God hadn’t fully revealed his will to them. He was working with them kind of where they were.
And this is something that Jesus talks about, how, you know, Moses gave them certain laws regarding divorce, not because God approves of divorce, but because their hearts were hard. And this is the same exact kind of thing: what do you do when you’ve got a jealous husband? Well, the instructions are that the husband’s supposed to take the wife to a priest, and so this is mitigating what the husband might otherwise do if he just took matters into his own hands. It’s like, “Nope, you can’t just deal with it yourself, you’ve got to bring her to the priest,” so there’s an outside observer who’s getting involved that will mitigate the situation.
And then, in keeping with the justice systems of the time, they use what’s known as “trial by ordeal.” And trial by ordeal is where a person is subjected to some ordeal, and if it’s God’s will, the person passes through the ordeal and is to be treated as innocent; but if the person doesn’t pass through the ordeal, that’s going to be taken as a sign that the person was guilty and they’ll be treated as legally guilty.
In this case, part of what the priest is prescribed to do is write the charge against the woman on a piece of papyrus or something, and wash the ink off into some water, and also take some of the dust from the floor of the tabernacle and put it in the water—so this is holy dirt, it’s dirt from God’s presence there in the tabernacle—and then the woman drinks this after taking an oath in front of the priest. And if she’s guilty of adultery, God may cause certain bodily effects to happen to signify her guilt; but if not, she gets to be treated as innocent.
Now there are two common areas where, in my experience, people who are pro-abortion have misused this passage. The first concerns the nature of what the woman drinks. It’s portrayed as if it’s an abortifacient, something that will kill the child. This is clearly not the case. Water with a little bit of dust and ink in it is not an abortifacient. And it’s clearly not meant to be an abortifacient, because if she’s innocent—let’s say she’s pregnant by her husband—well, it’s not going to kill the child. It wouldn’t kill any child, because a little water with a little bit of ink and dust in it is not an abortifacient, period.
The second has to do with a non-literal translation of what it says the bodily effects are going to be. Literally, what it says is that if she’s guilty, that her thigh will waste away and her abdomen swell. And sometimes people translate this as if she will miscarry, but that’s not what it says literally. And so that’s, I think, the second source of making a mistake in this passage. It doesn’t actually describe a miscarriage. Certainly it does not do so clearly. What it does say is: if she’s innocent, then her abdomen will not swell and her thigh won’t waste away, and she will be able to conceive children.
So it looks to me, based on what it literally says, that if she’s guilty of adultery, she may become unable to conceive children, she may become infertile due to the effects that have been described; but those effects are not a miscarriage, and that’s not what’s in view here. So the passage does not presuppose that she’s pregnant at all, just that she’s committed adultery—or, that’s the question to be decided. So I would say there are several mistakes being made by people who would try to use this passage as a warrant for abortion.
Also, this whole situation, as a trial by ordeal, is putting the whole issue in God’s hands. So even if this passage said “And if she’s pregnant due to adultery, she’ll miscarry,” which it does not say, that would be something that’s put in God’s hands, God having the power of life and death. That doesn’t mean we’ve got the power of life and death and can kill people on our own.