NPR on Abortion

Husbands and wives have their compromises. I get speakers in the bathroom so I can listen to NPR in the shower, and she gets… love. I mean, she’d get it anyway, but still.

So I’m listening to NPR this morning and a blog post pops into my head—because of this story.

People have been arguing for decades over whether abortion endangers a woman’s mental health. Now, a new study could settle the debate.

Choosing to have an abortion is not an easy decision, and scientists have put a lot of effort into trying to find out whether women are harmed by that choice. This new study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, says they are not.

Robert Blum, an expert on reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, did not work on the study, but he has worked in the field for decades.

"This is an extremely, extremely well done study," he said. "There is no evidence that abortion predisposes a woman to psychiatric and mental health problems."

No harm at all comes to moms who abort their babies?

I have a simple question: what counts as harm? To the NEJM and Robert Blum, at least according to this story, it’s only things that are scientifically measurable, namely “psychiatric and mental health problems.”

But doesn’t harm to a woman’s character count? How about harm to her faith and love? How about harm to her standing before God?

This scientist speaks from within his own faith-based worldview, a worldview in which science determines what counts as harmful. Naturalistic materialism—the idea that matter and energy is all there is, that there is no supernatural—has already won the debate by defining the presuppositions.

The Christian answer may include disputing the study on scientific grounds. A Christian social scientist might rightly do another study which corrects flaws in the first one and finds that abortion breaks up families or causes lifelong regret—things secular scientists might also call harms. But we have to be ready to find that the scientists were right on their own grounds.

Well before that admission comes, Christians have another duty. Christians are the only people who can and must point out that there is higher ground from which to view reality, and only one Person standing on it. God is the only one with a truly objective view; He gets to define “harm.”

Abortion does cause harm to mothers—not to mention babies.