A few years ago, I was in my local AT&T Mobile store, sitting in front of two employees working on my phone, when they started talking about abortion. We were the only people in the store.

Each employee said, “It should be a woman’s choice whether she keeps her baby.” They kept using the term “baby.” I calmly spoke up and said, “If an embryo is a baby, you can’t kill it.” That ended the discussion in its tracks, because if an embryo is a baby from conception, and he or she always is, then every abortion is the murder of a baby, and every miscarriage is the death of a baby.

Everyone knows this truth. That is why most family members weep over miscarriages. We do not weep over what the embryo would become; we weep over what he or she was from conception: a very small baby, a very small image-bearer of God (Gen 1:26-27).

This Sunday, January 18, Southern Baptists will celebrate the sanctity of human life. In 2025, there were over 73,000,000 abortions or murders of unborn babies worldwide. As a way of comparison, infectious diseases caused 17,000,000 deaths, cancer caused 10,000,000, and smoking caused 6,200,000.¹

Pastors, that’s a slaughter. A genocide of the preborn. Abortion is the greatest moral issue of our day.

 If you preach against any of the evils of our society–and I trust that you do–then surely you should preach against the greatest evil done to God’s image-bearers in our day! And you should definitely do so on Pro-Life Sunday.

Created in the Image of God

In the beginning, God created mankind, body and soul, male and female, in His image (Gen. 1:26-27; Matt. 10:28). God made mankind for the purpose of mirroring Him in His creation on earth. Body and soul exist in unity, and they make up human nature, but natures do not act on their own; rather, persons act through their natures. Persons are the acting subjects.² Natures do not subsist in themselves, but in persons.³

To have a human nature on earth, one needs a human body (however minimal) and a human soul. If the body is ensouled, the soul is embodied, and a human person is alive.

With these truths as a necessary foundation, we must ask, “Does Scripture teach that human embryos are human natures that subsist in persons?” 

Yes, and Jesus Christ in Mary’s womb proves this reality.

Jesus Christ, Fully Human from Conception

For Jesus Christ to represent humanity, he had to come from Adam (Gen. 3:15; John 1:1, 14; Heb. 2:14-17). Mary is treated as Jesus’s mother, not because she was a mere surrogate for the implanted embryo of Christ, but because her egg was miraculously fertilized by God. It was a miraculous virgin birth. The same process that you and I went through in the embryonic stage onward to birth is the same process Jesus Christ went through. Yet, He was not conceived in sin like us because He was conceived sinless by God the Holy Spirit from God the Father (Matt. 1:18; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5).

Before Jesus was conceived in Mary, her cousin Elizabeth became pregnant with John the Baptist. John was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb (Luke 1:15, 41). An angel told Mary she would be pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that Elizabeth, her cousin, was already six months pregnant. Mary then hurried to see Elizabeth. 

Mary greeted her, and John the Baptist jumped in Elizabeth’s womb:

“And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord’” (Luke 1:42-45).

It had only been a few days, or a few weeks at the most, since Mary became pregnant. She was still very early in the first trimester, and it is even possible that the embryo had not even attached to the uterine wall yet, a process that takes 6-10 days, which is also about two weeks before the baby’s heart even starts beating. Based on what Elizabeth said to Mary, Mary was already pregnant when she entered the room. Elizabeth referred to Mary’s baby, her embryo, as tou kuriou, literally translated, “the Lord.”

Jesus Christ, Fully God from Conception

Furthermore, John the Baptist, filled with the Spirit while in Elizabeth’s womb, leapt for joy at the presence of his Lord and Savior, who entered the room as a Divine Person united with a human embryo (the God-Man). God the Son had already united with His human nature at conception, for Elizabeth called him “the Lord.” Though it was very early in the first trimester, he did not form a mere “clump of cells.” That would mean there are two incarnations: God the Son, a “clump of cells,” and God the Son Incarnate. This adds a heretical “nature” to Christ in addition to His true humanity and true deity.

Additionally, due to Adam’s and our sin, mankind needed a Second Adam who was like the first Adam in nature, yet without sin: a man who could fulfill God’s law from His heart. Clumps of cells are neither obedient nor disobedient to God, nor can they be; therefore, God the Son united with a human nature, embryo, body, and soul, not an inhuman clump of cells. John the Baptist did not leap over what Mary’s “clump of cells” would become; he jumped for joy over what her embryo already was, even at a few days in utero: God the Son Incarnate.

Jesus Christ’s human nature subsisted in his divine Person from conception. To argue otherwise is to deny Scripture, deny orthodoxy, and to affirm heresy.

Pro-Abortion Heretics

There are two dominant positions when it comes to the discussion of abortion: pro-abolition and pro-abortion.

Those who affirm the abolition argument believe babies are living human persons from conception. All that a human being needs to possess in the womb to be considered a person is a body and a soul, which every baby has from conception. Just as death occurs when a soul leaves a body (2 Cor 5:6-8), life begins when an embryo (body) is ensouled (Gen 2:7).

On the other side, those who affirm the pro-abortion argument believe that mothers should have the choice concerning whether to bring their babies to delivery, since the babies are inside their mothers’ wombs. Some in this movement justify abortion by arguing that babies are not human persons until their hearts start beating, while others argue they are not persons until they possess higher brain function, self-consciousness, autonomy, etc. This “transformation” into human personhood takes place at about 22 days for the heartbeat, or at some point late in the second trimester for brain function, 4 to 5 months in the pregnancy.⁴ And some in this movement even argue that a baby is not a human person until birth, when the baby takes its first breath.⁵

If the pro-abortion movement is correct about when personhood begins, what does this say about Jesus at conception? Was He something less than human from conception to when His heart started beating, or late in the 2nd trimester, or at birth? If so, what was He, and how does this fit with orthodoxy?

From Scripture to Chalcedon

In the 4th and 5th centuries, heresies were spreading in the church. Christians needed to precisely understand and officially confess what Scripture said to answer heresy and prevent error. Thus, they had their fourth great ecumenical council in Chalcedon (Asia Minor) in 451 AD. 

The Chalcedonian Creed was the result:

“Following, then, the holy Fathers, we all with one voice teach that it is to be confessed that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same God, perfect in divinity, and perfect in humanity, true God and true human, with a rational soul and a body, of one substance with the Father in his divinity, and of one substance with us in his humanity, in every way like us, with the only exception of sin, begotten of the Father before all time in his divinity, and also begotten in the latter days, in his humanity, of Mary the virgin bearer of God.

This is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, manifested in two natures without any confusion, change, division, or separation. The union does not destroy the difference of the two natures, but, on the contrary, the properties of each are kept, and both are joined in one person and hypostasis. They are not divided into two persons, but belong to the one Only-begotten Son, the Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. All this, as the prophets of old said of him, and as he himself has taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers has passed on to us.”⁶

The Chalcedonian definition rejected heresy while reaffirming what had been decided in the three previous great councils: Nicaea in 325 (Christ is truly God), Constantinople in 381 (Christ is truly Man; the Holy Spirit is truly God),⁷ and Ephesus in 431 (Christ is one Divine Person with two natures: fully divine and fully human).⁸ From Scripture, Chalcedon drew the orthodox boundaries for discussion of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, to this day.

God the Son, the Person, acts through His natures. (The natures don’t act, the Person acts). Thus, God the Son simultaneously united Himself to a human nature in the incarnation while remaining united to His divine nature. As God the Son incarnate is hungry, thirsty, living under the Law, bleeding, suffering, and dying through His human nature, He holds all creation together through His Divine nature. There is unity without mixture and distinction without separation of the two natures in God the Son.

Conclusion

From Scripture, Chalcedon argued that God the Son is truly God and truly Man, united in one person of two natures, divine and human. Jesus has never been united to anything less than a human nature. 

Thus, to affirm the pro-abortion argument that a baby is less than human until his or her heart beat, or late in the 2nd trimester, or at birth, pro-abortion advocates must also argue that God the Son Incarnate was less than human at conception and became truly human at a later date. 

That’s Christological heresy, according to Scripture and what Christians have always believed. Because Jesus Christ was truly human from conception, all embryos are truly human from conception.

We need no other reason to call abortion murder. God has spoken. Will you listen? 

And will you speak up, this Sunday, in defense of the millions of defenseless unborn babies, who are fully human and deserving of equal protection under the law? 

I pray that you will.

1. Anugrah Kumar, “73 million defenseless people were killed last year. Here’s why,” January 3, 2026, https://www.christianpost.com/news/73-million-defenseless-people-were-killed-last-year-heres-why.html. ↩︎
2. See Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 10, 145, 310-311. Swinburne argues that the soul and body affect one another. I agree with this premise. But, he then argues that the soul is like a light bulb and the brain like a light socket. The bulb can exist apart from the socket, but will not light. I, however, want to argue that the human nature, body, and soul are the light bulb and the human person is the light socket, since natures subsist in persons. Of course, then the bulb (human nature) cannot exist without the socket (human person), and the socket cannot exist without the bulb; the analogy then fails. Truthfully, the analogy fails even in Swinburne’s original use, since the bulb does not affect the socket as the soul affects the human body. Also see Alvin Plantinga, “Materialism and Christian Belief,” in Persons: Human and Divine, eds. Peter Van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford, NY: Clarendon Press, 2007), 100-101. ↩︎
3. Jove Jim S. Aguas, “The Notions of the Human Person and Human Dignity in Aquinas and Wojtyla,” Kritike 3:1 (June 2009): 50-51. ↩︎
4. Francis J. Beckwith, “Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Part Three): Is the Unborn Human Less Than Human? Christian Research Institute, May 8, 2025, https://www.equip.org/articles/the-right-to-life-when-does-life-begin/#:~:text=Those%20who%20argue%20in%20this,rights%20than%20an%20adult%20woman. Also see, “The Ethics of Abortion,” May 14, 2025, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abortion/. ↩︎
5. Beckwith, “Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Part Three), https://www.equip.org/articles/the-right-to-life-when-does-life-begin/#:~:text=Those%20who%20argue%20in%20this,rights%20than%20an%20adult%20woman. Also see, Planned Parenthood South Texas, “The truth about abortion,” Planned Parenthood, Accessed 1/13/16, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/67/2d/672d620f-6b87-48eb-beb0-f98c8de4ccc8/ppst_the_truth_about_abortion.pdf. ↩︎
6. Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1985), 256-257. ↩︎
7. Stephen J. Wellum, Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, Volume One (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic), 700-701. ↩︎
8. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 260-261. ↩︎