On Abortion

A special guest post

This week I have a bit of a surprise, Historian of Worlds’ first official guest post, written by my friend and brother in Christ, Josiah Tedesco. But first, a bit of backstory.

This week I attended the 2026 Answers for Women Conference: Anchored; Pursuing Biblical Sexuality in Turbulent World at the Ark Encounter. If you can’t tell from the name of the conference, the theme was how we should approach the perversion and corruption of marriage, sexuality, identity, and reproduction in the world today as Bible-believing Christians. And right from the first day, the talks about abortion, an issue I’ve always had strong convictions about, struck fire in my soul.

I was processing the immense anger and deep grief I was feeling towards just how warped the world’s perception is of children and the life and value of the unborn in messages with Josiah, and found the same convictions in him. Thus, this post was born.

We must speak out about these issues, cause the darkness will grasp where the light retreats. Continued silence will only hasten the corruption. And so, we stand.

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On Abortion

by Josiah Tedesco

First, I extend my sincere gratitude to Romana for permitting me to contribute to her blog, and to address a topic that has long been to me less a subject of inquiry than a wound. There exist questions upon which one cannot maintain the polite veneers of social discourse, nor feign detachment from strong emotion; abortion is among them. I have often spoken of it with more passion than refinement, for certain evils do not deserve refinement. They merit exposure. They merit denunciation. They deserve to be drawn, blinking and apparent, from the perfumed darkness in which contemporary society has willingly concealed them. I am thus grateful for any forum in which I may state plainly what many presently strive to avoid saying plainly: abortion is evil, and no amount of softened language will render it otherwise.

Let us commence, as civilized discourse traditionally does, with definitions. Planned Parenthood, in a sanitized, clinical diction, characterizes abortion as a safe and legal means to terminate a pregnancy. How elegant. How scrupulously hygienic. How conveniently convenient for conscience to label a dead child as a “terminated pregnancy.” By contrast, the pro-life position speaks with the blunt honesty that truth often requires: abortion is the killing of an unborn child. For my part, I am not inclined to embellish the matter with medical veilings and moral lace. Abortion is the murder of children for the convenience of adults, undertaken to erase the consequences of lust, cowardice, selfishness, or simple imprudence. It is what occurs when individuals wish to preserve their pleasures while discarding their responsibilities, and when a society so corrupted by self-interest consents to call that arrangement compassion.

Its history is not nobler. Abortion is not the luminous emblem of progress, as its proponents often presume, but one more ancient barbarity cloaked in a modern form. The old world knew how to solve adult inconvenience with the blood of the innocent. Child sacrifice to Moloch stands in Scripture as a revolting sign of pagan corruption: the strong satisfying appetites by offering the weak to the furnace. Although our era purports to have progressed beyond such crude spectacles, it has achieved little more than substituting the altar for the clinic and the idol for ideology. The spirit remains essentially the same. Ancient cultures normalized the view of infant life as disposable, and later societies—ever inventive in vice—provide such cruelties with increasingly medical language, as though a cleaner instrument yields a cleaner conscience. By the time abortion entered the American discourse as something polished, protected, and politically fashionable, the old savagery had already acquired a doctorate. Roe v. Wade did not uncover a right so much as nationalize a sin. Behind much of the movement’s intellectual apparatus lies eugenics—the enduring, sleek doctrine that some lives are better eradicated for the improvement of the whole. Margaret Sanger, frequently treated as a heroine by those who would recoil at citing others with such a fixation on breeding, sterilization, and social engineering, belongs to that grim procession of reformers who imagine themselves compassionate while presuming that entire classes of humanity are a stain to be managed.

Yet the central question is not historical but moral. Why is abortion murder? Because no amount of euphemism can alter the nature of the act. If a person wished you run over in the street, wished a carriage wheel, a motorcar, or a truck to extinguish your life, you would not hesitate to say that person wished you dead. If he wished that you had been aborted, what is the difference except chronology? He still wishes you dead—earlier, smaller, and at a stage when your cries may be ignored and your absence excused as “healthcare.” The malice does not diminish merely because the victim is younger. Murder before birth is not more moral than murder after birth; it is merely more fashionable among the cowardly.

Now let us address the question of what the child is, for nearly the entire abortion debate relies on persuading others not to scrutinize this issue closely. A baby in the womb is not a suggestion, not an optional abstraction, not a mere inconvenience. That child possesses, first, a soul. Not a possible soul, not a developing soul, not a soul awaiting maternal approval, but a soul granted by God. Scripture is explicit on this point. God forms us in the womb. He knows us before we are born. He knits us together in secret. The biblical language is intimate, deliberate, personal. Heaven does not describe unborn children as medical waste; Heaven describes them as works of God. The unborn child is under divine authorship; he is not raw material awaiting permission from frightened adults to become morally real. From the moment of conception, there is not nothing, nor almost someone, nor a vague religious metaphor. There exists a human life bearing a soul, and that soul is bestowed not by the mother, nor by the father, nor by the state, nor by a physician in gloves, but by God Himself.

Second, that child possesses potential life, and here the abortionist reveals not only cruelty but remarkable dullness. To murder someone is always to destroy more than a body. It is to annihilate a future. It is to erase everything that person might have become and crush it beneath the heel before it can appear. Every person lives under the immense mystery of what he may yet become. The impoverished child may become a regal soul. The awkward boy may become a statesman. The little girl with scraped knees and a crooked ribbon may become a mother, an inventor, a teacher, a missionary, a poet, a singer, or simply one of those quiet saints whose gentleness preserves the world from becoming entirely intolerable. To kill a person, therefore, is not merely to end his present life but to steal his unwritten one. That theft does not become noble when committed in the womb; it becomes only more absolute.

We uphold, rightly, that our rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life takes precedence, for without life the others are only bureaucratic abstractions. Liberty is meaningless to a corpse. Happiness is difficult to pursue after dismemberment. A child’s life belongs to that child. It is not a temporary loan extended at the whim of adults until they decide the timing is inconvenient. It is hers or his. The smallest child holds the same fundamental claim against being killed as the greatest statesman. Greatness does not create human value; human value exists prior to greatness, which, if it occurs, follows.

Consider Abraham Lincoln. Here was a man whose shoulders bore a nation’s moral burden. He preserved the Union. He challenged slavery. He spoke with a rare fusion of grief and grandeur that makes certain individuals appear taller than their era in retrospect. And yet, even after all he accomplished, how much remained? What further healing might he have effected, what injustices might he have redressed, what wisdom might have informed the arduous work of reconciliation? But John Wilkes Booth murdered him, and with that single shot fell not only a man but a thousand unrealized futures. That is the essence of murder: it does not merely interrupt breathing; it pillages possibility.

There are also the small lives, which society often deems less impressive precisely because they have not yet demonstrated usefulness to others. I once knew a pastor’s daughter, six years old, who rode her scooter into a suburban street and was struck and killed by an accident. There is something especially horrifying in the death of a child, for children are almost made of future. She might have become a missionary, a singer, a bride, a mother, a teacher, a nurse, a writer, or a hidden pillar in many private lives. No one knew. That mystery belonged to her alone. Yet in one terrible instant, it was taken from her. All decent people understand that such a loss is tragic, unjust, and heartbreaking. Why, then, when the child is killed in a more clinical setting with a cleaner instrument and a signature on a form, are we expected to call that theft enlightened?

Abortion has stolen not one child, not a dozen, but millions. Millions of faces never seen, names never spoken, voices never heard, prayers never prayed, songs never sung, hands never held, lives never lived. Entire branches of human history ripped away before they could leaf. Annihilated not because they were guilty, not because they were wicked, not because they had forfeited the right to live, but because they were inconvenient to people who preferred pleasure without consequence, autonomy without duty, sex without sacrifice, and freedom without morality. We are missing multitudes because adults desired sin without accountability.

In this regard, modern society reveals its true character—not compassionate, not brave, not progressive, but decadent. It preaches incessantly about justice for the vulnerable, yet has spent decades defending the right to kill the most vulnerable humans in existence. It will lament publicly for distant suffering, hashtag its tenderness, illuminate buildings in sympathetic colors, and then gaze upon a child in the womb and declare, with the solemnity of a well-dressed barbarian, that this particular small person may be dismembered because the father was careless, the mother frightened, the timing inopportune, the finances insufficient, or the ambitions more pressing. In other words: the child must die because virtue is too expensive for adults.

Moreover, consider the men, those sleek cowards often concealed behind the rhetoric of female liberation. Much of abortion’s ordinary defense, when stripped of its rhetoric, rests on the appetites of men who refused to govern themselves. How many dead children lie at the feet of male selfishness? How many graves were dug because some man found chastity inconvenient, fatherhood troublesome, or contraception distasteful? A society that congratulates itself for sophistication while murdering children to preserve the sexual irresponsibility of fools deserves not applause but contempt.

Nor are women ennobled by being told that killing their children constitutes empowerment. What an insult masquerading as liberation. What a diminished gospel: that a woman is strongest when she imitates the moral negligence of the worst sort of man and proves her equality by consenting to the destruction of her own offspring. True compassion would support her, assist her, honor her endurance, hold the father to account, and provide practical mercy to mother and child alike. Instead, the age offers her an appointment, a slogan, and a lifetime of carefully managed silence.

Let no one say, then, that abortion is tragic yet necessary, regrettable yet understandable, or morally complex. There are indeed complexities in poverty, abandonment, terror, shame, and hardship; there is no complexity in whether the innocent may be intentionally killed. Civilization itself depends upon the answer being no. The moment we decide that helplessness justifies destroying a person, we have already abandoned justice and begun merely negotiating whose weakness renders them killable.

And Christians, above all, ought to abandon timid speech on this matter. God is not deceived by clinical vocabulary. Heaven is not impressed by legal rulings. The Lord who forms children in the womb does not become neutral because a legislature grows fashionable or a court grows arrogant. Scripture teaches that the blood of the slain cries out, and Revelation depicts the martyrs calling for justice. There will be justice. The age may scoff, may shrug, may hide its dead behind sterile walls and polite falsehoods, but God is not mocked. Those who destroy innocent life and call evil good do not evade accountability by altering the language on a brochure. Judgment is not nullified by euphemism.

Thus I state, without apology: abortion is murder. It is the murder of children. It is the destruction of souls known by God and futures that belonged to the children themselves. It is an atrocity defended by selfishness, excused by cowardice, financed by industry, justified by ideology, and cloaked in language so dishonest that it ought to blush to speak aloud. It represents a national disgrace and a spiritual abomination. The fact that many treat it as settled, sophisticated, or merciful does not diminish its immorality; it merely demonstrates how thoroughly a culture may perfume its corruption.

I am pro-life because I refuse to flatter evil with gentility. I am pro-life because children are not penalties, not interruptions, not disposable side effects of adult amusement. I am pro-life because the weak do not cease to be human simply because they are unseen. I am pro-life because life belongs first to God, then to the one who bears it, and not at all to those who would extinguish it for convenience. And I am pro-life because any society that teaches its members to kill their own children and call the act freedom has not achieved enlightenment; it has achieved magnificence only in hypocrisy.

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Rending

by Romana Stewart

The soils run red with the blood of innocents,
it drips from the hands of those claiming ‘freedom.’
Life, for autonomy.
Removal, for proclivity.
Death, for depravity.
And the stench drips out from their doors
as darkness wraps the world round with barbs
that stretch taught around its victims.
And roars.

For it does not want the world to hear truth;
that the blood is their chains,
the death is the sacrifice to their wantonness,
their sins are the shackles dragging them down
into the rusted mire.

For there is light that would shatter its illusion,
a truth that will decimate its hold.
The screams are defensive.
The berating aims to terrify.
The noise seeks conversion by bullying.
Do not fall for the screams for blood, no matter how fair they call.
For the screams of blood have been silenced here. Each drop is a rend
in God’s heart.

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Thank you so much, Josiah, for joining me today. It’s been an honor to write alongside you on this.