No one should be more supportive of a woman’s right to make choices about her own body than members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Choice is ingrained in church doctrine through the eternal principle of free agency. “The Plan of Salvation” describes a pre-Earth life where individual eternal spirit children of God exercised their agency and chose to come to Earth and inhabit physical bodies with which they prove themselves through trials. Here they remain free to choose.
At death, the spirits leave behind their bodies and continue to live eternally with the expectation of one day being reunited with glorified versions of their physical bodies.
Today many church members believe that it is wrong for a woman to choose to have an abortion. Some support efforts to control, restrict or eliminate the right to such a choice, often aligning themselves with radical attempts of state governments to completely outlaw it.
Such laws can force women, and face it, girls, to carry through pregnancies they may not have chosen or that are dangerous. This is a surprising stance for Latter-day Saints to take, given their knowledge of doctrines and practices emphasizing that only spirits are eternal.
Official church policy on abortion is to oppose it except in cases of forcible rape or incest, serious threats to the life or health of the mother or severe fetal defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. Because exceptions allow for carefully considered circumstances where the abortion is evidently considered a rational choice, not a sin, the position of the church suggests that abortion per se is not an absolute wrong.
Doctrinally, the spirit and physical body, joined together, constitute a “living soul,” i.e., a human being. Abortion opponents often state a belief that a spirit joins the physical body before birth, perhaps at conception, first fetal heartbeat, viability, or some other point — all suppositions.
However, Latter-day Saint scripture seems to support the idea that entry occurs with a successful birth, at which time a living soul is created, suggesting that an embryo or fetus is not yet a complete human being. In both the temple endowment and the Pearl of Great Price, “the Gods [sic] formed man from the dust of the ground (think physical body), and took his spirit (that is, the person’s spirit), and put it into him; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” (Abraham 5:7)
Even if one rejects this idea that the spirit is joined with the physical body only at live birth, and instead believes that it is resident much sooner, then what happens to the spirit in an embryo or fetus that is aborted, whether spontaneously or by choice?
The Plan of Salvation claims that all spirits who chose to come to Earth will indeed have the opportunity to receive a physical body, but miscarriages, i.e., spontaneous abortions, are common. In the United States an estimated 15-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, generally before 20 weeks, and most before seven weeks. Miscarriages are especially common among women who have previously given birth, with one study finding 43% having experienced one or more spontaneous miscarriages. Nineteenth century Latter-day Saint women reportedly averaged 8 live births and 16.7 miscarriages.
If a spirit is in a fetus at any time after conception, and is then aborted, it seemingly gets withdrawn to the heavenly realm of spirits for another opportunity for its promised physical body. If true for a spirit in a spontaneous abortion, then it is hard to argue that the spirit in a purposely aborted fetus, if it is in fact there, should be treated any differently.
So, whether there is a spirit in the aborted fetus or there is not, no spirit having made the choice to come to Earth will miss out on that opportunity. An abortion will not foil the Plan of Salvation for any eternal spirit.
We cannot know all the reasons why a woman makes the emotionally painful choice to have an abortion, but as God gave her the right to make choices, it should be her choice, not ours nor a government’s, to make. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have the most supportable reasons to defend her choice, and to do otherwise would be inconsistent with both their professed belief in church doctrine and current church policy.
Brian Wangsgard
Brian Wangsgard is an Air Force veteran, now retired and living in Washington, Utah.
