SILVER SPRING, MD – On October 16, 2019, the Executive Committee of the Seventh-day Adventist Church voted at its Annual Council meeting [see Video] to adopt the position that “[t]he Seventh-day Adventist Church considers abortion out of harmony with God’s plan for human life.” The newly adopted position statement affirms that “God considers the unborn child as human life” and that “the principle to preserve life enshrined in the sixth commandment places abortion within its scope.”
The document also states that “Life is protected by God. It is not measured by individuals’ abilities or their usefulness, but by the value that God’s creation and sacrificial love has placed on it. Personhood, human value, and salvation are not earned or merited but graciously granted by God.”
The position encourages churches to create “an atmosphere of true love” and that church members “should provide care for struggling individuals, couples, and families” and “open their homes to those in need, including single parents, parentless children, and children in adoptive or foster care.” For those who have had abortions, the statement encourages churches to “provide emotional and spiritual support.”
The adoption of a pro-life position does not imply that the denomination will become active in civil legislation on abortion-related issues but does provide internal guidance for church members and institutions.
Link: “Adventist Statement on the Biblical View of Unborn Life and Its Implications for Abortion”
Updated 10/24/2019 to include a link to the final approved statement.
These latest guidelines appear to me to put the SDA Church in the same position as the Catholic Church on this topic – with human life beginning at the moment of conception. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable position – even for a Bible-believing Christian. It ends up vilifying various forms of birth control that prevent the implantation or support of the early embryo as equivalent to true murder deserving of the imprisonment or death of those who engage in such activity. It also ends up vilifying a sexual relationship with one’s spouse outside of the deliberate attempt to conceive. Is this really what we are trying to say as a Church Body? At least the original 1992 statement of the church was more nuanced on this topic, recognizing some of these more difficult to define concepts regarding the true beginning of human life…
http://www.educatetruth.com/featured/updating-the-sda-position-on-abortion/
Agreed! I also posted a comment to this unfortunate stance taken by the executive committee.
This is a sad day, when the fetus is given an ALEC approved personhood status in defiance of even the Bible itself! Exodus 23:20 explains the incident where the fruit of the womb is lost by two men fighting, and the fetus is paid for by a sum of money as would the loss of cattle, as the judges saw fit, but never given equal status as life for a life. This also defies the grounded doctrine of the definition of a soul, wherein the soul is a combination of the body and the breath of life. This new concept, of which Doug Bachelor is an advocate, can be used by apostate christianity as a method to treat an abortion as murder, the very goal sought for. The committee has fallen to christian apostate rhetoric!
Correction, Exodus 21:22