A few years ago, I was sitting in my local AT&T store waiting for a new cell phone. Mine was no longer supported, so I had about an hour to kill. Only three people were in the store: me and two employees.
While I waited, the man and woman in front of my table started talking about abortion. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had been leaked a few days before. The court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion at the national level, and leave the laws up to the states. The employees stood right in front of me, speaking casually to one another: “It should be a woman’s choice whether or not she keeps her baby.” They kept using the term “baby.” I calmly spoke up and said, “If an embryo is a baby, then you can’t kill it.”
Their conversation stopped immediately.
But it struck me how cavalier they were, that they actually believed it was morally good to value a human being, not according to his or her humanity, but according to his or her age and location. To kill a baby outside the womb is murder, but to kill a baby inside the womb is health care? And the value of a baby is determined not by God but the baby’s mother?
They would never speak this way about any other human being in public, especially not at work in front of customers! But when it comes to the unborn, our culture has decided that a human being’s value depends on two things: age and location. This is the heart of the issue. Are embryos human beings made in God’s image from the moment of conception, or are they something less than human?
Does their value come from God or from their age and location?
Why This Book Matters
This question is not only disagreed upon between Christians and Non-Christians. Christians disagree about it too. Among evangelicals in 2024, 33% believed abortion should be legal in all/most cases and 65% believed it should be illegal in all/most cases.[1]
But this book is not merely for the Christians in the 33%, it’s for those in the 65% too. For, if teenagers were being killed by the millions in America, neither the 33% nor the 65% would stand for it. But because the baby is in the womb, many Christians treat them as less than human even if they believe they are truly human. Both our actions and our lack of action display our beliefs.
Do you believe an embryo is as valuable as a teenager?
If an embryo is a baby from conception, and of course he or she is, then every miscarriage is the death of a baby, and every abortion is the murder of a baby. We all know this. That is why most people weep over miscarriages. We do not weep over what the embryo would become; we weep over what he or she is from conception: a very small baby! A very small image-bearer!
That’s why I wrote this book: to show that God’s word teaches that embryos are babies from the moment they are conceived and are as valuable as any other human being.
Abortion is the greatest moral issue in American History, and possibly, in the entire history of humanity. In 2025 alone, there were over 1,126,000 abortions in the United States,[2] and over 73,000,000 worldwide.[3] Since 1973, when abortion became legal across the nation in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, there have been over 65,000,000 abortions in the United States.[4]
To put these numbers in perspective, America’s greatest war in her history with the most casualties was the Civil War, which had almost 700,000 deaths from 1861-1865.[5] More human beings are killed in abortions every single year in America than were killed in the entire Civil War.
Even after the Supreme Court returned the authority on abortion to the states, the total number of abortions has not declined, largely because of the widespread access to mail-order abortion pills. This shows that laws alone will not stop abortion. Hearts and minds must change. This change must begin in the church, among those who believe the Bible is God’s word. And Christians must bring these truths to the public square, for God is not silent. He has spoken clearly in His word.
The Biblically Faithful Answer
In the chapters that follow, we will walk through ten clear lines of evidence from Scripture and church history showing that embryos are truly human, body and soul, from the moment of conception. We will see what God’s word actually teaches rather than what our culture or even some Christians, assume it teaches.
The Scriptural and historical evidence are undeniable. Chapters 1-8 show that Scripture teaches embryos are truly human from conception and chapters 9-10 show that church history agrees with this truth:
Chapters 1-4: Biblical Examples – Jesus, John the Baptist, Ancient Israel, and David.
Chapters 5-8: Theological Conclusions – Ensoulment, Personhood, Human Dignity, and the Authority of the Holy Spirit
Chapters 9-10: The Witness of Church History and the Unexpected Testimony of Theological Liberals
My prayer is that as we open God’s word together in the pages that follow, you will see with fresh clarity what God has said about the smallest and most vulnerable people among us, and that your love for them will grow.
Embryos are our neighbors and our fellow image-bearers. As Jesus taught, we must love them as we love ourselves (Matt 22:37-39). May we learn to see the unborn as God sees them and love them accordingly.
[1] Gregory A. Smith et al., Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings from the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2025), 243, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/02/PR_2025.02.26_religious-landscape-study_report.pdf.
[2] Guttmacher Institute, “Guttmacher Releases Full-Year 2025 Abortion Incidence and Travel Data,” March 24, 2026, https://www.guttmacher.org/node/300867/printable/print.
[3] World Health Organization, “Abortion,” December 8, 2025, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/abortion.
[4] National Right to Life Committee, Abortion Statistics Fact Sheet, August 2025, https://nrlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/AbortionStatsFS.pdf.
[5] Joan Barceló et al., “New Estimates of US Civil War Mortality from Full-Census Records,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 48 (November 2024): 1-3, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2b22/c60a85c8dc89a6c9755c450e9d1c48dd7473.pdf.