The Most Relevant deduction From the Above Data

The above data seems to suggest that the majority of Seventh-day Adventists hold a pro-life position towards abortion. In spite of this, the official position of the church tends to be a pro-choice one. How can this enigma be solved? Evidently the decision power is not in the hands of SDA membership, but rather in the hands of the leadership of the church and in the hands of the SDA intelligentsia (authors of books and article writers), and said leadership seems to have given in to the pressure exercised by the managers of medical institutions, and delegated the task of preparing SDA official documents dealing with abortion to those ethicists connected with the medical institutions owned by the SDA church. Of course, a great number of SDAs are not even aware of this anomalous situation, and think in fact that the SDA church is officially pro-life; the facts of the case indicate the opposite.

Factors Leading to the Dramatic Shift in the SDA Attitude Towards Abortion

Now the big question: What factors can be advanced for the fact that the SDA Church officially defends the pro-choice position on abortion, while approximately a two third of individuals whose position on abortion were considered in this study fall in the pro-life group? How can then the official pro-choice of the SDA Church be explained? There are several logical explanations for this rare phenomenon derived from the data generated by this study. Additional research is needed to either confirm or disconfirm the following assumptions:

A. The Adventist Church is heavily invested in the provision of medical services to the public, and the SDA medical institutions employ a significant number of non-Adventist physicians and general personnel, who tend to be pro-choice, and some of these non-Adventist physicians did threaten to take their patients elsewhere if the SDA hospitals refused to offer abortion on demand.

B. Many SDA medical institutions were indebted to the general public for their financial assistance in the building of said medical facilities, and there was tremendous pressure from donors to provide abortion services on demand.

C. Financial profit was a significant factor in the development of the initial abortion guidelines.

D. The tremendous pressure for official guidelines on abortion prompted the General Conference to encourage Loma Linda University to establish a Bioethics program, thus giving ethicist connected with said medical university the power to influence the content of the development of those abortion guidelines.

E. A pro-choice posture is more amenable to the procurement of human organs for transplantation and research and for the search for a cure of certain diseases the afflict humanity.

F. By labeling abortion as “pregnancy interruption,” by calling a developing baby as the “product of conception,” and by redefining a live and kicking anencephalic baby as technically dead, the work of SDA research scientists is facilitated.

G. Once the book Abortion: Ethical Issue & Options and the SDA “Guidelines on Abortion” were published, the push for a pro-life position on abortion by the SDA Church was dealt a deathblow. Many of the leading pro-life movers within the SDA denomination left the church feeling that there was no hope of taking the SDA church back to the pro-life agenda of the original SDA pioneers.

H. The emphasis of the pro-choice movement on liberty and freedom found fertile ground among SDA leaders, who had inherited from Ellen G. White an obsession for religious freedom.

I. Adventist eschatology predicts that those keeping the Sabbath will be eventually persecuted, and sacrificing the lives of the unborn in exchange for freedom seemed to be a small price to pay in exchange for said freedom.

J. Ellen White’s silence on the abortion issue was taken as a signal that the SDA Church had a green light for adopting a pro-choice position on abortion.

K. The evidence indicates that the pro-choice option was selected by those in charge of preparing the abortion guidelines as the most suitable for our medical institutions, and then theologians were instructed to search for biblical support and justification for such a position on this issue. Bible study did not precede the adoption of a pro-choice position for the church.

L. Were it not for the SDA high investment in the medical phase of the church’s mission, the SDA Church would, very likely, have remained as a pro-life movement, akin to the Southern Baptist Church, which openly defends the belief that human life is sacred and protectable from the moment of conception and explicitly states this as the official position of the church.

M. In a democracy, the power is in the hands of the majority of the members. This does not seem to be the case with the SDA Church. Decisions are made elsewhere, regardless of the wish of the majority [this seems to be especially true in the case of the official policies connected with the issue of abortion].

N. At the time the first version of the guidelines of abortion was adopted by the church, there existed an inordinate dread of the potential consequences of the uncontrolled demographic explosion taking place at the time in certain Communist countries like China--a fear fueled by the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility of an atomic confrontation between the free world and Communism. Older people probably remember when the Atomic Clock was moved to three minutes before midnight.

Further investigations are recommended to either confirm or disconfirm the findings detailed in the present study. A study of the SDA attitude towards abortion is recommended covering a few decades prior to the legalization of abortion, since that is very likely the time when the big shift from a pro-life position to a pro-choice one must have taken place, and the first step was made towards a pro-choice attitude with the acceptance of therapeutic abortions by the SDA medical institutions.
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"Now choose life, so that you and your children may live." [Moses]
"I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly." [Jesus]