Southern Baptists may have a chance to consider three resolutions related to abortion, in-vitro fertilization, and other matters of sexual ethics at their June annual meeting.
The resolutions submitted for consideration by Dusty Deevers, a minister at Grace Reformed Baptist Church and a member of the Oklahoma State Senate, each revolve around the sanctity of preborn life and the abortifacient practices increasingly debated by lawmakers.
“These three resolutions represent the orthodox, Christian sentiment on the most pressing issues of our day,” Deevers said in a statement to The Sentinel. “The world and the devil’s primary point of assault against Christianity in our time is against Christian sexual ethics and our belief in the universal dignity of human life that comes from the image of God in man.”
One resolution on abortifacient birth control recognizes that all humans are made in the image of God from conception, concluding that chemical and hormonal birth control methods such as pills, patches, implants, and injections “have an abortifacient mechanism of action which prevents the embryo’s implantation by thinning the uterine lining.” Southern Baptists under the resolution would call on birth control involving such mechanisms to “not be utilized, prescribed, or manufactured,” as well as commit to “educate themselves and their flock” on the substances.
Deevers told The Sentinel that “loving God and our neighbors must cause us to educate our neighbors and rebuke a dishonest and destructive medical industry.”
Another resolution notes the rise of self-managed abortion in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, especially by means of “a woman ordering abortion pills online and using them at home” without assistance from the formal healthcare system. The document expresses concern that purported abortion bans in many pro-life states protect self-managed abortion “by giving blanket immunity to all mothers in the murder of their children,” thus calling on Southern Baptists to advocate for the application of “the same legal prohibitions and available sanctions against homicide that exist to protect persons after birth likewise to protect persons before birth.”
Critics of laws exempting mothers from prosecution, even when they willfully obtain abortions, observe that such measures have allowed for abortion pill use to increase in the pro-life states where surgical abortion facilities have been shuttered. Nearly two-thirds of abortions now occur by means of abortion pills, according to data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
“If we continue insisting on denying preborn children equal protection, self-managed abortion will continue unabated,” Deevers told The Sentinel. “There is no solution to abortion that does not include equal protection and the prosecuting of all parties complicit in an abortion.”
The third resolution addresses assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF, under which the vast majority of embryos conceived outside of the womb are selectively aborted or indefinitely frozen. The document says that there exist “appropriate uses of technology and medicine that help or assist the marital union to conceive” in a way that honors God, but that Christians must “abstain from the practices and barbarity of slaughtering and imprisoning image-bearers,” as well as work to prohibit IVF and adopt “abandoned embryos stored at fertility clinics.”
Republican and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation in recent months to enshrine IVF and remove penalties from those engaged in the practice. One proposal would threaten to withdraw federal healthcare funds from any state which enacts a prohibition on IVF.
Deevers observed to The Sentinel that “many people, even Christians, are unaware of the brutal, dehumanizing realities inherent to IVF.” He called on fellow pastors to “instruct our people with a robust, Christ-honoring theology of the family and procreation.”
The resolutions committee for the Southern Baptist Convention must approve the three submissions before they are heard on the floor of the annual meeting. The core confessional document of the denomination calls on members and churches to “speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.”
“With these resolutions, the Southern Baptist Convention has the opportunity to emphatically state our intention to push back darkness and seek to vindicate the Christian position on these crucial matters of life and death,” Deevers commented to The Sentinel.
Attendees of the Southern Baptist Convention this summer will also consider an amendment clarifying that churches must appoint "only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture" in order to remain in “friendly cooperation” with the denomination. Southern Baptists voted last year to disfellowship Saddleback Church, the megachurch founded by Rick Warren which installed a number of female pastors, as well as Fern Creek Baptist Church, which has employed a female pastor for three decades. Elevation Church, which is led by Steven Furtick and where his wife works as a pastor, withdrew their affiliation after the annual meeting.
