The Zika virus continues to cultivate fear for women throughout Central and South America because it has the potential for causing birth defects. Many of these women feel responsible to prevent the suffering that a child might endure if he or she was born with any of these defects—primarily microcephaly. For that reason, women are considering abortion.
The problem? They would be breaking their country’s laws by doing so. Most countries in Latin America, due to strong Roman Catholic influences, have restrictive abortion laws. Only in 2 countries, Mexico and Guyana, is abortion legal. In most others, abortion is legal only to save the mother’s life.
Apart from the national laws are the real fears these women are facing. On top of that, they face the possibility that their child will be born with birth defects that they will struggle with all their lives. Where abortion is an option, legal or illegal, the Zika virus poses serious moral questions for pregnant women and couples. What word does the Bible have for them? How does God invite them to respond to their circumstances?
Rather than living in fear, God invites all people to live by faith. He invites them to trust both in his power and his plan, for birth and also for life. And not just the child’s life, but every life—child and parent, siblings and grandparents, neighbors and teachers. All the people affected by the Zika virus.
In the Bible, Job was a man who knew something about living with suffering. When all his possessions were destroyed and his own beloved children killed, Job wondered why he’d ever been born at all: “Obliterate the day I was born. Black out the night I was conceived!” he said. “Why didn’t I die at birth, my first breath out of the womb my last?” These words sound very much like those that a child born with birth defects might ask.
Job continued to question God’s wisdom in allowing him to live and endure such immense suffering. Yet, in the end, Job saw a sliver of God’s bigger picture, and his heart was changed. Here’s how Job responded to God.
Job 42:1-6
“I’m convinced: You can do anything and everything.
Nothing and no one can upset your plans.
You asked, ‘Who is this muddying the water,
ignorantly confusing the issue, second-guessing my purposes?’
I admit it. I was the one. I babbled on about things far beyond me,
made small talk about wonders way over my head.
You told me, ‘Listen, and let me do the talking.
Let me ask the questions. You give the answers.’
I admit I once lived by rumors of you;
now I have it all firsthand—from my own eyes and ears!
I’m sorry—forgive me. I’ll never do that again, I promise!
I’ll never again live on crusts of hearsay, crumbs of rumor.”