In exploring people’s answers to, When does life begin? I discovered that some say, “When the mother wants a baby.” Since every child should be a wanted child, the thinking goes, then children come into existence when they are wanted.

In Shout Your Abortion, a collection of stories from women who are unashamed of their choice to abort, one author declared, “The simple truth is this: if a sperm and egg come together when a child is desired, a human being is born. But if a sperm and egg come together when a woman knows in her bones that it is not the right time for her to be a mother, then perhaps what is born is her own confident agency over her life” (p. 54). That’s a poetic way of saying that a woman who doesn’t want a child doesn’t have a child within her.

Does the Bible agree? In Psalm 139, a classic text for discussing abortion, King David writes, “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (verse 13). Notice the “you” that David mentions—God. God creates life in the womb. God knits children together within their mothers. God is the author—the starter—of human existence.

God’s confident agency, his desire to bring forth life, gets the deciding vote over what a woman may feel about her pregnancy. That doesn’t end the debate, nor does it address all the issues why a woman might not want a child, but it takes us one step closer to figuring out when exactly life begins.