Abortion is an age-old war. In Revelation 12:4, we read of the Dragon coming to the woman who has given birth and his endeavours to destroy the child.
David Chilton comments on this text as follows:
The Dragon's goal is to abort the work of Christ, to devour and kill Him. . . . This conflict between Christ and Satan was announced in Genesis 3:15, the war between the two seeds, the Seed of the Woman and the seed of the Serpent. From the first book of the Bible to the last, this is the basic warfare of history. The Dragon is at war with the Woman and her Seed, primarily Jesus Christ. All throughout history Satan was trying either to keep Christ from being born, or to kill Him as soon as He was born. This is why Cain killed Abel, under the inspiration of the Dragon: the attack on Abel ws an attempt to destroy the Seed. It was unsuccessful, for Even then gave birth to Seth, the Appointed One, "in place of Abel" (Gen. 4:25), and the Seed was thus preserved in him.
Satan's next tactic was to corrupt the line of Seth; thus, within ten generations from Adam, virtually all Seth's descendants apostatized through intermarriage with heathen (Gen. 6:1--12) and the whole earth was corrupted except for one righteous man and his family. Satan's mad rage to attack the Seed was so great that the entire world was destroyed, yet still he failed. The Seed was preserved within a single family in the Ark.
The Dragon again tried to murder the Seed in his attacks on the family of Abraham. On two occasions Satan attempted to have Sarah raped by a heathen king (Gen.12:10--20; 20: 1--18); he tried again with Rebekah (Gen. 26: 1--11). The Draconic enmity against the Seed is manifest also in the enmity of Esau against Jacob, a struggle between the two seeds that began in the womb (Gen. 25: 22-23). . . . Again, when the children of Israel were in Egypt, the Dragon tried to destroy the Seed by having all the male children killed (Ex. 1). Five hundred years later, the Seed was being carried in a shepherd-boy, and again the Dragon attacked, twice inspiring a demon-possessed king to throw javelins at him (I Sam. 18: 10-11). . . . The most striking example of this pattern on a large scale occurs throughout the history of Israel, from the Exodus to the Exile: the covenant people's perennial, consistent temptation to murder their own children, to offer them up as sacrifices to demons (Lev. 18:21; II Kings 16:3; II Chronicles 28:3; Psalm 106: 37,38; Ezekiel 16: 20.) Why? It was the war of the two seeds. The Dragon was trying to destroy the Christ.
This pattern comes to a dramatic climax at the birth of Christ, when the Dragon possesses King Herod, the Edomite ruler of Judea, and inspires him to slaughter the children of Bethlehem (Matt. 2:13--18); indeed, John's vision of the Woman, the Child, and the Dragon seems almost an allegory of that event. The Dragon tried again, of course: tempting the Lord (Luke 4: 1--13), seeking to have Him murdered (Luke 4: 28--29), subjecting Him to human and demonic oppression throughout His ministry, possessing one of the most trusted disciples to betray Him (John 13: 2,27), and finally orchestrating His crucifixion. Even then--rather, especially then--the Dragon was defeated, for the Cross was God's way of tricking Satan into fulfilling His purposes, according to His wisdom--the "hidden wisdom," St. Paul says, "which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (I Corinthians 2: 7--8). In wounding the Seed's heel, the Serpent's head was crushed. (David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p.307,308)
The diabolical hatred of the Dragon for the Son of Man has been utterly thwarted, but it remains still. Unable to ascend into heaven to attack the risen Lord, the Dragon is reduced to making war upon the saints on the earth. But here, too, he is persistently thwarted by the Lord and His people. "And they conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the world of their testimony, and they did not love their life even to death." (Revelation 12:11). The blood of the martyrs has been, indeed, the seed of the Church.
But ever a hater and a wrecker, the Dragon has one stratagem left. Unable to assail the Son any longer, constantly thwarted in his wars upon the saints, he now turns his attention to those of the seed of the Serpent who yet remain upon earth. He attacks his own, seeking to devour and destroy them, for he hates even his own seed, who yet bear ineradicable vestiges of the image of God. And so the Wicked kills the wicked; Unbelief devours its own children. In a ghoulish display of unmitigated evil the Dragon turns on his own followers to devour and dismember and kill. Abortion is Unbelief seeking to put itself to death, destroying its own seed.
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