Should We Baptize Infants? And If So, Why?

Regarding those killed before their birth. Entry 3 in the Answering Spiritual Questions Series.

This entry is not intended to be an exhaustive list of every single reason God has ordained for infant baptism. Rather, it’s intended to hone in on two specific reasons for the practice, reasons I suspect are rarely mentioned in modern times…

Once while visiting a monastery, I went to their bookstore and purchased a tract titled: The Truth About Abortions: Objective Information For What We Should Know. It was originally published in Greece in 2019 by Orthodoxos Kypseli, a publisher in Thessaloniki, but I cannot find the booklet for sale on their website, so I’m uploading pictures of it to confirm it is indeed real.

The tract, 48 pages in length, uses various ecclesiastical testimonies to preach against the abominable sin of the abortion of unborn children, and the need for repentance in cases where abortions have been committed. In a subsection titled: “Why those guilty of abortion cannot find peace even after true confession of their sin and being given forgiveness” (Pages 26 to 28), we learn two things:

1: Aborted children, as well as children who were born and died without being baptized, cannot rest in the afterlife.

“According to the ecclesiastical tradition, a murder by abortion is more serious than a common murder, because an embryo-child has not been baptized. This is the complaint of the murdered children to their parents when they appear in revealing and symbolic dreams: ‘Why did you send us into the other life unbaptized?’

It is a grave sin for a baby of Christian parents to die unbaptized…based on relevant revelations of the Saints, [we learn that] the unbaptized children, as well as the embryos, which were killed by abortion or due to miscarriages, do not go to a place of rest and comfort as the Saints and the saved Faithful do. On the contrary, they go to a rather dark place, where they have neither rest nor punishment, but they remain there as blind until the Second Coming Of Christ, because they were unbaptized.”

We simply don’t know when everything prophesied in the Scriptures will be fulfilled: the Apostasy, the reign of the Antichrist with his tribulation, and his eternal defeat with the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, who makes all things new. It could theoretically be thousands of years from now, meaning thousands more years the aborted cannot rest. This realm of restless blindness sounds quite uncomfortable to me, and I don’t wish for anyone to reside there.

Fortunately, with the Lord, there is great hope.

2: Aborted children benefit spiritually when their parents baptize other infants. The parents themselves benefit spiritually from these baptisms

“It has been revealed to Saints and Spiritual Fathers, as well as to persons in repentance for the sin of abortion, that they themselves as well as their murdered babies benefit greatly when they baptize children. In a spiritual and mysterious way, a substitution and spiritual adoption of the unbaptized murdered baby takes place.” (Page 27)

Another role of godparents is revealed here. What isn’t revealed is whether the unbaptized aborted children reap the benefits of these baptisms immediately. All we are told is: “with the Universal Resurrection Of The Dead, [aborted babies] will also be resurrected and saved, together with all the Saints and the saved. These unbaptized babies will also receive complete and mature bodies of 33-year olds, as all the resurrected will, having as a measure the body of the Theanthropos Christ’s earthly age and made in his image.” (Page 28)

One also cannot help but wonder how credobaptist sects like the Baptists, the Churches Of Christ, the Hutterites and the Amish, would respond to this information. Would it change their minds?

This information should be made widespread not only to parents, but also to pro-life activists around the world.