Rarely. Almost never for the reasons people assume.
The church’s 2019 statement calls abortion “out of harmony with God’s plan.” Elective procedures for convenience, birth control, or gender selection are not condoned. AdventHealth and similar systems ban them outright.
What still happens is the hard leftover: a pregnancy that will kill the mother, or a fetus with anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. Rape and incest remain on older guideline lists. Ethics committees review the cases. Staff who object can recuse themselves.
The volumes are tiny. One 2015 snapshot from Adventist HealthCare and Kettering showed a handful of terminations against thousands of live births—orders of magnitude below the national rate. AdventHealth later put its average under one per 1,000 births, mostly lethal anomalies.
That is not a loophole dressed up as theology. It is what happens when a hospital system serves the public, follows state law, and still tries to treat both mother and unborn as precious. The 1990s were messier; leaders now say the aim is as close to zero as safety allows.
So the honest answer is not “never” and not “yes, like everyone else.” It is: almost never, and only when medicine has already failed both patients.
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