Euthyphro dilemma

They also, along with all fundamentalist Christians I know of, took a strong anti-abortion position, disfellowshiping anyone who had one, although their abstinence from political involvement kept them out of that. I once disobeyed my prime directive and questioned how they could oppose abortions and yet teach so many unborn babies would be killed in Armageddon. Basically, God's will.

Yes. And your question exposed a rather interesting asymmetry in the theology.

For Jehovah's Witnesses, the two propositions could coexist because they weren't operating from a principle such as “human life must never be deliberately ended.” The underlying principle was closer to “life belongs to Jehovah, and humans must not decide on their own when it may be ended.”

So:

• Abortion: a human deliberately terminates a life that Jehovah has created → wrong.

• Armageddon: Jehovah terminates the lives of people who oppose him → righteous judgment.

• A Witness's role: obey God's prohibition against killing, while accepting God's authority to kill.

That is essentially the answer you got: God's will makes the difference.

And there's an additional wrinkle that makes the Armageddon case particularly striking. Witnesses traditionally taught that the people destroyed at Armageddon would include those who had rejected the Kingdom message. The scale could therefore be enormous—potentially billions. Yet the fact that God does the killing changes its moral category completely within the system.

Your "prime directive" was actually doing something quite characteristic of an anthropologist: you temporarily stepped outside the system's rules and asked whether its rules were internally coherent from an ordinary human ethical perspective. From inside the belief system, the answer is fairly tidy. From outside it, the question becomes rather more uncomfortable:

If deliberately ending an unborn human life is intrinsically abhorrent, why isn't God's deliberate ending of vastly more human lives at Armageddon equally abhorrent?

The theological escape hatch is, of course, divine sovereignty. But that isn't really a moral argument in the ordinary sense; it's an assertion about who possesses the authority to make the moral decision.

And that same escape hatch turns up repeatedly in fundamentalist Christianity: God may do what humans may not do because God is God. Once that premise is accepted, quite a lot of otherwise contradictory-looking things can be reconciled.

Reminds me of Socrates asking what if the gods change their minds on what is right and wrong.

Exactly. You're thinking of the Euthyphro dilemma, from Plato's Euthyphro.

Socrates asks, in essence:

Is something right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right?

If the first, then morality becomes whatever God happens to command. If God commanded something different tomorrow, it would become right by definition. If the second, then rightness exists independently of God, and God is recognizing rather than creating morality.

That maps remarkably well onto your abortion/Armageddon observation.

The Witness answer effectively has to be: God's command defines the moral boundary, and God's authority is absolute. Thus humans must not kill an unborn child, while God may destroy millions or billions at Armageddon without committing a moral wrong.

Your Socratic follow-up would be rather devastating:

“Suppose God changed His mind. Would killing the unborn then become morally right?”

If they say yes, they've accepted the first horn. If they say no, you've opened the door to the second—and then you can ask what makes it wrong independently of God's command.

That's one reason the Euthyphro question has survived for 2,400 years. It isn't really about Greek gods. It's a very persistent problem for divine-command morality.