Republicans are rushing to confirm a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg because they want a Supreme Court that will be friendly to them in any litigation over the coming election. But they also want to please conservative Christians who care about overturning Roe v Wade more than any political issue. In fact, for many of them, it's the only issue that matters.
I have always been puzzled about why pro-choice advocates never seem to point out the obvious: nowhere in the Bible, Old Testament or New, is there any condemnation of abortion. I recently heard an anti-abortion voter interviewed on the radio and she said that the Bible says that human life begins at conception and abortion is a mortal sin. The reporter said nothing, because she probably didn't now any better, but no, the Bible doesn't say that. Preachers who rail against abortion never quote the Bible, because they can't. As a matter of fact, however, there is one mention of abortion in the Old Testament, in Numbers 5. You can read verses 11-31 here. It's a bit too long to quote in full, but basically, if a man thinks his wife's pregnancy results from adultery, he is to take her to a priest, who will perform a ceremony and make her drink a bitter potion. If the baby is not the husband's, she will miscarry. In short, it's a ceremony for inducing abortion.
Since the Bible does not condemn abortion, and in fact specifically endorses it under these circumstances, you may well ask why so many Christians are convinced that God wants abortion outlawed. You may be even more inclined to ask this question when you reflect that about 50% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, usually before the woman even knows she is pregnant, making God by far the most prolific abortionist. That would also be the greatest public health crisis in all of history, but they don't seem to want to do anything about it.
The Catholic church has a complicated history regarding the question of abortion, but in a nutshell, the position that prevailed for most of church history was that abortion was permissible until the woman felt the fetus move in the womb, at which point the soul was thought to have entered. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV determined that this happened at about 24 weeks, which would make Roe v Wade consistent with church doctrine. It was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX changed church doctrine to make abortion a sin at any time.
The story with conservative protestants is considerably more interesting. Evangelical Christians didn't care about abortion at all until the 1980s. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1976, after Roe v Wade, affirming that women should have access to abortion. But the southern conservative Christian denominations also supported segregation, and when they lost that battle conservative activists needed to find another issue to mobilize them. Paul Weyrich had the inspiration. This is from a transcript of the NPR Throughline program at the link. Speakers include Throughline host Rund Abdelfatah and historian Randall Balmer:
BALMER: I was reading through Weyrich's papers - midterm election, 1978 - and it's almost like the papers began to sizzle because Weyrich said, I found it; this is the issue that's going to work for us in order to mobilize grassroots evangelical voters.
ABDELFATAH: Abortion.. . . He teamed up with some prominent anti-abortion activists and helped amplify resistance to abortion among evangelicals. It worked. In 1979, the Moral Majority was formed. They threw their support behind Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. And Reagan won. This began the close relationship between the Republican Party and white evangelicals.
So God didn't have the idea of outlawing abortion. Paul Weyrich did. If you ever get into a discussion with someone who wants to outlaw abortion, ask them where in the Bible it says that abortion is a sin.
3 comments:
The usual response is that abortion is addressed with the sweeping commandment "Thou shalt not murder/kill."
That's pretty funny since God himself has already killed millions of people and he eventually orders the Israelites to kill hundreds of thousands more. Of course, the whole question is whether the fetus is a person and the Bible clearly says no. In Exodus 21, if someone harms a pregnant woman and causes her to miscarry, the perpetrator owes money to the husband for destroying his property, but it ain't murder. And of course that says nothing about voluntary abortion, and then there is the serious embarrassment of Numbers 5.
Agreed, but there is no convincing the believers of any of that.
We've discussed this before; most people don't actually spend any time reading and evaluating what is contained in the "Holy Book". They just repeat what they've been told, by others who have filtered it to suit their own ends.
Post a Comment