What I'll say here I've mostly said before, but unfortunately the reporters who work for the corporate media don't seem to know any of it and Democratic politicians probably do know it but won't say it, for some reason.
The idea that "Christian" faith requires that abortion be outlawed is wholly modern. There is exactly one reference to abortion in the entire Bible. It's in the Old Testament, Numbers 5, and consists of a ceremony for the purpose of inducing an abortion in the case of an unfaithful wife, to be performed by a priest. Abortion is mentioned exactly nowhere in the New Testament, even though abortion and for that matter infanticide were commonplace in ancient times. Catholic doctrine did not condemn abortion until 1869. Abortion did not become a salient issue for protestant evangelicals until 1979 - six years after Roe v Wade -- and the reason was that conservative activists needed a new issue to mobilize evangelicals once segregation was outlawed. And yes, conservative white protestants in the U.S. were historically white supremacist and generally still are.*
There is no definitive answer as to when a fetus acquires the moral status of a person. You can think whatever you want about that I suppose but it should be obvious that a microscopic ball of cells is not a person. To most people, a functioning cerebral cortex is a requirement for personhood -- after all, we consider people to be legally dead if they don't have one even though their heart is beating and they are breathing. But a fetus does not produce brain waves until the 7th month of gestation. And no, a six-week fetus does not have a heart beat. It does not have a heart. It has an unformed clump of cells that beat rhythmically, which also happens if you put heart cells in a nutrient solution. It does not pump blood. Again, not that it matters because a heartbeat does not define human life.
Suppose you aren't convinced by that and you believe that a zygote -- the single cell produced by the fusion of a sperm cell and an ovum -- has the moral status of a human being. Or a blastocyst, or whatever. You've got a problem because at least half of them die naturally. Often the woman doesn't even know she had conceived. They may fail to implant or have a developmental defect that causes spontaneous abortion. This happens at least 50% of the time. So this ongoing holocaust is by far the worst in all history, and we should immediately redirect all of our medical research and public health funding to saving those millions of babies who are dying every year because of our callous neglect. God is the most prolific abortionist in all history by many orders of magnitude.
The one person who has a moral right to decide when a fetus has the moral status of a person is the person in whose body it is growing. And that is likely to be a function not only of how she thinks about all of the above, but also her relationship to that particular fetus. Does she want the baby or not? What were the circumstances of its conception? If you want to ban abortion generally, but think there should be an exception for rape or incest, then your true rationale is not that you think the fetus has the moral status of a person, it's that you think that having non-procreative sex is a sin -- for women at least, though not apparently for men.
*The majority of evangelical "Christians" also believe that the apocalypse is imminent. I'll get around to that one soon.
1 comment:
I have a hard time understanding why truths have such a hard time being pronounced, much less spoken, in newspapers and on radio and TV stations. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a really difficult truth, like the heritage of the United States of slavery and the domination of wealthy Caucasian men, or a current truth like anthropogenic climate change, or the constant truth of numerous policemen beating the shit out of and killing people with brown skin. Or the truth of the bomb shelter that we hit during the first Iraq war, searing over 400 women and children to their deaths and claiming it was a so-called military target. I met Ari Melber here in Ann Arbor eating lunch at Zingerman’s, and I’ve written his show at least five times, asking them to put Cervantes on their show as a guest. They don’t even reply to me. But I see numerous pundits on TV all the time, some of whom know a lot and some of whom don’t. The level of noise seems to be more important than the nature of what is said.
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