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Alexander's Horse
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Panmunjon, hands up!
Jan 1970
time: 15:20
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quote:
What Does The Bible Say
About Abortion?
Absolutely nothing! The word "abortion" does not appear in any translation of the bible!
Out of more than 600 laws of Moses, none comments on abortion. One Mosaic law about miscarriage specifically contradicts the claim that the bible is antiabortion, clearly stating that miscarriage does not involve the death of a human being. If a woman has a miscarriage as the result of a fight, the man who caused it should be fined. If the woman dies, however, the culprit must be killed:
"If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
"And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth . . ."--Ex. 21:22-25
The bible orders the death penalty for murder of a human being, but not for the expulsion of a fetus.
When Does Life Begin?
According to the bible, life begins at birth--when a baby draws its first breath. The bible defines life as "breath" in several significant passages, including the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7, when God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Jewish law traditionally considers that personhood begins at birth.
Desperate for a biblical basis for their beliefs, some antiabortionists cite obscure passages, usually metaphors or poetic phrasing, such as: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me." Psalm 51:5 This is sexist, but does nothing other than to invoke original sin. It says nothing about abortion.
The Commandments, Moses, Jesus and Paul ignored every chance to condemn abortion. If abortion was an important concern, why didn't the bible say so?
Thou Shalt Not Kill?
Many antiabortionists quote the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill" (Ex. 20:13) as evidence that the bible is antiabortion. They fail to investigate the bible's definition of life (breath) or its deafening silence on abortion. Moreover, the Mosaic law in Exodus 21:22-25, directly following the Ten Commandments, makes it clear that an embryo or fetus is not a human being.
An honest reader must admit that the bible contradicts itself. "Thou shalt not kill" did not apply to many living, breathing human beings, including children, who are routinely massacred in the bible. The Mosaic law orders "Thou shalt kill" people for committing such "crimes" as cursing one's father or mother (Ex. 21:17), for being a "stubborn son" (Deut. 21:18-21), for being a homosexual (Lev. 20:13), or even for picking up sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-35)! Far from protecting the sanctity of life, the bible promotes capital punishment for conduct which no civilized person or nation would regard as criminal.
Mass killings were routinely ordered, committed or approved by the God of the bible. One typical example is Numbers 25:4-9, when the Lord casually orders Moses to massacre 24,000 Israelites: "Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun." Clearly, the bible is not pro-life!
Most scholars and translators agree that the injunction against killing forbade only the murder of (already born) Hebrews. It was open season on everyone else, including children, pregnant women and newborn babies.
Does God Kill Babies?
"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."--Psalm 137:9
The bible is not pro-child. Why did God set a bear upon 42 children just for teasing a prophet (2 Kings 2:23-24)? Far from demonstrating a "pro-life" attitude, the bible decimates innocent babies and pregnant women in passage after gory passage, starting with the flood and the wanton destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, progressing to the murder of the firstborn child of every household in Egypt (Ex. 12:29), and the New Testament threats of annihilation.
Space permits only a small sampling of biblical commandments or threats to kill children:
Numbers 31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones.
Deuteronomy 2:34 utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little ones.
Deuteronomy 28:53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters.
I Samuel 15:3 slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.
2 Kings 8:12 dash their children, and rip up their women with child.
2 Kings 15:16 all the women therein that were with child he ripped up.
Isaiah 13:16 Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled and their wives ravished.
Isaiah 13:18 They shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not spare children.
Lamentations 2:20 Shall the women eat their fruit, and children.
Ezekiel 9:6 Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children.
Hosea 9:14 give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.
Hosea 13:16 their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.
Then there are the dire warnings of Jesus in the New Testament:
"For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the womb that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck."--Luke 23:29
The teachings and contradictions of the bible show that antiabortionists do not have a "scriptural base" for their claim that their deity is "pro-life." Spontaneous abortions occur far more often than medical abortions. Gynecology textbooks conservatively cite a 15% miscarriage rate, with one medical study finding a spontaneous abortion rate of almost 90% in very early pregnancy. That would make a deity in charge of nature the greatest abortionist in history!
Are Bible Teachings Kind to Women?
The bible is neither antiabortion nor pro-life, but does provide a biblical basis for the real motivation behind the antiabortion religious crusade: hatred of women. The bible is anti-woman, blaming women for sin, demanding subservience, mandating a slave/master relationship to men, and demonstrating contempt and lack of compassion:
"I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."--Genesis 3:16
What self-respecting woman today would submit willingly to such tyranny?
The antiabortion position does not demonstrate love for humanity, or compassion for real human beings. Worldwatch Institute statistics show that 50% of abortions worldwide are illegal, and that at least 200,000 women die every year--and thousands more are hurt and maimed--from illegal or self-induced abortions. Unwanted pregnancies and complications from multiple pregnancies are a leading killer of women. Why do antiabortionists want North American women to join these ghastly mortality statistics? Every day around the world more than 40,000 people, mostly children, die from starvation or malnutrition. We must protect and cherish the right to life of the already-born.
Do Churches Support Abortion Rights?
Numerous Christian denominations and religious groups agree that the bible does not condemn abortion and that abortion should continue to be legal. These include:
American Baptist Churches-USA
American Ethical Union
American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee
American Jewish Congress
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Episcopal Church
Lutheran Women's Caucus
Moravian Church in America-Northern Province
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Unitarian Universalist Association
United Church of Christ
United Methodist Church
United Synagogue of America
Women's Caucus Church of the Brethren
YWCA
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Catholics for Free Choice
Evangelicals for Choice
Belief that "a human being exists at conception" is a matter of faith, not fact. Legislating antiabortion faith would be as immoral and unAmerican as passing a law that all citizens must attend Catholic mass!
The bible does not condemn abortion; but even if it did, we live under a secular constitution, not in a theocracy. The separation of church and state, the right to privacy, and women's rights all demand freedom of choice.
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My bad - I must have been thinking of the Old Testament's general condoning of the mass killing of children 
I found the above here:
http://www.ffrf.org/nontracts/abortion.html
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Alexander's Horse
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Panmunjon, hands up!
Jan 1970
time: 15:20
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Here is an even better article - well worth a read. I'll post just an extract.
quote:
Myth: The Bible forbids abortion.
Fact: All Biblical arguments on abortion are indirect and open to debate.
Summary
The Bible does not comment directly on abortion, even though abortion was practiced even then. All Biblical arguments on abortion are indirect and open to interpretation, and debate continues even among the world's most respected theologians. Even so, the Bible seems to suggest in several places that the unborn are not endowed with the qualities or rights of personhood. In fact, the Jews, who are famous for their preservation of tradition, have never considered abortion to be a sin.
Argument
Many Christians believe that their opposition to abortion is firmly supported by the Bible. This is untrue. The Bible is remarkably silent about abortion, and all arguments about the subject are indirect and highly questionable. Not even the world's most respected theologians have been able to draw a firm conclusion one way or the other, despite continuing debate.
Most Christians know only one Biblical reason to oppose abortion, and that is the obvious one, "Thou shalt not kill." This is one of the most critical laws a society can obey, and every pro-choice advocate agrees with it. However, it is impossible to break this commandment if there is no person on the receiving end of this action. The challenge to Christians is to find a text that declares at what point a fetus becomes ensouled, and hence a person.
Before we look at these texts, we should consider a quick attempt by Christians to sidestep this entire question. Personhood is irrelevant, they argue; even if the zygote were not yet a person, it is nonetheless human life, and killing it is wrong. But this argument falls easily. The Hebrew word for "kill" in the 6th Commandment is rasach, which more accurately means "murder," or illegal killing judged harmful by the community. It is itself a relative term! Many forms of killing were considered legal; indeed, God often gave Israel permission to kill. (In I Samuel 15:3, God ordered Saul to massacre the Amalekites: "Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants…") Generally, levitical law permits killing in times of war, the commission of justice and in self-defense. But recall that the levitical law we have in the Bible is incomplete, and comes to us in large gaps. If a law did exist on abortion, then we simply do not know what it was. Fortunately, we have an excellent idea on what the law on abortion might have been. As Rabbi Balfour Brickner, National Director of the Commission on Interfaith Activities, says:
"Jewish law is quite clear in its statement that an embryo is not reckoned a viable living thing (in Hebrew, bar kayama) until thirty days after its birth. One is not allowed to observe the Laws of Mourning for an expelled fetus. As a matter of fact, these Laws are not applicable for a child who does not survive until his thirtieth day."
Since the fetus is not considered a person under Jewish law, it would be impossible to consider its abortion a murder. Indeed, most Jewish scholars have agreed that abortion was legal under Jewish law. This fact alone should give serious pause to the pro-life movement.
The legality of abortion in Jewish law fits into a larger and perfectly coherent philosophy on personhood according to the Bible. The philosophy I am about to demonstrate is this: that physical creation of the body comes first, and ensoulment only comes much later.
Pro-choice Christians note that the creation of Adam was a two-step process: God first formed Adam from the dust of the ground, and only then did he give him the breath of life, turning man into a living soul. This closely resembles the scientific description of pregnancy, which notes that the first seven months are devoted to constructing the organs and body, and only by the 8th month does the fetus display a waking consciousness.
There is also a long Christian tradition of the body/soul dichotomy. The flesh has long been condemned as temporary, imperfect, sinful and weak, whereas the soul has long been revered as eternal, pure, holy and God-like. It would be perfectly consistent for Christians to believe that personhood resides in the soul, and that there is no sin in disposing of a physical entity before it is given the soul of a new person.
From here we turn to specific Biblical evidence for ensoulment and personhood. Pro-choice activists have a near-argument stopper in Exodus 21:22-23:
"If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury [i.e., to the mother], the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury [i.e., to the mother], you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot…"
The traditional interpretation of this text, which even rabbinical scholars accepted for thousands of years, is this: if a man hurts a woman enough to cause a miscarriage, he reciprocates according to how much injury he caused her, i.e., an eye for an eye, etc. However, if the miscarriage resulted in no injury to the woman, then all the assailant had to pay was a monetary fine. The fact that the Bible does not equate the assailant's life with the stillborn's life is proof that the Bible does not count the fetus as a person.
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I found this here:
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-bibleforbids.htm
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Dr Strangelove
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The Hippocratic Oath explicitly forbids abortion. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
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Dr Strangelove
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quote:
Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
An unborn child is in fact an unborn child. It has the potential to become human but until there is a live birth this is nothing more than a potential.
I used to buy all this hardline anti-abortion crap until I had children of my own and went though the whole process. Now I don't know - so many pregnancies never make it to term - its a very iffy process. In my opinion, the welfare of the mother is much more important than the welfare of the unborn child.
I'm pro-choice as a result and I don't think a bunch of celibate priests and Christian fundamentalists know the first thing about it. Having said that I think abortion is a poor choice in most cases but I respect people's right to choose.
I've been in the delivery ward when a dead baby was born. The nurses were doing the birth cerificate for my son whilst they were doing the death certificate for the other child. It could very easily have been the other way round. That's life.
We've had 4 live births and lost one, our first, so don't tell me what to think about it until you've been there yourself.
Both my sisters have had miscarriages, one of them multiple miscarriages - but she's currently pregnant again - we're not going to send any congrats till she gets to 6 months with it. My sister in law had a couple of miscarriages. Friends of ours had a downes syndrome child, which they love dearly - they also had the courage to try again and had a child with no disability against all the odds.
I'm afraid this is an area where noone has the answers. |
Well Horsey, I've been in practice for nearly twenty years now, and I've encountered these situations among my patients, far more often than you can comprehend, so i will speak my mind if it so pleases you! In the US it's standard practice for a woman's physician to try to help her through the grieving process when she looses a pregnancy. We generally encourage the parents to deal with the child's death in the same manner that we would had the child survived birth. This procedure has in fact ben proven to improve the parents' mental health. It's the compassionate thing to do. If it's not standard practice in Australia then that's yet another good argument against socialized medicine.
You don't seem to be saying: "abortion? Big deal! Babies die in utero everyday!" It would appear that you're not making a distinction between abortion and natural death. Even you should be able to understand the fallacy in your reasoning.
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Dr Strangelove
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I saw little proof of his thesis within the article. One would have to accept his word that the bible says what he says it says. Why couldn't he supply actual quotes form the bible? The testimony from the rabbi is also worhtless. One would only have to tune in to "Dr. Laura" for a few minutes to realize that not all jews accept his interpretation of jewish law. I wonder what the law is in Israel?
The article you used above this is even worse. You took phrases ripped from the bible out of context to constuct a phony thesis. That's pretty disgusting. Is this the best you have?
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November Adam
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Calgary, AB, Canada
Jul 2001
time: 22:20
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AH, with all due respect I am going to have a little baby born within days, and it is a real person now, even though it isn't born. I say "it" cause I don't know the gender, otherwise it would be little Matthew, or little Sarah.
From a purely emotional stand point the little zygote became a person once I found out my wife was pregers. Because for a non-person it sure had an impact on our lives. Sure you could argue that finding out you have cancer would have an impact, but it would definetly be a different impact, as you don't buy a crib, or clothes for cancer!
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Dr Strangelove
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quote:
Originally posted by November Adam
yet doctors still perform abortions.
do doctors have to swear by the hypocratic oath when they get there degrees? |
The oath administered has been changed to exclude mentioning abortion at many American medical schools.
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08-07-2002 09:35
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