The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal

February 18, 2012 By Fred Clark 510 Comments

In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.

Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.

Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.

That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.

That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting.

Even more interesting is how thoroughly the record has been rewritten. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Click over to Dr. Norman L. Geisler’s website and you’ll find all the hallmarks of a respected figure in the evangelical establishment. You’ll see that Geisler has taught at Trinity Evangelical Seminary, Dallas Seminary and Southern Evangelical Seminary. You’ll see a promotion for his newest book, Defending Inerrancy, with recommendations from such evangelical stalwarts as Al Mohler and J.I. Packer, as well as a link to an online store offering some of the other dozens of books written by Geisler. And you’ll see a big promo for the anti-abortion movie October Baby, because Geisler is, of course, anti-abortion, just like Mohler and Packer and every other respected figure in the evangelical establishment is and, of course, must be.

But back in the day, Dudley notes, Geisler “argued for the permissibility of abortion in a 1971 book, stating ‘The embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.’” That was in Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, published by Zondervan. It’s still in print, kind of, as Christian Ethics: Contemporary Issues and Options. And now it says something different. Now it’s unambiguously anti-abortion.

I don’t mean to pick on Geisler. He’s no different from Packer or Graham or any other leading evangelical figure who’s been around as long as those guys have. They all now believe that the Bible teaches that life begins at conception. They believe this absolutely, unambiguously, firmly, resolutely and loudly. That’s what they believed 10 years ago, and that’s what they believed 20 years ago.

But it wasn’t what they believed 30 years ago. Thirty years ago they all believed quite the opposite.

Again, that’s interesting.

I heartily recommend Dudley’s book for his discussion of this switch and the main figures who brought it about — Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie, etc. But here I just want to quote one section about the strangeness of this 180-degree turn, and how it caught many evangelicals off-guard:

By the mid-1980s, the evangelical right was so successful with this strategy that the popular evangelical community would no longer tolerate any alternative position. Hence, the outrage over a book titled Brave New People published by InterVarsity Press in 1984. In addition to discussing a number of new biotechnologies, including genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, the author, an evangelical professor living in New Zealand, also devoted a chapter to abortion. His position was similar to that of most evangelicals 15 years prior. Although he did not believe the fetus was a full-fledged person from conception, he did believe that because it was a potential person, it should be treated with respect. Abortion was only permissible to protect the health and well-being of the mother, to preclude a severely deformed child, and in a few other hard cases, such as rape and incest.

Although this would have been an unremarkable book in 1970, the popular evangelical community was outraged. Evangelical magazines and popular leaders across the country decried the book and its author, and evangelicals picketed outside the publisher’s office and urged booksellers to boycott the publisher. One writer called it a “monstrous book.” … The popular response to the book — despite its endorsements from Carl F.H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, and Lew Smedes, an evangelical professor of ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary — was so overwhelmingly hostile that the book became the first ever withdrawn by InterVarsity Press over the course of nearly half a century in business.

The book was republished a year later by Eerdmans Press. In a preface, the author noted, “The heresy of which I appear to be guilty is that I cannot state categorically that human/personal life commences at day one of gestation. This, it seems, is being made a basic affirmation of evangelicalism, from which there can be no deviation. … No longer is it sufficient to hold classic evangelical affirmations on the nature of biblical revelation, the person and work of Christ, or justification by faith alone. In order to be labeled an evangelical, it is now essential to hold a particular view of the status of the embryo and fetus.”

The poor folks at InterVarsity Press, Carl Henry, Lewis Smedes and everyone else who was surprised by the totality of this reversal, by its suddenness and the vehemence with which it came to be an “essential” and “basic affirmation of evangelicalism” quickly got on board with the new rules.

By the time of the 1988 elections, no one any longer spoke sarcastically of “the heresy” of failing to “state categorically that human/personal life commences at day one of gestation.” By that time, it was simply viewed as an actual heresy. By the time of the 1988 elections, no one was aghast that a strict anti-abortion position was viewed as of equal — or greater — importance than one’s views of biblical revelation or the work of Christ. That was just a given.

By the time of the 1988 elections, everyone in American evangelicalism was wholly opposed to legal abortion and everyone in American evangelicalism was pretending that this had always been the case.

We have always been at war with Eastasia. Everyone knows that.

 

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  • Anonymous

     

    I don’t think the arguments based on what happens with other species are going to fly, because you see they don’t have souls.

    And I said exactly that in my post.

  • Worthless Beast

    In my own little cobbled-together Theology of Ideas (I don’t claim to have answers, just ideas), I lean toward the idea that animals have souls – they aren’t quite the same as human souls, but they may have souls after their kinds.  My biggest argument for this is that Heaven wouldn’t be Heaven for me without every cat I’ve ever loved there.  I still do eat meat, because species eating other species is nature and nature is ultimately a balance.   

    I *could* insert this heresy into my religion, except I haven’t been to church in years and even if I start going again, I’m not the kind of person anyone’s going to listen to. 

  • C.

    perception is reality.  value systems may be different therefore morality may be perceived differently. not wrong or immoral, different. and although there may be many valid points in your potential  ‘feminists’ argument, it doesn’t have to.  moderation and acceptance.

  • Lori

     
    Here are three verses I would use to argue that the fetus has life/soul at conception.

    These verses have been around much longer than 30 years.
    Job 10:10 NLT
    You guided my conception and formed me in the womb.
    (Job speaking to God.)Psalms 139:13 NLTYou made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.(David speaking to God.)

    Jeremiah 1:5 NLT”I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my spokesman to the world.” (God speaking to Jeremiah)  

      
    You can use those verses, but if you do you’d lose any reasonable argument at life beginning at conception because none of them say that. In fact, they don’t say anything about when life begins at all.

    The first 2 are humans expressing human ideas about the physical development of a fetus. The 3rd has to do with Jeremiah’s calling as a prophet and has nothing whatsoever to do with when life begins.

  • Lori

     
    Can you tell us what caused the switch in belief? Is there anything we can pinpoint for motive here?  

    Not to put too fine a point on it, politics in response to social change. Fred has written about the role Francis Schaeffer and other evangelical leaders in stirring up anti-abortion sentiment as part of the whole Moral Majority business. That was a reaction by conservatives against the social changes of the 60s and early 70s. Christianity as commonly practiced is strongly patriarchal (see the however many posts Fred has put up in the last week about how that works and why it sucks) and nothing freaks out the patriarchy like women being able to control reproduction. 

    Sarah Robinson wrote an interesting piece about this for Alternet:

    http://www.alternet.org/visions/154144/why_patriarchal_men_are_utterly_petrified_of_birth_control_–_and_why_we%27ll_still_be_fighting_about_it_100_years_from_now/?page=1

    I don’t 100% agree with her on every point, but I think the gist is accurate. This is a battle we’re going to be fighting for a long time. One of the important aspects of the fight is refusing to allow fundamentalists to get away with pretending that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia and that the anti-choice movement is purely about doctrine. 

  • hagsrus

    “Dust from the tabernacle floor?”

  • Readerjohn

    I note that Malte has not yet answered AndrewSshi’s question about Augustine. I share Andrew’s skepticism that Augustine was much “more liberal.”
    What Evangelicals have done since 1968, in my opinion, is to rejoin the historic Christian consensus on this one narrow point. The Christian consensus formed before there was a New Testament Canon and when the Church interpreted the Old Testament much differently than modern Evangelicals do. In the decades leading up to their change of heart, anti-Catholicism was rampant; it was motivation enough that Rome was against something for Evangelicals to favor it, and the biblical interpretation would obediently follow. I guess another way of saying it is that this is a helluva good blog on the absurdity and inconstancy of Evangelical biblicism. It pains me to see it pointed out so starkly on a matter that literally is one of life and death.

  • Anonymous

    My mother could remember discreet, drab little shops that sold pills that were supposed to “bring on” menstruation. She said ~ and I suspect that she would have known ~ that they didn’t work, any more than the old “cures” of hot baths and jumping up and down. The only sure way of ending a pregnancy was to find an abortionist (not easy) who might (if you were lucky) be a trained midwife or doctor, but who just as easily might not. The “procedure” wasn’t pleasant, to put it mildly, and there was always the chance that you might end up in hospital with a policeman at your bedside hoping to get your abortionist’s name before you bled to death.

    A woman of my mother’s generation, with little if any control over her own fertility, might just as easily regard a miscarriage as a blessing rather than a tragedy. Let me emphasise, I’m talking about a respectable married woman who was trying to bring up four children in difficult circumstances and whose last pregnancy and childbirth had damn near killed her. And this is before we consider unmarried girls, rape victims and so on. This is the reality that most Western women thought had been safely consigned to history and which male politicians and clerics want to re-establish.

  • Anonymous

    What about those tumours that turn out to be an undeveloped “twin” that has been absorbed into the sibling’s body during pregnancy?

  • Anonymous

    A woman of my mother’s generation, with little if any control over her
    own fertility, might just as easily regard a miscarriage as a blessing
    rather than a tragedy

    My mom got pregnant in her early 20s and had a miscarriage.  She was glad for it because it saved her the trouble of getting an abortion, which she would have absolutely done if she had to.

    Sometimes it does bother me when people just state “miscarriage is a tragedy” in response to someone’s loss, like it’s a universal truth.  For many women it is tragic.  But other women aren’t as affected by it, even for wanted pregnancies.  There’s not just one right reaction to have to a miscarriage, and while I understand that most people are just trying to be sympathetic, I wish they would make an effort to make it more personal and less universal.

  • Azrael D. Macool

    My grandmother, who’s some weird mix of old-fashionedschool country conservative and hippy liberal, said to me the other day her thoughts on abortion:

    “When they legalized abortion, I thanked God. I never desired to have one, but there were women, in my generation, sometimes rape victims, who had to go into back alleys and use coat hangers. And so I thanked god that women could go to a medical facility to get it done.”

    She really surprised me when she said that. She also told me that she knew some girls who had gotten pregnant, and the family hushed it up, sent her to live with a relative for a while, and then when she came back, claimed the baby was her sister.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Whittier-Nathan-Strong/1086243013 Whittier Nathan Strong

    The proof-texts which are most frequently used are:
     Psalm 139: 13-14:
    “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

    and
    Exodus 21:22-25
    “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Whittier-Nathan-Strong/1086243013 Whittier Nathan Strong

    The idea is that the entire Bible is to be taken as *equally* divinely inspired, the fact that different books serve different purposes notwithstanding.

  • Original Lee

    Fred, I hope it’s OK with your wife that I love you for this post.  In the agape sense, of course.  I’ve been trying to get my hard-right friends to take a little trip down memory lane on this exact point, and have gotten nowhere.  Those old farts from 30+ years ago were wrong, wrong, wrong, and similarly to certain theologians from back at the dawn of Christianity, can be ignored because God has revealed the truth to more worthy vessels.  Or something like that, anyway.

  • Termudgeon

    The Exodus verses seem to say quite clearly that bringing on a miscarriage results in a fine, but injuring the pregnant woman beyond that deserves matching punishment. That says that a fetus is not valued anywhere near as highly as a woman.

  • Anonymous

     What you are calling the “historic Christian consensus,” is actually one instantiation of first-century Christianity with centuries of cultural overlay created in part by the evolution of Christianity as a bureaucratically organized religious entity run by men chosen primarily from a very limited set of social groups and often for largely political reasons.

     Given that it has as often as not tended to run towards things like “slavery is just dandy,” adherence to the “historic Christian consensus” is not always the very best argument from authority.

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

    Worth pointing out, and I think Fred mentioned this at some point in the past, that there’s nothing inherently pro-forced-birth about believing that “never abort” is the morally “safest” thing to do — you can keep that belief and still believe that because the abortion *might* be before ensoulment, the “risk” is outweighed by the potential benefit.

    This makes it, fwiw, a much smaller theological move than it might seem for the catholic church to reposition itself on abortion: they don’t have to say “we were flat-out wrong”, just “It always was and still is morally risky, but we will no longer act as arbiters as to whether or not the moral risk is justified in any particualar situation”

  • Lori

     
     Psalm 139: 13-14:

    “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  

     
    Again, this text says absolutely nothing about when life begins. It’s a discussion of a human view of physical development and doesn’t even make any claims about when ensoulment occurs. The nicest thing that can be said about using this as a proof text is that it requires an extremely expansive definition of “proof”.

     
    Exodus 21:22-25“If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” 

     

    This is also not proof that life begins at conception and trying to make it say that is more than a stretch. The entire rule is predicated on people involved in the situation knowing that the woman is pregnant. That doesn’t apply to the moment of conception even now and at the time the rule was written the woman would have had to be much farther along for her pregnancy to be known. Discussing premature birth, as opposed to miscarriage, implies a quite advanced pregnancy.  

    These texts don’t prove anything about when life begins or ensoulment and are really irrelevant to the issue of voluntary abortion. They’re used because people reached a conclusion completely independent of the text and then tried to work backwards to create a justification for their opinion. 

  • Anonymous

    As a quick and somewhat pedantic note, the general consensus on slavery until a lot of the aberrations of the modern slave trade wasn’t that it was just dandy, but rather that it might not necessarily be a sin, but that you were morally better off freeing your slaves.  (Basically I’d say something like Makruh in shariah.)

    As an aside, as a married Christian man with no children, I obviously believe that the received tradition is always being renegotiated, but that if Christians are renegotiating it, we should be honest with ourselves about the content of scripture and tradition. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/jon.maki Jon Maki

    Further, they don’t actually “prove” anything to people – like me – who don’t view the Bible as being an authoritative source of information.

    At best they may* be used to show that this is what Christians who want to follow the Bible ought to believe about ensoulment, but so what?

    A “Clobber Verse” has less impact on me than a feather.

    And the fact remains that, as is the entire point of Fred’s post, these ideas about when life begins – even if a deep scouring of the Bible finds occasional references that “prove” that they should have been – were not widely-regarded as being biblical until relatively recently.

    *And it seems clear that they’re not even adequate in that regard.

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

    In the Western world, we mostly believe that the individual is contained
    in the brain.  A person can lack limbs, some organs, and other tissues
    and will still be considered their own person.  They can have many
    organs transplanted and will still be the same person.  But a
    hypothetical brain transplant would be considered more of a body
    transplant, which would retain the identity of the person that
    originally had that brain.  But like you said, that hasn’t always been
    the universal location of identity.

    We might consider the possibility that identity is too complex a thing to assert that it is “contained” in some particular body part.  I consider it less likely that we’ll ever be able to perform a whole-brain transplant than that we might someday be able to graft new brain tissue onto an injured brain, and what would we consider *that*?

    Perhaps, we might even suppose that the answer to “are conjoined twins one person or two people?” might in some cases be “Neither. They’re something else.”

  • Lori

    Yes, that too. The arguments for life beginning at conception don’t even come close to satisfying the requirement for civil law. 

  • Mrbunny8

    I’m a PK (pastor’s kid).  Well, 35 now, and my mom (everyone presume it’s my dad) is a now retired Lutheran minister who was a single mother of 2 when entered seminary.  For years, I have been at conflict with a great deal of this.  Though I prescribe to a great deal of my faith, I am by no means a lock-step Lutheran.  I feel it’s more interpersonal (you & God, not you + the whole collective & God).  But I digress.

    Last night, I found out a woman I had been involved with is now pregnant.  It is staggering to say the least.  Kinda’ losing my head to boot.  Due to age, mutual health backgrounds, 4 other children from her family, her own rather conservative faith (in addition to mine), pre-existing relationships, and so on, abortion is now an actionable choice.  Basically, IDK what I’m doing, unsure of her position, but this article was very illuminating in a period of otherwise intense darkness.  Thank you.

  • Tricksterson

    Depends on how you define soul I suppose.  Religions tend to be seriously vague on that subject.  Myself I define it as self awareness or maybe the capacity for freewill.  As to the first, does a cockroch have self awareness?  doubt it.  Does a cat or dog?  I would defintely say so.  As for free will that’s trickier.  I’m not sure it’s possible to prove whether or not free will exists (So I simply choose (sic) to act as if it does).

  • Lyra

    Please forgive me if the quoting doesn’t work on this, as I’m guessing on how to get the quoting to work.

    Job 10:10 NLT You guided my conception and formed me in the womb.
    When I first read this passage, I thought you had accidentally refered to the wrong passage, because I couldn’t find anything about conception and wombs in Job 10:10. After some searching, I realized that this is because the NLT is the only version of the bible that talks about conception and wombs.  If you go to any of the other versions of the bible, you find stuff about milk and cheese.

    NIV: Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese,
    NASB: Did You not pour me out like milk And curdle me like cheese;
    KJV: Didn’t you pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?
    AKJV: Have you not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?

    The fact that it talked about “conception” should have tipped me off, as people of that day and age didn’t have a concept of conception (people of that day and age didn’t even know that women made eggs). So, yeah, that is rather suspect. Furthermore, this is Job talking to God, not God talking to Job; unless one considers Job to be The Authority this kind of stuff, I don’t see why Job’s words would be binding even if he had talked about conception rather than cheese.

    Psalms 139:13 NLTYou made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and
    knit me together in my mother’s womb.(David speaking to God.)
    This passage shows more promise. However, it suffers from one of the same issues as your Job quote, in that it is David talking to God, not God talking to David. David was hardly correct about all things, so this manner of quote hardly seems binding. It would speak about what David believed, not as to what is true. Furthermore, “in my mother’s womb” is incredibly vague. Does it refer to conception? Implantation? Development of the heart? Development of the brain? Month 1? Month 8? Even if we took this at face value as ineffable truth, the only thing it would seem to say is that personhood doesn’t start outside the womb.

    Jeremiah
    1:5 NLT”I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before
    you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my spokesman to the
    world.” (God speaking to Jeremiah
    Now this one is finally God speaking. Unfortunately, this only indicates that God knew Jeremiah before he stuck him into his mother’s womb. This could (as others have indicated) mean that God knew Jeremiah before God made Jeremiah or that God allows for reincarnation. Furthermore, this once again doesn’t put a line on WHEN God formed Jeremoniah in the womb. Does it refer to conception? Pre-conception? Implantation? Development of the heart?
    Development of the brain? Month 1? Month 8? This one is less specific than the one before it, in that all it seems to say is that life doesn’t start after exit from the womb.

  • TBurt

     Which Bible version did you get this from?  I’m looking at 15 parallel references to this passage (Numbers 5:27) and they seem to say that her abdomen will swell and her thigh will shrink and she will be accursed…but non says anything about barrenness and a miscarrying womb. Are you making this up?  http://bible.cc/numbers/5-27.htm  Please also notice the notes below the passage, particularly those of Gill.  The Jews believed that because the words were repeated twice, that the guilty man would also be punished in the same way.  It would be impossible to create an abortion in the guilty man! This is not a valid argument.

  • Tricksterson

    Well, in a properly Christian society the baby, once born, should obviously be arrested and charged with murder and cannibalism.

  • TBurt

     Also, New Testament, Luke 1:41, when Elizabeth’s unborn baby leaps in his mother’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting.  The leaping (unborn) baby would become John the Baptist who continued to announce the arrival of the Christ until his own death.

  • Termudgeon

    Isn’t the point of Luke 1:41 that this was a miracle, rather than a defining characteristic of fetuses, who usually don’t understand words at this stage?

  • Termudgeon

    Also, TBurt, if you google for the words in the quote, you will find the version being quoted, so that next time you won’t have to apologize for suggesting someone has made them up.

  • VotGs

    Not really.  I mean, when I bake bread, I knead and guide the bread dough into shape.  I set part aside for a special purpose, perhaps to take to my mother’s house as a special treat.  I do all these things -before- it is even bread.  My intentions are to create bread.  I have even given that special part a name:  Mother’s Bread.  The rest is just regular bread. All the pieces are there.  Everything is there, -but it is not bread until it is baked-.  And to most people, baked properly.  You don’t pull half done bread dough out of the oven, and serve it to people. Its very ‘breadness’ is predicated on the end product of baking.

    Frankly, I’ve always felt ‘a little bun in the oven’ was the most apt expression for pregnancy ever.

    And those verses in no way even metaphorically talk about a soul.  It talks about the body, it is talking about the dough.  Not the bread.

  • Lyra

    As with the other passages, Luke 1:41 would not be an indicator that life starts at conception, as even the most generous of readings would not allow for a single celled organism to “leap.” How far along was Elizabeth in her pregnancy? I certainly don’t know.

    I don’t know why people bring up passages like these. It’s not like the pro-choice movement holds that life starts after birth; by the time you hit the third trimester, pro-choice individuals are pretty much on board with the fetus being pretty much equal to a baby, with abortion being only allowed for pretty serious problems (like if the fetus has a fatal defect).

    The only time I’ve ever heard that a 9 month old fetus was materially different than a 9 minute old baby was by people whose religion indicated that ensoulment happened when God breathed life into the baby at its first breath.

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

    Indeed, leaping in the womb would seem to point VERY CLEARLY to begning life no earlier than *quickening*. You know, the way mainstream christianity defined it up until the 80s

  • Lyra

    Actually, after reading a bit more, it seems that Elizabeth in her 6th month of pregnancy when Mary conceived. Her unborn baby leaped after Mary traveled to Judah from Galilee named Nazareth. So the pregnancy was somewhere in the sixth month plus travel time (I don’t know how long it took for her to make the journey; my googling tells me it’s about 70-80 miles).

    Also, as someone else pointed out, John was hardly a normal baby; he’s listed in Luke 1:64 has him speaking at 8 days old, which is hardly indicative of normal children. Thus, discussing John as some kind of marker for normal children might be a bad idea.

  • Termudgeon

    According to Luke 1:36, Elisabeth is in her sixth month.

  • Pam Hodges

    It is my belief that life is a continuum beginning eons upon eons ago and trying to pinpoint the beginning of life is beside the point. As a woman, I completely own the responsibility for deciding whether to allow the progresion of a particular budding of human life to continue within my womb, or to end it. There are personal reasons I can imagine for either decision at a given moment, which in no way disturbs my sense of moral obligation. Further, IMHO, I really think it imappropriate for anyone (ANYONE) else to make that decision for me, ESPECIALLY males (of religious persuasions or not) who can’t prove to me that they have never had irresponsible sexual intercourse with a woman outside of a longterm committed relationship (of the type required of a woman to bear and raise a child).

  • tsig

    You’re all making this to hard:

    As soon as a man’s tingler tings

    The soul to the sperm does wing.

  • Lori

     
    Last night, I found out a woman I had been involved with is now pregnant.  It is staggering to say the least.  Kinda’ losing my head to boot.  

    I wish you both the best in making the right decision for everyone involved. 

  • Lori

    I think the one thing that this thread has demonstrated is that everyone uses the same handful of supposed proof texts on this issue and none of them actually prove anything. And that’s assuming you spot folks the issue of Biblical inerrancy, which of course civil law does not. 

    Religious beliefs should never determine civil law, but it would be a lot galling if the attempt to have theocratic law was at least over something that has clear Biblical back-up. The fact that we’re not only still fighting, but are losing ground on an issue that boils down to making shit up is inexcusable. 

    In the spirit of the proposed amendments requiring things like drug testing for lawmakers and prostate exams for men wanting ED drugs, I’m getting to the point of supporting the notion of covenant marriage. Anyone who wants to restrict abortion because it’s a sin needs to make a legally binding agreement that they can’t get a divorce for any reason other than proven adultery. If you’re not willing to take seriously commands that are clearly stated in the book you claim to follow then I really don’t want to hear any more from you about preventing other people from doing things that violate your unsupported fantasies about what that book says. 

    Just to be clear, I think covenant marriage is a terrible idea and that women especially should refuse to have anything to do with them. I’m simply getting to the point where I think that if people are going to try to use the power of the state to force women accept having their lives ruined due to bad circumstances or less than ideal decision making then they need to put themselves at the same risk. 

  • Anonymous

     

    The Exodus verses seem to say quite clearly that bringing on a
    miscarriage results in a fine, but injuring the pregnant woman beyond
    that deserves matching punishment. That says that a fetus is not valued
    anywhere near as highly as a woman.

    Unfortunately, I have heard some make the claim that those verses are saying what should happen if the injury causes the pregnant woman to go into premature labor, rather than miscarriage.  Because the Bible is so inerrant and needs no interpretation, they have interpreted it to say whatever they want.  So a miscarriage would carry the penalty of death, even though it says nothing of the sort, and only a premature birth that the baby survived would warrant the fine.  Of course there’s no reason why this would be true if the verses never attempted to make that subtle distinction.

    I’ve also heard people brush it off by saying it’s in the Old Testament and doesn’t apply anymore because Jesus changed things.  Yes, Jesus changed what punishment was acceptable, but I highly doubt that God considered embryos/fetuses as not yet people and then suddenly changed his mind and decided to make them full people.

  • P J Evans

     One of my grandfather’s cousins was probably a cousin-once-removed, if family rumor is correct. No proof, but the cousin’s probable mother lived with him until she died.

  • http://twitter.com/john_s_wilkins John S. Wilkins

    In his book Crazy for God, the son of Francis Schaeffer notes that the abortion issue was not an evangelical issue until a Catholic, Fulton Sheen, approached the moral majority leaders, including his father, to make common cause. Until then, abortion and contraception were issues relating solely to promiscuity.

  • Anonymous

    I’m getting to the point of supporting the notion of covenant marriage.

    Via Sartre, there are two types of vertigo: the first is the fear of falling, while the second is the fear of voluntarily — in the next minute, for no reason at all — choosing to jump.

    I think the problem is, many politically active fundamentalists suffer from the second kind of vertigo. If something is banned, they’ll never have the option of choosing to do it.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2CUJHSQSQYTYT4DPZSKTVESYNQ B

    Re: Exodus 21:22-25

    Also note, it’s completely consistent to believe that abortion is OK, but that ending someone’s pregnancy against their will is a crime.  In that case, the crime wouldn’t be against the fetus for ending its life, it would be against the parents, for robbing them of a pregnancy they desired.

    So even if I really thought we should be bound today by laws that were made thousands of year ago (note that tonight I had shrimp for dinner), the fact that Exodus says that it’s a crime to end someone else’s pregnancy against their will IMO says jack-all about abortion.

  • Lori

    To paraphrase a comment on another blog about the Virginia ultrasound requirement—being Conservative apparently means never having any understanding of the concept of consent. 

  • Termudgeon

    Yes, some interpret it as a premature birth, and I think the Hebrew translates as “come forth,” but really, how well did premature babies born because of violence to their mothers
    do in the desert thousands of years ago? We can’t even save them all today, let alone keep the vast majority from permanent harm. I think it extremely unlikely that such a baby would have escaped any harm whatsoever, and if it did, why the fine?

  • Evan

    Also, as someone else pointed out, John was hardly a normal baby;
    he’s listed in Luke 1:64 has him speaking at 8 days old, which is hardly
    indicative of normal children. Thus, discussing John as some kind of
    marker for normal children might be a bad idea.

      I always considered the “he” who spoke in that verse to be John’s father Zechariah.

    I think it extremely unlikely that such a baby would have escaped any harm whatsoever, and if it did, why the fine?

    Because the attacker did something probably harmful, I’d guess, even if no actual harm came from it.

  • Anonymous

    some interpret it as a premature birth, and I think the Hebrew translates as “come forth,”

    Everett Fox, who put considerable effort into making his translation of the Torah bear as much resemblance to the Hebrew as possible (for example, ‘humus’ and ‘human’ to retain the ‘Adam’/'adamah’ pun), has ‘abort-forth’. Which is rather less ambiguous.

  • Rnjhuff

    Perceived by whom?  The definition is cute but unresolved.  Perception, by normal definition, needs a personal perceiver.  Who would that be?

    As to abortion, et al [I am only replying in this way b/c I'm not able to get on the main for some reason], I am by tradition a fundamentalists, and am mostly comfortable with it, though I attended a Meth. seminary.  I do not think the innerentist approach to the abortion issue was a strong one.  Even as a young man I cringed a bit when we trotted out our proof texts.   We no doubt disagree here, but my angle is to say a couple of things: 1.  We know life is there — we can even call it potential life if we like, but it is life and science simply knows it has a different DNA, for example, from the mother.  and 2.  If we are not sure of the metaphysical status of the fetus it seems a scary thing in purely human ethical terms, to destroy it, or even leave it to the mother’s will.  3.  There are many laws which assign manslaughter or similar felony to one who causes a woman to lose a fetus.  I have a friend who was arraigned on that very charge after his vehicle hit a pregnant pedestrian who subsequently lost the baby. 

  • Lyra

     Pssh, that may make more sense, but it infringes on my super-baby theory!

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