http://www.alternet.org/belief/theres-nothing-
about-abortion-bible-so-how-do-right-wing-
christians-justify-their-crusade
There's Nothing About Abortion in the Bible -
- So How Do Right-Wing Christians Justify
Their Crusade Against Women?
The modern religious right is trying to bring
back the Bible's teaching that women are
inferior and should be the possessions of
men.
Belief AlterNet / By Adam Lee 282
COMMENTS There's Nothing About Abortion
in the Bible -- So How Do Right-Wing
Christians Justify Their Crusade Against
Women?
The modern religious right is trying to bring
back the Bible's teaching that women are
inferior and should be the possessions of
men.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
July 17, 2013 | Like this article?Join our
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While America languishes in an economic
depression, Republican officeholders are
bending all their efforts... to ban abortion. In
the last few weeks and months, we've seen a
blizzard of anti-choice legislation in Texas,
Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and many
other places. These laws stall women
seeking abortions with mandatory waiting
periods, brutalize them with invasive and
unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, force
doctors to read shaming scripts rife with
falsehoods, and impose onerous regulatory
requirements that are designed to be
impossible to comply with so that family-
planning clinics will be forced to close. At
the federal level, the Republican-controlled
House of Representatives voted for a bill
banning all abortion after 20 weeks, without
even putting up a pretense that this was
constitutional.
One would think the drubbing taken by anti-
choice zealots like Todd Akin in the last
election would have given Republicans an
incentive to step back and consider whether
this is a winning strategy. Instead, it seems
as if their losses have only inspired them to
fight harder. For the right-wing Christian
fundamentalists who dominate the
Republican Party, banning abortion, or at
least piling up pointless regulations to make
it as burdensome and difficult to obtain as
possible, has become an all-consuming
obsession, akin to a religious crusade.
Given the amount of effort and political
capital the religious right puts into trying to
restrict abortion, you'd guess that opposition
to women's choice must take up a huge
portion of the Bible. But the reality is that
nothing could be further from the truth.
The Bible says nothing whatsoever about
abortion. It never mentions the subject, not
once, neither in the Old Testament nor the
New. This isn't because abortion was
unknown in the ancient world. Much to the
contrary, the ancient Greeks and Romans
were well-acquainted with the idea. Surviving
writings from these cultures recommend the
use of herbs like pennyroyal, silphium and
hellebore to induce abortion; others advise
vigorous physical activity to cause a
miscarriage, and some even discuss surgical
methods.
It's impossible to imagine that no Jewish or
Christian woman in the ancient world ever
had to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.
Thus, it's reasonable to conclude that the
Bible's authors never mention abortion
because they weren't especially concerned
about it. This often forces modern Christian
anti-choicers to resort to laughable
rationalizations like, "It was so unthinkable
that an Israelite woman should desire an
abortion that there was no need to mention
this offense in the criminal code." (This, in a
book whose authors thought it worthwhile to
set down the punishment for having a
threesome with your wife and mother-in-
law.)
There are later Christian writings that
explicitly mention and forbid abortion, such
as the Didache. But none of these
documents made it into the canon of the
Bible, which must be frustrating for modern
anti-choicers who'd love to have a "clobber
verse" they can throw at women seeking to
exercise control over their own bodies.
Instead, religious-right activists are forced to
engage in creative reinterpretation of vague
biblical passages, trying to wring out
something they can use to "prove" God is in
favor of mandatory childbearing. One of the
common ones is Jeremiah 1:4-5, which they
claim as a divine endorsement of fetal
personhood:
The word of the Lord came to me, saying,
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew
you, before you were born I set you apart; I
appointed you as a prophet to the nations."
The most obvious problem with this, besides
the fact that it says nothing specific about
abortion, is that it's not a general statement
about all of humanity; it's a special
predestination intended only for the prophet
Jeremiah. What's more, from an anti-choice
standpoint, it says too much: it says that
God knew Jeremiah not just while he was in
the womb, but before forming him in the
womb. Perhaps the pro-life slogan should
be, "Life begins before conception"?
RICKAMAVEN wrote:
