Via Gryana @ Flickr
With the evangelicals raging about family planning money in the federal budget, and the—God willing—imminent appointment of new, pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court, it seems even Hope and Change can’t save us from the Christian Right’s deep and abiding and vocal need to protect unborn Americans.
But let’s get one thing straight, my Jesus-loving brothers and sisters: I’m sick of you waving the Bible in my face to justify that deep and abiding and increasingly shrill ideology. Because it’s bullshit. The Bible does not condemn abortion. It doesn’t. Period. It condemns a lot of stuff, like eating pork, and painting pictures, and having sex with animals, but it does not say anywhere that abortion is murder or that unborn babies are people or that life begins at conception. In fact, it says the opposite.
The Old Testament is explicit that personhood was not granted at conception. In fact, while a child was considered a living being when it drew its first breath—mirroring Adam, who with his fully formed body was not alive until God gave him breath—a baby wasn’t considered a full member of the community until some time after its birth; in Numbers 3:15, when Israelites were commanded to take a census, they were instructed not to count any babies under one month of age, much less babies still in the womb. In an era when many women and their babies died in childbirth, and when 50% of babies did not live until their first birthday, it would have seemed ridiculous to give an unborn child the same legal status as an adult.
The anti-abortion movement—spearheaded, of course, by the same Christians who would have you believe every word of the Bible is law—go to great lengths to ignore the one specific law concerning the death of fetuses. In the section of Exodus that sets out legal codes regarding injury, death and slavery, we find the following:
“And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”
Exodus 21:22-25
This is a telling passage. The law commands that if a woman is accidentally injured and miscarries, the responsible party will pay a fine to her husband. But killing a woman’s fetus is not a serious enough crime to require capital punishment. Only if the woman herself dies does the “eye for eye” law apply. The aborted fetus is treated as a property concern, not a murder. It is not considered a person, therefore its death does not need to be avenged.
While the morality quandaries of abortion have been debated since Biblical times, it’s notable that in the vast body of Jewish ethics and legal teachings, abortion is never regarded as murder. This is because Jewish sages and scholars–who were analyzing these passages for thousands of years before Jesus–have always stuck to a close legal reading of the laws regarding murder and injury, and those laws do not give the fetus—a non-person—the protection of the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s supremely ironic that the Christian right, for whom the Bible is the literal word of God, choose to ignore the Old Testament’s very specific instructions regarding the penalties for killing unborn children. Instead they’d rather focus on the passages that support their agenda, like the oft-quoted Leviticus 18:22, which describes homosexuality as an abomination. But if we godly citizens are to take Bible literally on the matter of homosexuality, shouldn’t we then, logically, take just as seriously its legal precedents on abortion? After all, those two issues are practically the only ones the right wing seems to be able to get it up for these days.
Bear in mind, though, that the fact that abortion was not explicitly condemned had nothing to do with women’s rights. Most of the legal code set out in Exodus and Leviticus upholds property rights, including the laws involving women and sex; the Biblical bans on adultery, incest and rape forbid taking what is legally another man’s, not violating a woman’s rights or dignity. These legal codes are so out of step with modern culture that these days even devoutly religious Jews and Christians disregard the vast majority of them—from the blatantly misogynist laws to the oddball instructions about shunning shellfish or people with skin disease. So why has the Christian right become so stuck on certain Old Testament dictates while ignoring others? Is it simply hypocrisy, or is it that we define as “God’s word” only that which suits our cultural norms or ideological needs and sweep the rest under the carpet? As Shakespeare observed: “[Even] the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
Catholics for a free choice does really good work around theology of reproductive options from a Christian perspective. For example, did you know that for most of Catholic history abortion wasn’t a sin until quickening (when you can feel the baby kick?) It changed with ultrasounds, which moved the perspective of when life starts from the woman’s perception (who else would know about quickening?) to the male medical machinery gaze.
I think about it a lot with the Supreme Court too. You know how right wing anti choicers are always like, “there’s no right to abortion/privacy in the constitution?” And how Scalia always pretends to do all this “historical” research to find out what the framers “really meant” by the constitution? I found a recipe for abortifacient that was frequently used in the colonial period. It’s a spoonful of brewer’s yeast in a cup of pennyroyal tea. Do you think the framers felt the need to enshrine the right to drink tea in the Constitution? This whole fantasy that HISTORY is somehow right wing, that the past (biblical times, revolutionary times, etc.) was more conservative, is ridiculous.
I used the exact same scriptures to horrify my anti-choice classmates in high school, and then followed it up with statements from several Protestant Christian churches (including the one most of them attended).
jd: It’s particularly ridiculous given how many of the founding fathers were deists, a philosophy I somehow suspect that most right-wing conservatives would NOT be into.
I hope everyone reading puts this in their arsenal for the next time they’re battling a religious anti-choicer (on the Interwebs or the “real world”).
As a pro-choice, Jesus-loving sister I have to admit first, that I didn’t even know that passage existed, and I think that’s fascinating.
Secondly, I must say that many of the pro-life crowd base their entire reasoning on this issue on Psalm 139: ” 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
It’s important that they get this not just from what they would call the Law, which they supposedly believe Jesus’ atoning death rendered null and void, but from the Psalms, because you can’t just refute the Psalm, in THEIR minds, with another passage from Leviticus which is *also* to their minds basically null and void.
Also, RE homosexuality, the religious right ALSO uses passages from Paul’s epistles, which aren’t as easy to refute, again as the Leviticus passages. While we can say Leviticus no longer applies, it’s harder to do the same with Paul. While I, as a liberal Christian, can easily say that I think the Bible, and those Pauline passages, was written by humans in a certain time and place in a certain context FOR a certain context, they simply do NOT view it the same way.
funnyface, it is so weird to me that they think because God knew about you or knit you in your mama’s womb, that it follows that abortion should not be an option. Um, HELLO, people die all the time, and God knows about it if god knows anything. Trees are made by god, and we cut them down for lumber. As with so many pro life “arguments,” it’s not an ARGUMENT – just a romantic mental image that is somehow supposed to give rise to a totally extreme belief that abortion is murder. Same thing with ultrasound images — an image is not an argument! grrr. If it was Jesus’ #1 interest to prevent abortion, as so many American churches would have you believe, why the fuck wasn’t he more explicit about it? Honestly he barely even mentions murder. He mainly talks about how being rich is evil.
Oh, I totally feel you JD. The part that truly baffles me, both as a Christian, a writer, and an English major, is that they would think prophetic poetry is an argument for anything.
And don’t even get me started on how “the poor” are mentioned more than any other thing in the Bible besides “love” and “God” and yet most of the Religious Right has utter scorn for the lower classes.
funnyface, Paul was dead stupid on a lot of shit. He thought the world was gonna end like tomorrow. He wasn’t a huge fan of any kind of sex really. I’ve always hated Paul. Luke all the way.
@jd: “He mainly talks about how being rich is evil.”
Does Joel Osteen know that?
Sarah, he doesn’t know now but HE’LL FIND OUT BWAH HA HA HA HA
Paul can eat a bag of dicks.
JD: I didn’t know that bit about the Catholics and the quickening, which doesn’t usually happen much earlier than 20 weeks. 20 weeks is also the point where most women get the detailed ultrasound that reveals any potential birth defects and the testing for genetic problems. Even the most religious pro-life people I know (my mother) agree that those can be reasons to consider abortion.
FF: That’s the verse I’ve always heard used. But I’ve always argued that if God knows the future days of every soul, why does it matter if you abort a fetus? God already knew it wouldn’t be born, so he didn’t plan anything for it.
@funnyface: That and the line from Jeremiah “even before you were formed in the womb I knew you.” are often used by the anti-abortion movement, but they are both metaphors from revelatory/poetic parts of the OT, not the legal codes. Also, it makes no sense to use those as evidence because “even before you were formed in the womb” means “before conception.” So are bebehs alive before they’re even conceived? C’mon. Also, that passage from Psalms refers to “being made in the secret place” and “in the depths of the earth” which is just plain ol’ mythological language…unless literalists actually believe that we were made in the depths of the earth like Gimli from Lord of the Rings. The fact that the right wing has to rely on those passages only shows how poorly supported their argument is.
It’s also easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.
So why are so many fundies anti-taxes Republicans? Would being materially poor be a better state, to further the “let me into heaven!” cause?
This is why I do not believe in Sky Man; I believe in a Ceiling Cat that spends most of the day ignoring me and some of the day looking at me curiously wondering if I am going to feed it.
I’ve all too often heard Exodus 21:22-25 interpreted as an anti-abortion passage. The phrase rendered in the KJV as “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her” is bizarrely interpreted to refer to a premature birth — to be preserved in one of those Bronze Age neonatal ICUs, perhaps? And the bit about penalties — “life for life, eye for eye” and so on — refers obviously to injuries that might be suffered by the precious preborn poppet.
[...] beliefs to condemn a secular law. (I say “interpretation” because BeckySharper made a compelling argument that the Bible is actually pro-choice.) Do I want my secular dollars going to that religious [...]
Morning, that passage is always taken out of context. The “eye of a needle” was a gate that was too small for most ornately decorated camels to pass thru, hence the metaphor about rich people getting into the gates of heaven.
I wish I wasn’t reading this from my crackberry, otherwise if drop some knowledge about the gay marriage between Joshua and Samuel in the Bible, which blows the lid off any anti gay Bible beaters arguments. When I get to a computer ill post the essay
Also, Paul was a woman hating wanker. He got a lot is stuff wrong, wrong, wrong. Plus there is context…. He says different things to different cultures. If you really want to know what Jesus said about anything, stick to Matthew mark luke and John.