Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Do you agree with this point about abortion?
The bible actually does not explicitly forbid abortion, ever. It contains all sorts of specific details about the most personal aspects of life, including food, clothing, and hair, but it never once mentions you can't have an abortion. Then again, the bible does seem to be pretty much okay with killing you actually born children as well, so that doesn't get you too far. It is, however, interesting to note that this anti-abortion theism is actually a modern phenomena, not an ancient one. The prevailing Hebrew tradition is that the fetus is mere property and may be aborted at convenience when the woman has permission from her father, and, in some cases, the rabbi (this reflects on the position of women here rather than fetal value, no one cares if you destroy the fetus when the husband is indifferent). Jewish people are actually largely pro-choice. Also, if you look at Christian history, there is not much of any records of opinions on the issue before the middle ages, when a standard known as the 'quickening standard' was the common position and the official church position. Augustine, Aquinas, and basically every other medieval Christian theologian or saint who comments on the topic uses the quickening standard, wherein it is permissible to abort before 'quickening' which is usually considered to be somewhere between 12-15 weeks. This standard reigned supreme in Europe and the US until the 1800s. Early US law almost exclusively uses the quickening standard. First trimester abortions were legal for much of early US history (a fact which is also cited in the opinion in Roe v Wade). The rise of the "moment of conception" theory really is a modern situation. Some major culprits here were the church's increased concern about pregnancy as a social issue (scientific leaps about fetal development were occurring and it became abundantly clear to all that the quickening standard was rather arbitrary), the desire of the christians to prevent an increase in the rights of women in general, and the desire of the medical profession to take pregnancy and birthing away from midwives and put it in the hands of doctors (midwives generally performed four primary services, providing contraception, providing abortion, providing care during pregnancy, and delivery). Governments were also more likely to be seeking increased birth rates in order to fuel industrialization. This created a sort of perfect storm around the issue that did not exist historically.
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