Where is abortion in the bible

Instead, they speak from common theological sense. Instead, they are all part of a continuum of life beginning at the moment of conception.

Neither size nor distance from the birth canal determines life. God does when he begins the work of creating life. This is affirmed when the Bible speaks of God knowing specific people in the womb.

For example,. It presses the matter further by asserting a final truth: not only does God create and value life, He also protects and defends it. In fact, this is a major theme that runs throughout the pages of Scripture. As we turn through the pages of Scripture, we learn about a God who consistently stands ready to come to the aid of those who are in need.

He is on the side of the weak and powerless. A person who has no voice is defenseless. There are a number of problems with the paper in question, which was actually not about coercion but a comparison of post-abortion trauma in American and Russian women. Half thought abortion was wrong; only 40 per- cent thought women should have a right to it. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only. In a Guttmacher Institute survey, 1, women were asked their reasons for choosing abortion.

But when asked to name the single most important reason, less than 0. Anti-abortion literature is full of stories about women gravely injured or even killed in clinics. Steven Brigham has been in legal trouble in several states. Such doctors stay in business because they are cheap, they are in the neighborhood, they perform abortions later than the law allows, and they zero in on low-income patients who, sadly, are used to being treated badly by people in authority.

No doubt there are other inferior clinics out there. But only in abortion care do the few bad providers taint all the others—and taint them so much that opponents can pass laws that would virtually shut down the entire field in the name of patient safety.

And yet, abortion is remarkably safe. The CDC reports that from to , the most recent period for which it has figures, the national mortality rate was. In , a total of eight women died due to abortion. Tragic as that is, compare it with fatal reactions to penicillin, which occur in 1 case per 50—, courses. And what about Viagra?

According to the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, it has a death rate of 5 per , prescriptions. Really, though, there is only one directly relevant comparison of risk with respect to abortion, and that is pregnancy and childbirth. The death rate for that is 8. Continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. And maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.

Curiously, no one suggests that obstetricians be compelled to read pregnant women scripts about the dangers that lie ahead before sending them home for 24 hours to think about whether they wish to proceed. Sometimes what people mean when they say there are too many abortions is that we need to help girls and women take charge of their sexuality and have more options in life. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in abortion declined by 13 percent from , mostly because of better access to birth control and to longer-acting birth control methods like the IUD.

That is very good news. But often what people mean is that women are too casual about sex and contraception. It is difficult to come down hard on abortion as immoral, to insist that the ideal number of abortions is zero, as Will Saletan maintains , without blaming the individual woman who got herself into a fix and now wants to do a bad thing to get out of it.

In February , a three-story-high billboard popped up in New York City. But the charge that abortion is racist is commonplace in the pro-life movement. If the womb is the most dangerous place for an African American, that makes black women, the victims of racism, the real racists. The metaphor ignores the subjectivity of black women; once again, a woman is a vessel, a place—in this case a hostile place. Thus, the biblical portrait of a person is that of a complex, many-sided creature with the god-like ability and responsibility to make choices.

The fetus does not meet those criteria. When considering the issue of abortion, the one who unquestionably fits this portrait of personhood is the pregnant woman. The abortion question focuses on the personhood of the woman, who in turn considers the potential personhood of the fetus in terms of the multiple dimensions of her own history and the future. In biblical perspective, this is a god-like decision. Any study of the tradition of the church over the centuries must deal with at least 2 related questions: the morality of the act of induced abortion; and the definition of the person.

These are related, because if one does not believe that the fetus is a person until a certain age the act must be defined differently than if one considers the fetus a person from conception.