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The Bible Forbids Abortion
"Many Christians believe that their opposition to abortion is firmly supported by the Bible. This is untrue. The Bible is remarkably silent about abortion, and all arguments about the subject are indirect and highly questionable. Not even the world's most respected theologians have been able to draw a firm conclusion one way or the other, despite continuing debate...
As Rabbi Balfour Brickner, National Director of the Commission on Interfaith Activities, says:
- "Jewish law is quite clear in its statement that an embryo is not reckoned a viable living thing (in Hebrew, bar kayama) until thirty days after its birth. One is not allowed to observe the Laws of Mourning for an expelled fetus. As a matter of fact, these Laws are not applicable for a child who does not survive until his thirtieth day."
Since the fetus is not considered a person under Jewish law, it would be impossible to consider its abortion a murder. Indeed, most Jewish scholars have agreed that abortion was legal under Jewish law. This fact alone should give serious pause to the pro-life movement...
Pro-choice activists have a near-argument stopper in Exodus 21:22-23:
- "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury [i.e., to the mother], the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury [i.e., to the mother], you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot…"
The traditional interpretation of this text, which even rabbinical scholars accepted for thousands of years, is this: if a man hurts a woman enough to cause a miscarriage, he reciprocates according to how much injury he caused her, i.e., an eye for an eye, etc. However, if the miscarriage resulted in no injury to the woman, then all the assailant had to pay was a monetary fine. The fact that the Bible does not equate the assailant's life with the stillborn's life is proof that the Bible does not count the fetus as a person... An even more astonishing pro-choice passage is Numbers 5, where the Lord appears to give a curse that causes abortions in unfaithful wives...
When Jehovah gave monetary equivalents to the value of people of certain age groups in Leviticus 27:1-7, the lowest values were given to children between the ages of one month and five years. Boy babies were worth five shekels, and girls were worth three. Below the age of one month, they did not even merit a price.
For census purposes in Numbers 3:15, only male babies older than one month were to be counted. Below this age, they were not considered persons to be counted.
These texts, combined with the traditional Jewish acceptance of abortion, form a consistent philosophy on personhood...
The most commonly quoted texts occur in poetry, an unfortunate fact for Christian conservatives, because they are already clearly on record for denouncing the idea that Biblical poetry can be taken as scientific fact... Christian apologists have ever since... [claimed] that these texts [about the world being flat] were metaphors, mere poetic flights of fancy, ones that described appearances only. It follows that poetry is not meant as literal science."
