The Bible and Abortion
Sep. 9th, 2005 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterthunderI'm glad I went to this lecture- it brought up some interesting thoughts even if I didn't particularly like the subject. It wasn't a pro-life or pro-choice, but a philisophical examination of why the assumptions made from the precious few bible verses dealing with the subject are incorrect. I find it interesting that the Bible is so vague on the subject of abortion when the laws of other civilizations of the time were quite explicit. The Syrians, for example, stated that any woman found to have willfully aborted a pregnancy was to be impaled on a stick and denied a proper burial. And the theologians up until 100 years ago didn't oppose abortion on the grounds that the fetus was a living being- many of them thought that a fetus didn't become a person until between 40-80 days after conception. They opposed abortion because they thought it was humanity's duty to go forth and be fruitful. So it's really only in the last century that the idea that the fetus is a person from conception has emerged.
The majority of the lecture was a rather mind numbing list of philisophical arguments against the way the pro-life groups use the Bible to back up their arguments. The debate focused mainly on the definition of a person, defined by Dr. Endicott as a rational of immaterial being. For example, the assumption that X is sanctified and therefore X is a person is invalid, whereas the assumption that if X has committed a conscious act of sin implies that X is a person would be a valid philosophical argument. This went on for about 35 minutes and was the bulk of the lecture, each X did this and therefore X is a person argument pertaining to a different Bible verse. The main thought I had was that you could argue this until your face turned blue, but the majority of the public wouldn't give a flip about it. There is such a thing as being too intellectual. This showed itself quite starkly in the difference between the questions asked afterwards by professors and students. The professors argued with the lecturer by pulling quotes from different theologians and different bible verses, a lot of which went entirely over my head. I want to learn, but god, I hope I never turn into one of those people. And the students asked questions about the realities, argued with him over his definition of person.
There was someone standing outside afterwards with pictures of 10-day old fetuses, yelling out for us to come and look if we had any doubts about when life started. That little blob of cells is not a person, I'm sorry. That blob has the potential to become a person, if all the cell replecations and specializations and environmental factors fall correctly into place. I don't know when life begins. My thought is that life is embodied in the concept of self, that you become a person on the day that you realize you are one, when you think of yourself in terms of "I". This could take up until the age of two or later. Up until that point you are a life with the potential to become a person. Does potential have rights, inside the womb or out of it? I don't know. It's not something I particularly want to argue either, since discussions on this subject always seem to end with my damnation to hell. Does potential override the personhood of the mother? I don't know. To sacrifice potential is sad, scary and painful, but that is a choice to be made by each individual person and not by the government. I would have to think long and hard if I were ever to be in a situation where abortion was an option. Just because I consider myself to be pro-choice does not mean that I am an awful baby-killing woman. It means that I consider my personhood to be just as important, if not more important than the potential of any ball of cells that may happen to grow inside me.
The majority of the lecture was a rather mind numbing list of philisophical arguments against the way the pro-life groups use the Bible to back up their arguments. The debate focused mainly on the definition of a person, defined by Dr. Endicott as a rational of immaterial being. For example, the assumption that X is sanctified and therefore X is a person is invalid, whereas the assumption that if X has committed a conscious act of sin implies that X is a person would be a valid philosophical argument. This went on for about 35 minutes and was the bulk of the lecture, each X did this and therefore X is a person argument pertaining to a different Bible verse. The main thought I had was that you could argue this until your face turned blue, but the majority of the public wouldn't give a flip about it. There is such a thing as being too intellectual. This showed itself quite starkly in the difference between the questions asked afterwards by professors and students. The professors argued with the lecturer by pulling quotes from different theologians and different bible verses, a lot of which went entirely over my head. I want to learn, but god, I hope I never turn into one of those people. And the students asked questions about the realities, argued with him over his definition of person.
There was someone standing outside afterwards with pictures of 10-day old fetuses, yelling out for us to come and look if we had any doubts about when life started. That little blob of cells is not a person, I'm sorry. That blob has the potential to become a person, if all the cell replecations and specializations and environmental factors fall correctly into place. I don't know when life begins. My thought is that life is embodied in the concept of self, that you become a person on the day that you realize you are one, when you think of yourself in terms of "I". This could take up until the age of two or later. Up until that point you are a life with the potential to become a person. Does potential have rights, inside the womb or out of it? I don't know. It's not something I particularly want to argue either, since discussions on this subject always seem to end with my damnation to hell. Does potential override the personhood of the mother? I don't know. To sacrifice potential is sad, scary and painful, but that is a choice to be made by each individual person and not by the government. I would have to think long and hard if I were ever to be in a situation where abortion was an option. Just because I consider myself to be pro-choice does not mean that I am an awful baby-killing woman. It means that I consider my personhood to be just as important, if not more important than the potential of any ball of cells that may happen to grow inside me.
