It may have unintended consequences that are wider-scale. A surplus of young frustrated males can deplete the supply of females in other countries (thus moving the problem), and/or lead to wars as an unhappy demographics is easier to manipulate.
Otherwise I agree.
The social structure will have to adjust, as banning such biasing won’t be too effective in the face of rapidly cheapening and developing medical imaging tech.
Good point, often things don’t sort themselves out in a way that’s good for vulnerable people.
Or two weeks, if the newborn is female. Or never, if the newborn is a slave. Although I think passages establishing penalties for causing death and the period of ritual uncleanness don’t really relate to personhood at all. Traditional Jewish teachings don’t seem to support this idea in any case - abortion is allowed if the foetus is endangering the woman’s life and can be considered a ‘pursuer’ with an intent to kill, but even then it is not allowed if something like maiming the foetus is enough to remove this risk. Once the head or most of its body has been delivered though, its life is considered equal to the mother’s life.
If a woman is in hard travail, one cuts up the offspring in her womb and brings it forth member by member, because her life comes before the life of her foetus. But if the greater part has proceeded forth, one may not set aside one person for the sake of saving another.
ETA: Not that I think you disagree, but I wish the position on abortion of an ancient book (where the only prescribed use of an abortifacient is to publicly test the husband’s unsubstantiated jealousy and rape is basically seen as damage to the father’s property) wasn’t considered so important to this debate.
I’m not familiar with that verse, chgoliz, but you haven’t answered my question. How do you determine when a human individual becomes intelligent enough to be called “person”?
Let me guess how much hassle they give the cosmetic surgeons who desecrate God’s perfect creation purely for profit…
Of course, if it’s proven that they don’t do it for money, they must be fanatics who just want to kill babies…
How could I have answered a question you didn’t ask?
And why are you assuming intelligence level has anything to do with it?
If god didn’t want cleft palates…
quite right, sorry, confusing you with LDoBe.
Where’s the Bible ref you had in mind, btw?
…or burn victims
How about a month?
Or to go into more detail, the Bible says…
Abortion is not murder. A fetus is not considered a human life.
The Bible places no value on fetuses or infants less than one month old.
Fetuses and infants less than one month old are not considered persons.
God sometimes endorses the of killing fetuses.
[quote]And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? … Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. - Numbers 31:15-17
(Some of the non-virgin women must have been pregnant. They would have been killed along with their unborn fetuses.)
Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. - Hosea 9:14
Yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb. - Hosea 9:16
Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up. - Hosea 13:16[/quote]
God sometimes kills newborn babies to punish their parents.
God sometimes causes abortions by cursing unfaithful wives.
[quote]The priest shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell. And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.
…
And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed. - Numbers 5:21-21, 27-28[/quote]
In case that’s not clear, God dictated to Moses that unfaithful wives are to be given abortions, and the Bible gives detailed instructions on how to perform them.
God’s law sometimes requires the execution (by burning to death) of pregnant women.
Of course, any God that makes people do this is all together evil anyway:
Small wonder that American evangelical’s weren’t anti-abortion until the 1970s:
CNN: When evangelicals were pro-choice
In 1968, Christianity Today published a special issue on contraception and abortion, encapsulating the consensus among evangelical thinkers at the time. In the leading article, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life begins at birth:
“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: ‘If a man kills any human life he will be put to death’ (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”
The magazine Christian Life agreed, insisting, “The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult.” And the Southern Baptist Convention passed a 1971 resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well.
Isn’t the problem that nobody has a really consistent answer, and most of the answers eventually boil down to contentious philosophical concepts, hand-waving, or religious ideas? Isn’t that the kind of domain where laws trying to restrict things work the worst?
That’s a big (and probably copy-pasted) response to a comment that brought up a number of the verses you mentioned. I don’t think the Bible is a good guide on this issue (or indeed, on many others), but as a brief response:
the penalty for causing a miscarriage is not death, but this does not mean that the foetus is not considered a person.
male Levites over one month old were to be counted. This does not mean that women and males under a month old were not considered people.
God has no problem killing people, including when unborn. He punishes the third and fourth generation for the sins of their ancestors and approved the killing of captured women because they had had sex. The test for the unsubstantiated jealousy of a husband is for the woman to take an abortifacient and publicly curse herself. God’s ‘justice’ involves plenty of collateral damage. Deal with it.
Judah himself acknowledges that he was wrong and a hypocrite, FWIW. However, you’re right that it shows how little he cared about the life of an unborn foetus. Not everything that happens in the Bible is prescribed by it though.
I wouldn’t say that a 1970s evangelical interpretation trumps a traditionally accepted Jewish one. However, it is significant that the conservative evangelical position was much less uniform within many of our lifetimes.
To reiterate, many verses are used by people on both sides of the debate to prove their points. These verses are usually not talking about abortion or the personhood of a foetus. In any case, the main thing they should show is how irrelevant bronze age dogma is to the modern debate.
I don’t know, nemomen.
Does it make things worse that there’s a law against infanticide (though some prominent ethicists say there shouldn’t be)?
Did it make things worse when laws were passed against eugenics so that “imbeciles” could no longer be forcibly sterilised as they were in many US states before WW2 (though many progressives favoured eugenics)?*
Both these laws rely on the religious idea that people have equal (as in “created equal”) value regardless of their intellectual attributes. But there are always a few (smart) people who think differently.
You’ve had several other responses providing great detail on the subject, so I won’t spend the time to repeat the same passages.
Well, there’s the other concept, dysgenics.
There’s also that pesky negative correlation between fertility and intelligence. Which slowly slides the world towards the Idiocracy model.
I for one am in favor of genetic engineering, designer babies, and if needed just giving up and splitting off a new species. Tack on some rad-hardness and the meek (and dumb) shall inherit the stupid rock called Earth.
Close all the clinics and make abortion illegal, and then we’ll go back to a time when people really did do it for money.
No it doesn’t.
The physical differences between life inside a womb and outside of one are material enough to render your analogy total bullshit. While gestating only the mother has the solitary physical burden of keeping a fetus alive. Nobody else can take possession of it, it requires her body and only her body.
A newborn is capable of being placed in the custody of other human beings besides its mother in order to ensure survival. Hence we have maternity wards. Her choice to care for a born baby no longer becomes a solitary one.
Does it make things worse that there’s a law against infanticide (though some prominent ethicists say there shouldn’t be)?
Please provide citations to this? I do not believe you. The whole equating infanticide with abortion is complete bullshit. It misses the material difference in the care and possession of a fetus and a newborn. If you can take custody of a fetus the same way you can a newborn, you would have made sense. But you can’t.
This
is very different from this
If the FWAs (Fetus Worshiping Assholes) want to take possession of a fetus destined for abortion, they can figure out how to get it from the woman. I don’t see that crowd willing to pony up the time and effort anytime soon.
Especially when attacking the rights of women is more satisfying to them. Plus it feeds into the Talibanesque notion that women must obey their dictates as alleged moral superiors
Why the hell are we focussing on the 1%-2% of abortions that happen late-term?
Is the idea that the women that had to make that decision not capable?
I would really like to live in this anti-choice utopia where no pregnant woman gets cancer, where every fetus develops normally, where terminal illnesses don’t happen in-utero, where every baby is planned for and wanted and no one is coerced into getting pregnant, I really really would, that world sounds lovely. Too bad we all live in the real world…
