I heard once (don’t know if it’s true) that it does, and that it’s okay until the “quickening” or when the baby starts to move… But I’m unsure if that’s really the case…
That’s never been important. Not then and not now. Once you go down the road of forcing people to follow the will of something imaginary, the will of that imaginary thing is whatever you say it is. The content of religious texts exist not to illuminate but to provide something to point to and say " this means god want’s X and hates Y" as you see fit.
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Actually they might, depending on interpretation.
Enforced abortion is as bad as enforced birth though. Both treat women as property.
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I don’t suppose it’s worth considering that some of them (though probably not all) are just colossally ignorant?
The biblical punishment for causing a miscarriage is similar to that for property damage rather than causing injury. If you are living under bible literalism and aren’t an adult cis male you don’t have rights.
Exodus 21:22
22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
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They are hypocrites. Its never really about sincere belief in their positions, it is always “I have mine, I want yours, go f_ck yourself”
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I agree that the power of controlling others is a major part of their motivation in how they treat women. It seems that they also extend that attitude to children and value them more. Lack of children was one justification/excuse for treatment of women in The Handmaid’s Tale. Healthy children were (supposedly) the goal, but treated as trophies, commodities, or tools for emotional manipulation under complete control of the men in charge.
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It’s all about punishment. Punish women for having sex. Punish crime with death.
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Every sperm is sacred.
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They want the majority of women and children in their relative areas to be impoverished and too poorly educated to do skilled labor so that they can build a base of workers who can compete with unskilled immigrants and/or function as slaves. That’s my angle because “we just want to kill women” is something you don’t need to pass a law to do, and frankly you shouldn’t be worried about laws if that’s your intention. On the other hand, “we want to pass a law that partially criminalizes pregnancy so that we can imprison and profit off of marginalized women” sounds about right.
I do think a lot of them personally seem to have a very pronounced sadistic fetish for maternal death in childbirth though.
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Well there is such thing as the consistent life ethic. I couldn’t guess how much of the anti-abortion movement they represent.
Outside of the link I posted, as I’ve mentioned here before, and as someone wiser than I once put it:
“Kill the poor, not the unborn”
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I mean I disagree with that stance but at least it’s consistent in that it doesn’t pick and choose what kind of death is considered acceptable.
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Yeah, on top of which, they aren’t particularly even anti-abortion, as such.
Yep. These are the same people who are against HPV vaccines for their daughters because they want the threat of sterility/death to be present to prevent premarital sexual activity. But of course the virus doesn’t care if one is married or not - everyone who does the “right” thing but still suffers the punishment is just collateral damage in maintaining that system of ownership.
And to maintain that system, some women must die. It’s a necessarily, even desirable part of the dynamics that maintains the patriarchy where women are property. It’s no different from honor killings - it’s preferable for women who violate the patriarchy-reinforcing norms to die, but others necessarily die as collateral damage.
It’s about punishing women for their sexuality, part of that Abrahamic patriarchy. Eve sinned, therefore, the belief goes, all women are - and should be - punished by pain in childbirth. Women’s sexuality is bad - they’re only “supposed” to respond to men’s desires - so anything that punishes women for having sexual agency is good. That turns into punishing women for being sexual entities in general to keep them in line.
Keeping people poor is just a side-effect, albeit one that certain conservatives are also pleased about.
It’s often struck me that the argument many of them make against abortion (“think of what would have happened if your mother had an abortion instead of giving birth to you!”) applies equally to any other hypothetical where one’s parents didn’t meet and have children (or specifically, the one particular child who is “you”), which ignores the almost infinite number of other hypothetical children who could have been born instead of oneself…
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