Props to you Sampiro
This is the first time I’ve come across this passage (even though I’ve read the bible cover to cover several times over years ago :smack: ) and it will be an excellent resource the next time I have a discussion with my fundy friends on whether abortion is murder or not and whether a fetus qualifies as another human being before God.
Thankyou. Thanyou very much.
One person answered that the woman who was bawling about having an abortion 25 years ago had to act sad or she would be lynched. Well, she must really be sad or she wouldn’t be there, eh? :smack:
There’s other good reasons women get abortions. What if you found out you were going to have a f–king retard? (jk) I don’t wanna raise a fucking retard…it’s bad enough that I am a fucking retard myself.
I don’t wanna put more fucking retards like me on the earth.
I think I’ll just stay on the pill and do y’all a favour. :eek:
One person answered that the woman who was bawling about having an abortion 25 years ago had to act sad or she would be lynched. Well, she must really be sad or she wouldn’t be there, eh? :smack:
There’s other good reasons women get abortions. What if you found out you were going to have a f–king retard? (jk) (I don’t seriously have anything against retards - they’re quite nice actually). But I don’t wanna raise a fucking retard…it’s bad enough that I am a fucking retard myself.
I don’t wanna put more fucking retards like me on the earth.
I think I’ll just stay on the pill and do y’all a favour. :eek:
Sampiro- as well as the biblical things you mentioned, AFAIK the Jewish faith considers a foetus to be “as water” for 40 days after conception (about up to 7 weeks of pregnancy), rather than any kind of person. As a very pragmatic religion, in cases where a woman’s life is at risk some interpretations of Jewish law don’t just permit abortion, they require it, as a woman’s first duty is to protect her own G-d given life.
When two groups using the same book can’t even agree on the interpretation and they have had 2000+ years to think about it, I think this has to be left up to the individuals concerned and their own consciences.
One of the things that bugs me about pro-life people who speak of embryos being unique from conception and in possession of a “soul” of some kind is that they don’t seem to be aware that identical twins result from the splitting of an embryo up to 12 days after conception. Do identical twins get half a soul each?
An embarrassing admission about my near ancestry, but I had twin great-aunts whose father believed exactly that. It’s why he didn’t want either of them to marry. While it sounds like a country superstition, it wasn’t: everybody in rural Alabama in the late 19th century knew what twins were and that they were both “whole people”, but he was a very strange man.
Interesting about the 40 days (a figure they really seemed to love in the Bible incidentally- the flood was 40 days, Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, etc.). That’s about the time most abortions occur today if I’m not mistaken.
Speaking of conception, it’s a shock to many people just how recently we (humans) learned how it works. As late as Shakespeare and Galileo many intellectuals still believed that sperm cells were little bitty humans plopped into a woman during sex (famous 17th century drawing of what a scientist theorized he was seeing when he looked at sperm under a microscope). The knowledge of how eggs and sperm and the like that all 9th graders (hopefully) know now is newer than the Civil War; it was theorized before then, but it wasn’t until experiments in Germany in the 1870s that it became the official scientific theory. The misconceptions about conception that were with us for 99% of our history have, I think, a lot to do with some of the nuttier concepts of masturbation and abortion and what-not.
It’s got 1/3 of the Steelers logo!
That’s interesting. I’ve read tracts from some Christian religions that say even if the pregnancy is threatening the mother’s life, the outcome should be left in the hands of “God.”
Another interesting bit that I don’t think has been brought up…in some Asian countries they refer to miscarried or aborted fetuses as “water babies.” They even have a series of rituals to honor the babies and give them a sort of symbolic place within the family.
There is also a prayer: “Precious soul, I thank you for wanting to be my child. But this is not the right time, and this is not the right place. I am not meant to be your mother. Go in peace, precious soul, and find the right time and place to be incarnated. Go in peace, precious soul, and find your true mother for this incarnation.”
There is a great book about the whole deal… LaFleur, W.R. 1992. Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
A friend sent me all this info after I had a much regretted abortion a few years back.
My mother said the same thing when I was 3 and she put me on that bus to Albuquerque with the “ORPHAN” T-shirt and told me to hide whenever the driver stopped.
Man, we had fun adventures before she started taking the medicine.
