First off… my blog has a logo now! I am wicked excited about it 😊 Now to delve into slightly more controversial waters I present this video:
I actually looked up the passages, and I was furious. I’ve gotten to a point where I can usually roll my eyes at atrocities in the old testament since most modern Christians seem to cherry-pick verses about God’s sweetness, but this time I was furious. I was so brainwashed for most of my life thus far that I managed to read a lot of the old testament and I don’t even remember the verses Jeffrey mentions. Apparently I glossed over them, thinking nothing of them. I looked up the passages on the Internet because I wanted to see how Christians justified them. Some passages had no commentary, but I did find this on the Numbers verses (if you don’t want to read the whole thing, just look at the comment left by “Ian”):
(StackExchange, 2013).
That’s right, folks. It turns out that abortion used to be okay, but only if the woman didn’t want it.
Unpopular opinion: I think abortion is tragic. I would walk to the ends of the earth to defend its legality, but I’m also really uncomfortable with the idea of it on an emotional level. I think most women are.
But that’s exactly the reason I support Planned Parenthood. They perform abortions when necessary, but they also prevent more abortions than they perform by offering birth control to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get it, such as people who need evening appointments after work. Meanwhile, my brother told me that he opposed making birth control accessible because it would just encourage people to have sex. A certain recent president of ours who my brother supported and who was supposedly pro-life even actually tried to make it optional for health insurances to pay for maternity care.
I don’t understand why the Right claims to want to stop people from getting abortions, but they vehemently oppose all the things that would enable women who wanted to keep their pregnancies to do so. If you want to reduce the numbers of abortions, then support food stamps and WIC so that parents can feed their babies. Support paid maternity and even paid paternity leave so that parents can afford to care for their newborns. Support free child care so that parents can afford to go back to work. And for God’s sake, stop villainizing women who are forced to make agonizing decisions. Consider this article in which the author, Dina Zirlott was raped and conceived a child with “hydranencephaly, a congenital defect in which the brain fails to develop either cerebral hemisphere, instead filling with cerebrospinal fluid.” When Zirlott gave birth, “the most basic functions of [the baby’s] body were being controlled by her brainstem, but that was it.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/late-term-abortion-rape_n_5c630b8de4b0a8731aeabbd6
Zirlott concludes:
These are our bodies and our lives, and so rarely do we ask for the circumstances that command the weight of these critical decisions, but these choices are ours. We should not have to beg for permission to decide what is best for ourselves and our children, even the ones who may never be born ― and maybe never should be born.
(Zirlott, 2019)
To anyone screaming that not all circumstances are this dramatic, so what? Is abortion only okay if it does traumatize the mother? Because some Christians would apparently say yes.
References
DarkMatter2525. (2021, February 22). God VS Abortion [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 23, 2021 from https://youtu.be/KN4654qFxzk
StackExchange. (2013, June). Does Numbers 5:11-22 describe sanctioned abortion? Retrieved August 20, 2021, from Stackexchange.com website: https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/17009/does-numbers-511-22-describe-sanctioned-abortion
Zirlott, D. (2019, February 13). I wish I’d had A ‘late-term abortion’ instead of having my daughter. HuffPost Personal. Retrieved August 23, 2021, from HuffPost website: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/late-term-abortion-rape_n_5c630b8de4b0a8731aeabbd6
