Just to bring everyone up to speed. The one point, that you are talking about, where the bible "sanctions" an abortion is in fact performed by God through a priest. Not by a doctor or anyone else.
Correction: not God but through a priest; a priest acting on a man's suspicion of his wife's infidelity. An infusion of rue, which is what this potion was, would cause a miscarriage. God has nothing to do with it, I thin. I don’t see how making a pregnant woman consume a potion made of rue would result in anything but a miscarriage unless she were lucky and the ratio of rue/ water were off. This “dust” that is mentioned is rue powder, rue itself having often been brought before the altar.
So you are saying that since we are not in a perfect world we should not reach out to people and try to change their heart and minds?
Nope. Go back and read what I said. I never said, “Don’t bother trying to change hearts and minds,” what I said was that since you can’t stop people from having abortions even though you do your best to change their minds. In those instances, it’s either have it be legal and let them do it safely (legally) or make it illegal and let them take their chances doing it themselves.
Of corse not every abortion can be stopped, but if people realize that every abortion kills an innocent Human Being then fewer abortion would occur.
This is not necessarily true. Almost all the women I’ve spoken to who have had abortions have said they felt that they were killing their child—a human being—but that they felt that they couldn’t make any other choice. That being said, the abortion rates in this country compared with those in other countries (read countries without legalised abortion) is much lower.
The debate as to the morality of abortion is not that "we don't like it", it is that abortion is wrong and immoral.
Right, but I guess I just presumed, and wrongly so for that and I do apologise, that you based your moral position on the Bible. You can’t use the Bible for a prolife stance, unless you ignore a lot, since in certain instances God sanctions abortion. Not only that, but in times of war, God seems perfectly alright with the notion of taking children’s lives, even those in the womb.
[FONT="]Hosea 13:16 (New Living Translation) - The people of Samaria must bear the consequences of their guilt because they rebelled against their God. They will be killed by an invading army, their little ones dashed to death against the ground, their pregnant women ripped open by swords."[/FONT]
[FONT="]Isaiah 13:18 (New Living Translation
) — “[/FONT]The attacking armies will shoot down the young men with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for children.”
At that time Menahem, starting out from Tirzah, attacked Tiphsah and everyone in the city and its vicinity, because they refused to open their gates. He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women
[FONT="].[/FONT] (2 Kings 15:16)
I guess what we see here is that life is only precious and innocent if it’s on our side. I think that Jesus does a lot for the pro-life movement by talking about love off all people, that doesn’t take away the bad parts of the Bible, too. What would you take away from these passages? Abortion is okay as long as the woman is an adulteress or as long as she belongs to an enemy? So priests can make concoctions of powder and armies can rip open pregnant women, but a doctor in a sterile room can’t perform an abortion to keep a woman from making an even more drastic decision?
By the way, when abortion was illegal far fewer women were performing abortions on themselves then we might believe.
I’m not sure whether that’s true or not. Since abortion was illegal in those days there are no statistics that we could use to compare. My mother’s a child of the forties and seems to remember that it happened to women she knew.
And why would you care more for the life of the mother than the life of the unborn? Shouldn't they both be considered special and protect them equally?
Of course you should, I never said otherwise. What I’m talking about is that one woman who is going to have an abortion whose mind is made up and whom you can’t stop. She is going to have the abortion. You have two choices ahead of you: One, abortion is legalised so she can have it done safely; two, she takes her chances and performs an abortion on herself or has her friend do it or whatever.
Which of these two choices do you prefer?
[FONT="]This is a realistic scenario since in reality, you cannot stop a woman from having an abortion: whether it’s legal or illegal women will be having them.[/FONT]