The joys of starting a new job and being busy. Anyway, lots going on, including the Doonesbury strip covering the ludicrous Texan law that says women wanting an abortion must have an transvaginal ultrasound scan. Not for any sound medical reason but to intimidate vulnerable women to try to persuade them not to go through with it. Why? Cherry-picking the big book of tribal stories again as far as I can tell.
As I’ve said before, either you accept the Bible in its entirety including all the anomalies and bits you disagree with, or you accept that it is largely irrelevant as a “how to live your life” guide, particularly because English language versions have only been around since the 1500s and there was a lot of editorializing to get people to accept the change from the Latin versions. The 1535 Coverdale Bible was translated by Miles Coverdale who used Martin Luther’s German Bible and a couple of others because he didn’t understand Hebrew or Latin. Luther’s influences on the Reformation and other aspects of Christianity could easily fill an entire academic career, let alone a blog like this one. Let’s just say that a collection of stories that have gone through thousands of years of history, politics and argument, quite apart from errata and the Medieval and Renaissance equivalents of Google Translate, probably don’t have quite the same meaning that they did when they were first written down. For example there’s some debate about whether Moses’ burning bush was actually a bush and if it was on fire at all. It might even be a typo.
I think a lot of the “you must do X because the Bible says so” brigade would try to control people even if the Bible didn’t exist. Interesting how a lot of the “pro-life” campaigners become a lot less “pro-life” when it comes to the death penalty. Women will still have abortions regardless of the law, but some of the back street techniques can be quite horrific. Without going into too much detail, one technique uses a wire coat hanger, and that would be a burning bush. If abortion is legal, it can be done using safer techniques and the woman can receive counselling and medical care. There may be medical reasons why an abortion is necessary or the woman may have been raped. Even some “pro-lifers” accept these as exceptions.
People don’t just have sex for procreation and sometimes accidents happen. Maybe the woman is in no situation to take on the responsibilities of motherhood, either for the time being or permanently. Up to a point an undeveloped foetus is just a collection of cells rather than a partly-grown human baby and there’s a massive difference between a medical procedure and giving up a baby for adoption. It is a horrendously complex issue and not one that it helped by a bunch of busybodies deciding what they think is best based on a misinterpretation of a very old text. Is it murder? Not under English common law, which says that life begins once the baby has been born and starts breathing on its own. Whether the Bible defines it as murder is irrelevant because there’s no way of saying what the original intention of the “thou shalt not kill” bit actually was, for reasons discussed above.
TL;DR: it’s going to happen anyway whether it’s right or wrong, so you may as well reduce the unpleasantness of the situation as much as possible.