The Bible Doesn’t Forbid Abortion

Religious leaders who claim authority on fetuses are lying

I was raised a lackadaisical Catholic, but I’ve been pro-choice for as long as I can remember. “Women have a right to choose abortion, but I won’t ever have one myself,” was my motto. Until I did have one. A quote I read from Katharine Hepburn summed up my attitude neatly. “Abortion is necessary unless women are going to be absolute slaves,’’ the famous actress told the New York Times in 1988. Makes sense to me.

Some flaws in the anti-abortion movement’s thinking are pretty obvious:

• Why are only women punished for having abortions when it takes two to make an unwanted baby? Why don’t we lock up the fathers, too?
• Why are zygotes considered imbued with the spirit of life, but sperm isn’t? After all, sperm swim around and wiggle their little tails, which is a lot more lively than sitting immobile in a squishy womb like a fertilized egg.
• Why are anti-abortion crusaders more concerned with the mysterious “unborn” than the 1 in 6 living, breathing, real-live children who are living in poverty in the good ol’ USA?
• If mere life is sacred, without regard for intellect, how do you justify eating meat, fish, or vegetables; the death penalty; chopping down trees; putting animals “to sleep,” etc.?

But because my Catholic upbringing was spotty, at best, I didn’t have the wherewithal to counter religious arguments that God had outlawed abortion in the Bible — never mind that God didn’t write the Bible, something I just took for granted as a child. It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned the Bible was literally written by dozens of people over hundreds of years.

So, yeah. Because of my disinterest in the “good” book, I didn’t know what to say to the right-to-lifers who claimed Bible-backed knowledge about when souls are imbued and sacred life begins. Until now.

Because lucky for me, Gary Wills has read the Bible, and written more than 50 books on Catholicism, the history of Christianity, and American history and politics. In other words, he knows what he’s talking about.

Here’s what Wills has to say on the topic in an opinion piece about the American bishops (or as I heard one indigenous woman call Catholic clergy during testimony about genocide: the Black Robes ) wanting to deny President Biden the rite of holy communion as punishment for supporting a woman’s right to choose.

Anti-abortion sentiment is new-fangled

“No one told Dante that this was the worst crime, or he would have put abortionists, not Judas, in the deepest frozen depths of his Inferno. But in fact he does not put abortionists anywhere in the eight fiery tiers above the deepest one of his Hell.

“This is not a singular omission. No one told “Matthew” or “Mark” or “Luke” or “John” or Paul, or any other New Testament author, that he should condemn this sin of all sins. Nor did any author of the Old Testament raise this alarm, with the result that we do not have Moses or Jesus on record as opposing abortion. Nor did any of the major definitive creeds.”

In fact, Wills says that the “cult of the fetus” began sometime around the 1950s. Figures. That was also when women were told to give up their jobs for the returning war heroes, go back to their kitchens, and drum up some adoration for shiny new appliances.

Great thinkers have said life begins at birth

“Even major figures of religious history do not tell us that the fetus is a person. St. Augustine says he searched Scripture trying but failing to find out when in the procreative process personal life begins. But St. Thomas Aquinas knew. Aristotle told him — that it came at or near childbirth, after an earlier stage of having a nutritive soul (like plant life), which developed into an animal soul, at last receiving a rational soul. Thomas kept Aristotle’s biology, just adding that God himself infuses the soul into the body at some unspecified time during the last stage of this process. In other words, the fetus in its long pre-rational life is not a human being.”

That said, I’m not of a mind to blindly follow Aquinas or Aristotle just because they have good reputations for being earnest and wise. Because guess what? They don’t really “know” either. They’re guessing. That’s why, in a democracy in which we claim to believe that all people are created equal, it must be up to each individual to decide for themselves when or if souls are imbued and whether or not they want to terminate a pregnancy: not the church, or the state, or the nutjob next door.

Birth control is outlawed in the Bible, not abortion

“In 1930, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Casti Connubii, forbade all ways to prevent procreation, lumping them together with the condemnation of Onan, who prevents his widowed sister-in-law from childbirth by coitus interruptus. But the Vatican was embarrassed by scholars who noted that what was attacked there was a violation of the duty of Levirate marriage, to continue his brother’s line. The Vatican has never again tried to connect abortion with Scripture.”

It seems odd to me that the religious fanatics of the world aren’t marching around carrying picket signs saying birth control is evil, or urging men to marry their dead brothers’ wives. After all, those scenarios are actually mentioned and judged in the Bible, unlike abortion. The story of Onan castigates him for pulling out early to prevent pregnancy, which to my mind means men shouldn’t masturbate, either. Good luck with that!

Black Robes denouncing abortion are bullshitting and just trying to enslave women and prop up the patriarchy

Okay. Wills didn’t actually say that. But that’s what I conclude, given the fact that nowhere in the Bible is abortion outlawed. Furthermore, no one is told to give holy rites to their miscarriages, because no one in the Bible believes fetuses are fully formed human beings. And most modern-day Catholic clergy don’t believe it, either, despite their eagerness to denounce abortion and rally followers to march around heckling and picketing women who just want to control their lives.

When Wills’ wife was in danger of having a miscarriage, he asked his clergy how to handle that. “The church did not prescribe or recommend baptizing a miscarriage as if it were a full human being, nor giving it last rites, nor burying it in consecrated ground. My Catholic grandmother, Rose Collins, had three or four miscarriages, but told me she did not worry about how the discharges were disposed of — she had four living children to care for,” he wrote.

Given what I read recently by James Finn about German bishops supporting LGBTQ marriage and human rights in opposition to the pope and their American bishop counterparts, I have to conclude that the Black Robes in America are a unique brand of ugly.

They’re also out of touch, since almost 80% of Catholic lay people support marriage equality and 56% support abortion in all or most circumstances.

I chalk it up to patriarchal social systems, which Elle Beau ❇︎ points out is the source of a whole helluva lot of misery for the 99 percent of us who are on the bottom, and probably even the 1% on top who “win” the specious game of “I’m better than you are so therefore get to oppress you and tell you what to do.” One look at the shape of Jeff Bezo’s rocket tells you that he is not a secure man.

But I digress.

The point is, if you are suffering because you’re choosing to have an abortion and you believe the Lord wants you to keep your baby, you can stop now. Because the Lord, as reported by multiple people hundreds of years after events in which He supposedly appeared, simply hasn’t weighed in on the topic.

So it’s up to you to decide what’s best.

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