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| Governor Kay Ivey speaks after signing bill, New York Times, May 16, page A14 |
How is it possible that the Alabama legislature has just passed a bill banning abortion--even in cases of rape--and the female governor signed it?
Surely this is just a nightmare, like dt winning the presidency. Surely we will wake up in the 21st century again.
What galls me most is that people are using religion to legislate government control of women's bodies.
You'll never find Jesus suggesting that Israel just needs a few more laws, better enforced, to solve the nation's problems.
Some naive Christians truly feel that the Bible opposes abortion. Of course, they have never found a single verse of the Holy Book that even mentions the subject, but that's not a problem.
The Bible mentions miscarriage twice:
Exodus 21:22 says that if a man injures a woman and she miscarries, he must pay a penalty to her husband. If she dies, he pays with his life.
Numbers 5 describes how an extremely jealous husband can go to a priest and they can both make her drink a poison; if she is unharmed, she is innocent. If "her thigh rots and her belly swells," she becomes "a curse among her people" and probably dies.
There's also a lovely case in Genesis 38 where a widow, Tamar, deliberately conceives a child out of wedlock to carry on her late husband's line. Her society's solution to a pregnant "harlot" is to kill both her and the baby--until she reveals that the baby's father is her father-in-law.
These horrendous tales have nothing to do with a woman and her doctor making a decision to end a pregnancy. They're all about protecting men and their rights. Then as now, the life of the woman is expendable.
Conclusion: the Bible does not oppose legal abortion as we understand it today.
Thus I'm calling on all Bible-believing opponents of abortion to stop pretending that their plan of a government-enforced ban on abortion is holier than my Bible-believing support of women's decisions.
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| New York Times, May 16, page A15 |
On the dark side, let's face it: there are also some men who truly want to control women and their reproduction. Women are a dangerous unknown if left to their own devices.
“I never know what you’re going to do next,” my father sometimes complained to my mother.
Racism is one of the keys to understanding men's need to control women's bodies. Just read Pem Davidson Buck on "Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege."
It's no coincidence that only two former slave-holding states, Alabama and Georgia, have banned or heavily restricted legal access to abortion. The men in these states know all about preserving white male privilege--and some of the women have been trained to go along with it.
For more information:
Chipping away at Roe v. Wade
Opposition to abortion in Alabama
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