I Hate South Dakota

I was going to submit this to the Daily because there has been a lot of debate about abortion in the OpEd section. I got too lazy to send it in. I need about 300 more words and I didn't want to spend any more time on it. I suppose I could present the idea that the bible also has verses that support Pro-Life, but that if there are verses that provide support for both sides of the argument then the bible must be "fallible" and cannot therefore be the divinely imparted truth of God. Meh, oh well.

The Bible doesn’t support the pro-life movement: if you want to argue for pro-life, find other ethical reasons, not religious. For a short discussion we can actually look at two very clear verses in the Bible that actually oppose the view that the soul is planted in the embryo at conception or that the fetus is a person: Leviticus 17:14 and Exodus 21:22 provide all the information we need.

Chapter 17 of Leviticus repeatedly states the importance of blood as it constitutes the life of a being. As medical doctors can tell us, the first piece of the circulatory system to develop is the heart which only starts beating in the fifth week of pregnancy. Based off this idea it might become very hard for a Christian who believes in the infallibility of the Bible, to argue that the soul is part of the embryo at conception and therefore should not be aborted. If God doesn’t even consider the embryo to be a living being until there is blood in it, then women have about 35 days from the time of conception to consider whether an abortion would be a wise choice for them or not.

But Exodus disagrees with Leviticus in a law whose circumstances are ridiculous, but shows us the value placed on an embryo or fetus (whether the blood is present or not). If a person harms a woman so that she miscarries that person is to monetarily pay a fine that the husband of the would-be-mother decides. If a fetus can be paid for it is clearly not considered to be equal in value to the woman who was carrying it, or any other human being. We are told in the following verse if any harm comes to the woman carrying the fetus it is to be repaid “eye for an eye.”