Just out of curiosity, if people have free will, how will prayer “touch” and change these people that are bent on getting abortions?
Why would you ask such a question? If they choose the path of sin, God won’t stop it (for now… but we’ll all be judged), but that doesn’t mean that we should accept it.
Ah, that is a quite good answer, I was thinking…one dimensionally on that when I asked.
She was spot-on.
I mean, that doesn’t really show kindness towards “enemies” per say, if anything it deters them more from wanting to turn to God right?
Did Jesus show total kindness to the Pharisees? “You brood of vipers…” When someone is going to kill innocent human life, you can bet that will wind people up.
It’s quite clear to me that a woman doesn’t have that right. She should NOT be able to toss a life away just because she thinks it’ll suffer, she’ll suffer, or she’ll have financial problems. In those times, conditions were worse, and pregnancy more risky, but they didn’t have that mindset. The Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians had laws which forbade abortion. Evidently, the Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. Anybody looking at what has been written knows that the Bible doesn’t condone abortion.
“Against Apion”, Flavius Josephus
“The law, moreover, enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing human kind.”
“Sibylline Oracles”, Section: Punishment of the Wicked, Book II
“345 And all who loosed the girdle of the maid for secret intercourse, and all who caused abortions, and all who their offspring cast unlawfully away;”
“The Special Laws”, Book III, Philo of Alexandria
“But if anyone has a contest with a woman who is pregnant, and strike her a blow on her belly, and she miscarry, if the child which was conceived within her is still unfashioned and unformed, he shall be punished by a fine, both for the assault which he committed and also because he has prevented nature, who was fashioning and preparing that most excellent of all creatures, a human being, from bringing him into existence. But if the child which was conceived had assumed a distinct shape in all its parts, having received all its proper connective and distinctive qualities, he shall die; for such a creature as that is a man, whom he has slain while still in the workshop of nature, who had not thought it as yet a proper time to produce him to the light, but had kept him like a statue lying in a sculptor’s workshop, requiring nothing more than to be released and sent out into the world.”
