Pro choice in the bible?

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The Bible stands firmly against abortion. Pretty much every aspect of that meme is factually wrong. With regard to Genesis 2, life didn’t begin with birth, man was created by the hand of God. Though God did breath life into man, this was a special case not involving birth. We don’t argue the special case for all cases. What we see here is not breath being the determining factor of someone being alive, but the creative act of God and his will making the man to be alive. Psalm 139 demonstrates to us that the normative case is that God has created us and knows us even in the womb and decrees for us the days of our lives even before we are born. With regard to fetuses not being persons this person completely ignores the fact that in Exodus 21:22-25 a person who strikes a woman causing death of the child is put to death for murder. If the child is damaged, then the same punishment that is meted out for assault on an adult is applied to the offender. With regard to Numbers, the entire passage does not describe abortion, but a ritual wherein God is expected to judge the honesty of the woman and she bear a curse in herself. At no point is the child aborted in this passage. The warnings provided in Deuteronomy does not negate the fact that life is sacred, but warns the Israelites that their wickedness will result in their loss of protection from the wickedness of others. This is a description of a curse, not a prescription to engage in wicked behavior. With regard to the accounts in the Kings and prophets, the passages are likewise descriptive of what will come to be at the hands of wicked peoples who do not respect God’s law as Israel had failed to do, not prescriptive. In other words God does not tell the Israelites to do likewise.

All that being said, the Bible repeated says that for anyone taking the life of another, their life will be required of them. The prescriptive laws of God say that we shall not kill. Even the child in utero is protected under Israelite laws as is shown in Exodus 21. And again, Psalm 139 tells us that even before birth, God has created us for his purpose. Our lives are not our own, neither is the life of someone else.
 
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Half of those are completely wrong, the rest are extreme stretches. In most of those cases where there’s some connection, it’s about God or a prophet stating punishment is inbound for the Israelites and their betrayals of God. I fail to see how this proves the Bible is pro-choice at all. Just more heretic hogwash to try confusing people.
 
So first remember anyone can take words from any book or person and twist them to mean anything. One needs to view the faith in its fullness and tradition. Now to refute this stuff one cant do that (sadly).
But here is an easy part of the life of Mary and Jesus. During the visitation, Mary visits Elizabeth and John the Baptist jumps for Joy in the womb. And in current life a pregnant woman a lot of the time can fill the unborn baby moving. Which is a sign of life.
 
You seem to have access to a computer, why not just read and when you come across a word that you don’t know look it up?

Another good tool for that is the Kindle reader; which can look up the words for you.

I’d not worry about people who just LOVE to take out individual Bible verses. Sure, you can do that. No problem. If they want to open that door we can look at the context of the verse; the traditional understanding for thousands of years, and the culture in which the writers lived. If I didn’t consider it a stupid, immoral thing to do I’d spend some time on the heroes of the pro choice movement and take their words out of context to spit back at them. Fun game.
 
Oh, fun thing on the Numbers 5 reference. If you actually read it, what actually happens? The woman drinks water with a little dust and ink mixed into it. It’s nothing that would actually cause a problem with a healthy pregnancy, but it makes the husband feel better if he’s worried that the baby isn’t his. Whether or not the curse part works is the supernatural part that’s up to God whether to do anything about it— if you ran into this ceremony in any other culture, you’d just write it off as superstition.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing.

“‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curseenter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
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“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”

“‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter her. The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before the Lord and bring it to the altar. The priest is then to take a handful of the grain offering as a memorial offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the woman drink the water. If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.
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I think it’s more supposed to scare women into not having sex outside marriage than it is actually going to cause infertility. It shows the power God has over all things, including her uterus, and that God won’t hesitate to punish infidelity.
 
HAHAHHAAAA … that’s called “interpreting the Bible by yourself”. No, CATHOLIC bibles do not approve of abortion.

They are twisting Old Testament stories where jealous kings murdered all the male babies in the land so a messiah could never replace them.

The atheists on social media are getting better at memes!! But
we are smarter and faster bc WE have CHRIST on our side.

Good luck Buddy!
 
Rosie11 said:
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Well, in general, I agree with everyone’s answers. There are two of these verses which I can see how they would be troublesome to respond to.

Gen 21. It doesn’t say that the death of the fetus will result in the death penalty to the man who caused it. But, it does not say that the man who caused it, did it intentionally. In other words, he did not intentionally kill the child in the womb. This was an accidental death due to the injury to the woman.

So, I don’t see how that can be used to claim that the Bible is somehow supportive of abortion.

This next one, however, is more troublesome. Numbers 5:11-31. Here, a jealous man is instructed to send his wife to a priest, who will command the woman to drink holy water mixed with dirt. The end result of this will be, that if the woman is guilty, her womb will drop.

Quote:

Catholic versions say:

Numbers 5: 22 May this water, then, that brings a curse, enter your bowels to make your belly swell and your uterus fall!” And the woman shall say, “Amen, amen!”[

One Protestant version says:

New International Version
May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries." "'Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”

So, how do we respond to that one?
 

Question:​

How does one refute the assertion that Numbers 5:11-31 means that abortion is okay?

Answer:​

A little background on Numbers 5:11-31 is in order, because this is a rather unusual passage. It is a situation in which a husband suspects his wife is an adulterer but has no evidence. He could then bring her before a religious tribunal, and she would drink a concoction that would either prove or disprove the charge of adultery. There are no other such trial/ordeals in the Old Testament. While there is the occasional drawing of lots to determine guilt, this is the only time that someone must undergo some kind of trial where the results are believed to reveal the truth.

Such practices were more common among non-Jews in the ancient Middle East. Many scholars think that this practice was adopted to prevent women from becoming victims of jealous husbands and misogynist judges. We need to remember that ancient Judaism had a deep distrust of human judgment and human justice. In situations where the ancient Jews felt a judgment must be rendered and it did not have sufficient “checks and balances” on human prejudices, they would turn to ways of perceiving divine judgment.

To condemn someone for adultery, there had to be two witnesses, and the perpetrators had to have been warned in advance. But situations in which a husband was “sure” that his wife had committed adultery but could not prove it created such a strain on the marriage and the local community that they felt something had to be done to bring closure and resolution to the matter. Given the Jewish distrust of human notions of judgment and justice, having a group of men make the judgment probably seemed like a bad idea to them. It appears that they adopted, in this one instance, a sort of ordeal/test for the wife to go through if she insisted on her innocence.

Given that it’s generally assumed that the concoction is not actually a threat to health, the only way a bad reaction would occur would be because of psychological reaction due to a guilty conscience.
 
As strange as this matter is in the Old Testament, it also has no real attestation from the biblical period. It’s never mentioned again in the Bible, and it’s mentioned by only a few historical figures and writings—but always as something that they have heard about, never about an actual case they witnessed. Some of the recollections of the procedure also differ from the biblical method. And the Mishnah states the practice was stopped. So there is some question of whether this was ever actually used.

But it is in the Bible, so what would happen if she was guilty? Well, that depends on your translation. Some translations state that if she is guilty her “uterus will fail” or “shrink,” which would mean that she would become infertile. A few translations do translate that if guilty she will “miscarry,” but this is a distinct minority of translations.

It is important to note that the “reward” for innocence is that she will be able to conceive children, which seems to imply that even if she was infertile she would no longer be. This would also seem to imply that miscarriage is not what is being referred to as divine punishment but rather infertility.
 
Por choice is in hte Bible among those who were sacrificing their children to Moloch.
 
1ke said:
Genesis 2:7 — then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul

What this actually says is that life begins with the infusion of the soul into the body, which happens at conception.

Oops, not replying to @Joe_5859 but adding more to what he was saying
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That.

And seeing having breath is also linked to being able to speak, it is saying that God gave man the ability to speak. With the ability to speak comes the ability to formulate and share thoughts and hence become a rational being.
 
1ke said:
And yet, you post here asking for explanations of every ridiculous meme found on the internet. Have you stopped to consider that your lack of education, and ability to read the bible critically, is directly correlated to your inability to refute the most ridiculous memes and random postings on Facebook that you come across?
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If I may take the liberty of saying so, this is unfair towards Rosie.

Rosie’s posts don’t come across to me as being those of a totally uneducated person. I don’t know how much education she had but there are other ways to learn than at school. Whatever it is that she did, she comes across as thoughtful and puts her points well.

I’m sure we all sometimes get a meme or a post that raises certain questions, that make us think something is not OK. Surely then it is Ok to take those questions to this forum. If we want to get involved, we should do so in a supportive manner and help debunk or analyze the matter at hand rather than waving the person off telling them to do their own homework.
 
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Blimp said:
Pause for a moment.
I was always amazed how stupid ’pro choice’ term sound.

Like we all have choice, we are not some slaves chained to the wall in some dungeon. If you really want to kill some babies, go on.

But just call it propely: pro murder
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Good point.

God has given us the ability to chose. We can choose between good and evil in everything we do, every day.

Being pro life is also pro choice. It is pro the right choice.
 
“I” would post this, then disappear and pray for them. If you engage the ignorant, they will only drag you down to their level, then defeat you with experience.
2 Peter 3:16 Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)
“…speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”
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Let’s unwind this. Unfortunately @KylePlantEmoji didn’t specify which translation of the bible he was using, which matters because different translations can have different meanings.

Genesis 2:7 - This states that the life of Adam, one of the two humans who was never in the womb, began with his first breath. Adam was formed rather than born, and was an adult from the beginning.

Exodus 21:22-25 - This illustrates what I mean about translations. This verse talks about the law when two men are fighting and one hurts a pregnant woman and as a result cause problems. Some versions say “miscarriage”, while others say “so that her child come out” which can refer to a premature birth.

Numbers 5:11-31 - This verse describes a ritual carried out by the priest to determine if a woman has committed adultery. During the ritual the woman drinks a mixture of water and dust, which will cause a reaction in her womb and uterus if she is guilty. Nowhere does it say that the woman must be pregnant in order to take this test, or that it will adversely affect a child she is pregnant with if she does.

Deuteronomy 28:18-24 - The only way he could have gotten “life is not sacred” from this is by a bad-faith reading. This verse is about how God will punish the community of Israel if they break the old covenant, not permission for humans to kill each other when convenient.

2 Kings 8:12 - This verse doesn’t describe an Israelite King doing this, but rather describes Elisha weeping because he fears Hazael will do this to Israel after becoming King of Syria. It’s very clearly presented as a bad thing done by a patricidal villain.

2 Kings 15:16 - King Menahem is clearly a villain. Literally two lines later it states “he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord”. Using the argument that God approves of something because a King of Israel did it is flawed because God said from the beginning that the Kings of Israel would be wicked and most of them were.

Hosea 9:10-16 - This isn’t God directly speaking. Rather it is someone else warning that God will punish Israel for it’s sins by refusing to protect it from it’s enemies.

Hosea 13:16 - The same as above, but for Samaria instead.

…

Kyle not only misreads the scripture verses he quoted, but also ignored the pro-life verses commonly quoted. He also ignored the Didache, which was written by the apostles themselves and includes the line " you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten". Likewise pretty much every Church Father and Saint who wrote about abortion condemned it.
 
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It looks more like a religious ritual that invokes God’s intervention to give up that baby than a medical abortion.
Anyway the Bible shows it was a matter to decided by priests. I don’t think there are any Kohanim at hospitals and abortion clinics, praise the Lord!
Besides, our Christian priests have decided to rule against abortion completely and what this woman has presented from the Bible only proves again that the Church is only authority to rule about abortion and She has ruled on it.
 
The Biblical position on abortion is absolutely clear.

The 5th Commandment: “You shall not kill.”
 
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