When does life begin?

When you get your first credit card. We answer the cosmic questions here.

The main argument against abortion from the forced-birth crowd is that life begins at conception, which is why they view abortions — safe medical procedures that can save a woman’s life — as murder.

The theocrats among us tend to cling to one scripture in particular, a passage from Psalms 139:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

But here is where the Bible’s ambiguity works against them. Psalms is a series of songs that use fanciful imagery meant to bring the reader closer to the Holy. To take Psalms literally is as fraught an act as is taking the rest of the Bible literally — and as a baptized fundamentalist, I am something of a self-appointed authority on this.

Note the rest of the passage above. What does it mean that the writer’s frame was woven in the depths of the earth? We do not take that literally because that wouldn’t make sense, would it? The verse is meant to tell people that God is everywhere, not to serve as a scientific review of the gestation process.

Oddly, the religious right’s embrace of anti-abortion rhetoric was a bit of a historical accident, according to Randall Balmer, Dartmouth University professor of American religious history. I grew up in the Fourth & Forest (we tend to use addresses in the names of our churches) church of Christ in Joplin, Mo., and never once in all the Bible studies (and they were legion) was the word “abortion” mentioned. (Nor was “homosexuality,” “gay,” lesbian,” or “transgender,” which left little Biblical scholars like me free to make our own decisions, or so I assumed.) About that historical accident, from The Guardian:

It wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative,” which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the fetus,” that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.

Of course, arguing with an evangelical (especially a member of the subset of fundamentalists, like me) is a complicated matter. Bring a lunch. It could take a while and you just may go home empty-handed. The weird thing is that as a fundamentalist, I was trained to go to the source, and I was trained to appreciate facts — and, by that extension, science. Science tells us an embryo is precisely that, not a person, but a mass of cells. To say otherwise is to tell a person who is pregnant that she/he/they are little more than an upright incubator, and nothing in the Bible supports that notion, regardless of how far afield a believer wanders.

The decision to oppose abortion and cut off health care to people who need it is a cultural decision, not a biblical one, as it says in the linked story from The Conversation. And what did Jesus say about abortion? He said this:

Nothing. He said absolutely nothing. So brothers and sisters? Stop putting words in Jesus’ mouth, focus your energies on the people he suggested (the poor, the hungry, the widowed, the sick), and get out of the Judgment Seat on this one because that isn’t your seat.

(Of course, all this ignores that fact that we are not a theocracy, and we don’t divine our laws from a religious creed. That’s another post entirely.)

It’s enough to make you want to take a nap, but we haven’t the time for napping. There is simply too much to be done. Swords up.)