Wes Groggins didn’t mince words when he testified to a Missouri Senate committee Monday in support of legislation expanding legal protections for embryos.The executive director of Abolish Abortion Missouri invoked the Bible’s Old Testament in his justification that anyone who has an abortion or assi...
Actually God only demands a monetary fine if you cause a miscarriage in someone who didn’t want one (Exodus 21), and requires that you drink a potion that will give you a miscarriage if you got pregnant by someone who isn’t your husband (Numbers 5). If only those Republicans could read their own Bible, they would be very upset.
I believe the new testament also makes it pretty clear that it’s not up to the followers to dole out God’s justice. Something something turn the other cheek and something something let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Also pretty fucking arrogant to claim to speak on behalf of a diety. And pretty fucking stupid to believe anyone claiming such.
That it is a monetary fine is really crucial as one of two ways of establishing that the Mosaic law that Christians leverage for their legalism does not consider an unborn fetus a person.
First, as noted, the fine for a miscarriage is monetary only if no harm comes to the woman. If the woman is hurt, the Mosaic concept of reciprocal justice (eye for eye, etc), which was likely borrowed from the code of Hammurabi, kicks in. The death of an unborn fetus has no reciprocal punishment because that form of justice applies to people.
The second way of establishing that an unborn fetus is not considered a person in the hebrew bible is right in the second version of the creation story in Genesis 2:7
So here first, and in various other places in the bible (and in the broader Greco-Roman culture in which the nascent Christianity would later form), life began at first breath.
Yeah when I was a Christian I thought that all was pretty explicitly clear