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ShazzieB

(20,251 posts)
15. There aren't any restrictions on abortion ANYWHERE in the Bible!
Sun Nov 12, 2023, 07:20 PM
Nov 2023

The Catholic prohibition against abortion (and birth control as well) is based on Church tradition, not anything that's in the Bible. The LDS Church also forbids abortion (with rare exceptions), but that's not based on the Bible, either.

Abortion used to be a non-issue for most Protestants until the Evangelicals decided to jump on the anti-abortion bandwagon and team up with Catholics and Evangelicals to promote making abortion laws as strict as possible.

This unholy coalition was limited in what it could do as long as Roe was the law of the land, but once that was struck down by SCOTUS, all hell proceeded to break loose, as we all know.

The one OT verse that the antiabortion religious right really loves to quote to support their position, Jeremiah 1:5, is not even about abortion:

Jeremiah 1:5
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

If you read this verse in context, it's actually about God telling a specific person (Jeremiah) how he appointed J. to be a prophet before he was even "formed ... in the womb," but Evangelicals interpret this to somehow mean that terminating ANY pregnancy is "against God's will" (yeah, I don't get it either).

This verse is used extensively by the religious right, on anti-abortion websites, etc. They've latched onto it hard, presumably because they haven't got anything else. You see, Evangelicals need something scriptural to base their anti-abortion beliefs on, because they believe whatever the Bible says about something is the final word on that particular thing. Since the Bible literally does NOT say what they want it to say about abortion, they had to gin something up somehow, and that verse in Jeremiah was the only thing they could find that even came close!

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