Comments by "TheEvertw" (@TheEvertw) on "Abortion: A Founding American Tradition? - Into Context" video.

  1. Excellent video! The whole abortion debate is the typical red herring populists use to gain power. For Hitler, it was the Jewish scheme to oppress the German People. For the Republicans, it is Abortion that would earn the USA God's wrath. As appropriate, the whole issue has been surrounded by fear and emotion, referring to "baby killers" etc, and many un-truths -- like the ones you pointed out. However, even more fundamentally, it is not Biblical to condemn the practice of Abortion. There are only a few references to abortion in the Bible, the clearest is one where a pregnant woman is abused so as to loose the fetus. That is treated as an economic crime instead of homicide. Also waiting with the naming & circumcision ritual until the 8th day after birth indicated that a baby is not recognized as a person until that day. The Jewish People inferred from this that abortion is permitted under Biblical Law. So, people who claim that God's wrath is coming because of abortion, or denounce those in favour of a woman's right to choose as "evil demons" are on very shaky theological ground. One might even call it shifting sands.
    2
  2. The people of long ago were much smarter than we give them credit for. In fact, they were almost as smart as we are today. People have been studying gestation since long before the dawn of time. That abortions were likened to "coughing up blood" refers to its legal status, not that they thought the mechanisms were the same. The founding fathers will have been well aware that pregnancy starts with the insertion of a male part into the female's, not by some miracle where, hey presto, a baby appears. They would have seen feti and perhaps even embryo's in hunted and slaughtered animals. The people who wrote down that story about the bear cub will have known it to be nonsense, perhaps a funny story to tell children. In the case of abortion, "They didn't know any better" than to allow abortions does not hold water.
    1