Can you be a Christian and be pro-choice? Scripture please. I am a Christian and believe God’s word to be the guiding light to the Christian.
Here is how I responded:
Yes.
Although Christians who oppose abortion make reference to God knowing a person “before they were formed in the womb,” we really should keep the topic on abortion itself. The closest thing to an abortion in the Bible is actually a miscarriage, also medically known as a spontaneous abortion. Therefore, it makes sense to read how the Bible suggests handling miscarriages. Does the Bible treat miscarried fetuses the same way that it treats breathing human beings?
Passages from the Old Testament are the only ones that refer to miscarriages. There, the ancient Jews did not treat miscarried fetuses as human beings. They instead considered them simply the equivalent to a woman’s menstrual blood.
For example, Job 3:16 refers to “like a miscarriage which is discarded,” indicating that a miscarried fetus is not given a proper burial, as would have been necessary for any Jewish human being.
Miscarried fetuses were clearly meant to be forgotten. The passage in Ecclesiastes 6:3-4 refers to this: “If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, ‘Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity.’”
Exodus 21:22-25 refers to a woman who miscarries as a result of a assault on her body. If she is relatively unscathed, the only payment is money. If, on the other hand, if she is hurt in the process, the penalty is an equal injury inflicted upon the assailant:
“Suppose a pregnant woman suffers a miscarriage as the result of an injury caused by someone who is fighting. If she isn’t badly hurt, the one who injured her must pay whatever fine her husband demands and the judges approve. But if she is seriously injured, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, cut for cut, and bruise for bruise.”
Clearly here, the woman’s life is valued much more highly than the life of her fetus, which can be bought like a calf or a head of cabbage. The only true injury occurs when the woman herself is hurt.
These passages indicate that those who worshiped God in the Bible did not value fetuses as human beings. As such, it is entirely within the realm of Christian practice not to treat abortion as anything approaching murder. What’s more, the passage from Exodus, a book not generally known for its kindnesses toward women, indicates that the woman’s life is supremely more valued than that of an aborted fetus.
Given these passages, it is quite easy to show that allowing a woman a choice in her pregnancies falls entirely within the realm of Christian belief.
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Posted by gaytheistic
