Abortion and the Bible

There are a lot of folks who think the Bible is fully on one side or fully on the other. And I think we’re gonna make things a little more complicated.

Well, I mean, that’s the thing. Right. The whole problem with these either-or propositions and the Bible is that it never takes a position. It’s always a much more nuanced conversation.

And that’s for things that the Bible actually might even take an actual stance on; this issue, the Bible has no stance. The Bible has no stance.

Wait, what are we trying to do? What are you saying?

I’m saying that the Bible absolutely nowhere actually addresses the practice of abortion. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Just rocking and rolling, man. This one’s a big one, man. We’re tackling an issue.

This is a… This one is heavy.

And so content warning for those who are sensitive to this kind of thing. We are going to be talking about abortion.

That’s right. We’re diving in. We’re the… the whole show, one topic. And… and we’re gonna… We… we are not going to decide for once and for all which position you should take on abortion. I think that’s safe to say.

Absolutely.

But we are going to explore what the Bible has to say and we are going to dive into arguments on many sides of the issue and see if those arguments actually hold water. I think that’s… I think that’s a big part of the question.

And I think if anything, we’re going to muddy the waters a little bit. There are a lot of folks who think the Bible is fully on one side or fully on the other. And I think we’re going to make things a little more complicated.

Well, I mean, that’s the thing. Right. The whole problem with these either-or propositions and the Bible is that it never takes a position. It’s always a much more nuanced conversation. And anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to believe something.

And that’s for things that the Bible actually might even take an actual stance on; this issue, the Bible has no stance on.

Wait, what are we trying… What are you saying?

I’m saying that the Bible absolutely nowhere actually addresses the practice of abortion. However, some of the constituent… Some of the issues that are part of the debate around abortion are addressed to one degree or another in the Bible. But lest anyone think that we—at least I’m going to speak for myself here—am just in love with the idea of abortion because that is an accusation that sometimes gets thrown at me when I address these concepts. I agree with the principle that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. And I think that the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that the best way to reduce, to mitigate the occurrence of it is to provide increased access to women’s healthcare, to contraception, and a comprehensive sex education. And so for those of you who think I’m out here trying to increase the occurrence of abortion, the opposite is true.

Yeah, I think, I mean you are trying to increase all those other evil things like contraception and sexual education, etc., but absolutely, I think we can agree on all of that stuff. I think… I, you know, if you hate the idea of abortion, preventing the abortion or preventing an unwanted pregnancy is probably your first—should be your first line of defense.rst line of defense.

Exactly. That is the, that is the prerequisite for every elective abortion that has ever occurred. Yes, an unwanted pregnancy. So.

Right.

We can take a step back and say, “There’s your problem.”

Yeah. All right.

So, well, with that caveat in mind.

With a conclusion at the beginning, let’s, let’s, let’s dive in. There’s some things that I wanted to get to.

So let’s start with the, the idea of the Bible being against abortion. We’re going to make a pro-life biblical argument.

And I’ve seen this, I’ve researched it, I’ve looked around. I think that the biblical argument against abortion can be fairly, I think it’s fair to say that you can sum it up in this sort of very basic argument, which is: premise one, it’s morally wrong to kill a human. I think caveats abound for that biblically. But we’ll start with that. Premise two, a fetus is a human. And then like sort of a little half-premise that abortion is the killing of a fetus. And then so the, the conclusion is: therefore, it is morally wrong to kill a fetus. Does that seem like a fair sort of summation of, of the argument?

I, I think that is a fair summation of the argument that is made by those who would be arguing against the legality and the morality of abortion in general.

Right, right. So, so the support for premise one, which is just that it is morally wrong to kill a human, probably their strongest biblical support is that one of the Ten Commandments about “Thou shalt not kill.”

Right. Yeah, well, and “Thou shalt not kill” is not a great translation. So you have a couple different words in Hebrew that can be translated “kill” generically. However, what we have in Exodus 20 , verse 13 is none of those words. It’s a word… the root in Hebrew is ratsach, and this verbal root refers to illegal killing. So, premeditated murder. So this is something distinct from just the generic sense of “kill” that could be used in reference to murder, but also in reference to self-defense or to killing in battle or something like that.

Because we have lots of instances, biblical instances of condoned killing.

Absolutely.

So, so yeah, it’s not just “kill,” but yeah, wrongfully kill an innocent person. Is that a fair way of saying it?

And, and what is important to note here is that illegal killing or wrongful killing is relative to the society that you’re in. This is something that is socially curated and that is not an absolute line. It’s something that changes from society to society and even from time to time. So that, I think, qualification needs to be made that one part of the Bible may understand illegal killing to be a very different set of criteria than another part of the Bible. Much less than 21st-century United States of America. So we’re, we’re already muddying up the…

Waters a little bit. Back to that multivocality of the Bible.

Darn you, Bible.

Why can’t you be more perspicuous?

Okay, I’ll look up the word “perspicuous.”

The perspicuity of Scripture is one of the central dogmas of, of conservative Christianity. It means, it means clarity. Clear?

Okay, sure. Okay, wonderful. All right, so premise two is our big sticking point. Right? Because premise two is the claim that a fetus is a human.

Yeah, this, this is something that again, is, is relative.relative. Because I think when you look throughout history, the debate has not actually focused on is it a human being or not a human being. The debates have focused overwhelmingly on is it a person. Personhood is something that is distinct from a member of the species Homo sapiens.

Okay, let’s, let’s define them then.

Well, I’m not huge on definitions, but I will talk about, I will talk.

About how I forgot who I was talking to. Beg pardon.

I. But to my mind, there are folks who have, have attempted to define them or at least describe them in the past. And historically, the consensus view for as long as we can go back has been that personhood is rarely perceived to preexist. What has become known as the quickening, so that is when a fetus begins to move independently in the womb. So when you can start to feel movement in the womb. And this corresponds more or less with the, what we might call a fully formed fetus. So it is identifiable as a human as opposed to an embryo that may not be identifiable, where this embryo could still become twins, or this embryo’s sex has not yet been established. And so historically, when we look even at early Christianity, when we look at the 2000 years since then, when we look at other societies within Jewish cultures, within other, what we might label non-Western societies, very rarely does anyone say an embryo or a fetus that is not yet fully formed or that is not moving on its own has personhood or has the qualities of being something recognizable as a person.

And there are some societies that would push it off even, even further. Within Judaism, it tends to be closer to birth. For the most part. The, the fetus is considered a part of the woman’s thigh within some of the early rabbinic discussions. And it has something approximating personhood, but it doesn’t achieve full personhood until it’s actually born and draws a breath. There are some societies where the newborn has to survive for a month or two before it is now considered an actual person. And so this, there’s tons and tons of research on personhood through legal, through philosophical, through neuroscientific, through cognitive, through all different kinds of disciplines. There’s been research and debate on how do we establish when the person begins. And so folks who want to dodge that debate and say, no, it just matters when human life begins. That is the historical novelty, that is the revisionist take on things historically.

And it’s, and it’s also deeply problematic because if we’re going to call that collection of cells a human life, then, you know, also a collection of, you know, cancer, tumor cells could be considered. You know what I mean? Like, like there’s a whole, like, I’m, I’m not making that claim. I am just saying that when something is that, that, that is a problematic argument to make.

Yeah. And as we get into these biblical texts, we’re actually going to see that the Bible has a position on personhood over and against the threshold of human life.

Well, let me, let me start with a couple of scriptures, and these are scriptures that I have read people claim are indicative of personhood for a, a fetus in the womb, or, okay, you know, an entity in the womb. You’ve got Jeremiah 1 , verse 5 says, 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. Now I find this problematic because it talks about before you were even in the womb. So I don’t know that it’s actually talking about the, the actual womb inhabitant.

Yeah, the overwhelming consensus is that the Hebrew here is referring to what is occurring prior to actual conception.

Yeah.0] Dan McClellan: So from the start, this is talking about God’s foreknowledge of Jeremiah.

And so it’s not talking about once you began to be formed in the womb, it’s talking about even before that ever happened. I knew about you. And according to most Bible-based theologies, God has foreknowledge of all people and has since eternity. That does not mean that all people who will ever be born already have full legal and moral personhood. So from the start, this, this horse doesn’t even get out of the gate if we’re actually taking seriously what the text says.

Yeah. All right, well then that’s okay because that’s not the only thing we got.

Right.

We also have Psalms 139 and the other.

Sorry to interrupt. No, no, there’s one other thing about Jeremiah as well. This is actually speaking of Jeremiah as an exception to the rule. So we have this idea that God knew. Most of the prophetic calls happen when the prophet is already an adult. And it’s like, aha, you, I’m calling you. And so this is an exception. This is where God is saying, wasn’t even when you were an adult.

Wasn’t.

Wasn’t even when you were born, before you even started forming in the womb. I had already ordained you to be a prophet. So this is an exception to the rule. So if we’re trying to suggest that this attributes personhood to fetuses, then this would need to be the norm. But God knowing the people before they’re even formed in the womb is not established by Jeremiah 1:5 because Jeremiah 1:5 is saying, unlike every other person.

Right.

I knew you before you were even formed in the womb. So this is an exception, not the rule. So is not generalizable to all humans.

That’s fair.

Had to get that out.

So it could be that just aborting Jeremiah would be a problem. But everybody else is fine.

If we ignored that. Yeah, that Jeremiah was. That. This is talking about before Jeremiah was even conceived. Right.

All right, so I’m going to take us to Psalms 139 because now we’re in the womb. This is decidedly in the womb. We’re we’re in verse 13 and it says, for it was you who formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

The idea here being, at least when it’s made as an argument, as a pro-life argument, it’s that like, yeah, this was created by God in the womb.

What are your thoughts on that?

I. I think the. There are a lot of assumptions that are going on here. The fact that God kind of has. Is curating the development of the fetus is not an argument that the author of this text understood the fetus to be in possession of full legal and moral personhood. So ostensibly, according to most, again, most Bible-based theologies, God is the creator of all that is. And so God also would be the creator of a horse developing within the womb or a little seahorse developing in the womb. And I don’t know why I’m stuck on horses, but that’s where it went. And so if God is the creator of all things and has curation of, you know, the lilies of the field and the birds that fly in the air and oversees all of this, then this is in no way, shape or form an attribution of personhood, full legal and moral personhood to the entity being constructed within the womb.

That makes sense. Also. I mean, it says, you knit me together.ng, it is not a sweater until it is complete. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, you have a half-knit thing there. That is not going to— —we are not going to call that a person. I will jump to Luke because I think that this one is an interesting one. I have heard this one many times. And this one actually has a little bit of extra oomph to it. I think it is a— —slightly more fascinating take on— —on the personhood of womb occupants. And this one says— —this is Luke 41 —or no, sorry, Luke 1:41 and 42. It says: “And— —and it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost.”

So it seems to be indicating that not only was Elizabeth happy about Mary’s news, but also Elizabeth’s baby was pretty stoked, was jumping around for joy.

Yeah. Yeah. Which raises a bunch of questions.

And I will start by saying that even if we accepted this as indicating the personhood of John the Baptist, it is a post-quickening personhood. It is not John leaping prior to his ability to move within the womb. So it would not establish that this personhood extends all the way back to conception. But to get to that, we have to cross these questions, which I think are very problematic. One being, if this is supposed to be generalizable to all humanity—every fetus—is the suggestion really that, one, fetuses can recognize the voices of others outside the womb whom they have never heard before? And two, this means that the fetal John not only knows whose voice that is, but who they are carrying in their womb, and the mission and the identity of that entity being carried in that individual’s womb.

That is not an attribution of natural cognition to a fetus. That is supernatural cognition. Which brings up the point that earlier in this chapter, we have another identification of John as an exception to the rule because it says he will be filled with the Spirit even before he is born, which is foreshadowing this leaping in the womb, which obviously is a product of the machinations of the Spirit. And so basically, this text is stating the Spirit made John leap in the womb, and that is unlike every other human that has ever existed.

So there’s another way of looking at it too, which is just that Elizabeth was so excited that whatever was happening inside of her made—

Yeah, yeah. Some hormones or something— —Yeah— —galvanized this reaction. Yeah, that is another way to look at it. The notion that the author here is suggesting that full personhood is attributable to a fetus in the womb is not demonstrated. But even if we accepted the argument—which again is taking an exception to the rule and trying to turn it into the rule—it still would only establish personhood with a fully formed fetus that could move in the womb. In other words, a post-quickening personhood.ood. And so the notion that this extends that personhood back to the moment of conception is not in evidence at all.

All right, fine, fine. I’ll move on to another one. I’m going to go to Romans. I’m. I may be springing some of these on you. We discussed a few of these.

Yeah, we didn’t discuss Romans, so.

No, no, I’m gonna spring it on you. This is what I’m doing. I’m, I’m, I’m. This is. These are gotchas. I’m gonna get you.

All right.

Romans 9 is talking about Rebekah. It says something similar happened to Rebekah when she had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac, even before they had been born or done anything good or bad. So that God’s purpose of election might continue not by works, but by a call. She was told, the elder shall serve the younger. Again. I think we’re just back to maybe. And you know, we answered this a little bit when we were talking before that, that this is the, you know, the fact that God had an idea of the person before birth.

Doesn’t mean that that person has achieved personhood in the womb.

Right, right. It’s. It’s a demonstration of God’s foreknowledge, which for readers of the Bible today extends back to the eternities. And, and additionally, I think we. I don’t know that it’s in Romans, but in the actual text where it talks about these twins, it talks about them struggling within the womb. And that would be another example of obviously fully formed fetuses that are already capable of independent movement. So a post-quickening concept, if we accept the argument that there is personhood attributed to them, which I will argue is not a biblical view, although in this part of the New Testament, I think it’s probably closer. It’s more plausible than in the Hebrew Bible.

Okay. Are there any other scriptures that you want to go over in the, in the sort of pro-life argument side of things?

None that, none that I find convincing. I will say that there are a handful of scriptures, two or three that I think come the closest to a plausible argument, and they’re all in the New Testament. So they’re all talking about an early Christian perspective. They’re not direct evidence, but it’s plausible that they could reflect a general opposition to abortion. Not necessarily any abortion at any point in a pregnancy, but generically speaking, the references to, or the denigration, the condemnation of those who work what is sometimes translated as sorcery. It is translating the word pharmakeia in Greek, and this usually refers to using different kinds of potions and mixes and stuff to curse people or things like that, but could also refer to elixirs and things that could have been mixed together to function as abortifacients.

And so it is plausible that the authors of these texts that talk about pharmakeia and condemn pharmakeia considered abortifacients to be included within that general condemnation. So I think in all the Bible, the best case someone could make is that some New Testament authors considered abortifacients to be included in the pharmakeia, the sorcery that they were condemning. That does not, however, address the question of where they thought the threshold of personhood was.

Well, and also like the fact that it’s plausible that that could be what they’re talking about doesn’t mean that we know that it was, right?

It’s not positive evidence. It’s just a plausibility.

So, I mean, you can’t use that to say the Bible definitively is anti-abortion.

Correct.

Because we don’t even know if that’s what they were talking about. It’s possible. And then again, also, I think you made an interesting point. I think that there’s an interesting point here to be made about the fact that almost nothing in the Bible applies universally. You know, the rules that are laid down, even the, you know, even as we said, the, you know, the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not kill sounds definitive and yet is not, you know, is completely ignored in other parts of the Bible depending on, you know, who’s saying who should be killed and blah, blah, blah. Like nothing’s applied universally. Yes, almost nothing. So, so to say, even if we were to say that those authors in the New Testament were opposed to this form of, you know, abortion potion, that that would still not get us to the Bible is anti-abortion.

That would still not get us there. Even if we granted all of that stuff.

Right. That would require presupposing univocality and then presupposing that particular reading of that text when in fact we see a lot of conflicting perspectives on a lot of different moral and ethical questions in the Bible. And so what do we give priority? What do we marginalize and ignore? Well, that depends on how we want the Bible to speak to us. That depends on what we want to find in the Bible, which is usually a good sign that we are not trying to understand the Bible. We are trying to leverage the Bible as an authoritative text, as a proof text for our dogmas and our ideologies, which largely are rooted in our own contemporary identity politics and the ethics we’ve been conditioned to accept and to assert.

Which is an interesting point. I don’t want to get too into the weeds about this, but it is, like, useful to note that it was only very recently in like our culture’s history in, you know, especially American culture’s history that the majority of Christians became anti-abortion.

Up until the, you know, the late 70s, early 80s, the vast majority of non-Catholic Christians were actually fine with abortion.

I, I would say they were, they weren’t, they weren’t jazzed about it, but they, they were, they were of the opinion that I expressed at the beginning of this episode that it should be safe, legal and rare. And so for instance, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention when Roe v. Wade was decided, said, hey, we’re fine with this. This is, this decision is between a woman and her doctor and God and we’re going to stay out of it. And there were anti-abortion activists within evangelicalism, but the biggest players and the consensus view within evangelicalism was we’re okay with this until we had folks like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell put their heads together and say we need to galvanize a Religious Right. We need to get agents of conservative Christianity into the government. And this was primarily because they wanted to protect their universities that they did not want to admit black students to, from being forced into that.

And so thus began this campaign of turning abortion into a central evangelical identity marker. Yeah, and so that, yeah, like you said, that was late 70s, early 80s is when the balance shifted and that took over as central identity marker for evangelicalism.

Indeed. So there you go. It’s not like it was even, you know, a lot of people have this feeling like it was all it was ever thus and thus it would ever be. But that’s not at all the case.

Yeah. And in fact, I think even within, even among Catholics, it wasn’t until the 19th century that an opposition to pre-quickening abortion became salient and conspicuous. Prior to that, for the 1900 years before that, the consensus view within Christianity was precisely that it was at the moment where the fetus is fully formed, where it is recognizably human, where it is moving on its own accord, that abortion then becomes a problem or murder or something like that.urder or something like that.

Interesting.

So personhood throughout the overwhelming majority of the history of Christianity has been viewed as something achieved at some point within the gestational period and not at the moment of conception. Although there are exceptions and we’ll get to those later.

Well, or as you say, sometimes a little bit after birth. Yes, yes, so there’s also that possibility. Well, okay, so there we have the pro-life argument. It doesn’t seem too strong to make a biblical pro-life argument.

Yeah, I think at most you could say within the New Testament, it seems like there was a belief that personhood was achieved around the quickening. And so they were most likely opposed to abortion at that time. And we actually have a couple of texts, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, some other 2nd-century Christian texts that are firmly opposed to abortion, and they seem to be quite popular, quite widespread, and explicitly address it, although without discussing how far back personhood goes. So it seems likely that the earliest Christians were opposed to abortion. And so that’s why it’s more plausible that this is the position within the New Testament. But yeah, the Bible itself nowhere directly addresses it.

Okay. All right, well, I’m gonna go the opposite route now and I’m going to try to sum up some of the arguments on the other side where people are saying the Bible doesn’t support a pro-life position.

And we’ll start, I think, with the one that you and I have, have sort of, I’m not going to say clashed over, but you had to sort of put me in my place about it a little bit. And, and I’m going to let you do it again now because my humiliation is everyone’s entertainment. Because I have used Numbers 5 as an example. I thought of when the Bible actually has an explicit abortion.

And I don’t think that it does. I’ve reread it in multiple translations and I think I was wrong about that. But I’ve seen plenty of people who are closer to my side of the argument making this same argument. So let me present it and then you can tell me why I was an idiot. So the idea is that there is a question which is if we don’t know, there’s a woman and her husband suspects that she has been unfaithful, suspects that she has had an affair with another man, and takes her to the priest. And this is, and there is basically a big ritual that is to be done to determine whether or not she was faithful, was pure, was, whatever you want to say.

Right.

And it is basic. So this is Numbers 5 . It starts in sort of verse 11 and goes down through stuff. But basically the ritual is that, you know, there’s an offering, there’s a grain offering, and then the woman has to drink some bitter water. And then there’s some tricky language. It says, and when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass that if she be defiled and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her and become bitter. And her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot, and the woman shall be a curse among her people. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive seed. Now, I and many others have read that to mean that if she were pregnant from the other guy, you know, her thigh shall rot.

I. The thigh thing, you’ll.

You explained it earlier. You’ll have to re.

Explain it.

It’s very confusing to me. But I read that as she would miscarry or, you know, she would.590] Dan Beecher: then basically this ritual will have caused an abortion.

Yeah, that is… It’s not an uncommon reading, like the passage we’re going to get to a little later in Exodus. The reading I’m going to support is overwhelmingly the consensus view here. I don’t think there’s a consensus. I think it’s… It’s more or less split. Now, the… The issue comes down to the two verbs that are used here. “Her belly shall swell.” In the KJV. This verb is tsava in Hebrew: tsadi, bet, he. And it only occurs in a couple of places. Actually… I think it only occurs twice. Once in verse 27 and once in verse 22. And we’re not exactly sure what it means. There’s an Arabic cognate, we think, that means to grow or to sprout. And so we have the KJV render “swell,” but some people would suggest “sprout.”

We’re thinking of a flower like sprouting, blooming. Well, maybe this is the baby coming out. If we kind of go that conceptual route, it could also mean it distends, swells up, which could just be a disfiguration. So we don’t really have a way to know which one of these conceptual routes we should take. And then the next one, it says, “her thigh will”—what is it? “shall rot”— in the King James Version, the verbal root there is nafal, which means “to fall.” And so “her thigh will fall,” her thigh will droop, sag, something like that. Again, we could take this in the direction of disfiguration, or we could take it in the direction of “the fetus will fall out.” Now, there’s an argument to make for the kind of miscarriage or abortion reading to this. However, I don’t think it fits within the broader context, because when we look at other literature to see if language like this, imagery like this is being used, it’s primarily being used in places to reflect a curse of infertility, where genitals are disfigured and deformed in order to be a sign of infertility.

And I think one of the strongest indicators that that is the case here is that the very next verse says, and I’ll read from the King James Version, just because we’re in that groove: “And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive seed.” And this is unambiguously pointing into the future. She has not conceived here. She will conceive, which I think indicates that whatever has precipitated this ritual, this ordeal, it is not a pregnancy. If it were a pregnancy, then it would just say, “and she’ll have a healthy baby.” But no, it’s saying she will conceive, or she will be blessed with fertility. And so I think the imagery and the context suggests there is suspicion of infidelity, and either she’s going to be cursed or even killed with this kind of curse of disfigurement, of infertility, or if she’s innocent, she would be blessed with fertility.

And I think one of the indications that that’s how this text was understood by the earliest readers is we see this being debated—this ordeal—by early rabbis who were arguing whether or not it would be appropriate to submit a pregnant woman to this ordeal. In other words, they don’t understand the text to be presupposing a pregnancy, and they are wondering, “Hey, if that infidelity resulted in a pregnancy, if that is what raised the suspicions, is that appropriate?” And I think ultimately they decided it would be appropriate. But, yeah, if a woman was pregnant and they went through this, none of this process would actually result in a forced miscarriage or an abortion. This is sympathetic magic, for lack of a better word. We’re going to write a curse and scrape it into some water, and you’re going to drink the water.the water. That’s not an actual abortifacient. But, yes, if this were actually to take place and this curse were actually to occur, it would result in

yeah, the death of any fetus that was present. So in that sense, there is a you could say if a pregnant woman were to participate, yes, that would abort the child. So if you want to go that route, you could argue that that yeah, it’s it would abort any fetus that was present. Although I am not a huge fan of going this route for another reason, and that is that if this were or if this were to result in the death of a fetus, it would be against the will and the agency of the woman involved. This is something that is forced upon a woman, not something that she is engaging in voluntarily. And so where the pregnant woman’s agency is completely ignored, I don’t think it is rhetorically helpful to appeal to this story as a way to suggest that

that abortion was an option for women in the ancient world.

Listen, if we’re going to be looking, if we have to only allow for scripture that actually supports the agency of women, we’re going to be looking for a minute.

Don’t hold your breath. Yeah, absolutely.

But I do so, I mean, I’m gonna just say you took me away from this as being an argument and then you put me back into it. So I’m gonna say that I’m gonna say that this one’s a possible argument.

Possible. Okay. Although I will say where the agency of women is championed in the Bible, it usually has to do with her sexual agency.

Okay. And that’s an interesting point.

Her deployment of her sexual agency to get what she needs within a system that is stacked against her.

Right. Although you say that, I’m about to take us to Exodus, where women and agency are not going to be a part of this, a strong part of this. Next question.

Not at all.

So Exodus 21 , we’re in Exodus. We’re in the part of Exodus that is just rules about everything.

I mean, we are talking rules about what happens who gets what if somebody’s ox falls in a hole.

It’s granular about a lot of things.

Very specific. If an ox gets out of its pen and gores somebody, and the owner has been warned before about letting his ox get out of his pen to gore people, you kill the owner. Yeah, it’s very specific.

It’s, and oddly so, like, not in the way, like yeah, okay, that’s fine. But I think we can glean some interesting stuff from some of these things. And we’re talking specifically now about two different sort of scenarios, both in which, strangely, men are fighting and then a woman is injured.

Which is like, what is happening?

Yeah. I don’t know.

Like, how often did women just get caught up in the middle of a man fight and then get injured or whatever?

And this is not the only law that addresses what happens if two men are fighting and a woman gets involved.

Right. Yes.

The other one is where if two men are fighting and one of the men’s wives grabs the other guy by the genitals,

then she gets her hand cut off.2:47.140] Dan Beecher: Don’t dive in and grab your husband’s opponent’s junk. And there’s a, there’s a, there’s a comedian on TikTok who, who shared this. This passage. And I… I’m sorry, I forget the creator’s name, but I responded to it. But his presentation of the story is chef’s kiss. It is so funny. However, in Exodus 21:22-25 , if you want to go all the way to the end of the legislation it’s talking about, two men are fighting and they accidentally injure a pregnant woman. There are two outcomes for which we have penalties prescribed. One of the outcomes is if this causes the woman to miscarry. And the fine is that the husband imposes a fine on the other gentleman.

Right.

Who’s not a gentleman, obviously. And the other outcome that is addressed is if the injury causes the death of the pregnant woman, in which case the text says, you will give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. So this is what’s known as talionic justice. Whatever happened to the victim, you do the same to the perpetrator. And so this is the death penalty. And there have been attempts to try to reread these two scenarios as referring to what happens to the fetus. Where the first scenario is this hits the pregnant woman and causes her to give premature birth. But… And the Hebrew is a little cryptic here, it says, and there will not be harm. Ason is the word in Hebrew. And so the text literally in Hebrew says two men are fighting and they hit the woman.

The pregnant woman and her children go out, and no harm occurs. And so this is sometimes interpreted to refer to premature birth, where no harm actually comes to the prematurely born child. And then the other scenario is if the prematurely born child actually passes away. And so this would, I would suggest, be an awful reading of this text for a couple different reasons. The first is that if this causes the premature birth of the child, but no further harm comes to the child, there’s no material loss. And that would violate the entire logic of the legislation of the Hebrew Bible, which imposes fines where there is material loss. So there would be no penalty at all if two men caused a woman to give premature birth to a healthy child. So that’s nonsensical. And the… the…

And people argue that… Well, the verbal root here, yatsa, which means to go out, to depart, that is used to refer to natural birth. And yes, it can be used to refer to natural birth. I don’t know that it’s used to refer to premature birth anywhere. But it can also be used to refer to a miscarriage. And so that’s not determinative. Noting that we have this verbal root, yatsa, and also the word for child there is in the plural, which I suggest may indicate this is an abstract plural. And so we’re not actually referring to… It’s not like this law only applies to twins. I’m suggesting this is the… You can have… You can use the plural to take a noun and render it an abstraction. And so her pregnancy leaves her. In other words, she loses her child. So that would be a perfectly legitimate reading of that plural form of that noun. So the other reason that this is clearly a wrong interpretation of this passage is that we know exactly where the author of the Covenant Code, Exodus 21 , got this law from, because they’re taking most of their laws from the Laws of Hammurabi.aws from the Laws of Hammurabi.

I think you mean directly from the mouth of God. Okay, you go ahead and tell me about.

That’s fine. So the Laws of Hammurabi, coming from about a thousand years before the Covenant Code was written there. There’s a wonderful book by a scholar, a former Latter-day Saint scholar named David Wright, called Inventing God’s Law, where he demonstrates, I think, convincingly, that the Covenant Code is borrowing directly from the Laws of Hammurabi, showing that the content, even the order that the content is going in, matches the way it’s presented in the Laws of Hammurabi. And the Laws of Hammurabi have a section for what to do should a. A female citizen who is pregnant be injured by a man and either lose her pregnancy or be killed herself? And this matches laws that we find in Middle Assyrian Laws and. And other ancient Southwest Asian law codes that address the exact same scenario. What happens when a man injures a pregnant woman and she either miscarries or is killed?

It’s always the same two scenarios. And so we have no grounds to say Exodus 21 is presenting two entirely different scenarios. And so I would say that this is a pretty cut and dry situation where it’s referring to the loss of a fetus as property loss.

Right? This is not a person, because if it were a person, then we’d be back to life for life, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, but instead it’s just a fee. It is a monetary reimbursement required.

So. And the husband is considered the owner of this property, and therefore he is the one who assesses the fine. And so this is a pretty clear indication that at least in this period and the composition of the Covenant Code, a fetus was not considered to be a full person. It was considered closer to property than to a person. And I think the argument is pretty strong that this obtains throughout the entire pregnancy. In other words, the quickening was not the achievement of full personhood. It was birth that was considered the threshold of personhood, at least in this period.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and there are multiple scriptures that do talk about the breathing of life, the breath being the moment of personhood, or at least I’ve heard that argument being made.

Yeah. So if we go to Genesis 2:7 , we have the idea that God formed the man and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and he became a living soul. What’s funny is that there are two words that are frequently translated life. Well, there are three. Chayim is one kind of the standard word for life. But we also have nefesh and ruach. And both of those actually mean breath. So nefesh is sometimes translated soul. There’s a whole debate to be had about that. And there’s a great book by Richard Steiner, called Disembodied Souls, that talks about the different types of nefesh concepts in the Hebrew Bible. But nefesh means neck or breath. And then ruach can mean wind, can mean spirit, can mean breath. And it is also used as a euphemism for life.

We have references in the flood story and elsewhere to God killing everything that breathes, everything that draws breath. And so it never says, hey, if it doesn’t have breath, it’s not a person. But throughout the entire Hebrew Bible, breath is treated as the very essence of life. And so this is why within Judaism, within the majority streams of Judaism, personhood is considered to be achieved at the drawing of the first breath. And I would suggest that that accords with what we see in Exodus 21 . And so it’s not that the Bible explicitly says this.0:51:23.340] Dan McClellan: I mean, Genesis 2:7 , just like we can’t say that. Well, this is an exception over here with John the Baptist in the womb. Genesis 2:7 is not establishing that this can be generalized to all humanity, but it points in the direction of the conceptualization of life as requiring breath.

And so within the Hebrew Bible, I would suggest that that is their threshold. Threshold for personhood.

There’s another. Okay, so I feel like that’s a pretty strong argument not for pro-choice, but against the idea that it is clear that the Bible is pro-life. Yeah, I think that as, if we take the Bible as a whole especially, I think it’s pretty clear that you can’t make the argument that the Bible is definitively anti-abortion.

Yeah, at best you can say a minority of the passages in the Bible are plausibly opposed to abortion at some period within a pregnancy. And even that portion that could plausibly be argued to be taking that position is taking that position not because God said so, but because they’re actually adopting Greek philosophical frameworks. Because this was actually a debate going on among Greek philosophers when personhood started. And so for Plato you have this idea that personhood, the person, begins at conception. For I think it’s Pythagoras, the idea is that no, the person does not start until birth. And then Aristotle was right in the middle saying, no, the person starts at the quickening or at the period of the fully formed fetus where it is recognizably a human.

And so these debates were going on at the time and the Aristotelian position kind of takes the lead within early Christianity. And you have early Christians debating this, saying, well, if it’s before the quickening, it’s ethically wrong, but it’s not murder. If it’s after the quickening, it’s murder. You have others saying it’s not wrong at all if it happens before the quickening, because this is nothing remotely approximating a person. And then once you have the quickening, it’s murder. You have others saying it’s not murder until you actually have birth. But a lot of this is responding to Greco-Roman practices associated with abortion, particularly as a result of sex work and also exposure, which was a practice that was waning in popularity once you get into the Christian period. But it was something that was still conventionally associated with the excesses of the Greco-Roman world. So Christianity was in large part pushing back against what it saw as inappropriate practices within the Greco-Roman world.

And you know, people took different stances depending on which philosophical framework they thought made more sense to them.

Well, all I can say is thank goodness we live in the modern era when the question of when a person achieves personhood is solved. And everything’s easy now. And we’ve cracked the code and we know exactly when personhood starts. I do want to mention. I want to mention one thing that I have never heard discussed and, I mean, I’m springing this on you too. You may not have an answer, and that’s okay. But one of the things that is most salient to me about the whole question of abortion, at least from a legalistic standpoint, is that none of what we’ve discussed so far addresses the woman’s bodily autonomy question at all. The question of whether a woman or, sorry, a pregnant person can be made to support another life at hazard to her own life, at risk to her own life.

And I think that that is one of the most salient legal questions that we have to answer. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re not comfortable saying that someone could be forced to donate a kidney to save another person’s life, then you shouldn’t be tremendously comfortable saying that a woman or a pregnant person should be forced to support a life using her own body at hazard to her own health.y at hazard to her own health.

Well, and a more extreme example is the fact that it is totally illegal to take an organ out of a deceased body, even if it is the only possible way to save a life. A dead person in our country has more bodily autonomy than women do.

Yeah, in.

Under certain, under certain rules, yes. And so, but the bodily autonomy of women in the Bible is not great. Not salient. Yeah, she was, she was in many ways. She had a degree of personhood, a higher degree of personhood than a slave, a lesser degree of personhood than obviously a male citizen, but was also to a large degree considered property. So it’s. These aren’t black and white categories. There was overlap. There was bleeding in and out of these categories. There was integration. So a woman could both have personhood and also be considered somewhat property.

But bodily autonomy.

Yeah, that wasn’t really considered by the authors of the Bible.

Well, there you have it. I, I gotta say, Dan, I don’t think the Bible’s tremendously useful for this conversation.

No, no. Anyone who appeals to the Bible as the trump card in this debate does not understand either the Bible or the debate. So.

Well, as promised, I don’t think that we’ve actually solved anything other than, other than saying, you know, if you’re appealing to the Bible, cut it out. It’s not, you got nothing. Yeah, your, your appeal is not meaningful.

Yeah. And we don’t. We’re not here to solve stuff. We’re here to muddy the water and upset people. So.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s if we’ve done that, mission accomplished.

Well, there you go. I think you and I are going to have a little more discussion about this in the patrons-only content. That’ll be fun. So if you are a patron, tune in for that. If you’re not a patron, you can go ahead and become one and then you’ll get all the patrons-only content and you know, you’ll be. You’ll have the privilege of knowing that you’re helping the show go. To do so, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma if you want to reach out to us, you can find us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. And Dan, thanks so much for another interesting show.

Dan, thank you. I appreciate it and I hope everybody has a wonderful week.

See you next week. Goodbye.

Bye, everybody.

Abortion and the Bible

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology