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Abortion

To the editor:

Ken Toth’s letter (Mining Gazette, 10/21) is another example where men want control over women’s bodies. However, men can’t even control their own bodies. On average, there are 430,000 victims of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States. There would be several million worldwide since many countries have a higher rate of rape. Also, consider the sexual abuse of young people by some Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, church youth leaders, and Boy Scout leaders.

If Christian fundamentalists want to use the Bible as a guide, they won’t get much help from its pages where it actually condones a test that may produce an abortion. In Numbers 5:11-31, there is the jealously test that a man can use to determine if his wife has been faithful. If he thinks his wife has been “defiled” by another man he will bring her to the priest who will apply a test whereby she will be required to drink water mixed with dust from the floor of the tabernacle. If she is guilty, her belly will swell, and her thigh will rot (she will abort the fetus).

Abortion was common in ancient Roman, Greek, and Biblical times. If abortion was a problem, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it?

The Noachian Flood, supposedly precipitated by the Bible god, that killed millions of men, women, and children, save Noah, his family, and selected animals, was genocide on a massive scale. According to various passages the Bible god ordered his chosen armies to invade neighboring countries and slaughter everyone including all the men, women and children. A significant proportion of the women would have been pregnant and their fetuses destroyed. Pregnant women were sometimes ordered to be eviscerated.

A miscarriage is a natural abortion. Approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. There are about 4.4 million confirmed pregnancies in the U.S. every year and around 1 million of those end in miscarriages. Assuming this rate for the rest of the world, there would be more that 20 million miscarriages worldwide in a year and the Bible god has done nothing to save the fetuses.

All this makes the god of the Bible the biggest abortionist ever.

For another view see: “Abortion: Is it Possible to be both Pro-life and Pro-Choice or The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers” by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.

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