Abortion: why we’re missing the real issue

The inadequacy of the Bible on issues of modern morality

The politics swirling around the abortion issue has completely distracted from the fact that a huge number of American voters claim to have access to objective principles of morality found in a Stone Age book that will determine how they behave, treat others, and vote.  Based on a cursory examination of modern ethical concepts, here is a list of some of the variables that should probably be included in any equation hoping to determine the morality of abortion:

Physical health of mother

Mental health of mother

Fetal dependency on mother

Mother’s feelings about pregnancy

Mother’s feelings about motherhood

Pain/suffering of fetus

Likelihood of future physical suffering of child born with birth defects

Likelihood of future mental suffering of child in unwanted pregnancy

Likelihood of future physical or mental health suffering of child born to addicted

mother

Likelihood of future physical or mental health suffering of child born to mentally ill

mother

Relevant input from medicine:

1 out of every 5-6 pregnancies results in spontaneous abortion

Nervous systems development is far enough along that a fetus can likely feel pain

around 28-30 weeks

Typical fetal testing is completed by 22 weeks

My goal is not to determine the answer to the question of morality of abortion in this post. (I am pretty sure that, with the caveat that fetal pain needs to be taken into consideration for late-stage abortions, the moral answer is to allow the mother to make decisions about her body in all cases). My main reason for raising this issue is to simply ask the question:

What does the Bible bring to the table to help answer modern moral questions?

The word abortion is never used in the Bible. The concept of abortion is never addressed in the Bible. There is zero medical advice offered in the Bible. Mental health is not addressed in the Bible. To the extent that suffering is mentioned, there is a complete disregard for human suffering, so long as it is suffering of anyone in another Stone Age tribe that happened to be competing with the early Hebrew tribes for resources. People confined to a Judeo-Christian- belief-based worldview will point to a handful of isolated excerpts or ‘verses’ from the Bible, claiming that they convey moral principles that apply to the question of abortion. The problem is, these verses at face value say nothing that actually addresses any modern moral issue, much less abortion. Beyond abortion, where is the moral guidance on wealth inequality, immigration, treatment of animals, climate change, genetic modification, racism (there actually is guidance on this one—it’s not pretty), doctor-assisted suicide. At the very least, attempts to make the Bible appear relevant today requires major feats of cognitive contortion and mental acrobatics. Most believers are convinced that Bible verses are relevant to modernity only because other believers claim that they have been able to interpret them in such a way that they are relevant. The problem with this is that, for any given verse, there are and have been countless interpretations (go to any bookstore and look at the endless shelves of books written about what the Bible is trying to say), and for many issues since the enlightenment, it is obvious that modern humans are simply projecting their own up-to-date values onto primitive ideas written down by Stone Age tribal humans. When it comes to morality, there are some direct, Stone Age era-appropriate commands scattered throughout, but reasoned argument to justify them by any appropriate moral viewpoint is simply not found in the Bible nor is any depth of thought required for many modern nuanced issues. The Golden Rule is certainly a good approach to take with others, but variations of this advice predated Jesus’s version by hundreds of years and can be found in the Stone Age books of multiple other man-made religions. This post barely scratches the surface of the problems with using the Bible as a moral compass. I will leave it to other posts to address the blood-soaked stories of genocide, rape, and pillage commanded by the god of the first half of the Bible; the recent centuries of slavery and slaughter justified by believers based upon their interpretations of the Bible; and the question of whether doing what has been commanded by a divine dictator-- either for reward or to avoid punishment--can even be considered a moral act to begin with. In defense of our more recent ancestors, much of the world has made significant strides in morality in the past couple of hundred years, but it has been in spite of or irrelevant of what is found in the Bible, not because of it. In closing, this post started off with abortion and politics. The problem is this: abortion as a political issue is never going to be resolved while voters continue to rely on belief-based worldviews and use free-for-all interpretations of the Bible as their moral guidelines.