Tuesday, January 02, 2007

And abortion is forbidden in Scripture?

A recent comment on one of my posts reminded me of a passage from Nubers 5:11-31 about what to do if a man thinks his wife is unfaithful -

"if a spirit of jealousy comes on him, and he is jealous of his wife who
has defiled herselff; or if a spirit of jealousy comes on him, and he is jealous
of his wife, though she has not defiled herself;"
Numbers 5:14


- goes on to say something about if the woman has been unfaithful then her womb will discharge and her organs drop. (Numbers 5:28) This sure sounds like an induced abortion to me. And I use 'induced' with all due deliberation.

What many on the pro-life side forget is that abortion is a natural process. There are many more spontaneous abortions than people notice. My mother was unfortunate enough to have several spontaneous abortions late in the birth process. Yet those were a part of the natural world. To just say abortions are wrong is to ignore the several like and unlike scriptures taht speak to abortion and the many necessary choices where it is not between good and bad, but the best we can do right now in this situation.

3 comments:

Orlando Braga said...

You can read all the staff here. You can say there is a lot of "macho man" theory there, but definitively not anything about abortion.

Victor's child said...

Orlando's link is to a less than clear translation of the passage. In the original language of Nubers 5 it is evident that the womb discharged and the uterus dropped. That, along with the knowedge that abortifactants were known in ancient times, is an indication of either a spontaneous or induced abortion. The evidence in the passage is not definitive either way, but certainly not the 'definitively not anything about abortion' claimed by Orland. Both the original language and the knowledge we have of the ancient world speak more to my interpretation than that of orlando.

NannyKaren said...

You said, "What many on the pro-life side forget is that abortion is a natural process. There are many more spontaneous abortions than people notice."

When a doctor does late term abotions it is NOT I repeat NOT a normal process!