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Posted by on Jan 24, 2013 in Morality, Politics | 7 comments

A letter to the Bible Belt about abortion

One of the occasional commenters here, and a kindly man from across the pond, Russ, wrote this which I thought would be worth repeating, with his permission (the video, by the way, IS bizarre):

This is a response I made to one of my cousins, Chad, a Bible Belt Bible thumper, concerning a comment he made to my daughter about this video, abortion and President Obama.

 Chad,

I, too, think this is a truly bizarre video, but I don’t think the basic concern is the strangeness of the video.

You said, “I can’t help but wonder why he [President Obama], and all of the people who voted for him, would want to celebrate the barbaric destruction of human life.”

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Christians have never shied away from killing anyone when it suits their purposes, and that includes those not yet born. Christians have always celebrated their own barbaric destruction of human life. From the inception of Christianity, Christians have happily massacred infidels as well as other Christians they considered heretics. During the centuries-long Inquisitions Christians killed millions. The belt buckles of Hitler’s Nazi Party were emblazoned with “Gott Mit Uns.” Today, in the US several hundred children of Christian Science parents will die from easily remedied medical concerns due only to the fact that their parents are Christians of that particular type. In Africa, as I write this, some Christian parent or clergyman is killing a child with his own hands, and many others are being tortured or maimed, only because of the influence of the Bible verse, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” on the fundamentalist Christian mind. Under the Roman Catholic influence parents have permitted the rape of their children for as long as there has been a Roman Catholic church, and it continues today especially where secular controls are not strong enough to rein in the Christian church’s institutionally sanctioned rape of the innocent. Christians in Africa are intentionally perpetuating the AIDS plague, which is killing millions, by destroying the condoms that are donated by the WHO and others. Past and present, Christians have always celebrated their own barbaric destruction of human life. The barbaric destruction of human life is even celebrated in the Christian’s moral guidebook, The Holy Bible.

It seems that much of the time Christian concern for a life stops at birth. Christians seem to have significantly diminished concern for the already birthed. Here in the US Christians want to make sure poor people with children do not have access to health care, and they want to deny access to health care to households headed by gay people. Christians don’t seem to be very caring or loving or concerned for the welfare of others.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that here in the US it is Christians themselves who take advantage of this legal right at a higher rate than any other religious identification. It’s not Hindus; it’s not Muslims; it’s not even non-believers. It’s Christians. Roman Catholic Christians and fundamentalist Christians run neck-and-neck every year for the highest abortion rates out of all US religious identifications. Christians need safe legal abortions. Christians are not going to stop having unprotected sex that results in conception, so they need, and use, their right to safe legal abortions. Nearly every abortion in the US is had by a Christian who has been encouraged to have that abortion by some other Christian, and it is an abortion performed by yet another Christian. It is Christians themselves who create the need for abortions, encourage others to have them and perform the procedures.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Roe vs Wade was enacted by Christians in a country that was well over 90 percent Christian. Every single US President has self-identified as Christian, including President Obama. At the time Roe v Wade was made law every US Senator and every US Representative self-identified as Christian. So the law was put in place by Christians who recognized the need for a majority-Christian society to have access to safe abortions.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that it is Christians themselves who create the need for abortions. When Christians nurture ignorance of human reproduction, discourage the use of contraceptives, and psychologically abuse those who get pregnant outside marriage, they set up ideal conditions for abortions to be sought after. Add this to the fact that Christians want to destroy any social safety net that would help care for the child of a single mother and it is obvious that Christians are pushing woman toward getting pregnant as well as having abortions.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that Roe v Wade obligates no one to have an abortion. Christians could stop having unprotected sex, but they won’t. Christians could take every pregnancy full-term, but they won’t.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that some of the billions of dollars that Christians pour into their religious enterprise every year could be diverted to guaranteeing support for Christian child-mothers. For instance, the expenditures by Christians for a single anti-abortion rally in Washington, D. C. amount to millions and millions of dollars. What does it cost for 250,000 Christians to travel to DC? What’s the cost of their food? Lodging? The advertising? Printing costs? Or, just the parking fees? It can easily cost a quarter of a million dollars to rear a child from birth through high school, but Christians like rallies more than they care for children who are already born. What does an anti-gay rights rally cost? US Christians donate hundreds of billions of dollars a year to their Christian social clubs they call churches, but only a small fraction of it – less than ten percent overall – goes to any humanitarian cause. The rest of it goes into salaries, insurances, advertising, settling child-rape trials(currently Christians are paying out about 3 billion a year for this), buying up properties, vehicle fleets, retirement packages, deposits to offshore accounts, and other costs associated with the Christian religious industry. But, notice that their billions spent for all these things do not quell the need for Christians to have access to safe legal abortions. If abortion is such an important issue, apparently all that money is being misspent.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that it does not appear as though any of the power Christians claim to have at their disposal has any affect. Obviously, all the pooled monetary resources does essentially zip. Prayer clearly is doing nothing. Christians acknowledge the powerlessness of prayer when they throw so much money at things. For all the millions upon millions of prayers Christians pray each day, Christians still need safe legal abortions. Prayer does not work to stop unprotected sex by Christians. Prayer does not work to stop abortions gotten by Christians. Being Christian, with faith, belief and God on their side, does not work to stop abortion. So, anti-abortion Christians turn to the only influence they have at their disposal to stop all those gotten-almost-exclusively-by-Christians abortions: secular law.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that overturning Roe v Wade will not stop Christian woman from getting abortions, nor will it stop the also-Christian influences that so often coerce a woman to abort. Overturning Roe v Wade will simply make abortions move from the safety of the operating theater into the unsafe back-alley. It seems that this is what anti-abortion Christians want. Did abortions happen prior to Roe v Wade? Yep. Who got them then? Young Christian women. Why? Coercion by Christian social influences, mostly. Will overturning Roe v Wade change that? No.

If you object to a woman having legal, safe access to abortion on Christian religious grounds, please understand that you railing against abortion – again an almost entirely Christian undertaking in the US – is also you railing against other Christians and is an acknowledgement that not all Christians imagine their god and their Christianity the way you imagine yours. Christians are not all getting the same messages. That Christians disagree with Christians tells us that none of you is listening to anything reliable, so reproductive matters, including sex, contraception, and abortion should remain matters of personal choice. If Christianity was binding on anyone; if Christianity had force, power or influence; and, if the Christian claims of answered prayers, miracles and changed lives were true, we would see the abortion rate by US Christians, and thus the entire US abortion rate drop to essentially zero. Obviously, the over two hundred million Americans self-identifying as Christians are not all on the same page, and many millions of those same US Christians see the god they like as one that leaves abortion up to their own personal decision-making.

  • Peter

    Excellent! And same goes for up here in Canada also. There is no legal restriction against abortion here but those Christian zealots are trying everything they can to reintroduce anti-abortion legislation in Parliament. And given that Harper is a fundamentalist Christian they might succeed. He still has almost three years left in his mandate. I shudder.  

  • http://twitter.com/AndrewMarburger Andrew Marburger

    Anybody have a source on the claim that it is mostly Christians getting abortions?

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      Also:
      wiki:

      In 2011, the Guttmacher Institute reported that two out of three women having abortions in the U.S. identified as Christian.[71] The same report said that of all U.S. abortions, 37% were undertaken by women who identified as Protestant, and 28% were Catholic.[71] The number of abortions performed on U.S. Catholic women is about the same per capita as the average in the general U.S. population; in the 2000s, Catholic women were 29% more likely to have an abortion than Protestant women.[39] A 1996 study found that one out of five U.S. abortions was performed on a woman who was born-again or evangelical Christian.[72] The likelihood of a woman having an abortion is called the abortion index, with the value of 1.0 assigned to a probability equal to a population’s average. Using this metric in America, U.S. Catholics were assessed by Guttmacher Institute in the 2000s, showing an index of 1.00–1.04.[73] Similarly, Protestants were given an abortion index of 0.75–0.84, other religions 1.23–1.41, and non-religious women 1.38–1.59.[73] An earlier study by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research determined U.S. Protestants to have an abortion index of 0.69, Catholics 1.01, Jews 1.08, and non-Judeo-Christian religions 0.78.[74] Women following no organized religion were indexed at 4.02.[74]In countries where the dominant religion is Catholicism, abortions are higher per capita than the worldwide average, says the Alan Guttmacher Institute.[39] The estimated number of abortions per year in Brazil is roughtly 1 million to 2 million.[39] Peru, another Catholic country, each year sees abortions initiated by 5% of women in their childbearing years, whereas 3% of such women have abortions in the U.S.[39] Catholics for Choice reports that Italy—97% Catholic—is 74% in favor of using Mifepristone, an abortifacient.[69] A majority of Catholics in Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico say that abortion should be allowed in at least some circumstances.[69]In Nigeria, a 1999 study of 1,516 women having abortions determined that 69% were Protestant, 25% were Muslim, and the remainder were Catholic and other religions.[75]

  • MosesZD

    That is a brilliant article.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ashley-Alderman/149805178 Ashley Alderman

    Excellent article. The Christian pro-lifers are indeed the most hypocritical. They tend to be woefully misinformed and narrow-minded. Many of them are only pro-fetus/pro-birth. Easily available contraception and proper sex education are both great ways of reducing abortion rates, however complications which require termination will still occur and birth control is fallible (shocking! I know). This is a very personal decision that is to be addressed by a woman and her doctor. Despite what many think, every woman IS competent enough to evaluate her own situation and conclude what is best. 

  • TristanVick

    Great article by Russ! 

    I really question pro-lifers when they proceed to tell a woman what to do and how to think.

    Is their concern really about her health and the well being of the child? If so, they’d shut the hell up and trust her to make her own decisions. Women have that ability, you know? To think for themselves.

    I agree with Ashley too, it seems the pro-life side is narrow-minded, misinformed, and actually doesn’t give a hoot about educating themselves as to the facts. It’s all a power play and has nothing to do with the safety, health, or well being of the mother or child. 

    If they really did care, they would understand that their are necessary medical reasons for abortion. Not that it was any of their business in the first place. 

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      /i find the idea that Xtians are so into ‘saving the human being’s life’ at fetal stage, but somehow forget to give a shit about it when born. The welfare only goes so far, and never seems to stretch as far as a welfare state, or putting hands in pockets to further welfare for the families that don’t go through with abortion etc.