abortion

Abortion is the killing of an unborn child, legal from coast to coast in the US from 1973 to 2022.

Terminology:

• embryo: an unborn child before the 11th week since a woman’s last period.
• fetus: an unborn child after the 11th week.
• pro-life: against abortion rights
• pro-choice: for abortion rights, as in the catchphrase, “a woman’s right to choose”.
• abortion-on-demand: abortion given when the woman wants it, even without being a dire case (rape, incest, threat her life, etc).

Where abortion is legal: Abortion-on-demand was legal in 2022 in the blue and dark purple regions, at least for the first 17 weeks, limited elsewhere to dire cases:

Roe v Wade: It was on January 22nd 1973 – or 50 years ago on Sunday – that the US Supreme Court in Roe v Wade (1973) ruled that having an abortion was a right across the land. And it was on June 24th 2022 – or seven months ago next Tuesday – that the Supreme Court in Dobbs v Jackson (2022) ruled that it was no longer a right: each state could make its own laws.

The Southern Strategy is where the Republican Party in the US uses issues of race and religion, like abortion, to get “hard-working Americans” to vote against their class interests. It gave us Trump. It also gave us a Supreme Court stacked with anti-abortion judges from the Federalist Society. Abortion allows Republicans to paint the Democrats as being without morals. How could any honest, God-fearing person possibly vote for them?

Black genocide: From time to time, from the Black Panthers to White Evangelicals, the claim is sometimes made that abortion is a form of Black genocide. In 1978, for example, Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, said:

“abortionists have done more to get rid of generations and cripple others than all of the years of slavery and lynching.”

The Hippocratic Oath in 275 AD said:

“Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.”

The 1964 AD update says nothing about abortion.

The Bible: Exodus 21:22:

“If men quarrel, and one strike a woman with child, and she miscarry indeed, but live herself: he shall be answerable for so much damage as the woman’s husband shall require, and as arbiters shall award.”

An unborn child is simply called a “child” (yeled in Hebrew) not a “fetus” (nephel or golem). And causing its death is seen as wrong.

In Luke 1:41,44 the personhood of John the Baptist in the womb is clear.

Religion: Where different religious groups officially stand on abortion as of 2016 according to Pew Research:

Note that this does not always match what the rank and file think. For example, the Catholic Church sees abortion as the taking of an innocent life, yet in May 2022 about 56% of US Catholics, including President Biden, thought abortion should be legal in most cases – almost the same as the US as a whole: 61%. Even among Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week it was 30% (see Pew Research).

– Abagond, 2023.

See also:

• The Southern strategy
• genocide
  • Black genocide
• eugenics

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