Through the Flaming Sword

The conservative Christian war against abortion is predicated on a false and unbiblical premise, in hypocritical contradiction to the fact that its warriors claim allegiance to the Bible’s authority in all other things. And now that a decisive battle against abortion has been won in the Supreme Court, the scope of the war will expand, but the enemy will still be the same: the enemy is women.

To defend women from this armed assault, we have to disarm the artillery, and that means exposing the deceit, perverse mind, and shallowness of the theology that holds it together. That theology derives from the story of the fall in the first chapters of Genesis, a story that nevertheless these Christians ignore when it comes to their basic claim regarding abortion.

The false premise

Conservative Christian condemnation of abortion rests on the claim that the fetus is a human person and that therefore abortion is murder. But the Bible clearly says otherwise. Genesis 2:7 reads:

Then Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Humans become human persons when they take their first breath, according to the Bible. 

It’s important to remember that in both biblical Hebrew and Greek, the word for breath and the word for spirit are the same—ruah and pneuma. According to Genesis, God’s spirit enters the human with that first breath; it’s not just inanimate air. The spiritual life of a human being begins with the first breath, just as the physical life does.

The Bible reinforces this spiritual anthropology with its understanding of death, the other end of human life. In describing Jesus’ death on the cross, Matthew follows Mark with this description (Matthew 27:50, Mark 15:37): “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.” Luke uses the same phrase, “breathed his last,” but expands on the cry: “Father, into your hands I comment my spirit.” John uses different wording for the same thing (John 20:30): “When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Remember, spirit = breath. “Breathed his last” = “spirited his last”—that is, God’s animating spirit left him. This is most clear in John: “Gave up his spirit” = breathed his last; he stopped breathing.

The physical and spiritual life of the human being begins with breath and ends with breath. Fetuses don’t breathe.

Thus, fetuses are not yet human persons, according to the Bible. They are not animated by God’s animating spirit; they do not yet have a spiritual identity conferred upon them by God. In fact, as far as I know, the Bible never mentions fetuses at all.

The fall of man, the curse of woman

Abortion has never been the enemy of the conservative Christian anti-abortion movement. Women are the enemy. They are the ones who “murder” their falsely identified “unborn children”. The sin is the woman’s, her actions are to be criminalized.

So has it been since the creation, or so they claim because of their belief in the Fall:

To the woman [God] said:

I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing, 

in pain you shall bring forth children,

and yet your desire shall be for your husband,

and he shall rule over you.

Genesis 3:16

And the men got God’s message: women’s bodies are yours to command, and women even want it that way. And baby it hurts! to quote the Mick Jagger in “Midnight Rambler”.

Giving birth is your curse, but you deserve that pain. You started it all by listening to that snake, which is your real desire. So for God’s sake, suffer.

These so-called Christian misogynist fascists are going to expand the war on women from the narrow field of abortion to the wider battlefield of pregnancy itself. In some places, they already deploy their reconnaissance drones to stand watch over pregnant women, so that natural miscarriages can be investigated as possible cover-ups for an abortion. And so on. Only now the gloves are really off, thanks to the mostly Catholic justices on the Supreme Court.

The mythic fallacy and hypocrisy

Meanwhile, of course, the Fall never really happened. The whole thing is a myth. There was no original couple, no original sin, no snake, no Satan, no tree, no garden, no curses. No mud formed into shape, no divine breath breathed in its nostrils, no rib-snatching, no man first/woman second, no tree of life conferring immortality whose fruit we must be denied, no flaming sword, no paradise to go back to. We evolved from primates and we have trouble giving birth because our craniums grew bigger faster than our pelvises could keep up with. If only some of us could put those bigger brains to better use.

The entire theology of the anti-abortion movement is built on a myth that has been selectively—and thus hypocritically—employed to shape the laws even for those of us who aren’t even Christians in the first place. 

Why are these believers in a sectarian reading of the Christian Bible allowed to ignore how their Bible actually defines human personhood and yet still force their anti-woman mythology on our laws in contradiction to the clear testimony of their own scripture and in violation of our constitution? 

For this looks like a violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment to me. Suppose Muslims succeeded in forcing sharia law upon the rest of us and required all Americans to go to Mecca at least once in our lifetimes, just because the Quran told them so? The idea is laughable.

Yet we don’t think twice about letting Christian theology define the laws that govern us all. And to make matters worse, they have twisted their own theology into a perversion that is deliberately blind to its own source. The Father of Lies is surely laughing his serpentine butt off in the choir lofts of the megachurches.

So what now?

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t other moral factors involved with abortion. Fetuses are living beings of some kind, and abortion does kill them. Its legal status is the question here, and how we determine that status. 

We have not yet come to a clear consensus as a society on when a fetus becomes a human person, and we’re not likely to do so anytime soon. We’ve been shifting our threshold of week-counts for “viability” forward based on advances in medical science, but is “viability” the way to determine personhood? 

I am sure we will keep being tempted to use “science” to determine the matter of human personhood—that is, when aborting a fetus is murder—but the scientific path to decision has already been a failure; or rather, the pseudo-scientific path. The anti-abortionists already use some peculiar kind of “theology” of embryology to claim that a fetus is a human person from conception—based on what? Science? The Bible? What? 

I don’t want to leave this question of a fetus’s personhood up to them, or to the embryologists, or to the politicians. 

Defining human personhood is, in fact, a spiritual or at least a philosophical matter, and therefore even harder to agree upon than some allegedly scientific approach. Furthermore, the spiritual or philosophical decision will depend on the spiritual or philosophical tradition behind it and upon the people who make it, and those people cannot be trusted to be faithful to their tradition, anyway, as we can clearly see already from the way some Christians ignore the clear testimony of their own holy scripture about the matter.

Which is why the law should stay out of it and leave the decision to the woman carrying this being, whatever its spiritual or philosophical status is. We are not going to agree on this as a society in any foreseeable future. So the moral decisions should be left in the hearts and minds and hands of the women whose hearts and lives and bodies are directly involved. 

If the fetus could decide for itself—which would be a clear indication of its personhood—then that might clarify the matter. But a fetus can’t; it isn’t a person yet. So somebody has to decide for it. But who? The closest a fetus can come to human personhood in the sense of choosing for itself under the law is the mother whose body it shares. The farthest a fetus can get from its own human personhood is a man in a black robe on the bench of the Supreme Court.