Abortion, the Bible, and Us: Follow-Up

When I wrote my series on Abortion, the Bible, and Us, I was not able to address every biblical text that has been wrangled into debates on abortion or personhood. In the intervening time, I’ve had the idea to post occasional updates and thoughts, but these went the way of so many good intentions and never materialized.

Last week, I received an email from a thoughtful reader with questions about texts that I hadn’t mentioned. I asked him if I could post the question and my response as a Q&A, and he graciously agreed.

Below are his email and my reply, lightly edited to maintain his anonymity and streamline the post.

A cute swallowtail caterpillar (Papilio machaon) on a Ruta plant in Israel. It's wormlike, but probably not the author of Psalm 22.

[Photo credit איתן טל. License CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Hi Eric,

I’ve really enjoyed reading your series: “Abortion, the Bible, and us.”  I have been going through a pretty big transformation on this subject and your article has been very helpful.  There are 2 verses in the Bible that your article doesn’t mention and I’m curious how you see them in the abortion debate – specifically when we look at the ability of a fetus to be in God’s image (which I think means the ability to reflect God and have a relationship with Him).

I was wondering if you would help me understand how you don’t see these as problems for the viewpoint that God doesn’t have a relationship with a fetus.  And in case you are worried that I’m trying to engage in a debate with you please understand that it’s the exact opposite, I’m hoping you can help me figure out how to think of these verses in a context that is at peace with the views that you present in your article:

Psalm 51:6 – 

Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;

you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

I see 51:5 a lot in the abortion debate but I’m surprised 51:6 rarely comes up. To me, this verse implies that God desires us to be faithful while in the womb.  To me this passage should be coming up much more often than Psalm 139 or Jeremiah 1 and yet I almost never see it. When I do see it, it has only been on pro-life pages.

Psalm 22:10

From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

just curious about your thoughts on this one as well, since I think it implies a relationship between the unborn child and God.

Thanks,

_____

***

Hi _____,

I’m glad to hear my articles have been helpful as you reconsider your position on abortion. I am always encouraged when I learn that others are approaching the topic with openness and curiosity.

To your questions:

Both of these Psalms should be read as poetry. As compositions addressed to YHWH and written for the purpose of moving YHWH to action, they can’t be understood as straightforward statements about human or divine nature. The psalmists take many poetic liberties in service of their greater goals. 

We can see this clearly in Psalm 22. Before the verse you quoted, the psalmist asserts “I am a worm, not a man” (Ps 22:6). We don’t ask, though, how the author was transformed from a human being into a worm, and how a worm was able to compose and write down such a sophisticated composition. We understand that the psalmist was using the hyperbolic image of a worm to communicate his abjection and debasement.

Every word in this Psalm serves its central purpose, which is to move YHWH to show compassion on the psalmist in his’ current plight.

Psalm 22 is what scholars often call a “Psalm of Individual Lament,” although the German term Klagepsalm captures the purpose better with its sense of being a “Plea-psalm.” The whole point of the Psalm is to motivate YHWH to intervene in an unpleasant situation. This basic purpose is expressed most directly in verses 11 and 19–21, but every other part of the Psalm feeds into it. When the psalmist describes his misery, appeals to a long history of relationship between YHWH and his own community, and promises praise and sacrifices in the event of rescue, all of it is intended to inspire pity and help.

The argument develops in the first half of the Psalm. The psalmist connects his misery to divine abandonment and neglect (vv.1–2), but implies that this is inconsistent with YHWH’s character as the Holy One of Israel (v. 3) and the rescuer of the psalmist’s ancestors (vv. 4–5). Though the psalmist insists he is lowly and despised (vv. 6–8), he reminds YHWH that he is YHWH’s responsibility and has been since birth (vv. 9–10).

Within this framework, I understand verses 9–10 to be asserting that YHWH has an obligation to act on behalf of the psalmist in the context of their lifelong relationship and the generations-long relationship between YHWH and his family. 

I also think verse 9 sets the stage for verse 10. I prefer the NRSV translation here to the NIV:

9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;

you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

10 On you I was cast from my birth,

and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Birth and breastfeeding are described first, and the next verse does not then move back to a time when the psalmist was in utero. Rather, the verses describe the initiation of a relationship at birth.

IF there is blurring here, it relates to the communitarian conceptualization of divine-human relationships in Hebrew biblical texts. The psalmist’s individual relationship with YHWH exists within and as a component of a larger, familial and/or national relationship. As such, his gestation and birth occurred within a context of already existing mutual obligations, even if he was not yet fully initiated into them as a member of the community. 

The demonstration of YHWH’s presence in past generations and at the psalmist’s own birth serves to highlight the incongruity of YHWH’s absence in the current situation. This is not a statement of fetal personhood but a rhetorical plea for divine intervention based on shared history.

 

Psalm 51 comes with all the same cautions about taking poetic language too literally, but here there is also a fundamental issue of translation. You cited Ps 51:6 from the NIV:

NIV: Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

This is an idiosyncratic rendering. Compare with these other popular translations:

NRSV: You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

JPS: Indeed You desire truth about that which is hidden; teach me wisdom about secret things.

KJV: Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

ESV: Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. 

The NIV is notorious for being an evangelical translation and for embedding evangelical theology and politics in the text. In that regard, it’s noteworthy that the ESV—a translation that is even more hardline conservative evangelical than the NIV—does not back the NIV’s translation choice:

The Hebrew word at the end of the first clause is בַטֻּח֑וֹת (B̲aṭṭuḥôt̲), a rare word that is not well understood. In many translations, it has a footnote that says something like “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain.” Parallel as it is with the word וּ֝בְסָתֻ֗ם (ûb̲əsāt̲um) “in shut up/secret,” it likely has something to do with enclosed or hidden spaces.

In all likelihood, it doesn’t refer to the womb, though. If it did, the verse would be downright absurd. To say that YHWH desires faithfulness from fetuses implies that he would look unfavorably on their unfaithfulness. Faithfulness and wisdom are well beyond the capacity of fetuses, babies, and infants alike, and I doubt most ancient Israelites thought differently.

The Hebrew remains somewhat unclear, but if I had to guess I would say it means something to the effect that YHWH desires fidelity in private and even secret matters. That is, just because you can keep some wrongdoing hidden or keep it from having broad repercussions does not mean it is ok.

 

I would also note that the developing fetus need not have the same social, legal, or ethical status at every point in gestation. In line with the processual metaphors for fetal development I wrote about before, the social value of the fetus can change across the pregnancy. Would a 10-week fetus be considered identical, in a moral sense, to a 37-week baby who would likely thrive outside the womb? 

You mentioned the “image of God” in your question, which may be a relevant concept here. Later interpretations of that phrase have understood it to describe something about human nature or essence, but the most straightforward understanding of it in its ancient context would be quite simply to refer to human form. The word צלם tselem, translated “image,” comes from a common root in Semitic languages, usually referring to statues or statuettes/figurines. This is what it means in other biblical texts, too, and is likely what is meant in the phrase “image of God” in Genesis. Humans are like statuettes of God, lesser versions with basically the same embodied form.

How does this relate to the personhood debate? Since human embryos begin to resemble the basic human form more and more as they develop into fetuses and babies, they may also grow into their personhood as the process goes on..

In the end, the Bible doesn’t give us enough information to judge whether there was an ancient Israelite consensus on when personhood began, or what it would have been if there was. However, most of the texts that hit upon the issue tangentially suggest a processual understanding with no clear dividing lines. Perhaps there was no binary conception of personhood switching from zero to one in an instant, but rather a gradual growth of social worth over time. The fetus grows into its personhood as it develops into more mature forms. 

I hope this was helpful. I suspect it may not be entirely satisfying, but my point throughout the series has been that the Bible does not provide satisfying answers to this question. That is up to us.

Best wishes on the journey,

Eric

2023: My Year in Books

A grid, 10 wide and 7 tall, composed of the covers of the 70 books I read this year. The titles are listed below.

Time for my annual book post chronicling my reading and celebrating the ever-increasing availability of books to blind readers worldwide!

2023 felt like five years squished into one. We just did a lot of living this year, on every level, and surprisingly this didn’t cut into my reading at all. I read seventy books (not counting stuff directly related to research).

In previous years, I’ve gone a little overboard doing reviews for my favorites, but this year I’m not feeling the inspiration. It’s been such a diverse and interesting year of reading that I would scarcely know how to pick winners anyhow. There are only maybe two or three that I wouldn’t recommend to someone sometime in some frame of mind. So if you see something interesting in the list below assume I don’t think it’s terrible—and feel free to ask about it!

The List

  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgment of taste by Pierre Bourdieu
  • The Power by Naomi Alderman
  • Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
  • How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
  • Hello, Beautiful! by Anne Napolitano
  • Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
  • Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara
  • Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz
  • Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
  • Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
  • Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani
  • Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
  • Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew
  • Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kelly Carter Jackson
  • Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk and Robot #2) by Becky Chambers
  • Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle
  • The Lunar Chronicles (Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter) by Marissa Meyer
  • To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
  • The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
  • Work WOn’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
  • This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate by Naomi Klein
  • The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience by Toby Hemingway
  • Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
  • The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem by Christopher Shein
  • Building a Better World in Your Backyard (Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys) by Paul Wheaton (re-read)
  • Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments can Teach Us about the Good Life by Kristen R. Ghodsee
  • The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture by Konrad Schmid
  • The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg
  • The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty #1) by Ken Liu
  • Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
  • Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry
  • This is How YOu Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
  • Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft
  • The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education by John K. Wilson
  • The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy by John Shelton
  • Wilding by Isabella Tree
  • How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
  • Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke
  • In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by J. Jack Halberstam
  • Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
  • The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune
  • Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • A Place to Hang the Moon by kate Albus
  • The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed-Race Belonging by Samira Maida
  • The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University by Adrianna Kezar
  • Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of Gods) by N. K. Jemisin
  • The Overstory by Richard Powers
  • American War by Omar El Akkad
  • Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
  • The Amorites in the Bronze Age near East: The Making of a Regional Identity by Aaron Burke
  • No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba
  • The River of Silver by S. A. Chakraborty
  • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
  • The Reindeer Chronicles, and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with nature to Heal the Earth by Judith D. Schwartz
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by J. Jack Halberstam
  • Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

Two new Online Articles

I had two articles published online recently, but was too consumed with preparations for the Society of Biblical Literature’s Annual Meeting to remember to post about them. Here they are for your perusal, better late than never!

The first is a short piece at theTorah.com on the scene in which Jacob deceives his father Isaac to receive the blessing meant for his Brother Esau. If you’ve ever found this episode a bit hard to believe, you’re not alone. Many ancient and modern interpreters have hypothesized hidden factors that make it more plausible, but in the end this (and other biblical stories about blind people) reveal more about the literary meanings attached to blindness than about blindness itself.

The second is a pedagogical write-up at Ancient Jew Review, based on my blog series “Abortion,the Bible, and Us” from last year. If you or anyone you know is looking for lesson ideas for undergrads in biblical or religious studies, this might be a good place to start!

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think!

“Not Seeing, Unseeing, and Blind:” New Article and Blog-Only Bonus Content!

I have a new article out in the Journal of Biblical Literature (vol. 42 no. 3). The title is “Not Seeing, Unseeing,and Blind: Disentangling Disability from Adjacent Topoi in the Hebrew Bible,” and it is part of a broader research project reassessing the portrayal and metaphorical use of blindness in biblical texts and the ancient Middle East more broadly.

It argues that Hebrew biblical texts have a very limited range of blindness metaphors, and that several texts that have historically been identified as blindness metaphors originally had nothing to do with blindness at all. I structure it around the famous biblical line “they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear!” Variations show up in five different places in the Hebrew Bible, meaning very different things and revealing different aspects of the boundaries of blindness and disability.

IF you want to read it but don’t have institutional access, just let me know.

Bonus Content!

Sometimes, when you write articles for academic journals, they make you stick to the word count and you have to cut out fun tidbits that, while fascinating, don’t really contribute to the argument all that much. But lucky you! Since you read my blog, you get to read about one such little tidbit.

That biblical phrase above? The Bible was not the first to use it. Centuries before any of the biblical texts I discuss were written, it appeared in a Sumerian poem first published in 1977 under the catchy title (The GIR5 and the ki-sikil.”*

This photograph shows the front side of a small clay tablet with the Sumerian elegy written in cuneiform script.

The obverse (front) of tablet BM 24975, which contains the poem in question

[Photo © Trustees of the British Museum]

The ki-sikil is quite clearly a girl or young woman, but the identity of the GIR5 (or KAŠ4, if that’s your style) is more ambiguous. The basic meaning of this term is some kind of runner, messenger, or traveler, but where the young man has gone and why are never clarified. In the first 20 of the poem’s 49 lines, someone tells the young woman to prepare for the arrival of the GIR5.

Then the young woman starts speaking, saying that her GIR5 has arrived, yet not arrived. She says

igi in-tuku igi nu-mu-ni-dug-a 

ka in-tuku inim nu-mu-da-ba-e 

He has eyes, (but) he does not see me.

He has a mouth, (but) he does not speak

(lines 39–40).

As her poetic monologue progresses, it becomes clear that the woman’s GIR5 has not returned alive from his journeys. Scholars are divided on whether the GIR5’s body has been literally returned or is being represented here by a figurine, but in either case the woman proceeds to fulfill the rites of death, mourning, and offerings for those who have gone down to the netherworld.

Just like most of the biblical versions of this line, “The GIR5 and the ki-sikil” uses it to describe something that

  1. has eyes
  2. can’t see
  3. isn’t blind

If the GIR5 is a figurine, it is similar to the litanies of mockery directed at foreign gods in Psalms 115 and 135. IF it is a corpse, it has no biblical parallel and represents a unique usage of this ambiguous and versatile couplet.

I should add that I’m not saying the there’s a direct line of borrowing from the Sumerian elegy to the pre-exilic biblical prophets—a gap of more than a thousand years separates the two. It’s just fun to note that someone had the idea long before the texts that made it famous.

 

*Samuel Noah Kramer, “The GIR5 and the ki-sikil: A New Sumerian Elegy,” in Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of J. J. Finkelstein ( ed. M. de Jong; Hamden, 1977), 139–142.

Book Review: The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland

UntitledImage

I just finished The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, and recommend it highly!

I’m always a bit leery of blindness memoirs, but this one joins M. Leona Godin’s Their Plant Eyes (2021) as a truly excellent recent entry in the genre.

This one hit closer for me, since Leland’s experience has so many striking parallels with my own. Like me, he has one of the many genetic disorders that get lumped together into the junk diagnosis retinitis pigmentosa, though his vision is shrinking from the outside in while mine is fading from the center out. We both had visual impairments as children, but only had to confront the transition to blindness in our thirties, in the context of career, marriage, and life with young kids.

There were so many sparks of recognition as I read, an eery number of shared experiences. I also sat in those rolling chairs at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for a visual fields test, wore the Clockwork Orange electrodes on my eyeballs for an electroretinograph, and encountered their strange reticence to inform patients that they had crossed the line to “legally blind.” I received braille training from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, though my teacher was more knowledgeable than his (and stricter about technique).

As Leland described his first experience at the annual convention of the national Federation of the Blind, I was thinking back to my first (and, to this point, only) experience there. Then he mentioned the topic of the presidential address, I realized that he was talking about the same year I had attended. In fact, I show up briefly in the book, unnamed, as one of the scholarship recipients he ignored to focus on a much more interesting conversation with a 10 year old at his table (a decision I do not begrudge!).

But the recognition went far beyond the surface parallels. Many of the questions Leland asks and themes he explores are the same kinds of things I have thought about as I entered into blindness. What will blindness mean for my own identity? For the ways others identify me? I, too, wondered where the point was on this gradual journey where I could legitimately adopt the label “blind.” I struggled with using my white cane in public and the shifts in perception it provoked. I wondered about the changes that screen readers and braille would make to my writing and scholarship. I felt the frustration of reading children’s books more slowly than a first grader.

Questions of blindness and disability in society also gained sudden urgency, and I too left my vaguely benevolent obliviousness to explore evolving frameworks of disability rights, disability justice, and intersectional cross-disability solidarity. I became aware of the care and ingenuity of disabled communities and the creativity and innovation that they apply to the misfits between their bodies and the built environment.

All of these things Leland examines with curiosity and nuance. He can only do so much in a memoir of readable length, but he leaves plenty of breadcrumbs for readers who want more, pointing toward works in disability theory, history, and literature that can provide more depth and detail.

When I was first coming to grips with my own transition to blindness, I made everyone I know read John M. Hull’s memoir, Touching the Rock. It is a movingly written and insightful account of his loss of sight, but the longer I live as a blind person the more I think it gave the wrong impression. Hull emphasizes the negative and the tragic in a way that reinforces the pervasive assumption that blindness is to be feared and pitied.

Leland, on the other hand, presents blindness simultaneously as loss and gain—as a disability that obscures visual knowledge but also brings revelations about self, society, and human possibility. This is much closer to blindness as I have experienced it. Without eliding the difficulty of losing vision and learning new ways of being and living, he makes it clear that blindness is not all loss and not a tragedy.

At this point in my life, I’ve mostly left the liminal state Leland inhabits in the book behind. Blindness is solidly a part of my life, and though practical accommodations and adaptations will continue as the rest of my sight fades, the fundamental shift of identity no longer feels as intense or urgent. Although I have blog posts (and abandoned drafts) aplenty on many of the topics Leland covers, I don’t think a long form treatment of becoming blind is in my future. Now I’m just glad I have The Country of the Blind to recommend to anyone who is curious, and I wish I’d had it years ago!

2022: My Year in Books

A grid pattern with the covers of all 48 books I read in 2022
Hooray! It’s time for my annual book post. It’s always fun for me to look back at the reading I’ve done in a year and think about which books have stuck with me the most.

I got to 48 books this year. Most of them were really good,  but I’m not going to go overboard reviewing the standouts like I did last year. Instead, I’m going to recommend two thematic groups that could be read as loose trilogies on topics I find important. I hope you enjoy them!

And before you leave, let me know what you read this past year and what I should put on my 2023 list!

Trilogy One: Family Values

American society has a skewed approach to family values.

Too often, we mandate one acceptable path for everyone and punish those who deviate from it, rather than supporting and empowering people to make the best of where they find themselves.

We withhold tools for avoiding difficulty and then penalize people for encountering it.

We build slippery ramps into poverty and then punish people for being poor. 

We create impossible hurdles and then punish people for non-compliance.

These points were drilled into me by several books I read this year, two of which I already summarized in my final post on abortion. Gabrielle Blair’s Ejaculate Responsibly shows how we erroneously and unrealistically place the full responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancy on women, while providing them too few resources to either prevent them or support the children that result. That point is made even more strongly by Diana Greene Foster in The Turnaway Study, which shows that women denied an abortion are overwhelmingly worse off as a result than women who received one at the same gestational age. Anyone who makes any decisions about abortion policy at all—from writing laws or deciding Supreme Court cases to simply voting—should read both of them.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking book I read this year was Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. It is a searing indictment of the child welfare system as a fundamentally racist and classist institution that subjects poor and non-white parents—and mothers especially—to intense government surveillance, control, and punishment.

Families can attract the attention of CPS on the smallest of pretexts, and from there can be separated for anything from real abuse to non-compliance with unrealistic court requirements. And family separation does not reliably improve children’s lives. There are many wonderful foster parents—I know quite  a few—but many separated children find themselves in situations as harmful or more than the ones they left. Group homes especially are associated with higher levels of incarceration, institutionalization, and sex trafficking.

Critics argue that Roberts underemphasizes the seriousness of child abuse and neglect. To be clear, she doesn’t deny the problem or pretend it isn’t important. She does think, however, that the current child welfare system does more to exacerbate the problem than to lessen it. Earlier in her career, Roberts urged reform to the system, but in this book she argues for its complete demolition and a whole new approach to family welfare.

This is the thread that ties these three books together. They advocate for reversing our approach to family and the law. Instead of issuing punishments after things go wrong, why not use those resources to prevent problems in the first place? Upstream support and care can make a far more profound difference than downstream consequences.

Robust sex education, contraception, and trust in young people’s reproductive agency reduces unexpected pregnancy rates and prevents the psychological, social, educational, and economic struggles associated with parenting unwanted children. Supporting parents who have children in difficult circumstances with child care, health care, nutritional support, etc., reduces rates of neglect (and, by lowering parental stress, probably abuse as well).

To me, family values means valuing and supporting actual families, not using the state to mandate  a rigid archetype of the ideal family. 

Trilogy Two: Climate and Cultivation

It took me almost a year to wend my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. I listened to her read it in her own voice and, unlike most of my reading, I listened to it at normal speed. The book and her reading of it were calm and meditative, and I dipped in to it from time to time when I was in the right head space rather than plowing straight through. I won’t lie: I have some low-key climate anxiety that needs somewhere to go, and this book helped push it in a productive direction. Kimmerer is both an accomplished academic ecologist and a student of indigenous American land stewardship practices. She combines these two aspects of her life in this book, a sprawling mix of memoir, ecology, history, and philosophy. It’s a beautiful book, and I am grateful for the ways it expanded my imagination regarding the climate crisis and its potential solutions.

In the chapter titled “The Sacred and the Superfund,” for example, she ruminates on the shortcomings of mainstream environmentalism:

We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action…

“If people only knew that snow leopards are going extinct,” “If people only knew that rivers are dying.” If people only knew … then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn’t working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet… [The]  toxic waste dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair.

Kimmerer pushes past this despair, igniting an imagination that recognizes thrilling potential for mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the “more-than-human world,” as she calls it. We can hope for more than mere mitigation when it comes to our environment—more than just curbing our harmful effect on global and local ecosystems. Yes, we do need to cut extraction and pollution, but human activity can be a net benefit to the world of plants and animals if it is properly conceived and organized.

This leads nicely into my other mini-obsession: permaculture. I’m interested in restorative agriculture more broadly, but since I’m not likely to be in charge of any large-scale restoration projects any time soon, I’ve been learning about things i can do in my own yard.

The best book I read in this vein this year was Toby Hemingway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Hemingway adapts the principles and findings of permaculture to the real challenges of small spaces, ranging from a few acres on the large side to apartments in urban spaces on the smaller end.

What is permaculture? It is an approach to gardening/farming that minimizes the need for human labor and interference by designing communities of plants that work together in harmony with their landscapes. It moves away from homogenous plots with tidy rows of single plant varieties, which require inordinate amounts of fertilizer, water, weed killer, and insect repellant, and toward mixed plantings of varieties that support and protect each other.

Plant some crops that deplete the soil of nitrogen alongside ones that add it to the soil, along with low vines that prevent weeds and repel insects. Add some flowers that attract pollinators and repel pests, and you have a nice, low-maintenance plot that will produce better yields than single-variety plantings!

At least, that is how it works in theory. I’m starting small with some experimental hugelkultur beds this year, and I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Climate activists are quick to point out that individual solutions are too small to counteract the systemic and industrial degradation of our environments. Honestly, they are right. My backyard hugelkultur beds are not going to slow climate change. 

I still think it’s worth it, though. To build habits of nurturing the Earth, rather than just taking from it. To learn to use our little parts of it to produce food and build ecological resilience. And of course, it doesn’t preclude support for climate policies that have more systemic impact. In fact, the work of permaculture and restorative agriculture can point the way out of our current extractive and destructive practices.

But let’s be honest. Chances are good that we are facing some rough years ahead. The climate is already changing and its effects will get more pronounced as they ripple across the globe. If you are worried about the societal implications of climate change, I recommend Chris Begley’s The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival.

Begley is an archaeology professor and wilderness survival instructor who has lived and worked in Kentucky, Honduras, and the Mediterranean. In recent years he has seen increased  interest in his survival courses, motivated by fear of the looming climate crisis. In his opinion, though, people will not need the skills they think they need if climate change causes societal collapse.

In this book, he surveys the archaeology of collapsed societies to show that the process looks nothing like we imagine them in our apocalyptic film and fiction. And since civilizational collapse doesn’t look like our fiction, the best candidates for survival don’t look like our post-apocalyptic heroes. Prolonged survival in a period of collapse probably won’t depend on combat skills or fortifications, but on collaboration and mutual aid. It is not the rugged individual who will make it through, but the interdependent community that values unique skills and contributions, knows how to select prudent leaders, and makes wise corporate choices. 

Two More on Education

I love Elizabeth Berkshire and Jack Schneider’s podcast, “Have You Heard?” so I was excited to read their book on the school privatization movement, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. It’s a great look at the problems underlying charter schools, voucher programs, and their deleterious effects on American public education.

Will Bunch’s After the Ivory Tower Falls is a helpful look at the cultural fracas surrounding higher education. Is college the pathway to opportunity and economic mobility? An indoctrination machine and the root of all cultural ills? Or something else entirely? Bunch looks at what college is, what it has been, and what it has become in diverging popular imaginations, and makes some excellent suggestions regarding how it can function as part of a healthy and thriving democracy.

The Whole List

  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
  • Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
  • Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
  • The Next Apocalypse: The Art and science of survival by Chris Begley
  • The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
  • Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair
  • The World We Make (Great Cities, #2) by N. K. JemisinΩ
  • Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West by John M. Riddle
  • Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Christian Williams
  • The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (re-read)
    • The Fifth Season
    • The Obelisk Gate 
    • The Stone Sky
  • After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up our Politics, and How to Fix It by Will Bunch
  • On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care by Victor Ray
  • The performance of Doom: Ritual in Deuteronomy by Melissa Ramos
  • Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families, and How Abolition can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts
  • The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster
  • Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
  • Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker
  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck (re-read)
  • Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black
  • The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids who are Grounded, Generous, and Smart about Money by Ron Lieber
  • A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire
  • The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin
    • A Wizard of Earthsea
    • The Tombs of Atuan
    • The Farthest Shore
    • Tehanu
    • Tales from Earthsea
    • The Other Wind
  • White Evangelical racism by Anthea Butler
  • Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman
  • You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Millner (re-read)
  • Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemingway
  • Building a Better World in your Back Yard, Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys by Paul Wheaton
  • Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
  • The Golem and the Jinni (Golem and the Jinni, #1) by Helene Wecker
  • Complaint by Sarah Ahmed
  • A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1) by P. DjÈlÍe Clark
  • Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
  • God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
  • Abolition for the People by Colin Kaepernick
  • Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design by Bess Williamson
  • Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel Perry
  • Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions by Megan P. Goodwin
  • The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah Jones
  • A Song for the Wild-Built (Monk and Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers

Abortion, the Bible, and Us, Epilogue: How to Ask Better Questions about Abortion (and Get Better Answers)

Cover of the book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, by Loretta Ross and Ricky Solinger, which is discussed below.

Well, I’ve about exhausted what I have to say about the Bible and abortion, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of the modern ethics and policy discussion.

Up to this point, I’ve argued against something more than I’ve argued for anything, and what’s more I’ve fallen into the most basic trap of modern abortion politics: focusing too narrowly on the developing fetus.

Don’t get me wrong. The question of fetal personhood is central and it’s worth spending time on, but it can’t be the end of the discussion for several reasons. First, it’s intractable. I’ve made arguments that the Bible does not view a prenatal fetus as a person—and it doesn’t—but did I change any minds? My hunch is that if you believe personhood begins at conception, you will continue to think that, and if you believe personhood develops gradually or is imbued at some later point you will continue to believe that. The question is simply not one that can be reasoned from evidence, because personhood is a socially negotiated cultural construct, not an empirical fact.

The second reason is that abortion politics are about way more than the fetus and its rights. Raising children affects every part of parents’ lives. So do the ways wee regulate reproduction in society. With that in mind, discussion of abortion should be occurring within larger discussions about reproduction and childcare in society.

We have to take a step back. Instead of only asking what to do when people want or get abortions, we have to ask why they want abortions in the first place.

And when we get right down to it, ninety-nine percent of abortions have one cause: unwanted pregnancy.

That raises some questions:

  • Why are so many unexpected pregnancies unwanted?
  • Why are so many unexpected pregnancies occurring in the first place?
  • Why is there so much focus on restricting or banning abortion rather than on, say, reducing unwanted pregnancy or making unexpected pregnancy less frightening?

The answers could fill volumes, but here I’m just going to point to some resources I’ve found useful. If you’re interested in the politics of pregnancy, abortion, and child-raising, I think these books are a good place to start your own research.

The first book deals with the consequences of unplanned pregnancies, and what can make the prospect of an unexpected child so daunting. Let’s acknowledge that not all unexpected pregnancies have to be unwanted pregnancies—I’ve known many people who happily and lovingly raised “whoopsie” babies. But children affect everything in your life. Being willing and open to the process matters. Being safe and stable matters.

Diana Green Foster shows why in her recent book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion. The book recounts a massive ten year study following a thousand women who had sought abortions at around the legal limit in the regions they lived. Some were a few days under the limit and went through with their abortions, while others were a few days over the limit and were denied. By clustering the participants so closely around the cutoff date, Foster’s team ensured that the abortion and non-abortion groups were very similar for all practical purposes.

Foster’s study found that being denied an abortion had serious negative consequences on the lives of women over the ten year term of the study. The women themselves were less well-off economically, had attained less education, had poorer mental health, and were more likely to be in unhealthy and/or abusive relationships. Even the children that women already had fared better if their mother was provided an abortion.

Basically, along every axis of comparison, women who were allowed to have abortions and their families were better off than those women who sought abortions but were turned away. Being forced to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term and raise and unexpected child has profound consequences for the economic and material wellbeing of the family.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that unexpected pregnancies can be terrifying events. There is a lot in pregnancy and child-raising to fear if you are not willing and open to the process, or if you are in n unstable or precarious situation. Even the staunchest opponents of abortion must acknowledge, at the very least, that there are many times when it is rational not to want a child.

Abortion, though, is only one way of choosing not to have a child, and a late-stage one at that. Why are there so many unexpected pregnancies to deal with in the first place? And wouldn’t it be easier to prevent them than to abort them, regardless of your view of abortion itself?

For some innovative answers to these questions, I recommend Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion by Gabrielle Blair. This book is a game changer for the public discussion on abortion. It is incisive, laser-focused, and best of all: short. You can read it easily in a sitting or two. 

The book is based upon this twitter thread Blair wrote in 2018, expanded, honed, and supported with ample references. She begins with a provocative claim: 99% of abortions result from unwanted pregnancies and 100% of unwanted pregnancies result from irresponsible ejaculations. Thus, the responsibility for unwanted pregnancy—and thus for abortion and its prevention—should lie most heavily on men.

For those of you feeling skeptical or protesting women’s sexual irresponsibility right now, read the book. Blair does an impeccable job supporting her claims, and you’ll be hard-pressed to leave unchanged,. Of course, she admits that women make irresponsible sexual decisions too, but no uterus can impregnate itself.

Think of it like this: if your buddy urges you to shoot him on a dare, he’s being irresponsible. But guess what? It’s also irresponsible (and criminal) for you to comply.

If a woman begs a man to have unprotected sex with her when neither of them wants a child, she is being irresponsible. If he complies, so is he. And it’s only his irresponsibility that can cause a pregnancy. Begging for sex, by itself, cannot.

From here, she argues for increased and proactive contraception use among men and for improved sex education and contraceptive availability for everyone. This approach—impressing their reproductive responsibility on men from a young age and empowering everyone to make responsible reproductive decisions—has the potential to decrease abortion rates more than criminalization ever could.

Even in countries with bull bans and criminal penalties for abortion, around 68% of unwanted pregnancies are aborted nevertheless, according to WHO estimates. On the other hand, a pilot program in Colorado that provided free long-acting reversible contraception reduced teen birth and abortion rates  by nearly 50% between 2009 and 2017.

The program saved money as well. The Colorado Department of Public health estimated that every dollar spent providing free preventative birth control saved $5.85 in Medicaid costs, for a total savings of nearly $70million. With support and expansion, results would be even better.

 Bans are punitive—moderately effective but cruel. Strategies based in trust and provision are both more effective and more humane.

This leads to my final recommendation: a holistic framework known as Reproductive Justice. This framework was developed by a group of women including Loretta Ross who wanted to expand the discussion of reproductive ethics beyond fetuses and abortions. Their framework boils down to three simple rights:

  1. To have children when desired.
  2. To not have children when not desired.
  3. To raise and provide for the children you have in safe and nurturing environments.

They are simple, but profound when taken seriously. 

Instead of doing nothing to prevent unwanted pregnancies and punishing people for choosing to terminate them, this framework trusts and equips them to make informed and responsible reproductive decisions from the beginning to the end of the process.

It doesn’t treat birth like an endpoint, but includes the right to raise children in safe and healthy conditions as a central component. How much we care about embryos and fetuses should never be disconnected from how we care for children and adults, though too often it is.

***

So To put a bow on this series, I may think the ethics of fetal personhood and abortion are fraught and murky, but my approach to law, policy, and social norms end up being pretty simple.

I choose trust.

I choose care.

I don’t support bans or restrictions on abortion, but want to see solutions to the problems of unexpected and unwanted pregnancy, for parents raising children with inadequate support and children being raised in unstable and unsafe environments. I want to see a world where every child is wanted and cared for.

I want reproductive justice, in the most expansive sense.

Abortion, the Bible, and Us: The Evangelical About-Face on Abortion

An anti-abortion protest in California's Bay Area from 1986
A 1986 anti-abortion protest in the Bay Area
(Photo by Nancy Wong, CC by SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
To recap what I’ve covered in this series so far:

All of this is hard to square with the tenor of contemporary abortion politics, where absolute opposition to abortion, grounded in a belief that life begins at the moment of fertilization, is often held to be the defining political commitment of the religious (read: Christian) right. Within this conservative coalition, evangelicals in particular tend to justify their anti-abortion stance in originalist and biblicist terms. 

Take, for example, resources developed by Focus on the Family that assert that the Bible says life begins at conception, or megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s comment that “the reason I believe that life begins at conception is because the Bible says it.”

The Bible, of course, says no such thing.

And you have to work pretty hard to get the Bible to imply it.

 If it isn’t in the Bible, then—and it isn’t—where does it come from? Is it simply a constant element of Christian belief? Again, the answer is no.

The Evangelical About-Face

From the outset, we have to distinguish between different kinds of Christians, since different denominations do not have the same historical relationship with abortion. Officially, the Roman Catholic Church has long opposed abortion and, since the mid-20th century, contraception (individual Catholics have various opinions, of course, and tend to access contraception and abortion at roughly the same rates as everyone else in the United States.

Evangelical Christians, however, who are now at least as closely identified with anti-abortion politics as Catholics, have not always been politically motivated by abortion—or even united in opposition to it.

In the era before Roe v. Wade, many evangelical leaders argued that abortion was permissible in many circumstances. For example, the influential evangelical theologian and apologist Norman Geisler, in the 1971 and 1975 editions of his Christian Ethics, wrote the following, which I will quote at length:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — 
i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

Fifty years later, such a position from a notable conservative evangelical would be almost unthinkable. Indeed, Geisler himself did not remain supportive of abortion. Long before his death in 2019, he had become an ardent opponent of abortion in any form, arguing explicitly that it should supersede all other issues in determining Christians’ voting priorities. This change was already apparent in the 1989 2nd edition of his Christian ethics, where he asserted (as part of a much longer discussion):

Scripture texts leave no doubt that an unborn child is just as much a person in God’s image as a little child or an adult is. They are  created  in  God’s  image  from  the  very  moment  of  conception,  and  their  prenatal  life  is  precious  in  God’s  eyes  and  protected  by  his  prohibition  against  murder.

In 18 years, the Bible had managed to shift from being crystal clear in one direction to being crystal clear in the opposite and contradictory direction, something which Geisler scarcely hints at (and only in the preface)..

But Geisler’s permissive position was far from anomalous in the evangelical circles of the mid-20th century. Bruce Waltke, a professor at the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, wrote in Christianity Today in 1968 “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed.”

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted an official resolution that affirmed the value of fetal life but added “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

At the time, 70% of Southern baptist pastors approved of abortion to support the mental or physical health of the mother. Support was 64% for “fetal deformity” and 71% in cases of rape. 

Similarly, the evangelical response to Roe was not immediate or uniformly negative. While Christianity Today criticized the decision in 1973, many influential conservative pastors voiced their support. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the US, said “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother, that it became an individual person.” He went on “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and the future should be allowed.”

The Baptist Press actually hailed the decision as a win: “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”

Neither was this a case of leaders who were out of touch with the theological leanings of their congregations, as rank-and-file evangelicals were not exercised by the decision and proved hard for activist groups to mobilize. In 1980, the evangelical magazine Moody Monthly lamented that “Evangelicalism as a whole has uttered no real outcry. We’ve organized no protest. … The Catholics have called abortion ‘The Silent Holocaust.’ The deeper horror is the silence of the evangelical.”

This sentiment was echoed by other members of the new religious right at the time, including Heritage Foundation founder and John Birch Society member Paul Weyrich,  Moral Majority board member Ed Dobson, and the anti-abortion activist group the Christian Action Council.

Eventually, though, activist efforts to mobilize evangelicals against abortion did come to fruition. Harold O. J. Brown, the Christianity Today editor who wrote the original criticism of Roe v. Wade, founded the Human Life Review in 1975 and the Christian Action Council in 1976. Jerry Falwell preached his first sermon against abortion in 1978, and Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop published their influential Whatever Happened to the Human Race? in 1979. Together, these and other activists worked to bring abortion to prominence among evangelicals. 

By 1984, the landscape had changed. That year, the book Brave New People argued the once common evangelical view that abortion was ethically complicated and often permissible, but this time it provoked such a strong backlash that the publisher, Zondervan, conducted the first recall in its history.

Since then, staunch opposition to abortion has been the almost unquestioned position of the Christian right, evangelicals included.

What happened?

At this point, the facts are pretty clear. Abortion for evangelicals was not an important issue or an issue of unanimous agreement in the middle of the 20th century. Since Jonathan Dudley made this point in an influential op-ed for CNN, however, there has been a war over the narrative. Why exactly did evangelicals perform this about-face on abortion?

When evangelicals themselves tell the story, it becomes a story of heroes rousing morally sluggish congregations to realign with clear biblical truth. In other words, the problem was general ignorance of the Bible’s clear teachings and the remedy was deeper, more diligent Bible study.

These retellings rightly emphasize the significance of highly motivated activists, but their Bible-centrism falls flat. As I’ve argued throughout this series of posts, biblical texts stake out no clear position on abortion or fetal personhood, and neither do they suggest it was an issue of moral significance to the communities by and for whom biblical texts were written. The Bible could not have been the sole driver of this revolution in evangelical politics, which means that other motivations must be identified.

For Dudley, it was a story of the political tail wagging the theological dog. That is, adherence to political conservatism did not result from the belief that life begins at conception; rather, political conservatism motivated many Christians to interpret biblical texts to mean that life begins at conception.

Religious historian Randall Balmer puts a finer point on it. In his book Bad Faith and these articles for Politico Magazine, Balmer argues that political mobilization around abortion was actually kicked off by conservative evangelical resistance to government-mandated desegregation of religious schools. 

Balmer is not arguing for anything as simple as an “Aha! It was really just racism all along!” gotcha. This is America, and at some level it’s racism all the way down. The anti-abortion movement has had troubling connections with white supremacist and eugenics movements throughout its long history, but the pro-choice and birth control movements have a few racist and eugenicist skeletons in their closets as well.

What these reconstructions show, however, is that anti-abortion politics did not arise directly from diligent Bible reading and that abortion did not function as an independent political issue. Rather, it interacted with a slew of other issues that all revolved around the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam movement, sexual revolution, and second wave of feminism co-occurred in ways that profoundly destabilized the traditional hierarchies of American society and, working together, motivated the political resurgence of the religious right.

While the rhetoric of the abortion debate focuses intensely on the figures of the fetus and the mother, the ethics and politics of abortion have implications that connect very strongly to these traditional hierarchies. I have more research to do here, but I have a hunch that opposition to abortion has proved so powerful a galvanizing force because its intense focus on the fetus—usually portrayed as a baby no matter the gestational age being discussed—easily obscures its connections with less palatable and less popular conservative political priorities. For decades now, the mantra “abortion is murder” has acted as a powerful Trump card and a nearly insurmountable barrier to defecting from the Republican Party, as Bradley Onishi wrote in this powerful essay. No matter how many harmful and destructive policies they espouse, no matter how promiscuously they flirt with authoritarianism, how can any other issue compete with the murder of a million babies a year? This question keeps many people voting for candidates they disagree with on almost everything because the prevalence of abortion weighs too heavily to bear.

I understand this earnest belief. I understand this discomfort. At some point, though, I had to acknowledge that the Bible’s clarity on prenatal personhood and on abortion were illusory. 

This doesn’t mean that people who read and believe in the Bible can’t believe that life begins at conception or that abortion is always wrong. However, these beliefs must be understood also as reflections of social, historical, and political forces outside of the Bible. The attempt to locate fetal personhood and anti-abortion ethics in the original message of the Bible is an attempt to remove them from historical and cultural contingency and to sink them deep in the unchanging bedrock of eternal truth. However, theological priorities are influenced by contingent and contextual forces for evangelicals as much as for anyone else. 

In short, categorical opposition to abortion is neither a necessary element of true Christian faith nor an ethical issue so clear and settled that it should supersede all others in social and political reasoning.

I can’t tell you exactly what to think about abortion (I’ll share my own positions in the next post), but I can tell you this: if it were left to the Bible, we’d spend a lot less time policing it.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Most of these sources are linked above and repeated here for ease of reference. 

Balmer, Randall. Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Eerdmans, 2021.

—. “The Real Origins of the Religious Right.” Politico Magazine, May 27, 2022.

—. “The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth.” Politico magazine, May 10, 2022.

Dibranco, Alex. “The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Ties to White Supremacists.” The Nation, Feb 3, 2020.

Dudley, Jonathan. “When Evangelicals were Pro-Choice.” CNN Belief Blog, 2012.

—. “How Evangelicals Decided that Life Begins at Conception.“ HuffPost Religion, Nov. 5, 2012.

Farley, Audrey Clare. “The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values.” Religion and Politics, 2021.

Onishi, Bradley. “Pro-born: A Former Evangelical on the Single-Issue Politics of White Christians.” Religion Dispatches, March 18, 2018.

Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

 

Further Reading

Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. Basic Books, 2017..

Parker, Willie. Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice. 37 Inc., 2018.

Pittman, Ashton. “To Rule History with God: The Christian Dominionist War on Abortion.” Mississippi Free Press, Jan 26, 2022 (Part one of a three-part series).

Schenk, Rob. Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love. Harper COllins, 2019.

Abortion, the Bible, and Us: Conducting Abortions in the Ancient World

A silver coin from ancient Cyrene, dating from the 5th century BCE, which shows a fruit or pod from the silphium plant.

A 5th century BCE silver coin from Cyrene, showing part of a silphium plant. Photo from Expeditions Magazine 34 (1992).

In their accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion, all four of the canonical new Testament gospels include a scene in which Jesus stumbles under the weight of the cross and falls. In response, his Roman guards pull a man out of the crowd and compel him to carry it the rest of the way.

This may seem like a strange way to introduce a blog post on the practice of abortion in antiquity, but stay with me. I mention it more for the man than the story, and more specifically, for the man’s home town. His name was Simon, and he came from the North African town of Cyrene. Cyrene was not large, but it was famous throughout the Mediterranean world for its primary export—an herb called silphium that was reputed to be the safest and most effective contraceptive and abortifacient available. According to the Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus, drinking the juice from a chickpea-sized piece of silphium monthly would “not only prevent conception but destroys any already existing” (Riddle 1999).  

Silphium grew only on the Mediterranean-facing hillsides surrounding Cyrene, and proved impossible to cultivate agriculturally. Demand outstripped supply, and by Jesus’s time silphium had been harvested almost to the point of extinction. Writing around the same time, Pliny the Elder said the price of silphium had surpassed its weight in silver, and by the 3rd or 4th century CE, it could no longer be found, making it the first species extinction caused by humans in recorded history.

Of course, mentioning a guy from the town made famous by silphium doesn’t mean the Gospels were taking a position one way or the other on its use, but it does offer us a nice entry point into the discussion of abortion in the ancient world. Silphium was the herb of choice for those who could get it, but it was far from the only option for preventing or ending pregnancies in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean world. Starting almost two millennia before Jesus’s time, texts and art witness to a diverse array of contraceptive and abortive medicines and practices.

some General Comments on Ancient Birth Control

People in ancient societies cherished, valued, and wanted children just like people do today, but there were also times when it was not right to bring a(nother) child into the world. To this end, women developed ways to regulate their fertility to ensure that they would be able to meet the sustenance and care needs of any new additions to their families. Women generally managed their reproductive lives and health care among themselves, with little involvement or interference from men. Most of the relevant knowledge was held by midwives and other learned women, whose traditions did not tend to be put down in text as often as men’s. We must assume, therefore, that the texts we do have represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of ancient contraception and abortion. 

Why do I keep talking about contraception and abortion when this is a series on abortion? The line between the two is difficult to draw even today, and it was much more so in antiquity.

Today, the typical abortion is usually thought of as a highly medicalized surgical procedure, and this has been generally true for the past century or so. Recently, however, the identification of certain medications that cause abortions has revolutionized the practice (as described in this very helpful episode of Radiolab). This shift has brought the practice of abortion much more into line with the way it was conducted in the ancient world, where surgical abortions would have been dangerous and probably very rare. Instead, most abortion would have been handled early, through the use of pharmacological herbs and medicinal compounds. Because of how and when these worked, it’s not always clear whether we would classify them as contraceptives or abortifacients today—or how they would have been understood in antiquity. Basically, we call anything that prevents fertilization contraception and any intervention after conception abortion. This seems clear and tidy, except that the point of conception is hazy today and was far hazier in antiquity. Women in the ancient world may have begun to suspect pregnancy with a missed period, but they could not be sure until they detected fetal movement—sometime around the third month in most cases. This is where that divergence in ancient and modern concepts of conception becomes so crucial.

In his survey of premodern abortion methods, Eve’s Herbs, John Riddle covers a wide variety of birth control practices. Some are clearly contraceptive by anyone’s definition, including withdrawal during intercourse and lactation-induced amenorrhea (that is, a pause in ovulation caused by breastfeeding), while others are clearly abortive methods, such as late-term surgeries.

In the middle are a host of other methods that could have worked as contraceptives, abortifacients, or both depending on the case. Most of these involved herbal and/or other medicinal compounds, which could be prepared and administered in various combinations and forms. Some were taken orally—eaten, dissolved in water, beer, or wine, or brewed in teas. Others were used as pessaries (that is, vaginal suppositories). They could be used prophylactically or in response to suspected pregnancies.

They also worked by various biological mechanisms. Most common were emmenagogues, a term for any substance that stimulates menstruation. These can be used to ensure regular periods on an ongoing basis, but they also impede the implantation of fertilized eggs. Some 40–60% of fertilized eggs do not implant naturally and leave the uterus with the next menstrual cycle anyway, according to UCSF Medical Center and the Gutmacher Institute. Emmenagogues simply ensure this result when pregnancy is not wanted. Other treatments may have worked as spermicides or by forcing the uterine muscles to contract. 

The herbs and other substances used varied depending on local availability and pharmacological practices, and many mentioned in texts have been discovered to have abortifacient properties when tested in modern laboratories. Riddle’s list includes  silphium, of course, along with pomegranate skin, pennyroyal, artemisia, rue, Queen Anne’s lace, myrrh, squirting cucumber, juniper, aloe, dittany, chaste tree, birthwort, asarum, willow, cypress, and various mints. 

Let’s look at a few specific texts for examples.

Egypt

The earliest textual evidence for pregnancy prevention comes from Egypt. The Ebers Papyrus, dating from around 1550 BCE but based on earlier texts, is a 20 meter long medical compendium with cases, treatments, and medical theory discussed under some 877 section headings. It covers every part of the body, including several aspects of gynecology and reproductive care. It contains instructions for a pregnancy test as well as an abortion in the “first, second, or third period” (the time frame is not entirely certain). The prescription involves applying a paste of acacia, dates, and honey to a pessary of moistened plant fibers. In modern laboratories, some species of acacia have been found to decrease fertility substantially in rats.

Recipes for contraceptive pessaries also appear in the Kahun Papyrus, which was written sometime around 1900 BCE. These utilize acacia as well as colocynth, which was also described as an abortifacient in medieval texts. It is potent, but also quite toxic if taken in too large quantities, meaning that some knowledge and experience would have been necessary to prepare it safely.

Mesopotamia

Evidence from Mesopotamia is rarer, but there is at least one medical text with a prescription to “cause a pregnant woman to drop her fetus” (BAM 246). The tablet is broken and much of the process is lost, but it seems to consist of three different concoctions that are ingested on subsequent days. They involve mixing herbs and crushed lizards into beer and wine and are meant to be taken on an empty stomach. None of the herbs in question can be identified with any certainty, but one is mentioned as a drug that promotes easy birthing in other medical texts. Thus, it may have worked by stimulating the uterine muscles to contract, expelling the fetus.

Mesopotamian law collections also contain stipulations for cases of spontaneous, unintentional, and intentional miscarriages like the biblical ones discussed in the last post. These differ by time period and ruling polity, but most do not treat a fetus as equivalent to a child or adult person. However, one law collection from the Middle Assyrian period (15th–13th century BCE) commands the death penalty for any woman who procures or causes her own abortion (Middle Assyrian Law A 53). Further, her corpse must be impaled on a stake and never buried. This was not the majority position among ancient Mesopotamian polities, but it does demonstrate that they could clearly articulate bans on abortion when they wanted to.

Greece and Rome

Greece and Rome provide much more textual evidence for all areas of reproductive medicine, but they are way out of my wheelhouse, disciplinarily speaking. Nevertheless, I can sketch out some characteristics in broad strokes.

Greek and Roman writers held different positions on abortion, but it is clear they were regularly practiced and well-known. Aristotle, for example, supports the use of induced abortion as a means of limiting family size, while Pliny the Elder opposes it as a rule.

The herbal and pharmacological treatments mentioned above occur often in medical texts, identified as contraceptives, abortifacients, or “menstrual regulators.” In addition, physicians including Hippocrates and Galen recommend strenuous exertion or jumping up and down to cause abortion by inducing premature labor. The Hippocratic work Nature of the Child says that a woman early in pregnancy should “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap, for seven times,” at which point the seed should fall out onto the ground.

 Perhaps the most famous example of a ban on abortion, the Hippocratic Oath, turns out not to be one on closer investigation. The Latin translation of the oath that predominated for centuries in Europe included a blanket prohibition on abortion. The original Greek, however, especially in the earliest manuscripts, read differently:  “I will not give a woman a pessary for the purpose of inducing an abortion.” Hippocrates and his followers knew both oral and vaginal methods of birth control, so why the distinction? A likely explanation comes from Soranus’s treatise on gynecology, written in the 2nd century CE, where he says that the side effects and potential risks of pessaries are simply too great to support their use. thus, the oath seems to have been originally about the safety of abortions rather than their permissibility.

Ancient Israel

We do not have any explicit medical or pharmacological evidence of contraception or abortion from ancient Israel itself, except for one biblical text that indicates knowledge of withdrawal as a means of preventing pregnancy (genesis 38:8–10).

Aside from that, there is also one biblical ritual that can result in the termination of a pregnancy in some circumstances, although it is not clear that it should be understood as an abortion text in the same way as the medical writings referenced above. There is no identifiable mechanism by which the ritual could cause a miscarriage or abortion medically, and within the logic of the ritual the power that determines the result is magical or miraculous, depending on how you want to define it.

The ritual, Numbers 5:11–31, is known as the Sotah, after the Hebrew term for a “wayward woman.” It is intended as a means of divining whether a woman has had sexual intercourse with anyone other than her husband, and to initiate it he need only suspect her of infidelity (in biblical language, when “a spirit of jealousy comes over him,” Numbers 5:13–14).

The jealous husband brings his wife to the tabernacle courtyard, where a priest conducts the ritual test. First, he makes an offering of grain provided by the husband. Then he adds dust from the ground to a bowl of sanctified water. He makes the woman swear an oath of her fidelity, writes its words on a scroll, and then scrapes them off into the bowl of dust and water. He gives the woman this “water of bitterness” to drink, and its effects provide a judgment on her guilt or innocence.

If she has been faithful, the potion will have no effect and she may go free. If she has had sex with another man, however, the “water of bitterness” will cause bitterness within her and “her stomach will distend and her thigh will drop” (5:27).

This is not the same wording as the accidental miscarriage law in Exodus 21:22–25, which says “if…her baby comes out,” and some have suggested that it refers literally to symptoms of the intestines and legs. In context, however, termination of the pregnancy is the only viable interpretation.

The term translated ‘belly” (Hebrew בטן) is anatomically imprecise, but every time it occurs in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) it refers specifically to the womb. Likewise, the term translated “thigh” (Hebrew ירך) is a common euphemism for the genitals, as when all of Jacob’s descendants are called יצאי ירכו “those who came out of his ‘thighs’” (Genesis 46:26). And finally, if she is innocent the text states that “she will be able to retain seed” (ונזרעה זרע; i.e., become pregnant, Numbers 5:28). The implication, of course, is that the physical symptoms described in the opposite case would entail not being able to retain seed—that is, infertility.

This is unlike the previous examples of abortion texts for some obvious reasons. It is not primarily intended to induce an abortion; rather, the abortion results from being found guilty of adultery. Second, there is no identifiable abortifacient involved in the process. Within the logic of the text, the thing that makes it work is the incantation (or the god invoked in the incantation).

As with other ancient Middle Eastern and biblical texts, the concern was not for the fetus’s rights for their own sake, Neither was it for the health, wellbeing, or autonomy of the woman. The concern was for the paternity rights of the father, whose patrilineage was threatened by the prospect that his wife had become pregnant by another man. This is why this particular ritual doesn’t come up much in modern abortion debates: the moral justification for the abortion is unsympathetic, if not entirely abhorrent, to both sides of the contemporary struggle over abortion rights. Literally no one today would argue that doubts about paternity provide sufficient reason for a husband to unilaterally procure an abortion for his wife. 

 Final Thoughts

Abortion is not a new phenomenon, and neither is the demand for it. There are times when people want to have (more) children, and times when they do not. Ancient texts show us that people have devised many ways to regulate their fertility and reproductive rates throughout history, and that they have debated the ethics of these practices for just as long. The Bible speaks less of contraception and abortion than do texts that have been found in the areas surrounding ancient Israel, and in different terms. Its ethical concerns are foreign in many ways to the lines of the contemporary debate, yet they also circle around key issues that still drive political discourse and activity today: the roles of women in society, the purpose of reproduction, and who gets to make decisions about it.

On our next stop: the modern political fight over abortion inlight of the Bible’s extreme unclarity about it.

Bibliography/Further Reading:

Biggs, Robert D. “Conception, Contraception, and Abortion in Ancient Mesopotamia.”

Kapparis, K. A.  Abortion in the ancient world. Duckworth classical essays. London: Duckworth Academic, 2002.

Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Abortion, the Bible, and Us: On Personhood

Photograph of an angry bull in a pasture. It's not a goring ox like the laws mention but hey, close enough.

(Photo Wikimedia Creative Commons 2.0)

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the major ethical questions surrounding abortion is that of when life begins, or better, when a developing embryo or fetus acquires the right to life. In the last one, I showed how biblical descriptions of pregnancy—metaphorical though they are—tend to frame the formation of a new child as a process rather than an instantaneous event. But does this processual understanding extend to ethical considerations and the right to life as well?

There aren’t many relevant biblical texts to consult—again, there’s no biblical passage that comes right out with a direct statement on fetal personhood—but what little evidence there is suggests that it was also treated as something that develops over time.

 For this discussion, I’m indebted to the work of Tracy Lemos in her recent book Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts. Lemos examines the practice and punishment of violence as it relates to the social status of individuals. In particular, who is viewed as a person and who a non-person? To her, being recognized as a person in society means being recognized “as having value, not as a commodity but as a participant in social relations.” Importantly for this post, personhood is characterized by “the attribution of agency, rights, or protections—particularly protection from physical harm—and/or by public rituals that convey or reaffirm that individual’s value.” In other words, being seen as a person protects an individual from violence or makes violence a more serious crime.

Lemos conducts a holistic study, dealing in turn with personhood as it relates to gender, nationality, enslavement, and childhood. You can (and should!) read the whole chapter on children, “Visiting the Iniquity of the Father on the Son: Violence and the Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel,” at her academia.edu page. It deals mostly with children post birth, but discusses also the status of fetuses in Israelite society.

We can learn a lot by comparing legal penalties for violent acts, because these often link life and health directly with monetary payments and/or other punishments. The most relevant law relating to fetal personhood (and the most relevant biblical text, period) comes from a legal collection in Exodus 20–23 known as the Covenant Collection. Before we get to it , though, I’ll illustrate the point with reference to a few other laws. Since the Bible contains multiple collections of laws that don’t always agree with one another, choosing laws from the same collection has benefits as well as drawbacks. It allows us to expect some degree of internal consistency that does not characterize the Bible as a whole, but it also limits the discussion to just one of the Bible’s many and varied voices. We also know that the Covenant collection was not wholly a native Israelite creation, since it seems to have been based in large part upon the Code of Hammurabi for its overall structure and the content of many of its laws (there is A good book by my dissertation advisor on just that topic!).

Personhood and the Valuation of Life in the Covenant Collection

The Covenant Collection contains laws on a lot of different topics. It’s far from comprehensive, but its laws touch on altars, sacrifice, property, enslavement, liability, legal procedure, sexuality, and violence.

Often it presents illuminating variations on a legal scenario. Consider the Ten Commandments’ prohibition against murder:

You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)

Sweet. Good start. But what does that mean in practice. A little bit later, we get more legal detail:

Someone who strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:12)

This sets the standard penalty for taking a life as losing your own, according to the talionic principle (that is, an eye for an eye, etc.). But this doesn’t apply to every case. What if the killing wasn’t on purpose? What if it was in self defense or defense of property?

In the case of accidental manslaughter, the killer can flee to a place of refuge to avoid punishment (Ex. 21:13). Similarly, if someone beats a thief to death during a break-in, they incur no guilt or legal penalty (Ex. 22:1).

Punishments can also vary based on the identity of the victim. So, for example, if someone killed a person they had enslaved. If the victim died immediately from the wounds, the law prescribes that נקום ינקם “it shall be punished” (Ex. 21:20). This is different wording from the original law regarding murder: מות יומת “he shall be put to death.” Though of course punishment could be imagined to refer to the death penalty, that does not seem to be the intent. If the purpose of writing a separate law for the murder of enslaved people was to underscore that the punishment was identical to the murder of a free citizen, why choose a looser and more general word? More likely, laws concerning violence against enslaved people were written separately because they were conceived of differently.

The difference is even clearer when the enslaved person lives a few days after the attack, and then dies. In this case, the attacker incurs no penalty, because כספו הוא “he (the enslaved) was his (the enslaver’s) property” (Ex. 21:21).

Thus, it seems that an individual’s personhood could be mitigated by their enslavement, and that a crime against an enslaved person was not viewed in the same way as a crime against a free citizen.

This distinction between the free and the enslaved appears throughout the Covenant Collection. For example, the owner of a habitually aggressive ox that gores a free person—no matter their age or gender—is put to death (Ex. 21:29–31). If that same ox, with the same negligent owner, kills someone who has been enslaved, the owner must only pay a fine to the victim’s owner—remuneration for lost property rather than for lost life )Ex. 21:32).

In the same way, the law of “an eye for an eye” only applies to free citizens. If an enslaver puts out the eye or tooth of someone they enslave, they are not subject to the loss of their own eyes or teeth. Rather, they have to free their victim from slavery. 

This case is especially striking. In the case of free-on-free violence, the appropriate restitution for one harm is an equivalent harm enacted upon the perpetrator. In free-on-enslaved violence, the injustice is rectified by conveying a benefit upon—or, more accurately, removing an oppression from—the victim.

While enslaved people were not treated as complete non-persons in all biblical texts, as Lemos argues elsewhere, it is clear from these laws and others that they were not treated as persons in the same way or as consistently as free people. Their position allowed for mitigation of their rights in ways that were truly brutal and dehumanizing. Morally abhorrent as they are, these laws illustrate the principle that levels of personhood can be embedded in legal discourse, particularly in the permissibility and punishment of violence. This sets us up for the main event:

The Case of Collateral Miscarriage

After all that intro, here it is at last: the closest thing we get to a biblical pronouncement on fetal personhood, in the context of a law about collateral damage during a brawl.

“When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.

If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22–25)

Here we have two variations on a common scenario: in both cases the brawl causes the end of a pregnancy, but the penalties differ based on whether “harm” (Hebrew אסון) occurs or not. There has been some debate over the nature of this harm and who experiences it, but the general consensus is that the pregnancy is terminated and the fetus is lost, and the harm that may or may not occur refers to the mother. In this case, the first variation imagines a situation where the blow causes a miscarriage but the woman remains healthy. The second a scenario in which the pregnant woman experiences physical harm beyond the loss of her pregnancy.

A minority position holds that the additional harm is done to the infant—that is, that the scenario describes an early birth rather than a miscarriage, and the additional penalties result from further injury to the child. The earliest Greek translation actually misunderstood the term for “harm” entirely and translated it “if the fetus is not fully formed” vs. “if the fetus is fully formed.” Due to our better understanding of biblical Hebrew and our knowledge of Hammurabi, however, most scholars find the first interpretation much more likely. 

In the first scenario, where the pregnancy is terminated but the woman is unhurt, the penalty characterizes it as a property crime against the father. As such, it does not seem that the fetus was understood to be a person with social and legal standing of its own. Further, it characterizes the loss of the potential child primarily as a loss of the father rather than the expectant mother.

As Lemos writes, “In Exod 21:22–5, a hierarchy is thus established in which a fetus has much lower standing than its mother, harms against whom require talionic pun­ishment rather than monetary compensation, but who also has less legal standing than her husband.19 If we examine these different sections of Exodus 21 together, then, children’s standing appears to be higher than that of either slaves or fetuses… While slaves are offered some legal protections, the fetus occupies an extremely subordinated position and has no apparent legal standing separate from its father.” Fellow biblical scholar Naomi Steinberg states it plainly: “The fetus is a nonperson.””

This is scant evidence, and perhaps it is unwarranted to discover a universal cultural belief about fetal non-personhood in one group of laws among several within a literary anthology of many voices and perspectives, but this conclusion does align with the processual view of fetal development implied in pregnancy texts and with the subordination of fetal and maternal rights under the father in texts I will discuss later.

And again, there is the question for those who see opposition to abortion as an eternal, God-given absolute: if an omniscient deity were using a sacred text to communicate abhorrence for abortion, why would this be all we get?