Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Gus" wrote in message
ups.com...

[snip]

And can't there be ethical questions outside of
religion?

Certainly there are. But almost all of the ones that give trouble in
medicine come from religion.

I'm reminded of an old friend of mine, taught by the Jesuits and
Harvard-educated, an old-time Catholic, who says his God "is an angry
God."
g He prefers the Old Testament. And then I was reading today a
reference
to a passage from Deuteronomy 21:10 that they must have skipped in
parochial
school, but which I had read as an adult, in which the Bible proclaims a
right to capture women in battle, shave their heads, lock them up for a
month, rape them into matrimony, and then deny them the right to an
abortion
afterward.

I too looked into the bibles available to me, the King James and Young's
Literal Translation, which say more or less the same thing. It's a
statement of either custom and/or law on the handling of captive women,
in the context of the day.

But I cannot see anything about denial of abortion rights, or even the
slightest most oblique reference to the issue. Could you help me find
the thread here?

Ah, the article referred to the irony of the sexual violence explicit in
Deut. 21:10 and the claim made by some religious pro-lifers that Deuteronomy
contains numerous pro-life inferences, in which life is "positive," and that
therefore God was saying that abortion was "negative."

I don't buy that pro-life claim about Deuteronomy, but the ironic comment is
something I've heard before from pro-choice folks, in answer to the supposed
anti-abortion inferences of Deuteronomy as a whole.

I must say that the reference to abortion mystified
me, as these verses have to be 5,000 years old, long before medical
abortion became remotely practical.

Well, biblical scholars mostly place Moses's life around 1200 - 1500 BC or
so, and both physical and herbal (medicinal) methods for inducing abortion
were recorded from before the time of Hippocrates. He wrote of it himself.
So it's been around for a long time. It seems likely that it's been with us
since Moses's time.

--
Ed Huntress

Finding abortion in the bible is like finding it in the constitution.
You have to look through the "vapor". g