In article ,
"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."

It's a bit remote, to be sure.

A significant bit of the Old Testament (I forget which books) was about
competition between tribes, and one standard way to grow one's tribe was
to conquer a neighboring tribe and steal their women, killing or
enslaving the men. Slaves fetch a good price.

And killing or enslaving any overly resistant women. This is probably
the evolutionary basis for the Stockholm Syndrome.

I would guess that the purpose of the shaved head, new clothes, and
month of grieving in solitude is to cause the woman to "readjust", so
that at the end of the month she will welcome her conquerer.


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.

There is a reason I don't try to follow this debate.


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.

One assumes that these were oral traditions long before being written
down, but OK, let's say it's more like 3000-4000 years ago. It's still
millennia before the invention of modern medicine.

Some of those herbs are used to this day, but still the abortion debate
of 1500 BC would turn only on the practical issues of efficacy versus
risk of the few options then available. None were particularly
attractive.

Joe Gwinn