From a Christian "pro-life" site:
"When dealing with the likes of Beket, you really aren't even speaking with people. These guys have been completely taken over by demons. Not influenced (like many people who are pro-choice), but actually taken over...so when you are arguing with them, you are arguing with a preternatural being. Picture Screwtape. You're just a game to this guy. Just a demon passing time...and you are his little toy...they won't respond to logic, or conscience...what they need is an exorcism!
Or maybe stretched on the rack, bludgeoned and excoriated, then slowly burned alive at the stake in that historic Roman Catholic ritual?
The author of that prescription has the makings of an acclaimed and honored priest.
The Roman Catholic Church, along with its many and varied offshoots (including Christian Protestantism), as well as all other religions, are, in word and in deed and in many ways, the sources of an enormous amount of good in our world, and I respect and appreciate that contribution.
However, in my wistful fantasy of a rational, enlightened secular civilization that unremitting and unrepentant religious strife seems to guarantee will never materialize, all of that enormous amount of good and much more, could be accomplished without the concomitant discrimination, destruction, suffering, and death guaranteed by the enshrinement of the supernaturalism of religion. No human and no human institution, religion, or philosophy is infallible, perfect, or above criticism - and nothing is more contrary to, and irreconcilable with, the fundamental ideals and principles of the United States of America than attempts to force upon others dogmatic and absolute religious beliefs and philosophies about what to think and how to behave. Such efforts by any religion, or by any corruption of it by misguided followers, inevitably spawn fanatical fundamentalist extremism that is indistinguishable from any other form of uncompromising religious fanaticism, such as the militant Islamic fundamentalism that is also responsible for such horrific human suffering among millions and has declared jihad, or "holy war," against the United States and the entire modern world. With our whole world being torn apart, as it has been throughout recorded history, by the extremes of misguided religious fervor, it is my fervent hope that we will at long last see the lesson in this and overcome not only Islamic fanaticism, but the fanaticism that sprouts from all other religions as well. Our survival and the survival of our freedoms and our way of life depend upon overcoming these anachronistic barriers to rational cooperation, now more than ever before, in this age of global technological interconnectedness and interdependence through rapid transportation and trade and instantaneous worldwide communication - and the ability to massively kill and destroy with equal quickness, distance, and ease.
It matters little whether one of the fanatical extremists spawned by religious fervor is a wild-eyed, screaming, ranting, raving, bomb-blasting, gun-brandishing, murderous zealot or a quiet, passive, and polite one who claims to offer mainly moral, philosophical, or financial support. He or she is still a fanatical bigot who has personally identified with, and thus contributes to, a larger body of fanaticism that does indeed threaten all of our lives, eminently the lives and health of millions of women and teenage girls - usually arising out of underlying neurotic needs to compensate for feelings, generally to a large extent engendered and reinforced by the extreme religious beliefs themselves, of inferiority, shame, fear, and guilt, by selectively identifying with certain "cherry-picked," selected and twisted, highly speculative and controversial beliefs about absolute laws of "God" and thus feeling superior, more "Godly," more moral, and more civilized than the "unsaved" who have not "seen the light" (the "infidels") It is an extreme, fanatical, and uncivilized position in a free and pluralistic society, regardless of one's particular ideology, method, or degree or kind of activism, to advocate that any individual, and much moreso a whole class of fellow citizens, be stripped of human rights, whether on the basis of one's indoctrinated religious belief system or any other opinion-based rationale for tyrannical control. The so-called "culture of life" is a conflicted hypocrisy, but I, too, have very grave concerns about a tradition-bound and abiding cross-cultural insensitivity to death and suffering, one that is ages-old, and the well-meaning religionists are the world's leading advocates of this death-dealing, pious moral blindness that so troubles me.
I am a provider of legal, safe, professional abortion care. Before I was that, I was an abortion rights activist. Lest my thought and opinion be dismissed merely as careless and gratuitous arrogance and religion-bashing, I think I should openly clarify in as few words as possible my position on religious belief, although religious belief should not in my opinion be of general relevance to the secular question of abortion rights. There are as many (or more) abortion providers and abortion rights supporters who are religious believers as not. (The reader might find the website of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice interesting and enlightening.) I think I can state my beliefs briefly and simply, but only at the risk of appearing to be cursory and simplistic, which I do not believe myself to be. Although I am not a religious believer, it is not religion I disrespect, fear, and fervently oppose, but extreme religious zeal, or fanaticism - the belief of absolute certainty where in fact, clearly and obviously, none really exists, the megalomaniacal claims of diverse religious zealots that only they know the "true mind of God," and their strident efforts to impose their own particular, often quite peculiar, even bizarre, religious beliefs upon all others by not only fear and intimidation, but by political power. After all, is it not exactly this that we have observed to be the basis of the relentless and ruthless terrorism that holds the entire world under threat of death and destruction and come to see as the greatest barrier of all to peace and cooperation anywhere in the world and to modern civilization itself?
Yes, of course it is!
The great religions of the world are the sources of immeasurable good. However, the flip side is that the power and influence they command by virtue of their good works and fear-inducing belief systems, when twisted by the false certainty and intolerance of fanatics, become the evils of tyranny and terrorism, whether Islamic, Christian, or other.
I guess I am agnostic, meaning simply that I simply acknowledge that I do not know what is not known. That seems reasonable enough to me. Although my mind was assaulted in my childhood by the emotionally-charged, terror-inducing Southern Baptist barrage of indoctrination that pervaded the small Texas town in which I grew up, I somehow managed to preserve my ability to question authority and commonly held beliefs and to think for myself even while observing that most of my friends and acquaintances were having theirs "brainwashed" away ("indoctrinated" if you prefer - "a rose by any other name . . ."). I remember creating quite a stir and getting into trouble I couldn't then well comprehend when I decided at about the age of five or six, all by myself, that nobody could possibly visit every child in the world and bring them all gifts that were packed into one small sleigh in the space of many lifetimes, much less in one night and, besides, deer don’t fly. Expecting to be honored for this triumph of rational thought over unquestioning belief in magic, I excitedly told everyone I could about my discovery. Of course, the other little kids were angry and upset, told their parents, who complained to mine, and hence the trouble. Although I’m sure he didn’t mean it, even in that small Texas town, one young boy in the neighborhood even threatened to kill me for saying (or even thinking) that, and that threat was the harbinger of many like threats I was destined to receive throughout my life for questioning authority and thinking for myself.
But I was right.
It should have been just a short and easy step from doubting the legend of Santa Claus to doubting the broadly similar mythology of Christianity (and all other religions as well, but the only religion I knew of at that time was fundamentalist "bible-belt" Christianity). After all, aren't they both essentially the same stories, slightly different versions, of reward for "good" and punishment for "bad" by a supernatural old man endowed with magical powers with the element of gruesome human sacrifice amended to one but not the other? I think so. Obviously. However, the stakes for disbelieving the one imbued with religious significance were far greater (or so I was assured by the furrowed-brow concern of everybody within my range of experience). Risking Santa Claus filling my hung-with-care stocking with a generous supply of switches presumably with which to be beaten, as was the common "hell-on-earth" scare story told to children to encourage them to be "good," along with my parents' disapproval for upsetting the other little kids in the neighborhood, was as nothing compared to being rebuked and condemned as an "infidel" by the whole town and maybe (I wasn't that sure of myself or of any of it) eventually serving a promised "after-life" sentence of eternity in a "lake of fire" or worse for not being "good" enough to believe in "God" and obey all of "His" supposed commands. So what should have been a short and easy step of extrapolating disbelief in one case of imagined superstitious, supernatural folklore to another actually became a very long and fearsome journey of many years of on again, off again torment during which I repeatedly reprimanded myself for doubting the false certainties of religion and vacillated back and forth with great anguish.
All of that is now way behind me. Now, long-since having left that small town behind and thought my way through all of that fear and trembling, it seems perfectly clear to me that the questions that all religions speciously claim to answer in their diverse ways are as yet unanswerable and that all the religious "explanations," stories, beliefs, and rituals are pretentious, anachronistic vestiges of ancient folklore and superstition, nothing more. However, I am not arrogant enough to believe that I know that which I believe to be not known (or presently even knowable) by anyone - either that there is or is not some sort of a "god," or a "creator," or, if there is such an entity, whether he, she, or it is of the nature described variously in any of the staggering array of different religious traditions -- or, if so, which one. The sheer number of different religions, as well as the dizzying array of different denominations, sects, and cults within each of them, each with its own unique concept of "God," constitute more than ample proof to me that no one really knows what the vast majority of people believe they know so certainly.
The most oft-heard argument in favor of the assertion that there must be a "god" is the one that rests upon the principle that every effect must have a cause, so that therefore there must be a "god" to have caused the creation of the universe and all that is in it. While I know of no concrete exceptions to the principle of cause and effect and thus generally agree that every effect must have a cause, I could never accept the gross irrationality of those who jump to a conclusion about the nature of that cause by surmising that there logically must be a conscious and deliberate "god" of the identity in which they choose on the basis of their indoctrination to believe, on the basis of the specific and particular ancient folklore and historical tradition to which they have been exposed, in order for the universe and all that's in it to exist, but then could not (or would not) comprehend the obvious and logically inescapable fact that one cannot rationally take the logical approach of invoking cause and effect to that point and then abandon it entirely - for, if every effect must have a cause, then a "god" must also have a "creator" of a presumably higher order, then that "creator" a still higher one et cetera ad infinitum. If there must be a "god" in order for the heavens and the earth to have been created, there must for the same reason then also have been a creator of "God" for "God" to be created. Who or what created "God?" And who or what created the "god" that created "God?" Etc. ad infinitum. The "answer" uncritically accepted by the majority of people is no answer at all, the "explanation" explains nothing, and the mystery remains unsolved -- and, what's worse, even further obscured by abandonment of the quest for an answer by the intellectually reckless and irrational expediency of believing that what is only believed is known.
Some believers assert that the "obvious" intelligence in design of the universe points to an intelligent creator. I wonder what they mean. Do they mean the intelligence of design that created the human lower back? Or the intelligence of design that made a rabbit's intestinal tract too short to extract nutrients from the vegetation rabbits eat, thereby forcing rabbits to reconsume their own feces to process it twice? Or the intelligent design that launched the occasional asteroid toward earth to decimate life now and then? Or the intelligent design of random quantum phenomena? Or the useless vermiform appendix in the beginning portion of every person's large intestine that accomplishes no known vital function and frequently becomes inflamed and infected and can cause painful death? Or . . . ? To them I say, "Good grief! Look around you. The universe is not terribly ordered by our customary standards except in obeying the laws of physics and chemistry that were derived from observation of it, and man himself is the one remaining twig on a previously lush branch of hominid evolution. There's no proof of God's existence in the design of the universe. It pretty much looks jury-rigged by the laws of physics and chemistry interacting with the seemingly random forces of nature to the objective observer. You keep trying to find proof where there apparently is none. All you have is faith, and if you keep trying to dredge up proof, you must think faith is a terribly weak foundation. With that I wholeheartedly agree."
A common refrain of opponents of legal abortion is, "Every human life is, from conception, created by God and is infinitely precious in His sight." Given the indisputable fact that approximately 50% of those "infinitely precious in His sight" are spontaneously aborted (miscarried), other millions a year are electively aborted, legally and illegally, after women discover they are pregnant, and many millions more are slaughtered or starve to death throughout the world, God has a terribly odd way of showing how precious these human lives are in His sight. Given the horrors that this supposedly all knowing, all seeing and all powerful entity permits, might it be that "God" is not "Love" and infinite goodness after all? That would certainly make more sense given the horrors that afflict so many of the world's very young and so many of its poor and defenseless. It seems to me, given what we know about so much of history and the multitude of children's and other innocents' suffering and deaths for all of humanity's history, that God is just an irresponsible sadist - or he/she/it is powerless, blind, and really doesn't care. Or, most likely, is but a non-existent figment of the imagination.
Or am I just cynical? Worse - possessed?
I do not have any credible explanations for why or how the universe, life, and all related things all came about. In my opinion, it is clearly obvious that no one as yet has final answers, and just as clearly obvious that objective scientific inquiry, not blind belief in the ancient folklore and superstition called religion, offers the only real hope of ever discovering such answers. I cannot accept what to me are patently obvious to be the imaginary, fictitious explanations of different religious traditions. I do not at all believe that there is a "god" or "gods" above like a big "Santa Claus" in the sky keeping a ledger on the "goods" and "bads" of all us "little boys and girls" toward the end of eventually rewarding or punishing us. I've never understood why a "god" would indulge in this seemingly childish game of "You must believe in me without seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling me, or in any other way being able to directly and definitively verify even my very existence or I'll cause you indescribably and incomprehensibly excruciating misery and pain forever and ever because I love you so much." I am agnostic only because I think for myself, and, displaying the opposite of arrogance, I have the honesty, the humility, and the rationality to understand I could be wrong in believing that I know what I only believe.
I've found that generally, in regard to matters beyond the mundane and practical, believers do not think, and thinkers do not believe. I don't believe in evolution. I'm convinced by the massive and rationally undeniable evidence.
Regardless of how fervently, fearfully, proudly, or fondly one believes that one knows what one only believes, one only believes it.
Some, knowing they don't know, decide they have nothing to lose by believing anyway, so decide to believe. "If I don't believe and 'they' are right," they reason, "I'll go to 'hell,' but if I just go ahead and believe I'll go to 'heaven.'" "O.K., fine," I reply, "but you can't believe in one 'god' as 'THE GOD' without disbelieving all the others, and what if one of the others is the 'real' one? Why, what if Huitzilopochtli, the ancient 'god' of the Aztecs is the 'real' one, and the only way to 'heaven,' or 'paradise,' or 'eternal life' is through carving the still beating hearts out of living young maidens (and others) atop great pyramids with stone knives? (Ah! The Stone Age! They really knew how to do that "old time religion" good!) Or, hey, maybe 'THE REAL GOD' is the one who some believe bestows boundless rewards upon those faithful enough to pilot large hijacked airliners full of innocent people into tall buildings full of innocent people - mild compared to what devout Roman Catholics did to those millions branded as 'heretics' during the Crusades and the reign of the 'Holy Inquisition' - as well as paltry compared to the suffering and death directly and indirectly caused by religious beliefs of all the various kinds operative in the world today. Some who call themselves 'Christians' now believe that they could get a non-stop ticket to 'heaven' by killing me. There are many other versions of 'God.' Which 'God?'"
Do "miracles" occur? The word "miracle" is casually tossed around a lot with little or no thought as to its actual meaning, just as are many other words and phrases that get similarly roughed up in common usage, but do they actually occur? Well, here's what I make of it: No, they do not, or at least I'm not willing to concede that they do, because I've yet to see or hear of a "miracle," i.e., an event or phenomenon said to be caused by an only imagined and believed in supernatural force, that was not either a misconception, a coincidence, a constellation of coincidences, an outright fabrication, or more likely explainable in terms other than causation by supernatural intervention or influence. As has clearly and consistently been demonstrated time after time throughout history, phenomena follow the laws of nature whether we as yet understand all of those laws or not. When something happens that seems strange, unusual, or unlikely to have happened, or appears to exceed or run counter to our always limited knowledge, our every day experience, and our expectations, or to defy the laws of nature as we perceive them to be, and we have no ready explanation for it, we are perplexed and faced with a dilemma. How could this have happened? Is our surprise and puzzlement shared by others or the result of our own unique ignorance and lack of experience with such a phenomenon? How can it be explained? Can it be influenced or controlled?
The most significant distinction between human beings and all other life-forms on earth and the factor that has allowed humans to achieve the dominant position, perhaps only temporary, at the top of the "pecking order" among life-forms on earth (which is in many ways ultimately and disastrously to the detriment of the environment that sustains all life) is the human brain that is so capable of abstract thinking, contemplating life and knowing of death, wondering why and why not, and imagining elaborate myths in attempting to understand those cases of why and why not for which explanations are not immediately apparent. In the beginning, the mass of unexplained phenomena, especially natural disasters resulting in illness, injury, and death, was so overwhelming and disturbing that there was a desperately felt need for a sense of understanding that might lead to some feeling of control or influence over them. In response to that desperately felt need, supernatural beings, "gods" and "goddesses," as well as mythical "devils" and "demons," had to be imagined as blanket explanations for all that was mysterious and otherwise unexplained, be it wonderfully good or horrifically bad, and religions were therefore conceived in and born from the human imagination. Then, over decades and centuries, as the imagined "gods" and "goddesses" were further elaborated in folklore, myth, and legend, it became more universally accepted, i.e., believed (NOT known), that, though unseen or otherwise directly sensed or observed, they actually existed, concretely and factually, and further that illness, injury, famine, flood, war, death, and all other harmful or merely unpleasant natural occurrences were the results of displeasing these imaginary supernatural entities and being punished by them. Conversely, prosperity, good fortune, bountiful crops, good health, happiness, and all else perceived as good and desirable were attributed to pleasing them and enjoying the rewards of their fantasized "divine intervention." ("He's making a list and checking it twice; gonna find out who's naughty or nice . . . He sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake; he knows when you've been good or bad; so be good for goodness' sake.") Thusly, the systems of belief and superstition known as religion were born out of the human mind and elaborated upon through many centuries of richly imaginative folklore, ritual, and art.
And politics.
Perhaps the main reason religious dogma has survived and flourished through the ages of human history is that chieftains, rulers, and monarchs, both secular and sectarian, found the fear of imaginary "gods" so useful as a means of maintaining control over subjected masses of people by perpetuating myths of their own "divine" selection or guidance - exactly the manner in which, and the reason, religious belief is kept alive today.
In instances of especially unexpected and unexplainable turns of good fortune, the concept of what came to be called "miracles" of "divine intervention" was forged in the minds of those who were believers in the imagined "gods" and "goddesses." All the vast array of unexplained phenomena were attributed to "miracles," and, "That is simply that; no need to look any further for explanation and understanding," sufficed for all but a relative handful of renegades and "infidels" through the centuries. Dissatisfied with the mythical "explanations" and "answers," the false certainty, of religious belief, these mavericks, gradually and against great odds, through relentless and often egregiously brutal persecution by the believers, dared to question the generally accepted systems of belief and develop the rational philosophy and science through which most of what was once considered "miraculous" has been explained in natural rather than supernatural terms and by means of which we have learned to channel and control so much of the forces of nature to our benefit, at least in the short term.
Such rebellious "infidels" were generally denounced and ostracized, or much worse, for their unorthodox "heresies" that contradicted the established traditional systems of belief and were thus feared to be displeasing to the "gods" and "goddesses." Consider as one of countless examples the case of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), a Dominican monk of the Roman Catholic Church, who summed up his "heresy" by writing, "It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
The Holy Office of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church had Bruno imprisoned, tortured with ghastly brutality, and eventually burned alive because he believed that the earth circled around the sun in contradiction to the official position of the Church that it was just the other way around. The Roman Catholic Church, then as now, considered its authority to be unquestionable, absolute, and infallible. However:
He was of course right, not the Church.
The Church has never even apologized, and these same qualities of rigid authoritarian dogmatism and intolerance and persecution for "heresy" continue to the present day, albeit in watered down form which now is by and large confined merely to [a] threatening an eternal "after-life" in "Hell" filled with the kind of incomprehensibly severe brutality once regularly meted out directly, right here on earth, by the Church itself to millions of living, breathing persons as punishment for deviating in thought or deed from the official dogma of the Church - and [b] intensive political involvement toward the ends of restricting certain human rights and rational medical intervention in some matters especially disproportionately harmful to women, most notably those involving sexuality and reproduction, such as effective contraception, abortion rights, stem-cell research, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and comprehensive reality-based sex education.
Do we have "souls?" I have not found a reason to believe that I know there really is such an entity as a "soul" or which religion's version of a "soul" it might be. If we do have "souls," I'll leave it to someone else to explain in credible terms how abortion harms an "immortal soul" and to credibly tell me also why an omnipotent "God" would care so much about every human zygote, embryo, or fetus. If "He" is omnipotent, if "He" created the entire universe in a few days and nights, "He" could just have something like a quick thought and in the blink of the "divine" eye or a twitch of the "divine" nose create countless human fetuses. Right? No big deal. Furthermore, although there are numerous oft-quoted scriptures in the Bible in which the obvious facts of the development of a fetus in the womb are simply acknowledged, nowhere is it stated in what believers take to be the "word of God" that "He" abhors abortion. Indeed, just the opposite. There are various references in the stories of the Bible in which "He" not only condones, but orders, massacres and mass destruction of newborn babies and fetuses in the wombs of pregnant women, despite the innocence of those babies and fetuses, and believers surely must credit "God" with the deaths of uncountable millions of embryos and fetuses lost to spontaneous abortion, or "miscarriage," also despite their innocence. It is likely that considerably less than fifty percent of pregnancies progress to birth of a baby when simply left to nature, or to "God." Despite the innocence of them all.
But, "Because we are so 'miraculously' conceived and wondrously made," some say, "only 'God' has the right to terminate our lives." Are we that much more "miraculously" conceived and wondrously made than a chimpanzee that is over 98% genetically identical to a human? We are conceived through the recombination of DNA from two parents. Is this recombination of human DNA any more "miraculous" than the recombination of bovine DNA from which we make hamburgers?
Actually, there is nothing in the Bible to indicate that abortion should be illegal. There may be passages that seem to indicate that maybe it should be, according to one or another of the writers of the Bible, but dragging that meaning out of even those passages is quite a stretch. Many offenses of relatively trivial nature are specified in considerable detail in the Old Testament: Don't eat the flesh of cloven-hoofed animals (there’re those bovine DNA hamburgers again); don't keep graven images (e.g., like the little gold graven images of the scaffolds of brutal torture and capital punishment used to accomplish crucifixion in the ancient Roman Empire); don't let cattle graze with other kinds of cattle; don't have a variety of crops on the same field; don't wear clothes made of more than one fabric; don't cut your hair or shave; any person who curses his mother or father must be put to death; if a man cheats on his wife, or vice versa, both the man and the woman must die. When even relatively inconsequential things are forbidden in scripture, there appears to be little mincing of words on the subject, and whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term is a pretty important decision regardless of whether approved or disapproved, so I would think that if either "God" or the human authors of scripture had thought it was an important moral issue some one of them would have said so explicitly. They did not, and the primary text of the Judeo-Christian faiths is entirely silent on the subject except to note in passing that it was considered as a punishment in one instance.
Under the circumstances, arguments against abortion must obviously be considered outside the context of scripture simply because there is no basis for them in scripture. The actual theological arguments against abortion and contraception arise not from scripture, but from the natural law philosophies developed by Roman Catholic scholars and philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who attempted to derive principles of human morality from what he termed the "nature of human beings." While that philosophical foundation deserves some measure of respect as an honorable contender for a workable system of morality, it is not scriptural, and certainly to disagree with its conclusions should not be considered "heresy" even by Roman Catholic believers.
Let's turn from considering what some believe to some things we know. We know that all over the world since human civilization began, countless "crimes against life," including wars, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and purges that annihilated the lives and livelihoods of millions, have resulted from the rageful intolerance of zealous proponents of opposing dogmatic and authoritarian religious ideologies, a most prominent and especially intolerant one of which, both historically and currently, is represented and presided over by the Pope. Although many, like the Pope, are all-too-humanly in denial of it and much else for the sake of preserving their own highly questionable, highly controversial, non-evidentiary, and non-rational systems of traditional dogmatic belief in a rich variety of exquisitely nuanced religious ideologies (Christian and numerous others) and the illusory (as far as anyone really knows) sense of security and triumph over death they derive from those beliefs, we know that perhaps the greatest threat to life - even to our continued survival as a species and that of many other species as well - is rampant, exponentially expanding worldwide human overpopulation, with resultant overcrowding; environmental pollution and habitat destruction; depletion of limited land, water, oil, and other natural resources with progressively vicious competition for the dwindling remains; rapidly progressing global climate change from our expanding excess of fossil fuel usage for the energy essential to our survival; and inevitable violent political strife in an age when terrorism or war can lead not only to massive suffering, loss of life, and destruction of our civilizations - of our cities and nations - but to destruction of the earth's capacity to support and sustain all higher forms of life.
We also know that in those countries where men who think like the Pope (or publicly pretend agreement with him out of fear and cowardice or economic, political, and social advantage) have outlawed the extremely safe minor surgical procedure of vacuum aspiration abortion and even effective pregnancy prevention measures, even condoms and diaphragms, and now the "abortion pill" as well, millions of desperate women and terrified teenage girls knowingly risk death and serious injury each year in seeking illegal abortions, and we know that 70,000 or more of these actually die, often horribly and in chilling fear and excruciating pain, each year around the world from incompetent and dangerous abortion attempts made by often well-intended, but ill-trained, unskilled, and inadequately-equipped outlawed abortionists. We know, too, that many times the number who die are seriously injured and maimed for life by incompetent illegal abortion attempts. We know that the effects of overpopulation in some areas of the world have long been catastrophic, that any baby born has a less than fifty percent chance of living to be five years old in some of those areas, and that illegal, and thus unsafe, abortion is the leading cause of death of women of childbearing age in some of those countries in which we know the Pope and his indoctrinated minions regularly and consistently preach to swooning multitudes of cradle-to-grave indoctrinated true-believers not only against abortion, but against any and all forms of effective birth control and sex education, including condom use to prevent AIDS, and we know that he is thus undeniably, though indirectly (and, of course, denied by him and his fawning ecclesiastical hierarchy and those multitudes of indoctrinated true-believing followers), responsible for egregious human suffering and death on a massive scale.
In 2001 the "National Catholic Reporter" broke a story, based on internal church reports, characterizing as a "serious problem" the sexual harassment, exploitation and sexual abuse of nuns - and other girls and women - by priests in 23 countries, on five continents, and especially in Africa. The most outrageous charge in the report involved a nun impregnated by a priest, who reportedly forced her to have an illegal abortion that killed her and then officiated at her funeral! Other allegations were that priests were pressing young nuns to have sex with them in exchange for documentation to enter religious orders and using nuns as "safe" alternatives to prostitutes in countries plagued by HIV/AIDS - with some demanding that heads of convents make nuns sexually available to them. The church responded to these charges in the same way it has responded to charges of priest pedophilia: by dismissing the victims and shielding the wrongdoers. What is most offensive about all of this is that a church hierarchy so obviously unable to handle its own sexuality continues to sit in arrogant judgment of the sexuality of others, with the blessing of politicians and policymakers around the globe. Indeed, the Catholic Church, more than any other religion in the non-Muslim world, is in a bloody battle to exercise complete dominion over women's reproductive lives. The Catholic Church today is committed to the unconscionably cruel and utterly morally untenable position of withholding from sexually active people the condoms that could prevent much of the spread of HIV/AIDS. The pope and the world's bishops regularly lobby to deprive rape victims - in war zones, refugee camps, and hospital emergency rooms - of drugs that will end the misery of a forced pregnancy. The church continues to obstruct access to artificial birth control. And it allows tens of thousands of women to die worldwide from unsafe abortions rather than to find some compassion for women who in good conscience feel they cannot endure pregnancy and the birth of a child and/or cannot bring another child into the world. I fervently hope that out of this terrible crisis will come a worldwide willingness to question the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church on any matter related to sex, reproduction, or human intimacy. It is also my hope that people will begin to see past the church's flamboyant trappings of "holiness" to the unforgivable system of gender apartheid on which the church is based. Not surprisingly, that male-made system has elevated men to near-gods, while officially relegating women and children to silence, to the sidelines, and to a heart-breaking relative irrelevance. It is long past time to oppose and change that system and its general influence. Only then can the real healing begin.
Some American Protestant Christians, especially those known as "fundamentalists" or "evangelicals," have jumped onto this deceptive and misguided "bandwagon" that was originally driven mainly by the Roman Catholic Church - this despite the fact that they claim absolute obedience to, and guidance by, a literal interpretation of the ancient literature of the Bible, which contains not one word clearly referring to abortion in either the Old or the New Testament. It is known historical fact that abortion was practiced in the time of Jesus, but there is not a single reference to prohibition of elective abortion in those scriptures early church leaders chose to include in the Old or New Testaments of the Bible. Not one. There are the oft-quoted scriptures that refer in pre-scientific terms to the well-known facts of prenatal development, as well as numerous scriptures that refer to various other prohibited behaviors, but not a single mention of elective abortion. Not one. Does not one have to wonder why this is so if abortion is really so terrible a "sin?"
Some of us, especially those of us in the dwindling ranks of older physicians, remember with stark clarity that not-so-long-ago time before legalization of elective abortion in the United States by the Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, when very large numbers of American women and teenage girls were among those forced by misguided law of the kind advocated by the Pope and his followers and "evangelical" Protestants into desperately risking, and often sacrificing, their lives and health to obtain often very dangerous illegal abortions in our country. Some of us were there with them in emergency rooms and hospitals around the country, trying desperately with all we could do to treat them as they bled and fevered and agonized and all too often died. All of these many vivid and heart-wrenching memories well illustrate the "culture of death" that concerns me; the one so strongly advocated by the indoctrinated followers of the dogmatic Pope and the "evangelical" Christians.
Those who think like the Pope, or who just robotically agree with him and the ecclesiastical tradition he represents out of deference to the falsely claimed authority, or who pretend or are compelled to agree in order to gain favor in the bureaucratic world of ecclesiastical politics, without question or free independent thought of their own, and want to see this kind of bloodbath revisited upon women and teenage girls by recriminalizing abortion in the United States incredibly insist upon being called "pro-life." Those "pro-lifers" in some states have begun to hear a "wake-up call" - a taste of the denied horrific downside of their detached and misguided piety and fanatical advocacy, as largely pseudo-sanctimonious politicians (almost all of whom are of course detached, politically-obligated panderers, mostly men, to massively propagandized "socially conservative" voters) in some state legislatures and governors' offices have been successful in their foolishly and callously misguided efforts to legislate ever more restrictions of abortion rights that affect preponderantly the poorer, less able, and less privileged among us.
As was thoroughly predictable, desperate American women and teenage girls have thus begun to seek the services of incompetent "back-alley" illegal abortionists and/or herbs, toxins, and drugs they have been led to believe will induce abortion, and thereby to unnecessarily risk injury and death. Tragic and bitter past experience has richly demonstrated that, when restrictions are placed upon access to competent abortion services, incompetent outlaws rush in to fill the gaps. Have we so soon forgotten the past, and are we therefore doomed to repeat it? Must we require that the broken lives, suffering, and deaths of American women and teenage girls, as they pile up over decades, remind us? If so, there will be no excuse for this. We could and should know better than to allow narrow systems of intolerant sectarian belief to dominate secular law in this nation. Forcing a woman or teenage girl to bear a pregnancy against her will, no matter the disruption, danger, and cost to her and/or her family, or attempting to manipulate her choice by lying to her about the nature of abortion or of the fetus or with grossly exaggerated and made-up tales of the "dangers" of safe, legal, professional abortion practices should be considered criminally immoral, especially in this "Land of the Free," certainly not a "family value," and certainly must be resisted and stopped short of becoming law.
Meanwhile, in the highest councils of government, the Inquisition lives. Ask a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.