This is just an addendum to the diary by Zawn Villines “Pro-Lifers have always believed in their right to kidnap and traumatize other peoples’ children”.
Ensoulment
Modern pro-life fanaticism is based on a theory of ensoulment invented by Pope Pius IX in 1869. Before this moment, doctors of the church largely agreed that when an expectant mother felt a fetus stir in her womb, in the way Elizabeth responds to Mary in the Bible, that was the moment the fetus acquired a soul and became an ethically sacred child. This corresponds roughly with the end of the first trimester, or what we can all recognize as a perfectly reasonable place to argue about limiting at-will abortions. “You feel a child moving around in your tummy? Ok, maybe it’s time to consider the ethics of terminating the pregnancy a little differently.” That’s a middle-ground we could potentially all meet around, but I digress. And anyway it’s a moot point because baby-stealing Pius IX fucked it all up 150 years ago.
So, more about this dickhead: He decided in 1854 that Mary the mother of Jesus was conceived without the taint of original sin. This is “immaculate conception” and is now a fundamental dogma of the church. Fine. Weird, but fine. But after kicking his pet theory around for 15 years he decided that since the holy spirit was with Mary from the moment of conception, the Holy Spirit might (only “might”, but this possibility is enough to fuck up reproductive rights for the rest of time, apparently) be sitting in every zygote from the moment of conception. And because there’s a smidgen-of-a-chance that a sperm might squeeze a soul into the egg along with 23 chromosomes, every abortion had to be outlawed. Because a dust-speck of human tissue might (might!) be magically sacred now.
[This is not the only dumb idea about reproduction that the church has had, it’s just the most damaging one. The funnier one that was popular all across western culture before the invention of microscopes is that each sperm was a fully formed little dude that just grew up inside and egg. This idea sucked in a different way because Catholics thought that every time you jerked off you were killing thousands of little people, but who cares about that now because frankly they deserve that nonsense, yeah?]
The Origins of Right to Life mysticism
Oh! So...Pontus Dickheadmus abruptly bans abortions for everyone from conception in 1869. And the very same year he invents the idea of Papal Infallibility, ensuring that we will be stuck with his dumb-as-shit mystical inventions for all eternity. Thanks, guy. And now stupid Christian fanatics across America believe that every two-celled organism inside a womb is a holy baby that needs to be preserved through force if need-be until it can be torn from it’s nursing mother at the age of 8 months and thrown into a cage a few hundreds of miles away until it gets lost.
Baby Stealing Came First
But baby stealing was something he got into in 1858, when he ripped a 6 year-old Jewish boy away from his family and kept him at the Vatican FOREVER after that. He never gave the boy, Edgardo Morata, back to the family. (Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg!) The boy had been baptized in secret by a nanny years earlier, and so the Pope decided his own parents just weren’t fit to care for their own son. So stealing babies is built into the very core of right to life fanaticism.
And this Pope? He’s currently “blessed”, one step away from being canonized a saint. How fucked up is that?
Oh yeah, Pro-Slavery, too
Still on the fence about Pope Asshole the Nth? He wrote a lengthy justification for slavery in 1866, a year AFTER the American Civil War ended. Yeah, a total fucking prince, this one. Can’t wait for his feast day “The Feast of the Handmaids and Baby Stealing Slave Owners”.
I’ll be away from this site and won’t be able to respond to comments for at least a day.