Unplanned

The last couple of weeks, there's been a big story in the media about Planned Parenthood and attempts to sell the remains of unborn fetuses to science.  I have no interest in debating whether that's true or not, or whether it's right for aborted human zygotes to be sold. I would instead like to talk about why right-wing groups consistently try to find problems within the organization as part of their attempts to defund it.

I've talked previously about how within Fundamentalist Christianity, we were taught to see the world in "us vs them" terms, that we were having to wage war for our very souls.  We were also taught that abortion was evil - that life began at conception and that abortion was therefore murder.  Their key passages to prove this are:

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalms 139:13, NIV)

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..."  (Jeremiah 1:5a, NIV)

As with the creation of the Heavens and the Earth, Fundamentalists see the creative acts ascribed to God in the Bible as being entirely dependent upon Him - ergo, every child is literally a miracle of God, rather than something that would happen anyway.  This act of creation is instantaneous rather than a process - the initial cell combination of sperm and egg is God's Will, and it cannot spark the engine that will churn out a human being without God's Will.  God knew He would create such a child before the child's conception, which means that the child is part of God's plan. 

There is a final passage, though, that requires a bit of willing self-deception to accept.  Allow me to digress a moment...

See, so far, we haven't got a living human being in the womb, just something that is knit together.  Carrie Gordon Earll, in a post as part of Focus on the Family's "Abortion Series," gives us this passage:

"'If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise' (Exodus 21:22-25, NIV)"

She uses this as proof that humans are not "allowed to take life before birth."  The idea hinges upon the idea that she is giving birth to a living, breathing child, which is why the passage says "gives birth prematurely."  The second sentence, then, appears to mean that the fetus is not delivered successfully, and that fetus's life is equal to the life of the man who caused the accident, ergo the man should be put to death as well. 

Earll jumps around between versions in her article, quoting:

• the New American Standard Version 6 times;
• the New International Version 6 times;
• the New King James Version 5 times;
• the Phillips New Testament in Modern English 1 time;
• the Revised Standard Version 1 time;
• the King James Version 1 time.

If she had access to these other translations, she might see Exodus 21:22 translated as follows:

"When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." (RSV)

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. (KJV)

In fact, this idea of "miscarriage" instead of "birth" occurs in the Common English Bible, The Message Bible, and the New Revised Standard. 

Greg Koukl does a great job breaking down the meaning behind the original Hebrew words, and why they might be translated as birth or miscarriage.  Unfortunately, he makes a leap in logic that isn't supported - namely, that Moses chose a word that means live birth.  By Koukl's own admission, though, it doesn't:

The verb yasa is a primary, primitive root that means "to go or come out." 

There is only one time yasa is clearly used for a dead child. Numbers 12:12 says, "Oh, do not let her be like one dead, whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes from his mother's womb!"

He says that the frequency of the word's use to describe live birth, and its infrequency as anything else, means that it must be a living child delivered in this passage; however, he just said it means "to go or come out".  That is, when a woman gives birth, it doesn't matter whether the child has a pulse or not, whether it's a stillbirth or not, for the purposes of the word "birth."  We often assume it means that the child is alive, but that is not necessary to the word.  In the Hebrew language, it's the same way, just as the KJV translates it into simply "depart from her."

If Earll encountered such a definition (and it is in the RSV and the KJV that she quotes), then she is being intellectually dishonest by hiding that possibility from her readers.

If we read the passage as "delivered" rather than birth or even miscarriage, then we discover that the passage doesn't care one whit for the life of the child - the injury is to the mother, who may very well die from an injury serious enough to cause her to deliver early.  Thus, "life for life" refers to her life, not her child's.

If we disregard that, then we can accept that the death of the fetus is equivalent to the life of a man, and we can infer from that that means the child is covered by the same "thou shalt not murder" law that covers other human beings.  Then, finally we have a "proof" that abortion is murder.

Back to the main thread...

Because abortion is murder in the minds of Fundamentalists, it serves therefore that those who execute abortions (doctors and women who terminate pregnancies) are murderers, and organizations that facilitate this interaction are accomplices to murder.

And, since abortion is legal, and murderers and accomplices cannot be tried in court, this simply frustrates the Fundamentalists even more, which is how we end up with vigilantes bombing abortion clinics in the hopes of stopping abortions from happening.  In the mind of such a vigilante, murder demands a death sentence for the murderers, and since the law won't do it, it's up to vigilantes to do so.

In the church, we publicly condemned such actions, but we did so with a side of "but they earned it," because we honestly believed they did.

So the thinking goes: Planned Parenthood, as an organization that facilitates abortions, then, is an accomplice to murder.  Rather than bombing it, the only thing left to do is attempt to defund it.  If we defund it enough, then perhaps abortions will stop occurring there.  Their other services aren't bad, but their abortions must be stopped.  Nevermind that federal money can't be used to pay for abortions, and thus defunding the organization means only taking money from their other beneficial programs, because we had to do SOMETHING.

Obviously, I felt the same way at one point in my life.  Planned Parenthood was the poster child for abortion clinics. As a 20-year-old IT worker for a local IT company, I was given the task to go to a Planned Parenthood office to fix several computers.  (Interestingly, no part of me said I should be a conscientious objector to that - we didn't think about rejecting work just because our client did something we didn't agree with.)  I felt like I was walking into the gates of Hell.  I tried not to make contact with the women sitting in the waiting room of the office, who I imagined were all there because they wanted to have abortions, and I judged them for it.  I thought I might accidentally wander into some doctor's office where an abortion was actually being performed (nevermind that Planned Parenthood doesn't do that in Oklahoma - my level of education about the organization was limited at best). 

My experience was somewhat different from what I expected.

While I did see some information about abortion - one small pamphlet on the subject, if I recall correctly - everything else was about mostly unrelated activities, such as breast exams and other women's health issues.  There were several resources about adoption, and contraception information was probably the thing I saw most.

And the employees weren't hateful people hell-bent on killing babies; instead, they were people who were just trying to help others as best they could.

It was an eye-opening experience, but the ways in which it was were unexpected and unplanned.

It would be another 7 years before I started becoming a liberal, but that would be the last time I badmouthed Planned Parenthood.  Perhaps a field trip should be a requirement for everyone.