Saturday 24 August 2013

Eight facts most people don’t know about women having abortions

Contrary to popular opinion a large proportion of abortions are either unwanted or coerced.

TheUnChoice.com is an evidence-based Elliot Institute campaign to raise awareness about unwanted abortions, post-abortion issues and maternal deaths and to provide help, hope and healing.

The US-based Elliot Institute was founded in 1988 to perform original research and education on the impact of abortion on women, men, siblings, and society. It publishes research and educational materials and works as an advocate for women and men seeking post-abortion healing.

The following figures, referenced below from an Elliott Institute publication, are eight evidence-based facts about the pressures women having abortions face.

1. 64% of women having abortions feel pressured by others into it by others (1)

2. The number one killer of pregnant women is homicide (2, 3)

3. 54% of women felt uncertain at the time of their abortion (1)

4. 52% of women felt rushed at the time of their abortion (1)

5. 67% of women received no counseling by the clinic or other service-providers who performed the abortion (1)

6. 84% of women felt they did not receive adequate counseling before their abortion (1)

7. 79% of women were not informed by the abortion provider about available alternatives (1)

8. If a teenager has had an abortion within the last six months she is six times more likely to commit suicide (4)

References




4. Garfinkel et al., “Stress, Depression and Suicide: A Study of Adolescents in Minnesota,” Responding to High Risk Youth (U. of Minnesota: Minnesota Extension Service, 1986).

48 comments:

  1. I don't understand the point you're trying to make by including the 2nd "fact". Pregnant women are more likely to be killed by their husbands/partners/etc than those that aren't ... what does that have to do with abortion?

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    1. Some men respond violently to their partners continuing with a pregnancy they don't want when other more subtle forms of coercion fail. It is part of the spectrum of domestic abuse.

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    2. And so ... pregnant women would be less likely to be murdered by the men in their lives if abortion was illegal and therefore not an option?

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    3. If abortion was illegal and not an option there would be far fewer unplanned pregnancies.

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    4. I'll skip over that one for the moment because I'm still having trouble understanding the connection you're trying to make between homicide and abortion. It seems to me that a man is more likely to kill a woman if she is NOT going to have one. Are you saying that women that get murdered by the men that get them pregnant have only themselves to blame for not practicing better birth control, and they would have taken more care if abortion wasn't an option?

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    5. I think the argument being made is that abusive partners can become violent because they're angry about an unplanned pregnancy. The fact that abortion is easily available raises the expectation that the woman will do the 'sensible' thing and abort an unplanned pregnancy - perhaps the couple are in debt and that's what's causing the strain in the relationship. The partner becomes more violent when the woman refuses because he perceives her behaviour to be unreasonable.

      This is a difficult area because forced abortions also happen in countries where it's illegal - especially in connection with incest of prostitution.

      The worrying thing is that 'pregnancy advisery centres' seem to just go ahead with the abortion rather than helping the women in these abusive situations. They even argue that the women are making a 'responsible' choice by not bringing a child into an abusive relationship. They then dismiss the findings of the Elliot Institute by saying that the women are depressed or mentally unhinged in some way.

      Organisations like the Elliot Institute and Life (which supports pregnant women in difficult situations such as abusive relationships or drug addiction) are accused of being 'anti-Choice' and of manipulating women into having children they'd be better off aborting.

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    6. Thanks Rosy. Assuming you are right, then this is a spurious "fact", not connecting homicide to "women having abortions" at all but connecting it to pregnancy.

      Back to your last reply Peter, it is ridiculous to think that number of unplanned pregnancies is connected to the legality of abortion. Number of unplanned pregnancies is connected to availability of birth control. Legal abortion drastically reduces the number of deaths to pregnant women. These are facts.

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    7. The number of unplanned pregnancies is primarily related to the frequency of sex outside marriage. Contraception has never been more readily available and yet abortion rates are higher than at any time in history. This is because the effectiveness of contraception is swamped by the massive increase of sex outside marriage since the wide availability of contraception and abortion in the 1960s.

      There is no evidence for your belief that legal abortion drastically reduces the number of deaths to pregnant women - see http://bit.ly/LYAVjM

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    8. Yes, Shane. I think the Elliot institute is doing important research showing the ugly side of abortion, but I'm not sure about that connection myself. Pregnancy is a difficult time for both partners. Even if the baby is planned women often feel sick and not at all like having sex. Then there's the prospect of all that responsibility and your partner not being available just to think about you and your needs. A selfish, immature man can resent those things.

      The Catholic Church has argued a connection between these attitudes to women and contraception, but not legal abortion. I guess it's about raised expectations. Expecting to be able to have sex without the 'burden' of pregnancy and childbirth can make people more selfish, perhaps.

      But people were pretty selfish in the past as well - I don't think we want to idealize the past.

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    9. Peter, I'm glad you agree that the number of unplanned pregnancies is due to the frequency of unprotected sex rather than the legal status of abortion. I disagree that there is a massive increase of sex outside of marriage due to the availability of contraception. We have evolved as a species to procreate. We have a drive to do it which is fueled by our chemistry and the fact that it feels good. There were obviously no records kept on this sort of thing in the past, but a quick collation of number of births within the first 9 months of marriage in a selection of New England towns shows that between 1761 and 1800 a third of children were conceived before the marriage. http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so142/premarital/premaritalTs.htm Whilst there might be more instances of sex outside of marriage now I would suggest the larger population and the fact that the average age for marriage is increasing are far bigger factors.

      Contraception is more readily available as a whole, but is it easily accessible for the people that would benefit most, namely do public high schools have condom vending machines or are they freely available. And saying abortion rates are the highest they have ever been is similar to saying vaccination rates are the highest they have every been. How many people were getting vaccinated 100 years ago? It is also incorrect. The U.S instance of abortion peaked in 1990 with 1.9 million perfromed when it's population was 248 million. It's stabilised around 1.2 million now with it's population at 315 million.

      Your first graphic in the linked to blog post shows maternal deaths compared to births. It possibly has to be that way because of the data available, but as the death of the mother will most likely not end in a birth, a graph of "pregnancies vs deaths" would give a more accurate reading.

      I understand that advances in medicine have coincided with abortion becoming legal in the developed world. I'm much more concerned about what is happening in places where abortion is illegal today and carried out in an unsafe way, accounting for approximately 48% of those performed each year and killing 70 000 women annually. By your own figures, 5 women per million die during a "safe" abortion; 42 million abortions are performed annually; ergo if all abortions were performed safely the morality rate would be 210 every year, compared to the 70 000 that currently die. That is evidence that legal abortion for all would drastically reduce (by over 99.5%) the number of deaths to pregnant women.

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    10. Rosy, I don't believe it shows the ugly side of abortion, but rather the ugly side of relationships. You are so very right about people being selfish, but pregnancy is only the beginning. It gets worse after the child is born, because there is even less time for each other with a 3rd person in the house. A helpless person who needs constant care. People need to get over how important they think they are.

      It often seems I'm in the minority, but I made a conscious decision when I got married, that my wife would be more important than me. Her needs came first. Then when our children were born, the youngest (I have 4) would get put to the top of the priority list with my wife moving down the page and with me at the bottom. I think our marriage has worked so well for so long (25 years next January) because my wife had her own list that looked like mine but had me just above her needs, so we were always looking out for each other, once the kids were taken care of. The balance worked well, even though there were plenty of times when we just didn't have time or energy for each other after looking after the children.

      To put it another way, I read somewhere that a successful marriage is about two things: Finding the right person, and being the right person.

      Seems I got a little off topic there. Or I guess, I think most of the points bought up in this post are not really about the topic of abortion.

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    11. Can you really separate abortion from the ugly relationships that often lead to it?

      Glad things worked out so well in your marriage. And 4 kids is more than most people these days imagine they can cope with, so I'm sure you needed that willingness to put others first. I'd like to say I have the same attitude, but I'm afraid my attitude too often tends to be 'I'm feeling down/sick, my husband should be thinking about me!' Luckily I have a really amazing husband.

      Pregnancy is difficult. I can well understand how women in miserable relationships just lose heart. I have a problem with the idea that that's somehow 'empowering'. More empowering than a coat hanger, but that's like saying it's more empowering to be a wage slave than being beaten by a slave master.

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    12. Sure you can separate it. An abortion doesn't define a couple anymore than getting matching tattoos or deciding to have meat free Mondays. Women from all ages, races, religions and socioeconomic groups have abortions.

      Being a wage slave is very different to being owned by another person. The working conditions in Bangladesh are appalling right now, like they were in China before that and pretty much every industrialised country before that. But the workers have freedom and through that freedom the ability to change their working conditions, as happened everywhere else in the world. Slaves do not have that ability. But back on topic, it's not that women in bad relationships are empowered, but all women. Looking at any country where abortion is illegal, and you will see that women are nothing more than property of the men. Their only value is in the ability to make more men. Empowerment is about the realisation that women are just as valuable as men and are individuals in their own right. Control over their own bodies is an important part of that.

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    13. Hmmm ... I guess I don't have quite such a positive view of the West or such a negative view of other cultures. Western women like to imagine that their empowered, but it seems to me that they're often deluding themselves. In those countries where women are supposedly treated like property, they can't understand why a woman would allow herself to be treated like a sex object by a man who has no intention of marrying her.

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    14. Also, just a minute, are you really claiming that in Ireland men view women as property for their own use?

      Actually, I've never come across a married man that looked upon his wife in this way. I've come across a lot of unmarried men who talk about taking their girlfriend 'for a test drive' before they might deign to consider putting money down for an engagement ring.

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    15. Perhaps we need to understand different kinds of belonging. There's belonging in the sense of being a object for somebody else's use - like a car or a bin bag. Then there's belonging in the sense of being another person's care/responsibility. I belong to my husband and family in that sense, and my children will belong to my family in that sense.

      We belong to one another in the same way that our bodies belong to us - as something to care for, not to abuse or use. I can just use my body for my own pleasure, or, worse, give it to somebody else for their's. But there's a good chance it'll end in abortion - like a third of pregnancies in the UK. I could call that being 'in control of my body', but that reminds me of what a good friend said when she recalled her battle with bulimia as a young woman - 'when you're in the middle of bulimia you think you're in control. then comes that horrible moment when you realise that you're out of control.'

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    16. Rosy, to clarify, I'm talking about countries where a woman cannot leave the house on her own, must be covered head to foot when in public because her hair or skin can make men do things that have no control over. a country where a 15 year old girl can be raped by her step father, and than flogged for the crime of fornication, whilst the rapist goes free. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/maldives-rape-victim-spared-the-lash-after-global-anger-8783406.html

      I misspoke when I said any country where abortion is illegal, but yes, a country that allows something like this to happen is no respecter of women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Hodgers and I don't mean specific men talking about their wifes but the culture as a whole. If a woman doesn't have control of her body at all times then someone else is controlling her.

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    17. Yes, I gather your meaning. And there are some very devout Muslim women, amongst others, working to reverse this situation. It just seems to me that you're making a weak connection between legalised abortion and women's control over their own bodies - in the same way that it's a bit spurious for the Elliot Institute to try to argue that legalised abortion actually *leads* to violence against women (as opposed to abortion being one of the things that a couple might argue over). Abortion is legal in China, but Chinese women have less control over their own bodies than anywhere else in the world.

      The aim of feminism used to be to tackle the underlying problems that caused women to be in this awful position of having a crisis pregnancy in the first place (eg. having to turn to prostitution because of limited work options and the fact that the law didn't expect unmarried fathers to care for their children). The fact that feminists now see the very high number of pregnancies ending in abortion as a sign of women's independence or freedom suggests to me that the movement has lost it's way at some point.

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    18. I don't understand why you think my connection is weak. The difference between men and women having sex is that men can do so with no consequences, apart from STDs, whereas women can not. The invention of reliable contraception was a first major step in equalising the playing field and legalised abortion is the second. This equality, and equality in all other areas, eg voting rights, property ownership, equal pay, etc is what feminism is about.

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    19. So women get to be equal to men if they're prepared to abort their children?

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    20. No Rosy, its not that women get to be equal to men because they can have an abortion.

      Rather, its about the woman being able to have control over herself and not others having control over her. It is her choice, no one else. She is the one who will have to live with the consequences, one way or another. We really should not attempt to project our own understanding of morality on another, or we lose the whole concept of 'The right to life, libery, and the pursuit of happiness' deeming it only for ourselves, not others. An idea better suited to dictator and communist countries.

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    21. Well, you can count me out your 'equal' Utopia. I consider an abortion quite a serious consequence of 'consequence-free' sex, even if you don't.

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    22. Rosy, no-one has said it is consequence free, except for the man, as I said above.

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    23. Well, not so sure about that ... If you don't manage persuade the girl to have an abortion the state will chase you for child support contributions for the next 18 years.

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    24. Well the girl has to put a case forward and the state has to find you and you need to have money to pay for support. Lots of holes there for men to avoid their responsibilities. But in any case, I meant physically and emotionally the man is consequence free.

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    25. And your argument is that if women have access to abortion then she can also have this physically and emotionally consequence free sex?

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    26. Hmm ... didn't realise it would leave the fact I had made a comment there. Just wanted to add to it, but couldn't see an edit button. My post is below.

      No. I'm pretty sure you are the one that bought up the term 'consequence free'. Contraception is obviously a billion times better than abortion with regards to consequences. No-one is disputing that.

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  2. 1,3,4,5,6&7 seem to be different ways of restating two points: A large percentage of pregnant women contemplating what to do are not getting the appropriate support from their family or from the medical practitioners. I'm sure we all agree that this is a terrible state of affairs and something that should be fixed. None of the first 7 points have an influence on the pro/con argument in anyway.

    Regarding point 8, how does that compare to the suicide rate of pregnant teens with unwanted pregnancies, particularly those that don't have access to an abortion?

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    1. Yes I agree that these facts deal essentially with the same sorts of issues. The main points to grasp are that many women choose abortion because they are coerced to do so or because they feel they have no other option and/or are offered no support to explore other options.

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  3. Studies like these come from only one perspective, unfortunately, and do not take into account other, equally important, issues.

    For instance, what studies have been done on mothers who were either forced into giving up their babies for adoption, or chose to because they thought it best at the time. Or studies done of those children. I understand adopted children are overly represented in the mental health community because the people who adopted them really wanted to have their own babies and settled for second best.

    Another study that would be appropriate would be one of how many people would have preferred to have been aborted. There are some. I wonder how the 200 and growing number of children living on the street, if they have the cognitive ability, wish they had not been born. Or children sold into brothels with no hope of escape. Even children in our own land of plenty, many of whom try to escape into drugs and alcohol, eventually dieing from an overdose or being murdered.

    Finally, I believe what the Eliot study shows, if anything, is that women need responsible counseling to know what they will be facing emotionally down the road. I believe anti-abortionists have a negative impact on any emotional health they might hope to gain, adding undeserved guilt and shame.

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    1. I'm sorry, but I find your post rather sick. Exterminating people because we think their life is not worth living is just plain wrong.

      I think proper counselling for women considering abortion is exactly what the Eliot institute is campaigning for.

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    2. At no point did she say that we should exterminate people.

      And I think the suicide rate of teenagers is a reasonable starting figure for people who would have preferred to have been aborted.

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    3. Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:

      I saw the tears of the oppressed—
      and they have no comforter;
      power was on the side of their oppressors—
      and they have no comforter.
      And I declared that the dead,
      who had already died,
      are happier than the living,
      who are still alive.
      But better than both
      is the one who has never been born,
      who has not seen the evil
      that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:1-3)

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  4. Yes, Rosy, even Solomon (under inspiration of the Holy Spirit) stated it was better to be dead than to suffer the oppression so many are suffering now as then.

    The Holy Spirit inspired him to go one step further and declare the unborn to be more blessed in not seeing "the evil that is done under the sun". It comes across to me as a strong argument in favor of abortion from God Who suffers far more than the human sufferer.

    Another text that shows that God knows best when people should live or not is that of:
    1Kings14:12...When your feet enter the city, the child shall die. 13 ... for he alone of Jeroboam's family shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something pleasing to the Lord, the God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.

    God declared the horrible deaths the family of Jeroboam would suffer so He allowed the child to die to spare him that.

    Would that we would seek the thoughts of the Lord, more than our own inclinations, through a study of all the scriptures rather than a single text.

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    1. Yes, r-q-. The message of scripture is that our lives are not worth living and it would have been better if we had all been aborted (unless you happen to be one of the rich, successful oppressors, that is - in which case - live on and prosper!) I don't know how we've missed it all these years. Thank goodness you came along!

      By the way, I've worked with street children and children who've been rescued from prostitution. I've got my questionnaire all ready for them:

      1) Are you happy living on the streets?
      2) Do you think if your parents loved you they would have planned you better?
      3) Would you rather be a nice, clean, happy, Western middle class kid with lots of stuff like i-pods and money to spend on drugs rather than having to steal to pay for your habit?
      4) Do you wish you weren't alive at all?
      5) Do you think it would have been better if you'd been aborted?

      What a service I would have been doing to mankind if I'd just thought to get this information down on paper. Why did we waste all that energy rescuing children from street gangs, children's armies and prostitution rings when we should have been promoting abortion instead? What fools we were!

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  5. Rosy, do you think your reply above is a good refutation of the verse RQ quoted from 1st Kings? And what were you trying to say with your Ecclesiastes quote? I am a little confused.

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  6. I let my sarcasm get the better of me. Sorry.

    I'm not sure what I was trying to say with the Ecclesiastes quote. Thinking about the suffering in the world, and how helpless we often feel in the face of it, made me think about that quote. It wasn't really an argument for anything. Is there an answer to suffering? I've come to the conclusion that suffering is a profound mystery - a bit like love. You can't explain it and you can't quantify it.

    I've also come to the conclusion that trying to relieve suffering through taking human life is a very dangerous road to go down. How can you quantify suffering? How can you measure the value of a human life? I've led a very privileged life, but I'm not at all sure that I could say that I'm happier than a child on the street. I'm more comfortable. I'm probably better psychologically adjusted, but happier? more valuable? how do we measure those things?

    In the past, when infant mortality was very high, one of the ways people comforted themselves was by saying that it was a mercy when God took children early in their life because it saved them years of suffering and care. They never once thought about killing the children themselves. Does that answer your 1 Kings question better?

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  7. Rosy, no problems. Frustration gets in the way sometimes.

    Suffering is based on two elements;
    Firstly - harmful actions against you by either a specific person or group of persons, by society as a whole or by nature.
    Secondly - how you process and handle the actions against you.

    Specifically quantifying it might be hard, but It's our job as citizens of the human race to stand up to minimise/eliminate the first element and to offer support to people with the second.

    No-one is arguing for taking a human life. Killing children to spare them suffering in the future is an abhorrent thought. And people have always been able to put God on both sides of any equation that you care to name.

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    1. I count killing offspring in the womb to spare them suffering in the future in the category of taking human life. I guess that's where we disagree.

      I'm not against contraception, but I think people should think carefully about why they're using it, and about the messages that we're sending to people when we teach them how to use it. Unfortunately, we haven't done a good job of that either in our own society or in places like Africa.

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    2. That is where we disagree. Sperm and Eggs have no intrinsic value of themselves. A billion eggs die every month around the world, and a billion sperm die every day for every male that is of an age to produce them. A ridiculous amount of "life" that is disposed of. Why is it different if two of them happen to meet and complete a cell? Why does that cell suddenly become something more than the 2 disposable parts that made it?

      My thoughts on this are that Christians believe something extra is added at that time, I'm going to suggest the 'soul', and thus it becomes something more than what it physically is. Would that be an accurate guess on my part?

      Regarding contraception, it is not up to us to make people think carefully about why they're using it. The only thing that is important is that it stops pregnancy and many options protect against sexually transmitted diseases. That is the only message to send. People don't have sex because they have access to contraception. They have safe sex. We are biologically driven to mate and produce offspring. People are going to do it, and the younger they are the more irresponsible they are going to be, because they don't think of the future or consequences. Making it hard to access it, physically or emotionally, will only stop people from trying to get it. It will not stop them from having sex. Pro Lifers should be especially eager to make contraception easy for everyone to access, and to make it free of any strings.

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    3. Because when egg and sperm meet they develop very rapidly into a human life - eyes, ears, internal organs. At just 4 weeks after conception the heart is beating. Yet abortion is legal until 24 weeks. If we're entirely comfortable with this situation, then why does the woman at thisismyabortion.com keep taking down any posts with the link to this entirely impartial website about fetal development?

      As r-q- helpfully (and rather unexpectedly) explains, soul isn't anything as platonic and abstract as something that gets 'added on' to a disposable piece of material. The material itself is sacred because it has been created by God. God created man out of the dust. He didn't just trip over him while on a dander around the universe and think 'hey, this is kind of cool. why don't i add on a soul?' (sorry for being so sarcastic a bit earlier r-q- - I work with these kids, so that's why I got myself a bit worked up)

      The real question is 'why is human life valuable at all?' As you rightly point out, Shane, a lot of eggs die. But you're certainly going to die within a few decades. There are millions of people in this world, they're pretty easy and cheap to make. They all die after about 60-80 years. The world is billions of years old. Men are like grass. So what's the big deal if we just bump a few off?

      The Christian answer is that human life is valuable because it is created by God. That means *all* human life. The embryo in the womb. The abandoned child on the streets. The Western middle class kid with his i-pod. The girls who are aborted or killed in China and India. The disabled child. The child who will only live a few hours outside the womb. *All* are valuable because they have been created by God.

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    4. Oops. I meant this entirely impartial website http://www.ehd.org/see-baby.php (The Endowment for Human Development is a society committed to fetal and maternal health, but takes no political stand on abortion)

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    5. Actually, quite a lot of young people report having sex because peer pressure or pressure from a partner. There's even pressure from the health services who treat you like you have a mental illness if you're still a virgin in your late teens/early twenties. I think we could do a lot more than just throwing the contraception at the under 25s and telling them to get on with it.

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    6. Okay, few points to get to here and I'll answer the quick ones first, so this post might seem a little unstructured and not in the order you raise them. Apologies in advance.

      Why someone at some website does something is not related to my feelings on abortion, or really anyones, other than her own.

      Abortion is legal to 24 weeks because evidence at the time of the laws passage (and still today, as I understand it) shows the fetus does not feel pain till at least the 28th week.

      Human life is not created by God. Even if He created the first two, he did not have a hand in creating any that came after ... save for Jesus, I guess. God has no effect on the world/universe as it functions as everything falls under natural laws. All people and animals have free will, and I guess plants as well to a certain degree, so sperm and egg do their own thing, and neither is guided by God's hand. So you need to pick another reason that human life is valuable.

      Isn't there a trilogy of body, spirit and soul in man that is supposed to mirror the trinity of God? Is the soul inherent in the sperm or the egg? Where does it come from? Doesn't It have to be something beyond the physical if it will continue on after the physical death?

      I have no doubt that people are pressured into sex by their partner. Taking away contraception is not going to stop that, it is just going to increase the number of people having unsafe sex. I doubt removing the availability of contraception would even diminish the number of people being pressured into having sex, but even if it did by a decent margin it would still be incredibly irresponsible. Can you think of a percentage of "virginities saved" that would be worth even one unwanted pregnancy? Let alone the spread of disease? I don't believe anyone has sex because someone gave them contraception. No-one is thinking that they don't want to have sex and then, "Oh, you gave me a condom? Better put it to use before it expires."

      You want people to not have sex when they don't want to? Then educate them to value themselves as strong self aware people that don't need the approval of anyone else to make themselves feel good. I'm pretty proud of the way my two eldest daughters turned out, but I realise that not every father does as good a job. Not all women have this innate sense of worth in this fatuous fake plastic world. I can't save all the women. But I can try and protect them the best way possible by giving them access to things to protect their own bodies.

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  8. Shane Fletcher: "My thoughts on this are that Christians believe something extra is added at that time"

    Interesting point you bring up. I vaguely remember coming across some philosophizing regarding this that was going on pre-midieval, medieval era time.

    I think a look into the Catholic archive section, or google online, might bring up the when, what, and why. According to the bible, tho, we neither receive, nor have, souls, but ARE "living souls", or beings. Dust+breath of life = living soul, living being, living person.

    Gen 2:7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

    Even the animal kingdom are "living souls" which defined by the bible as above is breath of life+dust.
    Rev 16:3... and every living soul died in the sea.

    Ecc 3:19For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts;... yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: ....

    Psa 146:4 His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

    The bible often refers to a person or people as "souls".

    Gen 12:5And Abram took Sarai his wife, ... and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; ....

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    1. Rosy, It warms my heart that you are working with such children, for the most part they are left to suffer whatever cruel human beings have to dish out. It would appear that we are coming from different perspectives; we may be talking past each other. I also think that there are distinct issues in this discussion that need to be identified and dealt with separately rather than lumping them together as if they were the same issue.

      I don't think anyone is saying a life is not valuable depending on whose it is. Because each person is valuable regardless of their circumstances, that would include women who have the right to decide for themselves whether they wish to continue a pregnancy or not. I believe God gives them that freedom of choice, and that in the end they have to answer to God, even in regard to bringing that life into the world. They shouldn't have to answer to us. Nor is everyone so ready to step in and work with children who need a chance, as you have been. Nor work with the woman.

      "Pro-lifers" treat pregnant women more as objects that need to live by the pro-lifers' rules of life and have little regard for what happens to either them or the children they bring into this world. Yet, Jesus stated a principle when He stated that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Rules are supposed to be made to give 'life, and that more abundantly". Not the other way around where humans were created to keep rigid rules without regard for their well-being or happiness.

      As I understand it God is into the quality of life rather than the quantity. I believe "life is sacred" is more of a man-made notion in this particular world than it is God's feeling. God was not devaluing the little boy who died in 1Kings so as to not see the evil in this world, nor did He see life as some kind of 'sacred' idea that people should have to live through horrors that most of us in the western world have little idea of. And that is the point of Solomon's inspired thoughts as well as the story of 1Kings. Because God does see each human as valuable He wants them to have "life, and that more abundantly"; quality, not quantity.

      My understanding of the scriptures is that death is not the end. I don't believe the bible teaches that something in us continues to live after we die, rather death is like a peaceful sleep til resurrection, when we will be raised, body and soul, to either eternal life or end up choosing eternal death. I guess that is why abortion does not bother me as much as it does some others. I believe the babies that are aborted now may end up having an eternity in an ideal environment. So skipping what may be a life worse than death here doesn't seem all that bad, to me.

      And, Rosy, it is nice to meet such a caring, thoughtful individual, as yourself. I rarely see that in pro-lifers. For the most part they seem to have come from some mold incapable of thinking past the script.

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  9. I left out the scripture references so as not make the post overly long, but I can provide them upon request.

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