Chapter 5 in the Bible’s book of Numbers gives a potion through which God would judge a wife suspected of adultery. We analyzed it in part 1. Let’s move on to what it means.

So then does this potion cause a miscarriage?

This is the part that surprised me. Going into this research, I thought that the potion would cause a miscarriage. The Bible doesn’t much care about sex outside of marriage except when there’s a married woman involved, because that means that a man’s property was damaged (if calling a wife “property” isn’t correct, it’s not far off). Captured women as sex slaves are okay, multiple wives are okay, and prostitutes are okay (more). It’s only adultery if the woman has sex outside of marriage.

And maybe the potion would cause abortion—after all, while the focus of the ritual was discovering adultery, the woman still might be pregnant. Though we’re uncertain about the meaning of the curse, “This water . . . will go into your stomach and make your abdomen swell and your thigh fall away” in Numbers 5:21, that doesn’t sound like a supportive environment for a pregnancy.

A note in the NET Bible for this verse brings the scholars into the picture. It says, “Most commentators take the expressions to be euphemisms of miscarriage or stillbirth, meaning that there would be no fruit from an illegitimate union.”

Many verses in the Old Testament show that the Bible isn’t squeamish about the occasional miscarriage. Or even the killing of pregnant women or children. The popular Christian response that God is a doting grandfather who would never sanction an abortion is ridiculous. This is the same guy who said, “The people of Samaria . . . will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). Even today, roughly half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. God apparently doesn’t much care.

Nevertheless, the goal of the test was to identify an adulterous woman. The trial as we have it (and it’s possible that the test was changed as it went through many copyists) was not designed as a test to resolve the problem of a man whose wife is pregnant, possibly with some other dude’s kid.

Conclusions

I thought that this trial was a potion that would magically abort a fetus that was not the husband’s. It is not.

I don’t like being corrected during a debate or argument, and I want to use only correct arguments. If “God himself used abortions to correct paternity debates” isn’t a correct argument, then I won’t use it anymore. And, with sufficient evidence that I’m wrong here, I’ll change my mind back.

This exercise is a helpful reminder that some Bible arguments are built on shaky foundations. “Most scholars agree” can be applied to an explanation like evolution that has overwhelming support among relevant scholars, or it can be applied to the meanings of the words translated as “swell” and “thigh” in Numbers 5, where substantial doubt clouds the issue and (perhaps) a scant majority agree. God’s holy word doesn’t look so impressive when God obviously didn’t do much to preserve the meaning through time.

While God’s potion as an abortifacient is likely the wrong interpretation, it could’ve caused abortions as a side effect, and plenty can be said about God’s disinterest in the life of a fetus. The Christian response is often to cherry-pick Bible verses about God’s cheerful side or about how he’s a tenacious defender of human rights. But no argument that claims God as a champion of human life is worth anything unless it looks at the whole Bible and addresses all of God’s killings and the Bible’s savagery. Taken as a whole, God in the Bible is a nasty piece of work.

Let’s compare the Bible with a souffle. You can make a souffle with the finest truffles, but if it has just one cockroach in it, it is a cockroach souffle. And the Bible has lots of cockroaches. (h/t commenter Greg G.)

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Image from Wikipedia, public domain
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The most effective response to abortion is obvious, but pro-life advocates don’t see it.

This is the conclusion of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

Pro-life advocates claim they want to reduce abortion . . . but do they?

Do pro-lifers really want to reduce abortion? I doubt it. Maybe some of those carrying the signs do, but their leaders, the ones pulling the strings, don’t. If they did, they wouldn’t be going about it in so inept a manner.

Suppose abortion really were murder. Pro-lifers would be really, really motivated to make it as infrequent as possible. Any little compromises would be insignificant concessions on the way to the big prize of a negligible number of abortions.

Here’s how to reduce abortion

They say that abortion in the United States is the equivalent of the Holocaust. But if they really believed that, they’d be focusing on steps that would actually work.

Koukl in his Pollyanna world pretends that making abortion illegal would eliminate abortion, but the statistics make clear that it would have little effect (see this recent post). What you want is to eliminate the need for abortion—only that will be effective.

An excellent article by Valerie Tarico outlines the steps that would plausibly reduce the U.S. abortion rate by 90 percent in “What a Serious Anti-Abortion Movement Would Actually Look Like.” And yes, she’s saying that the current anti-abortion movement is not serious.

Her recommendations are simple, and instead of fighting pro-choice advocates, pro-lifers would actually be allied with them. If pro-lifers could get over the novelty of cooperating instead of obstructing (and ignore their leaders whose existence sometimes depends on conflict), they might be amazed at what they could get done.

Tarico’s suggestions include getting over squeamishness about sex so that children and teens can get accurate and complete sex education in school and at home, focusing on sex education that works and discarding approaches that don’t, encouraging the best contraception, and making sure that women in poverty have access to health care and contraception.

Pro-life advocates, look at the abortion rate. Harassing abortion providers and seekers may satisfy some psychological need of yours, but that isn’t the way to reach your goal.

You want to reduce the abortion rate by 90 percent? Seriously? Then read and follow the guidelines in Tarico’s article and see how cooperating with pro-choice advocates would work. When you read it and conclude that you won’t take those steps, admit to yourself that you’re not serious about abortion.

How can you have a crime without a punishment?

I’ll wrap up this series by revisiting the inherent inconsistency underlying Koukl’s position, his avoidance of the punishment that goes along with the crime.

We don’t have to [determine the punishment] because that’s the second step after the first step has been solved, and this is something we are capable of doing and the rank and file too, and that is determining whether abortion itself is a genuine moral harm. (@22:13)

A “genuine moral harm?” Like what? Like murder? If so, then the punishment has already been defined, many times in many jurisdictions. Don’t call it murder unless you want to bring along the range of punishments that go with murder.

If abortion isn’t murder, then perhaps it’s manslaughter or some lesser kind of murder? Perhaps the woman isn’t a murderer but an accessory to murder? Punishments for these crimes have been defined as well.

If it’s not murder of any kind, is it perhaps the moral equivalent of littering or jaywalking? In that case, it’s insignificant and you’re wasting our time.

If it’s not something to be criminalized, perhaps it’s just a bad or immoral act that we don’t make laws against (lying, gambling, consuming drugs, or adultery might be in this category). If abortion is an example, don’t tell us you want it made illegal.

Koukl has painted himself into a corner. He desperately wants to say that abortion is murder (or something similarly bad), but he looks heartless if the appropriate punishment comes along. He retreats by saying that abortion is a “genuine moral harm,” but what is that supposed to mean? Moral harm like murder or moral harm like an unkind word to a stranger? Unless he tells us what abortion is (or at least what it’s like), the argument is just handwaving . . . but as soon as he does, there’s that unwanted punishment along for the ride.

We see this same problem with Christians opposed to homosexuality. They will point to biblical justification in Leviticus where God declares it as wrong. The problem is that God also gives the punishment: “[Both men] are to be put to death” (Leviticus 20:13). You can’t have a crime without the punishment.

When faced with fundamental problems in their arguments, few Christians face the problem squarely and either fix the broken argument or discard it.

Read the first post in this series here.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/4/16.)

Image from Alan O’Rourke (license CC BY 2.0)

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Let’s critique three points often made by pro-life Christians.

This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

I’ve responded in detail to the case against abortion here, but let me respond to the pro-life argument given in this podcast. To quote Sherlock Holmes, “Elementary as [the argument is], there [are] points of interest and novelty about it which may excuse my placing it upon record.”

The pro-life case point 1: abortion is killing a child

Koukl said:

We spend our time helping people see clearly that taking the life of an innocent human child in the womb is just wrong. What surprises me is that we have to continue to make this point because it strikes me that the point is so obvious. (@26:25)

You think your point is obvious? If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard the obvious response: a fetus is not a child, a baby, or a person—it’s just a fetus. In the same way, a cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter.

The pro-life case point 2: the SLED test shows that the fetus is a child

SLED is an acronym for Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency. The argument attempts to show that, while the fetus is different than a newborn on each of these categories, none disqualify it from being a child (I use “child” because Koukl used it above, though other pro-life advocates might use “human being” or “person”). I’ll respond to the SLED argument as laid out in the Cold Case Christianity blog, since Koukl didn’t discuss it thoroughly.

• Size: A fetus is much smaller than a newborn, but is size important? An adult might weigh 300 pounds while a newborn might weigh 5 pounds, but is the adult any more human? Any more a person?

Response: An adult being 60 times heavier than a newborn doesn’t begin to illustrate the difference between the newborn and the single cell that it started out as. The newborn has a trillion cells, and the single cell has just one. I expand on this thinking with the spectrum argument here and here.

• Level of development: A fetus is less developed than a newborn, but so what? A newborn is less developed than an adult—does that make the newborn less a human?

Response: Here again, this childish approach doesn’t begin to acknowledge the differences. Yes, a 30-year-old adult (say) is far stronger, smarter, and more agile than the newborn, but these are mostly changes of degree. Both the newborn and the adult have arms; the adult’s arms are just better developed. Both the newborn and the adult have a brain; the adult’s is just better developed. And so on.

By contrast, the difference between the newborn and the single cell is one of kind. The newborn and the adult have pretty much the same parts—arms, legs, eyes, ears, skin, brain, and so on, while the single cell doesn’t have any of these parts. It doesn’t even have a single cell of any of these parts.

• Environment: The fetus is in the womb and the newborn isn’t, but so what? Is the location of the child important?

Response: Abortion laws must have a simple, unambiguous criterion for drawing the line after which the fetus is too much a person to abort. Once a baby is born, it has crossed that line. That doesn’t change the fact that a growing fetus becomes more a person with time and that a single cell is not a person or a child.

• Degree of dependency: The fetus is totally dependent on the mother, but then the newborn is also dependent on caregivers. Even as adults, we might not be completely independent—perhaps we need heart or thyroid medicine, a pacemaker, dialysis, or a wheelchair. We might be bedridden or even comatose. Just because we’re dependent on others doesn’t make us not a person.

Response: Dependency isn’t the issue. There’s a spectrum of personhood through gestation. A newborn is a person, and the single cell nine months earlier wasn’t.

The pro-life case point 3: ignore the facts and change definitions to suit yourself

Koukl again:

People say, “Well, the unborn doesn’t look like a human being.” To which I respond: of course it does; he or she looks like any human being ought to look like at that stage of development! (@27:30)

This is simply the Argument from Potential: the fetus isn’t a human being (or a person) . . . but it will be!

Ignoring the possibility of miscarriage, I agree. That there is a spectrum of personhood that increases through the nine months of gestation is my main point.

Koukl takes what it will be (a human being) and applies that definition retroactively. The fetus is a potential human being, so Koukl simply drops the unwanted word “potential” and declares victory. Taken to an extreme, the thought, “It might be fun to have a baby” is also a potential human being. Is it immoral to deny that one life as well?

Seen properly, babies aren’t killed with abortion; they’re prevented.

The only thing that changes is how they look at any given point in time, and that should not change the value, because if it did, it won’t be long before ugly people are going to be on the chopping block, right? (@28:00)

Once again, Koukl is either confusing himself or deliberately confusing his audience about the kind of development we’re talking about. The differences between a child, teenager, or adult on one hand and a newborn on the other (or the difference between an ugly person and a beautiful one) are trivial compared to the difference between that newborn and the single cell it started as. In the first case, we’re talking about the set of persons (with eyes and ears, arms and legs, stomach and digestive system, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and so on) who have trillions of cells each precisely interconnected into a whole. And in the second case, we’re talking about a single unindividuated cell.

See the difference?

There’s one final post in this series on abortion: Do Pro-Life Advocates Want to Reduce Abortion? Sure Doesn’t Look Like It.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/2/16.)

Image from Hartwig HKD (license CC BY-ND 2.0)

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