Not sure what to make of this:
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-religion-alabama-2efb7c0ca49d6d7260773aad5ee956fa
The ELCA has come out in support of abortion. There are idiots willing to twist scripture in many directions.
They try to claim they’re following god’s call to be compassionate. How helping a woman murder her child is compassionate is beyond me. If she’s so poor she’s worried about being able to feed the kid, compassion would be helping them find the resources (welfare, job training for her or baby-daddy, etc) to be able to afford to care for the child. If she’s in a domestic violence situation compassion would be helping her escape that domestic violence, not putting her right back into it. If she was a rape victim (and let’s also be clear here that rape accounts for at absolute most 2% of abortions, and probably a lot less than that) compassion would be helping her through the process of reporting and prosecuting the rape and healing from the trauma (mental as well as physical) of the violence of the rape.
And in all cases compassion for the child would entail informing the woman of alternatives to abortion, whether that meant helping her find the resources to raise it herself or give it up for adoption.
And before anyone trots out the “necessary to save the life of the mother” there is no such thing as abortion being necessary to save the life of mother. There are medical treatments that are known to result in fetal death that are necessary to save the mother. But the death of the child is an unfortunate side effect of saving the mother. Yes, there are cases where a pregnancy must be ended to save the mother but in those cases deliberately killing the child is not required. Premature delivery may required, and it’s possible the child could die as a result, but outright killing them is unnecessary to the goal of saving the mother.
Someone will probably say “Well, what about ectopic pregnancy? You want to make the mom bleed to death or die of infection rather than save her life by aborting the pregnancy!!” An ectopic pregnancy (defined as any time a zygote attempts to implant outside the uterus, most commonly but not exclusively in the Fallopian tube) is not viable (like maybe 1 in 100,000 being able to carry to viability is extremely generous odds). If tubal it’s categorically impossible to carry to anything close to viability, let alone full term. So the baby is not going survive no matter what anyone does. So treating the woman to save her life and future fertility is the goal. That is not “abortion”. Even though fetal death is a necessary outcome of the treatment in that case, it is not the express goal. Even the most hard-core religious pro-lifers I know don’t consider treating an ectopic pregnancy as an abortion.