Well the thing is…

I like to watch and read the news. Here in the United States the Supreme court has made some news with many of its decisions. On June 24, 2022 the supreme court overturned a woman’s right to have an abortion and left woman’s rights up to each state to decide.

Today is September 9 2023 so why am I right now speaking about this court decision made in 2022? I am speaking about the Dobbs decision today because many state laws are just being imposed on women all over the country. Right now 13 states have abortion bans in place and there is so much confusion over state laws that health providers in states that do not necessarily have a ban in place are just shutting down. So I am witting now because this issue matters now and did when it was first over turned and will for decades later.

A big part of the push behind abortion bans was a coordinated effort of the evangelical Christians in the United States of America. The Moral Majority is a group founded by Jerry Falwell and a major point of the religious organization was stopping abortion, through influencing legislation and it seems to have worked.

The evangelical Christians believe that abortion is a sin. The reason for this belief stems from something called the “univocality of the bible”. This univocality means that the bible speaks with one voice and I just don’t think this is true. There is a pretty amazing video in which a scholar I follow mentions how univocality cannot be true

Clearly though this idea for univocality is pretty hard to come up with for any work of art. The bible is an amazing work of art written by many through the years from originally the spoken word.

First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental contentor concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal.

William of Ockham

Ockham really helps define what faith is and faith is not fact. Theology is not a sciences and I never want to live in a society where faith or theology make laws. With state laws and no protection for women the United States seem to be on the precipice of a theocracy.

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If you disagree with your government, that’s political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you’re evil.

Margaret Atwood

A government that is a democracy will have disagreements and those should be settle d with logic and ethics and votes however governments that are theocracies are not ran this way. In a theocracy an enemy of the state is also an enemy of god and a theocracy requires a single faith and that is problematic as well because faith is not fact, faith is subjective and different for everyone.

It should go without saying however it seems it must be said. All countries should do their best to avoid a theocracy.

The future of Motherhood

There was a book I read and it was made into a series on Hulu. The book is The Handmaids tale. If you enjoy dystopian books about the future with just a hint of hope sprinkled in I suggest reading it. I liked the book and so did my daughter. My sister watched the Hulu series and loved it. The Handmaids tale is the diary of a handmaid in the city of Gilead in the distant kind of near distant future. Of course there was a war and the side that won is ultra religious draconian and a twist most of the women are infertile. So what does the ruling class do? The take the few fertile women and make them handmaids. The handmaids job is to bear the children for the ruling class.

The book was published in 1985 and the Hulu adaptation happened in 2017 and the fifth season is coming soon. The book left a lot to the imagination at the end and I have never seen the show (it is on my to watch list though). As soon as the show premiered it seemed like parallels were made between women’s reproductive health rights (access to safe abortions) and the show.

Abortion has a long and weird history in the United States. There is a book about it’s history named “When Abortion was a crime”. I cannot dedicate enough time to go through the history of abortion in the United States but of course I will try….

Lets see up until about 1880 abortions were legal in most of the United States and not considered a sin by the Catholic church, if they were performed before the quickening, the Baptists in the United States did not consider abortion a sin until about 1979. Abortion was made illegal in the United States because of how dangerous it was in 1880 for the woman. In 1973 Abortion was decriminalized in the United States. Currently states are finding ways to restrict women from having abortions and seem to be working to once again criminalize abortion. The reason for the criminalization of abortion is not to protect the women’s health but to protect the right of the unborn or the fetus to become born or alive.

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What does it mean to be alive? That is a question that religious scholars have and are still arguing over now. Is it as black and white as someone is alive when they are born? The people arguing against women’s rights do not think so.

I was a young child and me and my sisters had a hamster 2 hamsters. The hamsters were male and female and had a litter of pups. There were four kids in the house the hamster family and I think we had a cat and a dog too. (not sure about the cat) The mother hamster ate all her pups! I was traumatized and for the longest time never understood what happened. Hamsters do not always eat their young but when they do it is usually because they are either stressed, under feed, feel that there young are unsafe, or the scent of the young has changed.

If you have a hamster and it has pups.. Be sure to increase the hamsters diet remove any stress to the animal, keep its habitat clean, and avoid handling the cute little pups, otherwise your child could be traumatized.

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I was born because my mother choose to bare me. Yeah I feel a little sick thinking about it but its true. If my mother choose not to be a mom I would not be here. No matter what we think a woman should have the right to decide if she is a mother or not full stop.

Women’ s rights are human rights and no matter what your or my religious leaders tell me this year about when life begins it will always be wrong to tell a woman whether she should be a mother or not.

Instead of working to limit women’s rights this March why not help women who are mothers? Donate time and money to charities that are working to keep women safe, clean, and healthy. Dedicate your time to protecting the living.

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