Meet Dr. Willie Parker, a Southern Christian Abortion Provider

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/meet-dr-willie-parker-a-southern-christian-abortion-provider.html?_r=0

Since 2002, he has been providing abortions, mostly on the front lines in Southern states, walking past picketers who scream that he is a baby killer. He puts up with the danger, he says, because it’s morally right to help desperate women.

If that seems incongruous, let’s remember that conservative Christianity’s ferocious opposition to abortion is relatively new in historical terms.

The Bible does not explicitly discuss abortion, and there’s no evidence that Christians traditionally believed that life begins at conception. St. Thomas Aquinas, the father of much of Catholic theology, believed that abortion was murder only after God imbued fetuses with a soul, at 40 days or more after conception.

One common view was that life begins at quickening, when the mother can feel the baby’s kicks, at about 20 weeks. When America was founded, abortion was legal everywhere until quickening, and it wasn’t until the 19th century that states began enacting laws prohibiting abortions, beginning with Connecticut in 1821.

Even in the modern era, religion has taken a more complex view of abortion than is generally realized. In the 1960s, ministers and rabbis formed the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, advising pregnant women how to obtain abortions. More than 100,000 women sought their services.

[niyad]

1. k and r for this brave, caring man.

[ehrnst]

2. Kicked & Recd.