I grew up Southern Baptist in the 1950s and 1960s in Georgia and Alabama. My father, in fact, was a Southern Baptist preacher. In Sunday School classes I remember discussions about the issue of when a person's life begins. It was always at birth, when the doctor slapped the newborn infant's behind to get its respiration started and God breathed the breath of life into the child. That's also when the soul enters the body of the newborn infant.
That's what we were taught back then, in the Southern Baptist Sunday School classes I went to, when I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s. I still vividly remember those discussions now. But that's not what they teach now! They subtly changed their teachings, apparently after Roe v. Wade, and started teaching that "life begins at conception" instead.
Another issue that's connected with this one: If they believe that abortion "murders babies", then why don't they promote contraceptives? Use an effective contraceptive and you prevent conception from happening at all, and there is no fetus or fertilized egg or "baby" there to "murder" at all. Yet, they fight tooth and nail against contraceptives just as they do against a medical procedure that they claim "kills babies". So what are they REALLY trying to stop? It seems to me that they're trying to keep people from having sex. They're TRYING to make sex fraught with all kinds of burdensome consequences, INCLUDING unwanted pregnancies.
What they want is for sex to ALWAYS be within marriage, between a man and a woman who are married to each other and nobody else for their entire adult lives, under the covers, with the lights out, and only ONCE for each child that married couple has. And even then, they're NEVER allowed to enjoy it. It's just a nasty procreative duty. That's the puritanical attitude that was drummed into me when I was a kid — very subtly, but there it was.
— Ron
= new reply since forum marked as read