Politico broke the story. The US Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade and let the individual states decide how to manage abortion instead of following the 49 year old precedent of respecting abortion as a right guaranteed by the federal government.
It is reasonable to assume that the Armstrongite groups will be pleased with this development. Similar to evangelical churches and the Roman Catholic Church the Armstrongites tend to teach that abortion is forbidden within their religion. (Fred Dattolo, "Is Abortion Murder?," Tomorrow's World, March-April 2001, pp. 14-17.) At times LCG even compare abortion to the Holocaust even though most American Jews support abortion being legal. (Douglas S. Winnail, "Abortion: A Modern Holocaust?," Tomorrow's World, March-April 2005, pp. 10-13, 29.) But despite this stance it does appear that the old WCG did encourage abortion under certain extreme circumstances as is evident in an article for The Plain Truth which was published in 1985.
Having read the draft opinion by Justice Alito it cannot help but be noted that there is little discussion about the inevitable negative effects of such a ruling upon women in the United States. One cannot help but think about Savita Halappanavar, a woman who died on October 28, 2012 in Ireland after her request for an abortion was denied. The outcry over her death help lead Ireland into legalizing abortion.
Also noteworthy is what happened to Agnieszka T., a woman in Poland who died of sepsis after being denied an abortion on January 25, 2022. She was the mother of three children. Recently Poland passed a law making abortion very difficult to get. Because of that restrictive law tragic events like this are now happening in Poland.
Knowing of such events it seems certain that harrowing events like this will happen in the United States once a ruling allowing states to restrict abortion is made law. It is to be wondered at if the right wing judges in the US Supreme Court are not worried about these consequences of their ruling.
(Knowing how passionately views are held on this issue on both sides I am not interested in trying to change peoples' religious views on abortion. Many unconnected to Armstrongism also condemn abortion. So if one were to criticize the anti-abortion stance such a person would be criticizing many other people outside of the Armstrongite groups. On this blog I wish to focus on Armstrongism. But I cannot help but express sadness at what will inevitably occur under laws that severely restricts access to abortion. We need to see things as they are, not what we wish them to be.)
Great post on a controversial subject. Personally, I believe that life begins at conception. However, that is my personal conviction on the matter, and I do NOT feel comfortable imposing my convictions on anyone else. As you indicate in the post, there are a great many other moral issues associated with this subject, and we cannot pretend that those other issues don't exist. There is a wide consensus that pulling out a gun and shooting someone or stabbing them with a knife is murder, but there is no such consensus about abortion. Some folks think life begins with the first breath of life (which is possible to justify in Scripture), and other folks think that some of those other moral considerations trump concerns about the life of a fetus. Who are we to dictate to them? Who are we to insist that they follow the dictates of our conscience instead of their own?
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