I'd like to start out by saying that I am not anti-religion. I am just sharing my personal experiences.
Once, I had a dream that I was reading the scriptures with my family. We
were reading something out of the Old Testament and one of the
scriptures said something along the lines of "no one knows when life
begins, but it doesn't begin at conception" (FYI, that is not a verse in
the scriptures). I knew that was not true. Biology says that life
begins at conception, but the bible (in my dream) said otherwise. I got
really angry, but no one would believe me.
I was relieved to
realize that it was just a dream, but it made me think. I believe that
unborn children are alive because of a strict biological definition of
life, not because my religion says so. I believe that unborn children
are persons because of philosophy, not because of religion.
Personally,
I don't really know what my religion is, but I have my own form of
spirituality. My family is LDS, and the LDS church is anti-abortion, but
they seem to have no official stance on when life begins. As a child, I
got the message from church that earth life begins at birth rather than
at conception or even implantation. Clearly, my religion did not
cultivate my pro-life views.
I remember asking my father a
question about something in The Book of Mormon. In one part of The Book
of Mormon, Jesus was telling one of the prophets that he was going to be
born that night. That verse didn't make sense to me because I knew that
life began before birth. My dad told me two things: first, that we
don't know exactly how God communicates with people, and second, that
we're not sure when life actually begins.
The first answer
satisfied me (at one point I had a theory that maybe Jesus had an
out-of-body experience in the womb), but the second one didn't. All the
theories about when the soul enters the body seemed arbitrary to me.
For
a long time, I believed that life became important at implantation. I
knew that it biologically began at conception, but I found myself using
religious concepts to justify my view that life became important at
implantation. I did this because I didn't want to believe that there
were immoral forms of birth control other than abortion*. I soon realized
how arbitrary this was and I knew that life began at conception.
While
I believe that religion can be a positive thing, it did not help to
cultivate my pro-life views. If your experience is different, great!
That's just not how it worked for me.
--Mary
*I later found out that it's unlikely that oral contraceptives act as abortifacients, which I may blog about later.
