GOP presidential aspirant Dr Ben Carson is out of sync with his church.

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)

GOP presidential aspirant Dr Ben Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist but says that he is strongly anti-choice on abortion. That means that he is out of sync with his church.

The Seventh-day Adventist church (nearly 2 million members in the US; several million worldwide) officially approves of abortion for serious medical reasons or in cases of rape or incest. The church approved this policy around 1970. Shortly before Roe v Wade was handed down (1973) I was asked to speak on the subject at Columbia Union College, an Adventist college in Takoma Park, MD. The fairly large audience was composed of students, faculty and clergy. Unsure of the audience, I took the position of the American Law Institute (ALI) at the time, that abortions should be legal for serious medical reasons and for victims of rape or incest.  The audience accused me of being too conservative! (I was just being cautious.)

There are about 60 Adventist hospitals in the US and all seem to perform abortions. The only one for which I have statistics is the Washington (DC) Adventist Hospital., and here they are:

1975 to 1982  --  213 abortions per year

1992  -- 547

1993  --  574

2006 to 2010  -- about 200 in toto

The numbers taper off mainly because abortions are cheaper in clinics.

Of course all of the GOP aspirants are anti-choice, including Carly Fiorina, the lone female and failed Hewlett-Packard exec who has no respect whatever for the rights of conscience and religious freedom of women, about 1/3 of whom will have had abortions before the age of 45.

See also  Ben Carson Puts Spotlight on Seventh-Day Adventists

Aborting Aristotle

Aborting Aristotle, by  Dave Sterrett. St Augustine’s Press, 2015, 121 pp, $17.

a review by Edd Doerr

This odd little opus, a review copy of which arrived in  my mailbox unsolicited, is an anti-abortion screed extruded by an evangelical publisher and concocted by a youngish Southern Evangelical Seminary grad who evidently dwells in a rickety Ivory Tower somewhere in the Twilight Zone beyond Cloud Nine. It dwells at length on Plato and Aristotle, as if they were relevant to the subject today, mentions Augustine and Aquinas, neither of whom believed that human personhood begins at conception, and, while abortion is a response to problem pregnancies incurred by the female half of the human population, says not a word about women, women’s rights of conscience, women’s religious freedom, or women’s health. Indeed, no woman is even quoted or referred to in the book. (Has he ever really talked to a live woman?) Nor does the evangelical author discuss the Bible, which does not condemn abortion and actually tends to support the view that personhood begins at birth (see Genesis 1:27 and 2:7) or modern science, which is clear that the functions of personhood are not possible until brain development permits consciousness, sometime after 28-32 weeks of gestation. This opus minimus grandly pontificates on its last page, rather like the mouse with an erection floating down the river on his back yelling “Raise the drawbridge!”: “These classical truths could help progressive [huh?] ethicists who are blinded by an incoherent naturalistic worldview, become more open-minded about the dignity and personhood of unborn human beings.” And to think that real trees were cut down to produce this, uh, book.