> I am surprised that Adventist Church, or the one you went to, said that the Bible does not say anything about abortion. The sixth commandment explicitly say that: "You shall not murder."
I'm not a theologian, but I know the Adventists took a much harder stance against killing real, live people in war than they did about in the abstract in utero, and that makes rational sense to me. Everyone has a different take on scripture so I expect for other religions it will say what they want to it say.
> Reading all these verses – and many others – and combining them, I don't think it is correct to state that: "the bible says nothing about abortion".
Great, don't get one. In any case, that's not how the Adventists have historically seen it, and I'm not an Adventist now in any case.
The Bible says a lot more directly about holding slaves and that being acceptable than anything you could argue regarding abortion as a divine directive. Even the New Testament is pro slavery in some respects. The citations noted, regarding abortion, are really stretching things.
Remember this is the same book that says “Oops we can’t let the Benjaminites die out because the prophecies won’t come true unless there are 12 tribes so because we won’t intermarry with them as punishment they can kidnap and keep women from a nearby people as wives so they survive.”
If one considers life to begin at conception, abortion unambiguously violates the commandment not to kill. I grew up Adventist, and contrary to OP, I didn’t know anyone pro-abortion. Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion. The Bible doesn’t command Christians to own slaves and keeping other commandments literally would conflict with chattel slavery, but it does command not killing (murder).
> Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion.
The largest organized religious group in the United States is an evangelical community founded specifically in support of slavery, and against a movement within its former parent community to oppose slavery.
Evangelicals, did not, as a while, oppose chattel slavery, whether for literalist or other reasons.
I grew up in the Adventist church. I am still a Christian (although no longer Adventist). While I don’t agree with it at all, it is actually true that there are some weird pockets within the denomination that either overtly or tacitly approve abortion. It’s very bizarre.
Not just tacitly approved, the church has run hospitals that have performed a lot of them[1].
> Early Adventism published positions in harmony with the Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion, though it was not active in that movement. The church produced its first set of abortion guidelines in 1970, when American attitudes toward abortion had changed and some of the church's hospitals were experiencing in creasing pressure from their communities to provide abortion services.
> Less than a year after the first set of abortion guidelines was developed, the church revised and expanded it. The resulting liberalized guidelines have allowed Adventist hospitals a great deal of freedom in their abortion practices, a freedom that has resulted in a large number of abortions being performed. Although the church has been hesitant to let it be known, at the present it is clearly not, in either policy or practice, limiting its medical institutions to therapeutic abortions.
^ From 1991.
I think the church, historically, has been so conservative that they are unwilling to contort the scripture to get it to support their political ambitions to the same extent other churches are (although lately that's not so true). This is similar to how the Southern Baptists initially supported and ran an op-ed praising the Roe v Wade ruling[2].
It’s important to bear in mind the distinction between slavery and indentured servitude. While both are terrible, projecting modern day morales onto scripture on this subject isn’t appropriate. It’s not like people could file for bankruptcy as we know it 2,000 years ago. You had to work it off.
