(LifeSiteNews) – Far-left actress and The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg falsely claimed on Monday that the Ten Commandments held as sacred by Christians and Jews do not contain a prohibition on abortion, as part of a broader recitation of general pro-abortion arguments.
The comments came as part of a discussion of former President and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump coming out on Monday against additional pro-life laws at the national level, instead saying that further legislative action on abortion should be relegated to individual states.
“No one is obligated to have an abortion. You never have to have one, and I hope no one ever has to have one,” Goldberg said. “I want to make sure that if you decide this is what you need to do, I’m going to get behind you because I don’t know your life, and if you say this is what you need, that’s what I’m going to do.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ9bqus0d3Q
“It’s you, your doctor, and God. That’s who you have to be conversational to, and it’s not mentioned in the big ten, I’m just going to say,” she added.
Sunny Hostin suggested that pro-lifers would apply it to “thou shalt not kill,” which Goldberg dismissed on the grounds that “‘thou shall not kill’ cannot be used as the block because we allow wars all the time […] So there is some conversation to be had there, so either thou shall not kill for everybody, and everything, or we have to talk about all the things you and I have to do.”
Exodus 20:13 is often understood more specifically as “thou shalt not murder,” to reflect that the Bible does not preclude killing in self-defense or to save the life of another, while still identifying the intentional and unnecessary taking of human life as a grievous offense. God creating humans “in His own image” is widely understood to mean human life carries tremendous intrinsic value, and elsewhere the Bible warns that “hands that shed innocent blood” are “detestable” to God.
Further, long-settled biological criteria and mainstream medical textbooks establish that a living human being, structurally and genetically distinct from his or her mother, is created upon fertilization and is present throughout the entirety of pregnancy – regardless of whether that embryonic human is being artificially sustained outside of the womb.
This is not in serious dispute; in 2019, University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development graduate Steve Jacobs found that 96 percent of more than 5,500 biologists he surveyed agreed, despite overwhelmingly identifying as “liberal,” “pro-choice,” and Democrats, and a majority identifying as “non-religious.” Many abortionists and pro-abortion activists and philosophers admit as much, granting preborn babies’ humanity while either asserting that a mother’s “bodily autonomy” trumps her baby’s rights or making the loaded claim that some humans do not necessarily count as “persons.”
As detailed by the pro-life group Live Action, simply describing common abortion procedures contrasts sharply with the framing of the practice as a vague “personal choice” from defenders like Goldberg.
First-trimester aspiration abortions, for example, consist of sucking an already-recognizable child out of the womb with “approximately 10 to 20 times the force of a household vacuum cleaner,” then using sharp implements to scrape out whatever remains are left behind. In the second trimester, dilation and evacuation abortions entail using a sopher clamp, a “grasping instrument with rows of sharp ‘teeth,’” to literally rip a baby’s limbs off and crush his or her skull.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating that now-enforceable pro-life laws could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 abortions a year.