Posted by:
anybody
(
)
Date: June 12, 2024 06:49PM
Hmmmmmm...
##########
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/12/southern-baptist-convention-ivf-voteLargest Protestant US group condemns IVF in win for anti-abortion movement
The largest Protestant group in the US has condemned the use of in vitro fertilization, a move that is sure to inflame the already white-hot battle over IVF and reproductive rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v Wade.
On Wednesday, during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, delegates voted in favor of a resolution that urges Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation”.
The resolution in effect calls on the Southern Baptist Convention – a group that includes nearly 50,000 churches and almost 13 million members – to avoid IVF.
The success of the resolution is a major victory for the anti-abortion movement, swathes of which have long opposed IVF on the grounds that providers create embryos that are not implanted in a woman’s uterus or are set aside after being screened for genetic anomalies. It also advances the tenets of “fetal personhood”, a movement to enshrine embryos and fetuses with full legal rights and protections that, if fully enacted, would rewrite vast swaths of US law.
The Catholic church already officially opposes IVF, but the issue has not historically loomed as large among Protestants. Majorities of both white non-evangelical Protestants, white evangelical Protestants, and Black Protestants all support access to IVF.
##########
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/opinion/genz-women-organized-religion.htmlAlexis Draut, 28, was raised Christian in Kentucky. Her parents took her and her sister to nondenominational megachurches that adhered to a lot of Baptist and Pentecostal ideals, she said. As a kid, she loved the way every service felt “like a concert,” filled with music and light, and she made loads of friends through church. She went to Berry College in rural Georgia, a place that she described as “steeped in Southern culture, where religion is incredibly important.”
But even surrounded by believers as a college student, Draut began to question some of the values she was brought up with. Specifically, she took issue “with the sexism, with the purity culture, with being boxed in as a woman.” She couldn’t stomach the notion that “you only have these specific roles of childbearing, taking care of the children, cooking and being submissive to your husband,” she told me. “That was also around the time that Donald Trump was elected president,” she added. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”
Draut is representative of an emerging trend: young women leaving church “in unprecedented numbers,” as Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond wrote in April for Cox’s newsletter, American Storylines. Cox and Hammond, who work at the Survey Center on American Life at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, explained: “For as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.”
While over the past half-century, Americans of all ages, genders and backgrounds have moved away from organized religion, as I wrote in a series on religious nones — atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — young women are now disaffiliating from organized religion in greater percentages than young men.