March 12, 2012 4:44 PM
Letter to the editor, JDNews.com.
The Republican war on women’s health culminated, in 2011, with nearly 1,000 anti-abortion bills in state legislatures and continual attacks on the federal level — especially against Planned Parenthood. Criminalizing contraception has always been a goal. The war on contraception is war against women.
The war against women is rooted in Genesis 3:16, where the biblical god punishes Eve and all women with the pains of childbirth and subjugation to men. Women were to be forever punished for introducing original sin into the world. Church Fathers condemned women in the harshest terms imaginable. Subjugation explains why most anti-abortionists are men.
“Malleus Maleficarum” (Hammer of the Witches), a book endorsed and recommended by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484, caused thousands of women to be burned at the stake: “What else is a woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.”
