So last week I read to you from the book of Exodus, chapter 21, verse 22,

if men strive together and hurt a woman with child so that her fruit depart and yet no harm follow,

he shall surely be fine according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him and he shall pay as the

judge's determined. This week we're going to get to what the heck I was on about with reading that,

but I also want to read to you from the book of Shout Your Abortion. This is a real activism website

and organization. Abortion bans, quote, are intended to keep poor people in poverty and keep white

people in charge of everything. This has been a reading from the book of Shout Your Abortion.

So I said we were going to talk about abortion and dobs v. Jackson women's health

organization, which is the big abortion case currently working its way through the supreme court.

And this is the context in which I want to talk about it through the lens of these two incompatible

kinds of first principles. And I have been suggesting throughout that when we have these fights in

public, when we go on the op-ed page or whatever and we talk about poor black people or this is

all about keeping white people in charge of everything, right? That is a smokescreen to disguise a

deeper debate between these two theological sets of first principles. I'm going to call one the

Imago Dei set of first principles, which is that every human being is created in the image of God

and therefore has the right to life. And I'm going to call the other one the clump of cells

first principles, which is the premise that a fetus up to a certain point, indeed perhaps even

up to birth, is merely a concatenation of biological stuff material, just matter, right? And the reason

I want to have the debate from that perspective is because I think that underlies the fury with which

we approach one another. And it is not as if I cannot understand there might be hard cases,

edge cases, reasons why you need to terminate a pregnancy that is not all viable that threatens

the life of the mother, right? All of these difficult cases, which as we know make bad law, right?

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