Not to say there isn't some interesting discussion on this thread, but I do find it amazing that this thread seems to be mostly men discussing decisions about a woman's body.

That's what started this whole damned mess, ESPECIALLY since all of those texts were not only written by men, but by men with no concept of science or biology, and the fact that they were men who typically did not think of women as being anywhere near their equals.

Even if divinely inspired, God's message still has to flow through the mind and body of those men before it reaches the paper leaving it open to corruption by the mind of the vessel, and that alone makes anything they wrote dealing with women suspect in my mind.

I do credit you guys on your knowledge of the texts (and all that Greek!), but my personal belief is that with the "written word of God" shit gets lost or changed in translation, and I'm not talking human languages; I'm talking about how God's message is translated from inspiration to text on the page.

So what a bunch of men 2000 years ago claim some specifically MALE deity says about women and birth and all that is meaningless in a society that should have evolved out of the Dark Ages created by those same patriarch's disdain of rational thought and humanism, which led to said Dark Ages.