Are we indeed to interpret that God, speaking through David in these Psalms, is saying we have been abandoned by God and that when wronged we can ask God to cause our enemies to die and cause our enemies' children to wander hungry and homeless? Indeed, it would seem the case.
But rather than interpret that God is with us as a fetus, but forgets us as adults, and yet will allow us to plead for the death of our enemies, we need to look at the greater context in which all these verses are found: songs.
Called Psalms, these are the songs of King David, a man of great faith who was also greatly tormented. He was a man of passions. He loved God, lusted for another man's wife, and murdered him to get her. He marveled at nature and at his own existence. All his great swings in emotion are recorded in the songs he wrote, and we can read them today in the Book of Psalms. What we cannot do is take one song, or one stanza of a song, and proclaim that it is indeed to be taken literally while taking other stanzas from David's songs and claim they should not be taken literally.
Yet that is exactly what anti-abortion Christians are asking us to do. They use those few verses from the Psalms to support their dogma that abortion is wrong. They proclaim those verses as holy writ and the other verses as poetry that we should not be following. Clearly, this is a perfect example of taking verses out of context. And it leads us to only one conclusion: if we cannot trust that God wants to kill our enemies and abandon us, we must also conclude that we cannot trust that God has defined the fetus as being a person.
For indeed, if we allow that kind of thinking we could also make an argument that God is willing to maul children to death if they make fun of a bald guy who just happens to be in God's favor. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. In the book of Second Kings, our hero, the Prophet Elisha, who was quite bald, so it seems, was taunted by a group of young boys. Elisha's response was bitter and cruel:
"...as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, 'Go up, you baldhead; go up you baldhead!' When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number."
2 Kings 2:22-24
Did God kill those forty-two kids for making fun of a bald prophet? We can certainly make an argument for that if we use the anti-abortionists' kind of thinking.
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