Secular Humanism can Improve Women's Public Health

Wisdom, ethics, and virtue can guide us to a more equitable and healthy world.

Earth Rise, taken by Bill Anders on Apollo 8. Seeing home from 400,000 km away might have a way of changing how you think about things. This image has everything to do with women’s health, our common humanity, and the big-perspective universal thinking we need right now. The authors of the Bible could never have predicted such an image would ever happen.

Note: This essay will address topics that may unsettle the reader.

Women close to me have had miscarriages. My own human empathy tells me that I cannot begin to understand what it feels like to go through such an event. May I write this essay with compassion and do my best to convey common humanity. May we all work to create a world in which all women will have a refuge, in which society will support women through their experiences, low, and high, for their entire lives.

Now, I will attempt to address my feelings and thoughts. This essay will be imperfect. But we must not let mistakes in communication inhibit our pursuit of dialogue.

The steps and process of “successfully” navigating a miscarriage are adjacent to but not central to this essay. I will say that in the cases close to me, women were instructed to carry out the process at home, and in private. Doing so at home relieves hospital resources (which is truly an insurance problem, not a biblical one). Miscarriages are primal, and they can be easier or more arduous depending on the individual.

As many of you are aware, I live in Florida. My husband, who is a pediatrician, enlightened me to the fact that because we live in Florida, women face challenges getting pharmaceutical, surgical, and psychological support through this process because of our state’s laws, which were written based on fundamentalist cultural interpretations of ancient scripture. These barriers exist because modern Biblical interpretations are used to justify the prohibition of treatments that are also used for ending a pregnancy. The current legal and insurance infrastructure are so draconian that pharmaceutical, physical and emotional therapies are put out of reach for people who aren’t having an abortion at all. In fact, they’re trying to have successful pregnancies.

It needs to be said that, for many reasonable reasons, women do not talk about this topic. It is likely that many more women in our lives may bear the burden of miscarriage alone, without ever telling their friends or family circles. This issue is closer to us than our social circles make apparent.

I am not a woman, and I am not a pediatrician. I am not a legislator, nor a preacher, but I have been trained in science and engineering, and I know how to do research. In my educational journey, I was brought up with the stories of how science has been attacked over the millennia, how the people who made profound discoveries were persecuted by the religious. Over the course of my career, it was clear how society held itself back by clinging to ancient writing that was not based in truth. So this is where I come in.

Part I of III: We (all) need to talk about ancient books.

I love many of the traditions and teachings of the Catholic Church, in which I was raised. But the Church failed me when I started to realize my own sexuality. I had to choose between scripture and my direct observations, so I investigated both. And what I learned was that:

1. the Bible has many flaws (Ref. 1), and,

2. the development of a new human’s sexuality is a process that starts at conception and takes place over decades. There’s a sequence of developmental events in a human’s biology which create sexuality, and there are many twists and turns along the way (Ref. 2).

That’s science:

1. I learned a little bit of archeology and history to learn about how the Bible we have today was created,

2. and a little bit of biology to learn about how humans develop sexually. So, due to my research.

I therefore concluded that I am not destined to burn in hell forever for a decision I never made, but rather I was experiencing a natural biological development process which has been a stable feature of our species for hundreds of thousands of years. Also, “hell” as we know it today is a concept that’s not even mentioned in the entirety of the Bible; zealous practitioners made it up afterward.

Because I still needed a spiritual outlet, I explored other philosophies of virtue. Training in Zen helped me understand my mind, and the relationship between impermanence, desire, and suffering. I’m also an unashamed Italophile, so I was reading stoicism before it was cool. I bought my first copy of Marcus Aurelius when I was 18, back in 2000. I love both Zen and Stoicism.

But let’s address Marcus Aurelius, in particular. His journals, now called Meditations, are a profound look into the mind of a Roman emperor raised in the traditions of the pursuit of wisdom. There is a lot to be learned from his journals, both historically, but also a great deal on a philosophical and ethical basis. You will be more wise from reading Marcus Aurelius’ journal.

That said, while I love the writings of Marcus Aurelius, I do not live my life in a fundamentalist way to the letter of his words or the world he lived in. Why?

1. First of all, I do not believe Italy should violently subjugate Germany and France, and I think Christians should be allowed to practice their religion without having to worry about the lions. I also do not aspire to have slaves. I actually think Marcus Aurelius might have been coming around to this way of thinking, but that is up for debate.

2. For all I know, Marcus Aurelius, even though he was a philosopher, still might have believed in the Fates and tried to understand the future by examining the guts of slaughtered cows.

   1. Friend: “Can you make lunch next Thursday?”

   2. Me as an Aurelian fundamentalist: “I’m not sure yet. Luckily it’s the half moon. I’ll need to ask my admin. Let me pick up a live chicken from the store, see what color the liver is this month, and get back to you tonight, ok? Happy Lupercalia!”

3. We also need to be cognizant of the fact that the reason we have ancient scriptures today is because ancient monks copied these works, by hand, for thousands of years before the invention of the printing press, and they were prone to making errors (Ref. 3). Modern humans doing data entry make errors at a rate or 1-4% (Ref. 4). The Bible has over 700,000 words, so the low end of this estimate gives us 7,000 errors from one hand-written copy to the next. This went on for thousands of years before the printing press. A 1.5% difference in the genetic code is the difference between a human and a chimpanzee. In ancient texts, words and names are misspelled, mistranslations occur, and entire lines or pages are skipped. Because of all this, the meaning becomes distorted over the centuries. This is exactly why, when we write a check, we spell out “One thousand dollars” in addition to writing “$1,000”, because “1” can look like a “7” depending on how a given person is writing that day.

4. We need to remember that ancient scriptures were by-and-large edited by men with agendas. In the case of the Bible, entire books where added and removed over centuries. To this day preachers, Catholic and reformed, largely do not mention the God of the Old Testament commanded the death of entire communities, and their innocent children, and babies (Refs. 5, 6). Modern pastors largely do not mention the fact that in Paul’s letter to the Romans, he greets and acknowledges three women, Phoebe, a deacon, as well as Priscilla and Aquila, his ‘co-workers in Christ’ (Ref. 7)! The editing and selective presentation continues to modern times. Maybe the Conclave should consider choosing a nun to be the next leader of Catholics: the first Pontifexa Maxima.

We need to treat ancient works very carefully, especially when we are deciding how to live by them, and when we construct society’s laws by them.

Part II of III: The Bible and Women’s Health

In the Bible, god says: “I knew you before you were born” (Ref. 8).

For this and many other scriptural reasons, pro-life activists end up advocating limiting the care women can receive because they believe they are protecting a human life. It is noble to pursue the protection of the vulnerable, even though I don’t agree with this particular interpretation. But I don’t want to talk about abortions here, specifically. I want to talk about how the treatment of abortion by fundamentalists is causing collateral damage to a greater span of women’s healthcare needs, and our society at large.

In the scenario of a miscarriage, a pregnancy has lost viability. This is devastating for women, and the families they lead. Nobody has made the personal decision of whether to continue a pregnancy in these cases. Biological circumstances outside the woman’s control have created this event. And the response of our medical system is: go home, carry out the logical conclusion of your non-viable pregnancy, go to work the next day, and call me if you have a problem.

So I think the questions to ask in this case are: when did the developing human stop being sacred? When it became nonviable? Was the mother ever seen as sacred?

If unborn viable humans are sacred and to be protected, based on fundamentalist interpretations of ancient books, wouldn’t the Bible also tell us to honor the deceased? Shouldn’t we also honor the mother?

Women carry the immense burden and adventure of creating new human beings. How does it honor this effort to instruct women to proceed with their miscarriages at home, to pass a nonviable pregnancy, which, as long as it was alive, was previously believed to be sacred, without the support of doctors, medicines, and therapies that will honor the pregnancy as well as support the woman through her journey? How on Earth does this honor women and our collective humanity?

It doesn’t. This makes neither religious nor medical sense. The fact that women cannot receive care they need, at their most challenging time, is cruel and medieval. “Medieval” is an appropriate description because it invokes a time in Europe when religious fundamentalism was rampant. The Medieval period was a time when religion-inspired mass executions of non-Christians took place to cure society of Bubonic Plague, which is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis. Today, we use vaccines rather than execute innocent people. Thankfully, science eventually solved the plague before the Church burned everyone in Europe.

In modern times, men living in Florida (who are lucky to have mothers who raised them) receive care for low testosterone, hair loss, behavioral health, and so on. I don’t mean to suggest that men shouldn’t receive care. I do mean to point out that there is a great inequality in care, and if were men to face the challenges of miscarriages, I believe laws would be different. We might even have a Biblical interpretation in support of this. Men wouldn’t tolerate carrying out a miscarriage without supportive medical care.

Part III: Secular Humanism

I cannot change this current situation for women, immediately and on my own. What I mean to advocate for in this essay is a return to secular humanism. This is a philosophy, born during the post-plague European Enlightenment, which seeks to promote virtue, ethics, reason, as well as honor our collective humanity, without the burden of rigid adherence to anything but the pursuit of wisdom. We can be good to one another, and live lives of virtue without “god.” We also do not have to leave god behind, and we can address the concept of god totally differently.

We can look at god as a binding universal truth to which we are all connected. I probably didn’t say that right, and guess what: instead of taking that statement literally, try to interpret my sentiment, which is noble. In this way, and as Paul wrote, women and men are equal in the eyes of his god (Ref. 9). Both deserve human love, support, and care.

Because secular humanism is based on the use of reason to pursue wisdom, its adherents treat the Bible, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the State of the Union Address, and Lady Gaga’s Born this Way for what they are: human interpretations of the universe from a unique perspective. Humanists use reason interrogate these works for their meaning. They do not abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves by blindly adhering to written or spoken words.

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The foundation of reason, and the achievement of knowledge and wisdom, starts with asking questions. Like these:

1. If “Almighty God” is perfect, why does he rely on the Bible, a book with errors in it, and flawed men to spread his message? Shouldn’t he be able to at least create a highly effective social media presence or buy a Super Bowl ad?

2. Why did the 1755 Lisbon, Portugal earthquake cause so many churches to collapse while leaving brothels standing (Ref. 10)? So, do we burn the witches or the clergy?

3. Why do the finches of the Galapagos islands have different beaks?

4. What causes the phases of the Moon?

5. How can we build a dome on this cathedral?

6. What makes humans crave power, and can anything be done to help humans overcome their base impulses to motivate the pursuit of virtue?

7. What are the causes of, and what must it be like to go through miscarriages? How can we best support our fellow human beings who face these challenges?

All of these big questions have answers, and we need to reason our way to the solutions, not seek out the answers in ancient texts, where they do not exist.

I do not mean to lose sight of women’s health, which was the impulse for writing this essay, but I also need to point out that, as I sit here, I do not have a way to change this terrible crisis of women’s health right now. Women will suffer today, and tomorrow, and beyond because of religious fundamentalism. What can start to change things is if we elevated and spread the habits of using reason and the promotion of secular ethics and empathy.

We must stop allowing our lives to be dictated by the typos, mistranslations, and agendas of ancient men, and take responsibility for the world in which we exist.

It is far past the time when we should have claimed our agency by using our ability to reason. We can still use the fields of ethics and humanism to be good to one another and live virtuously.

Secular humanism (Ref. 11) is based on reason and the pursuit of wisdom, so hard-won scientific knowledge can team up with the field of ethics to help us create a society of both goodness as well as technological and scientific advancement that we can leverage to spread the blessings of the universe to all humans.

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References (go ahead, check my work):

1. “Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them),” Bart Ehrmann, Harper Collins, 2010.

2. “Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation,” Second Edition, Simon LeVay, Oxford University Press, 2016.

3. Ehrman, Bart, Intriguing Scribal Errors Made by Accident, The Bart Ehrmann Blog, 2022.

4. Measuring the rate of manual transcription error in outpatient point-of-care testing, James A Mays, Patrick C Mathias, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 26, Issue 3, March 2019, Pages 269–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocy170

5. 1 Samuel 15:2–3, NIV, (… kill the donkeys too! what did the donkey’s do wrong?!)

6. Numbers 31:17–18, KJV (‘Kill everyone, but if the kids and women are virgins, go ahead and keep them for yourself.’ -God)

7. Romans 16:1–5, NIV

8. Jeremiah 1:5, NIV

9. Galatians 3:27-29, NIV

10. Goff, James, and Walter Dudley, '1755, Lisbon: The Benefit of Brothels', Tsunami: The World's Greatest Waves (New York, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Mar. 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197546123.003.0013, accessed 1 May 2025.

11. Secular Humanism, Wikipedia

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