re: Heard it all before.
You make a good point that the question of abortion rights would probably not even be directly comprehensible to the Founders. I was just making a theoretical point, much as Cesca was projecting his own assumptions onto that earlier time.
From the article:
So the founders created a secular nation in which any and all religions would be free to prosper without government intrusion -- and vice versa.
The saddest thing about our country's founding is that this principle has not been applied strictly to any other human activity besides religion, although if you look at the basic principles of liberty, why shouldn't it be? At the time, state religions were a major issue. It never occurred to them that their government would one day be running everything else.
I don't pay much attention to Bible verses as a justification for views on abortion. If colonial America wasn't that great for women and children and their rights, it was still pretty damn good compared to the Middle Eastern society that the Bible came from. The word "slave" is mentioned in the Bible many times, and assumed to be a normal part of the society of the time, even by Jesus.
I'm not sure how progressive thinkers back then would view our tax burdens of today if they were able to look upon the incredible infrastructure those revenues gave us such as giant hydroelectric dams on on our rivers, a vast and productive transportation system, the internet, the incredible power of our military, our space program.
If you add up everything in this category (other than the military), you would be astounded at what a small fraction of our Federal budget this kind of thing amounts to. Most of the rest of what people think of as "government services" (schools, fire departments, police, etc.) is funded by state and local taxes.