Abortion

Religions of the world are divided on the subject of abortion. Pro-choice views coexist alongside no-choice views in the world's major and indigenous religions.

All religions are united on reverence and awe and concern for the preservation of life. For that [Page 4]reason, life and death issues are of prime concern for all the world religions. Mysteries such as birth and death particularly stimulate the emotion of the religio-sacred, making religion an inevitable factor—for good or for ill—in the ethics and policies of family planning. Religion has always been a dominant presence in discussions of abortion rights.

Many factors are involved in fertility motivation (such as education level, affluence, the status of women, etc.), and thus, it is notoriously difficult to say with certainty how much the official teachings of the various religions relate to fertility decisions. Positions held by religious leaders are not necessarily shared by the adherents of those religions. Within Christianity, for instance, the Roman Catholic hierarchy opposes both contraception and abortion, and yet France was the first country to experience a transition from high fertility to replacement levels or lower, and Italy (which hosts the Vatican) and Spain have among the three lowest fertility rates in the world. The implication is that birth control measures are widely used in these Catholic countries. In Judaism, there is strong support for abortion under certain circumstances. In some cases, abortion is not only permitted, it is, in fact, mandated, as when the physical or mental health of the woman is at risk or when there is a prospect of having a severely disabled child, such as a child with Tay-Sachs disease. Jewish scholars cite texts from the Bible and from the classical commentaries on the Bible in support of this position.

In Christianity, abortion became widely discussed only in the Middle Ages. Delayed ensoulment was broadly accepted throughout Christian history. The early embryo/fetus was thought to have a vegetative soul. This was succeeded by an animal soul. But only when the fetus was “formed” could God infuse a spiritual soul into it, and only at that point did the fetus attain the moral status of a person. Prior to this, therapeutic abortion could be permitted. There was debate as to when the fetus became “ensouled.” Some held that it happened after 40 days of pregnancy; some said it happened at 80 or 90 days into the pregnancy. In practice, “quickening,” detectable movement of the fetus in the woman, was taken as the arrival of a “person” status for the fetus. Early abortion was permissible for many reasons, such as to save the woman's life or to end a pregnancy conceived outside marriage, as when a girl was betrothed to one man but pregnant from another. The Catholic hierarchy today holds conservative views on both contraception and abortion. These are not shared by all modern Catholic theologians or by all Catholic parishioners.

In Islam, there is also a great diversity of views on abortion. Legal positions range from total prohibition of all abortion to unqualified permission for abortion up to 120 days into the pregnancy. Islam also holds that the moral status of the fetus depends on its age. Only when the fetus is sufficiently developed can God's angel breathe spirit into the fetus.

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