FREE ESSAY ON ABORTION AND THE BIBLE

ABORTION AND THE BIBLE

Abortion in the Bible
I am for abortion in most cases. It is my personal belief that an unborn fetus is not a
living being. At the time of birth, when the fetus is out of the mother's womb and
breathing on it's own, then it is to be considered a living being in my opinion.
Let me touch on the religious aspect of abortion since the original author has elected to
mention it. I did some research on the biblical aspects and was surprised to find some
interesting interpretations on the subject.
The Bible doesn't seem to tackle the topic of abortion directly. Roy Bowen Ward quotes
two anti-abortion books in his essay on the personhood of the fetus: 
John T. Noonan (1970) said: The Old Testament has nothing to say on abortion. 
John Connery (1977) said: If anyone expects to find an explicit condemnation of abortion
in the New Testament, he will be disappointed. The silence of the New Testament regarding
abortion surpasses even that of the Old Testament. 
Ward found this silence difficult to understand, because abortion was widely practiced
during New Testament era in the Middle East. The Assyrians had a law concerning
self-induced abortions as far back as the 12th century BC.
On the other hand, there are some Biblical passages that might be interpreted as
referring to the worth of a fetus. But even these suggest that a fetus carried less value
than human life. Here are samples of passages that I have found that possibly address
this subject:
Genesis 2:7 God made Adam's body out of the dust of the earth. Later, the man became a
living soul only after God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This would
imply that Adam's personhood started when he took his first breath. Following this
reasoning, a newborn becomes human after it starts breathing; a fetus is only potentially
human; an abortion would not terminate a human life. The most important word in the
Hebrew Scriptures that was used to describe a person was nephesh; it appears 755 times in
the Old Testament. It is translated as living soul in the above passage. One scholar,
H.W. Wolff , believes that the word's root means to breath. He argues that during Old
Testament times, Living creatures are in this way exactly defined in Hebrew as creatures
that breathe. 
Leviticus 27:6 And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then Thy
estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver and for the female ten shekels. A
child was only given a value after the age of one month; boys were worth five shekels;
girls three; below that age, (and presumably before birth) they were assigned no monetary
value. 
Numbers 3:15 Take a census...including every male a month or more old. Only male babies
over one month of age were considered persons for the purposes of enumeration. A baby
under one month of age and a fetus were apparently not worthy of being counted as a
human. 
Ecclesiastes 6:3-5 If a man begats 100 children...and his soul be not filled with good,
and also that he have no burial; I say that an untimely birth [a miscarriage] is better
than he. The passage implies that a person can have many children and a long life; but if
he is not motivated by love and goodness, and if he is not properly buried, then it would
have been better if he had been born dead. The suggestion here is that a terminated
pregnancy (one that does not produce a live birth) is better than a pregnancy that
produced a life that is empty and miserable. 
In closing, I would also remind the original author that the United States Supreme Court
ruled on abortion in the Roe v. Wade case of 1973. This law left the decision to abort a
pregnancy, during the first trimester, up to the woman involved and her physician. That
decision marked an important turning point in public health policy. It made it possible
for women to get safe, legal abortions from well-trained medical practitioners and
therefore led to dramatic decreases in pregnancy-related injury and death. 
Bibliography
Roy Bowen Ward, Is the Fetus a person? at: http://www.rcrc.org/religion/es2/comp.html 
John T. Noonan, An Almost Absolute Value in History, in John T. Noonan, ed., The Morality
of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA,
(1970), Page. 6 
John Connery, S.J. Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective, Loyola
University Press, Chicago IL, (1977), Page. 34. 
Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, Fortress Press, Philadelphia PA,
(1974), Pages 14 & 59. 
B.A. Robinson, What The Bible Says About Abortion at:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_bibl.htm
B.A. Robinson, What The Bible Says About Abortion at:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_bibl.htm
B.A. Robinson, WhatThe Bible Says About Abortion at:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_bibl.htm
B.A. Robinson, What The Bible Says About Abortion at:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_bibl.htm