Abortion And 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.