Interesting interpretation in the following website:
huffingtonpost.com/rick-lowery-phd/abortion-what-the-bible-says-and-doesnt-say_b_1856049.html
Genesis 2:7 is clearest. The first human became a “living being” (nefesh hayah, “a living breath”) when God blew into its nostrils and it started to breathe.
Human life begins when you start breathing, biblical writers thought. It ends when you stop. That’s why the Hebrew word often translated “spirit” (ruah) – “life force” might be a better translation – literally means “wind” or “breath.”
But what about babies in the womb?
It’s hard to ask biblical texts the modern question, “when does human life begin?” because the Bible has a very different understanding of human reproduction. Biblical writers don’t talk about sperm fertilizing eggs. They talk about male “seed” planted in fertile female ground. Just as a seed becomes a plant when it emerges from the ground, so too a man’s planted seed becomes another human being when it emerges from the womb.
Exodus 21:22-25 describes a case where a pregnant woman jumps into a fight between her husband and another man and suffers injuries that cause her to miscarry.
The miscarriage is treated as property loss, not murder. The assailant must pay a fine to the husband. The law of a life for a life does not apply. The fetus is important, but it’s not human life in the same way the pregnant woman is.
For the Bible, that’s when a child is born and starts breathing. For many of us today, it’s when a fetus becomes “viable” – somewhere between 21 and 27 weeks into the pregnancy, thanks to our amazing medical technology.
If something goes wrong late in the pregnancy and the fetus dies, we call it “still birth” and, by law, issue a death certificate.
If the pregnancy ends early on, we call it “miscarriage.” It’s traumatic, a terrible loss, but most of us think of it differently than we think of a still birth. We don’t require death certificates for miscarriages.
Recognizing this difference, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade created the “trimester” system to sort through the legal implications of the constitutional “right to privacy” they said we all have as Americans.
The justices ruled that the early and late stages of pregnancy are morally and legally distinct.
Early on, in the “first trimester,” the embryo undeniably is human life, but it’s not “a human being” in the normal sense of the term. At this stage of pregnancy, a woman’s right to privacy trumps any responsibility the state might have to protect the embryo by interfering with the woman’s decision to terminate the pregnancy.
Late in the pregnancy, certainly by the “third trimester,” however, the child has reached a stage of development that changes its moral and legal status. To protect the rights of the viable fetus, states can put serious limits on a woman’s right to abortion, though they must continue to respect her right to self-defense, to terminate the pregnancy to save her own life or prevent serious injury.
In the ambiguous middle of the pregnancy, the “second trimester,” the state has to balance the right to life of the unborn with the right to privacy of the woman, a balance that continues to tip toward the fetus as the pregnancy progresses. In this stage, our constantly improving medical technology plays an important role in the moral-legal equation.
Abortion is illegal in most states once the fetus is viable (normally 24 weeks into the pregnancy), unless it’s necessary to save the life of the mother or prevent serious physical or mental harm.
I think the moral reasoning of Roe and subsequent Supreme Court decisions reflects what many of us actually think: the moral status of the fetus changes over the course of the pregnancy.
Advances in medical technology affect our opinions about when exactly the line is crossed. But most of us think there’s a difference between a recently fertilized egg and a late-term unborn child.
The moral view that underlies Roe v. Wade – that a line is crossed when a fetus becomes “viable” – seems most plausible, morally defensible, and consistent with the spirit of the biblical view.
