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What, then, should we base our morality upon? Some people would reply that morality comes from God. Yet the heads of the various Christian denominations — and even the individual members of the clergy — haven't reached any more of a consensus than the general public. The only widely accepted source for God's word is the Bible — and the Bible is quite silent on the subject of abortion. The only passage that's even remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there's a fight between two men, and a woman bystander is accidentally injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine. In such a situation, the woman would be deprived of her choice to continue or terminate the pregnancy. If this were actually a case of murder, a fine would hardly seem an appropriate punishment.

A diligent scholar could find historical basis for virtually any position he wanted to support, beginning with the practice of impaling women on stakes for attempting an abortion — as the Assyrians did. On the other hand, abortion was commonplace in ancient Greece and Rome, and the Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. Within the Christian tradition, things are even more muddled. The question there was often the precise time of "ensoulment" — when the soul entered the body — a matter, as Carl Sagan says wryly, which is "not readily amenable to scientific investigation, and an issue of controversy even among learned theologians." ¹⁹

Thomas Aquinas' theory, basis unknown, was that boys were ensouled forty days after conception, and girls at day eighty. ¹⁶ St. Augustine held the view that the soul had to be inherited in the act of generation — in its tainted form, consistent with the doctrine of Original Sin — yet he made "a distinction between embryo informatus, before the entry of the soul, when inducing abortion could be considered a minor crime, and embryo formatus, when to cause abortion was punishable by death." ² "The Catholic Church's first and long-standing collection of canon law (according to the leading historian of the Church's teachings on abortion, John Connery, S.J.) held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already 'formed' — roughly, the end of the first trimester. It was not until 1869 that abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication." ¹⁹ That particular decision, notes one ethicist, was not the result of any conclusion about abortion per se. Rather, in an attempt to fix "problems with the concept of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary ... papal teaching then determined she was animated from the very beginning [of conception] on." ¹⁶

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