Abortion: A Religious Issue

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Abortion: A Religious Issue
One of the toughest issues to debate in our world today is abortion. Abortion is the induced termination of pregnancy before the fetus can survive. Nowadays, abortion affects all people, not just the mother and the baby. There are moral, ethical, health-related, political, and religious aspects that affect how people feel towards abortion. By looking at religion and its views, one can see just how hard it would be to argue in the pro-choice position of this debate.
First of all, I must start with the truth…the Bible does not directly say anything about abortion. The actual word is not mentioned at all. During biblical times, abortion was an unthinkable act and “there was no need to mention it in the criminal code” (Anderson 1). “Children were viewed as a gift or heritage from the Lord… the Scriptures state…that God opens and closes the womb and is sovereign over conception” (Anderson 1). In this sense, “childlessness was seen as a curse” (Anderson 1). Passages taken from the Bible are used as supporting details because they state indirectly how God feels towards the issue.
Before Christ was born, however, opinions differed towards abortion. Unwanted children were destroyed through abortion and infanticide because the Romans and Greeks thought human life was neither sacred nor inviolate (Ayd 48). In fact, Aristole claimed “that all babies beyond a legally defined quota should be sentenced to death by exposure” (Ayd 48). However, there were some people who objected this inhumanity.
“Hippocrates declared that physicians should not perform or enable a women to procure an abortion” (Ayd 48). Even though there were laws against the act, people ignored them and continued to perform the procedure as if it was nothing.
Then God became man, and man was created in God’s image. The Bible says that man is not the owner of his life and body, and the uses he can make of these are limited and governed by divine law (Ayd 48). The entire will of God is for man to come to know Him in a personal relationship so that he may spend eternity in Heaven. This is why there is life on Earth. If one can go through the trials and temptations of life and stay on the side of the Lord, then he is deemed worthy to go to Heaven. By following through with an abortion, the u...

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...holic Churches will continue to teach that the Bible and God are against abortion. There will also be many people who will oppose this teaching because of their own opinions and beliefs. No matter how people feel towards the issue of abortion, we must remember that the entire procedure is between the mother and the fetus. Both need to be taken into consideration when making a decision, and it is not hard to see where one might be led once reading the Bible.
There is just one thing I do not understand. Whatever happened to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? As Dr. Irvine Page says, “ Life has a way of taking revenge on those who destroy it” (Ayd 51).

Works Cited
Anderson, Kerby. “Arguments Against Abortion.” 2000: 19 February 2001
<http://www.christiani…1183,PTID1000/CHID74/CIID164304,00.html>.
Ayd, Frank J., M.D. “Abortion: The Catholic Viewpoint.” Abortion: Changing Views
And Practice. Ed. R. Bruce Sloane, M.D. New York: Grune and Stratton, Inc, 1971. 48-52.
Bible- New International Version
Scwarz, Stephen D. The Moral Question of Abortion. Chicago: Loyola University Press,
1990.

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