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[quote=Anonymous]The wrong science about when life begins and personhood at fertilization pushed by the Catholic Church is my biggest hang up. How can anyone follow their leadership on this issue if they aren't going to be truthful?

"But despite the insistence of anti-abortion activists, the notion that life begins at the bright line of conception is at odds with many ethical traditions. In a number of religions, when an embryo or fetus becomes a person remains a mystery, something that occurs not in a single moment but in a series of moments, none necessarily more important than the next. And, for all the anti-abortion side’s embrace of ultrasounds, the medical community tends to agree.

“Many scientists would say they don’t know when life begins. There are a series of landmark moments,” said Arthur Caplan, professor and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center. “The first is conception, the second is the development of the spine, the third the development of the brain, consciousness, and so on.” That perspective, it turns out, has deep roots. It’s also one that resonates for many pregnant women who experience the embryo’s gradual passage to personhood on a visceral level.

Many religious traditions, including a number of denominations of Christianity, are ambivalent about the beginnings of life. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and many American Baptists don’t believe abortion is akin to murder. Presbyterians concede that they “may not know exactly when human life begins” and encourage their followers to make their own careful decisions on abortion. Unitarians are more overtly pro-choice and “believe not only in the value of life itself but also in the quality of life.”

Among Muslims, there is no universally agreed-upon moment when a fetus becomes a person. “Some say it takes 40 days, others say it takes 120 days, for a human soul to be breathed into a fetus,” Sherine Hamdy, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown who researches cross-cultural bioethics, told Slate. She said many Muslim religious leaders allow for abortion in case of rape before 4 months, and some also allow for it in the case of a prenatal diagnosis of disability if it is seen as “an arduous burden on the family’s well-being.”

The majority of Jews do not believe that life begins at conception but instead see the creation of life as something that happens over time. During this process, the fetus is seen as part of the mother, whose well-being, both immediate and future, takes precedence. As with other religious traditions, Jewish ethicists have increasingly become willing to consider psychological threats to the mother in addition to physical ones, when considering whether an abortion is the right decision.

“The tradition holds that we enter life in stages and leave in stages,” Rabbi Elliot Dorff, bioethicist and professor of Jewish theology at the American Jewish University in California, told Slate. He pointed to Exodus 21, in which the Bible explains that if a pregnant woman is physically harmed and miscarries as a result, the punishment for her assailant should not be the same as if he killed another person. “It’s clear here that there is real distinction between the status of fetus and status of a woman who is a full-fledged human being.”

There are also a number of biblical passages in which the breath, and not the heartbeat, serves as the central symbol for life, including, most famously, Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Anti-abortion activists often counter these examples with two other biblical passages, both which suggest that some kind of ensoulment happens at conception. “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee,” reads Jeremiah 1:5. Together, these passages suggest that the author or authors of the Bible were as uncertain as we are about when life begins."
https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/04/when-does-life-begin-outside-the-christian-right-the-answer-is-over-time.html[/quote]

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