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Old 10-21-2008, 07:36 PM
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Diligent Diligent is offline
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The Bible refers to a woman who is pregnant as "with child," a phrase that appears in 25 verses in the Bible. Thus, the Bible says an unborn baby is indeed a "child," not some lower-class human. If we let the Bible define its own words, there can be no question that child = child, not child = pre-human. Besides, a fetus is simply a young human -- younger than an infant and a toddler, older than a zygote.

Now the real question is what legal standing (in the Bible) an unborn child has. It is clear that the rules of manslaughter with regard to unborn children show that there is a difference (Exodus 21:22), but even if we accept Mosaic law as binding here (which would be interesting, since the prior few verses allow a man to get away with killing his servant!), this is only a manslaughter issue, not a premeditated killing.

The Bible doesn't address abortion directly like we'd like it to. But as so many of the verses already quoted in this thread show, killing an unborn child is killing a person -- Jeremiah and John are described as having attributes of a person while in the womb. And to bring this back to the beginning, the Bible already makes it clear what an unborn human is -- a child! We don't let parents kill their children, plain and simple. There is no Biblical basis for excusing abortion.