Before saying a rape victim should keep her attacker's child, that a child should give birth, that a severely unhealthy and/or malformed foetus should be left to develop and be born, that a woman should give birth if it risks her own life or that any woman should be told to carry out a pregnancy she (for any reason) does not wish to carry out (or feels unable to), here are some things to consider and questions to ask yourself.
If life begins at conception and a soul is bestowed upon the new zygote, do the souls of miscarried embryos/zygotes go to heaven? Some sources predict around half of all pregnancies are miscarried. Often without women realising they were ever pregnant. Is heaven full of foetus souls? Why would God create these "lives" and then kill them before anyone knows they existed?
With non-fraternal (monozygotic) twins, the embryo splits into two. Does this mean these identical twins share a soul? Or was a new soul beamed down into the womb or somehow created?
What about parasitic twins? When an embryo starts to split, but doesn't fully and one of them doesn't survive. Did it have a soul? Did that go to heaven or do the body-parts sticking out of the surviving twin have a soul that remains until the surviving twin dies?
Do conjoined twins share a soul or do they have one each? If they have one each, where did the second soul come from? They came from one zygote. Is it possible a zygote could contain multiple souls?
Do all or some teratomas have souls of their own?
Do human chimeras (one zygote absorbing another zygote entirely) have two souls? Are there people walking around with two souls in them? Or was one of the souls destroyed during the process? Did it go to heaven?
Do eggs that are fertilised in a lab contain souls? When they are split in a lab, is a new soul created? If one is kept frozen, will the soul remain indefinitely?
Or perhaps souls are a myth and we just can't handle our own mortality or let go of those we've lost. What we mistake for souls is most likely just our own consciousness. Little more than brainwaves. Is it right for you to force your personal beliefs on others? How would you feel if forced to live by the rules of a religion you don't believe in?
Well over 80% of abortions occur before 12 weeks (the first trimester). At this stage, the zygote is not aware, does not have any brainwaves and does not respire.
A foetus doesn't even distinguish sound until around 22 weeks. Less than 1% of abortions in Great Britain occur after this period and the upper limit is usually 24 weeks in Great Britain and the United States of America. Peer-reviewed science concludes that they feel no pain before 24 weeks.
Before 23 weeks, the nervous system isn't usually joined together. Before 24 weeks, the foetus cannot usually regulate its own organs and doesn't usually have a complete and activated auditory or visual system. It cannot usually dream until 27 weeks.
Is it a "potential life" you are concerned with? If so, using any form of birth control (including condoms, 'coils' and "the pill"), masturbation, "pulling out", oral sex and anal sex are stopping the sperms from reaching the egg, so is stopping potential life. We can all be prone to it, but have to accept that the difference between this and a fertilised egg is just irrational sentimentality. If we speak in terms of potential life, not only is God a mass murderer (if you believe in him or another deity), but some of the aforementioned acts range from reckless abandonment or murder to possibly even cannibalism (oral sex)!
There are a lot of children in terrible conditions and in state care. Are you willing to adopt these children or did you stop caring once they were born?
The world is over-populated and the Earth only has so many resources (maybe not a deciding factor, but these are all points for you think about).
Making abortions illegal never stopped abortions from happening. It just meant unsafe, unhygienic abortions took place and often resulted in the death of the woman.
