Numerous religious traditions have taken a stance on abortion but few are absolute. These stances span a broad spectrum, based on numerous teachings, deities, or religious print, and some of those views are highlighted below.
Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health, including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine, ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.
This Index of ethics articles puts articles relevant to well-known ethical debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.
Religious philosophy is philosophical thinking that is influenced and directed as a consequence of teachings from a particular religion. It can be done objectively, but it may also be done as a persuasion tool by believers in that faith. Religious philosophy is concerned with the nature of religion, theories of salvation, and conceptions of god, gods, and/or the divine.
In religion and philosophy, ensoulment is the moment at which a human or other being gains a soul. Some belief systems maintain that a soul is newly created within a developing child and others, especially in religions that believe in reincarnation, that the soul is pre-existing and added at a particular stage of development.
David Novak, is a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law (Halakha). He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. His areas of interest are Jewish theology, Jewish ethics and biomedical ethics, political theory, and Jewish-Christian relations.
Abortion in Iran, as can be expected of many government policies, changed drastically between governments.
Pikuach nefesh is the principle in Halakha that the preservation of human life overrides virtually any other religious rule of Judaism. In the event that a person is in critical danger, most mitzvot, including those from the Ten Commandments of the Torah, become inapplicable if they would hinder the ability to save oneself or someone else in such a situation. However, there are certain exceptions; some rules and commandments may not be broken under any circumstances and thus sanction an act of self-sacrifice.
Certain fundamental Jewish law questions arise in issues of organ donation. Donation of an organ from a living person to save another's life, where the donor's health will not appreciably suffer, is permitted and encouraged in Jewish law. Donation of an organ from a dead person is equally permitted for the same purpose: to save a life. This simple statement of the issue belies, however, the complexity of defining death in Jewish law. Thus, although there are side issues regarding mutilation of the body etc., the primary issue that prevents organ donation from the dead amongst Jews, in many cases, is the definition of death, simply because to take a life-sustaining organ from a person who was still alive would be murder.
Jewish medical ethics is a modern scholarly and clinical approach to medical ethics that draws upon Jewish thought and teachings. Pioneered by Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits in the 1950s, Jewish medical ethics centers mainly around an applied ethics drawing upon traditional rabbinic law (halakhah). In addition, scholars have begun examining theoretical and methodological questions, while the field itself has been broadened to encompass bioethics and non-halakhic approaches.
Christianity and abortion have a long and complex history. There is a general consensus that the texts of the Bible are "ambiguous" on the subject of abortion, neither containing explicit support or opposition, although there has been several passages interpreted that have been interpreted indicating both. Today, Christian denominations hold widely variant stances.
In Judaism, views on abortion draw primarily upon the legal and ethical teachings of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the case-by-case decisions of responsa, and other rabbinic literature. While all major Jewish religious movements allow or encourage abortion in order to save the life of a pregnant woman, authorities differ on when and whether it is permitted in other cases.
The beginning of human personhood is the moment when a human is first recognized as a person. There are differences of opinion as to the precise time when human personhood begins and the nature of that status. The issue arises in a number of fields including science, religion, philosophy, and law, and is most acute in debates relating to abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.
Baruch A. Brody was an American bioethicist. He was the Leon Jaworski Professor of biomedical ethics and former Director of the Center for Ethics, Medicine and Public Issues at The Baylor College of Medicine and Andrew Mellow professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University.
Muslim views on abortion are shaped by Hadith, as well as by the opinions of legal and religious scholars and commentators. The Quran does not directly address intentional abortion, leaving greater discretion to the laws of individual countries. Although opinions among Islamic scholars differ over when a pregnancy can be terminated, there are no explicit prohibitions on a woman's ability to abort under Islamic law.
Many different major religious groups and denominations have varying views on organ donation of a deceased and live bodies, depending on their ideologies. Differing opinions can arise depending on if the death is categorized as brain death or cease of the heartbeat. It is important for doctors and health care providers to be knowledgeable about differentiating theological and cultural views on death and organ donations as nations are becoming more multicultural.
Christianity and abortion has a long and complex history. There is scholarly disagreement on how early Christians felt about abortion. Some scholars have concluded that early Christians took a nuanced stance on what is now called abortion, and that at different and in separate places early Christians have taken different stances. Other scholars have concluded that early Christians considered abortion a sin at all stages; though there is disagreement over their thoughts on what type of sin it was and how grave a sin it was held to be. Some early Christians believed that the embryo did not have a soul from conception, and consequently opinion was divided as to whether early abortion was murder or ethically equivalent to murder. Some early Christian texts nonetheless condemned abortion without distinction: Luker mentions the Didache, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Saint Basil. Early church councils punished women for abortions that were combined with other sexual crimes, as well as makers of abortifacient drugs, but, like some early Church Fathers such as Basil of Caesarea, did not make distinction between "formed" and "unformed" fetuses.
Islamic bioethics, or Islamic medical ethics, refers to Islamic guidance on ethical or moral issues relating to medical and scientific fields, in particular, those dealing with human life.
The official teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1992 oppose all forms of abortion procedures whose direct purpose is to destroy a zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus, since it holds that "human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life". However, the Church does recognize as morally legitimate certain acts which indirectly result in the death of the fetus, as when the direct purpose is removal of a cancerous womb. Canon 1397 §2 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law imposes automatic excommunication on Latin Catholics who actually procure an abortion, if they fulfill the conditions for being subject to such a sanction. Eastern Catholics are not subject to automatic excommunication, but by canon 1450 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches they are to be excommunicated by decree if found guilty of the same action, and they may be absolved of the sin only by the eparchial bishop. In addition to teaching that abortion is immoral, the Catholic Church also generally makes public statements and takes actions in opposition to its legality.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre is a Catholic academic institute based in Oxford, which engages in scholarship, public debate, and education. Established in 1977, it is the oldest bioethical research institution in the United Kingdom.
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