Religion : Faiths Disagree on Morality of Abortion

The Holy Koran, the font of divine truth for the world’s one billion Muslims, proclaims in its 16th Sura that Allah made man “out of a drop of sperm.”

But when, precisely, did the droplet become a living being?

For centuries, the issue might have appeared so abstruse as to worry nobody but the muftis, Islam’s theologians, who ruled that abortion was a sin and illegal in the main except to save the life of the mother. But that was before modern medicine, the internationalization of the debate on abortion and the women’s rights movement.

Now, more than ever, Islamic believers ask the question: Can a Muslim have an abortion in good conscience? And when? Muslims are not alone, of course. All of the world’s great faiths have been pushed by contemporary life to re-examine their positions on abortion. The responses they offer are strikingly different, because of varying views on when life begins, what God commands from human beings and the immutability of divine law.

Ranging from Arabia to the Sahara, to the East Indies and beyond, believers in Islam have no single spiritual leader. So not surprisingly, the muftis’ religious rulings, or fatwas , differ on when life, or more particularly what some call “ensoulment”--the soul’s entry into the body--begins.

Nearly all Muslim scholars agree that ensoulment occurs 40 days after conception at the latest. But some women’s groups in the Arab world point to other fatwas that hold that life does not officially start until 120 days after conception.

Using centuries-old common-sense reasoning that observes that at four months a fetus has a developed head, limbs and heart, and the mother can feel it “quicken,” or move inside her, some Islamic scholars have ruled that abortion is narrowly permissible before a pregnancy enters its second trimester, and never afterward.

“If a child is aborted before 120 days, it’s a smaller sin,” said New Delhi’s head mufti, Abdul Rehman. “After 120 days, it’s considered a great sin, equivalent to murder.”

Rehman said a woman may end a pregnancy to save her own life if another baby would endanger her milk supply for an older offspring, or if she has been raped--provided, in all cases, that her husband gives permission for the abortion.

But Rehman’s interpretation of the Koran and an anthology of fatwas called the Shami is just one interpretation. Last autumn, his counterpart in Cairo, Sheik Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, grand mufti of Egypt, echoed his government’s policy by ruling that abortion is allowed before “ensoulment” if pregnancy threatens the mother’s life, was caused by rape or incest or was due to the failure of contraceptives in cases where the parents are too poor to raise another child.

Roman Catholicism stands alone among the world’s large organized religions in holding that intentional destruction of the embryo or fetus is always a sin in God’s eyes. According to Vatican doctrine, the instant a man’s sperm comes in contact with the woman’s egg, a human life begins, said Father Gregory Coiro, director of public affairs for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Outside the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, nothing has divided its worldwide, billion-member flock more than its adamant condemnation of abortion, likened to murder and blasphemy in Pope John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“The Splendor of Truth”).

“As sexual mores have changed in the secular society, that’s brought a great deal of pressure on the church either to relax or to change its moral teachings,” Coiro said. “But the church’s response is that which was objectively true during the Victorian Age is still true now and will be true tomorrow and was true 1,000 years ago.”

Adding to the disagreement in Catholics’ ranks is the fact that in their faith’s interpretation of the Bible, there is no explicit scriptural ban on abortion. Coiro instead cites a verse of the Gospels, Luke 1:44 (“ . . . the babe leaped in my womb for joy”), as proof that the fetus is an “unborn human life.”

Not all Christian denominations make the same leap of reasoning or faith. The Church of England, for instance, calls abortion “morally a very serious matter” and deplores its widespread use, but is more permissive than the Vatican.

Like Christians, the world’s 314 million Buddhists are divided into various sub-currents and sects, but many believe that life begins 14 days after conception, when, in the words of Tozen Nakano, a priest at Ryuhoji in Kyoto, the embryo “starts to have potential sensual function.”

Buddhism’s basic tenet is that abortion is a “misdeed,” the Japanese priest stressed in a newspaper interview. But the faith allows that in the “battle between precious life and the happiness of living human beings,” the needs of the living should sometimes prevail.

In the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda, which Hindus believe are divinely inspired, the “killing of a bhruna “ is numbered among the seven acts that make a man a sinner. The exact meaning of the Sanskrit word has been lost in the mists of time, but many Hindu scholars such as Lokesh Chandra believe that it meant fetus .

And yet, that old injunction notwithstanding, the vast majority of Hindu priests and divines have nothing particular to say about abortion to the 732 million worshipers of Shiva, Vishnu and the other members of the Hindu pantheon.

For unlike Catholicism, Hinduism’s conception of what is right and wrong is believed, and even expected, to evolve like a growing organism over the centuries.

“We accept that every religious law, every moral law, is subject to time and space,” said Chandra, director of the New Delhi-based International Academy of Indian Culture.

India is already home to hundreds of millions of poor. So Chandra said most Indians have concluded that abortion fulfills a legitimate need: population control.

Judaism bases its rabbinical law on abortion on the interpretation of a short passage in the Torah, Exodus 21:22-23: “And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow--he shall surely be fined. . . . “

To the rabbis, since only a fine was to be exacted, and not the life of the person responsible, this was a biblical proof that the fetus was not the equivalent of the woman carrying it or another human being.

Judaism has always held that the health of the mother--both physical and emotional--takes precedence over the health of the fetus.

Contributing to this article were Times staff writers David Holley, William Tuohy, Kim Murphy and Mary Curtius, and researchers Janet Stobart, Chiaki Kitada and Megumi Shimizu.