Anti-abortion proponents, can you help me answer this question about abortions ?

[Happyhome038]

the bible says life begins at birth: in Hebrew, "life" and "breath" are the same.

There’s nothing explicitly said in the Bible about induced abortion. Zero. The Jewish position begins with Exodus 21:22: “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.” So, only a fine; no punishment for homicide. On the basis of this passage, the rabbis argued in the Talmud that a fetus is not considered adam (human) and has no legal standing as a person. Killing a fetus is not murder and it is not treated that way. The mainstream Jewish position historically and today is that human life or personhood begins at birth, when we take our first breath. There are a number of biblical passages that have been cited by rabbis over the years as connecting the breath and human life, starting with the creation story in Genesis 2:7: “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

This is not to say that Judaism doesn’t take the value of potential life in the womb very seriously, before and after the heart starts beating and brain activity begins. Historically, as required in Exodus, there have been fines for killing a fetus, and, in the words of the Conservative rabbinate, “the decision to abort should not be taken lightly.” Most Orthodox rabbis approve abortion only to protect the life or health of the mother. Conservative rabbis sanction abortion under a wider range of circumstances, but always thoughtfully and prayerfully. The Reform rabbinate leaves the decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy in the hands of a woman or her family, but recognizes how difficult that decision often is.

For most of the history of the Catholic Church, one did not become a human being or a person until well after conception. Saint Augustine in the fourth century adopted the Aristotelian belief that the human soul didn’t enter the fetus until forty to ninety days after conception. In roughly the same era Saint Jerome emphasized human shape: “The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs.” The Apostolic Constitutions of the late fourth century allowed abortion if it was done both before the human soul entered and before the fetus was of human shape. Saint Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century followed Augustine in not considering the abortion of a non-ensouled fetus to be murder. Pope Innocent III, earlier in the same century as Aquinas, emphasized that the soul enters the body at the time of quickening—when a prospective mother first feels movement of the fetus. When Pope Gregory XIV affirmed the quickening test for ensoulment in 1591, he set the time for it as 116 days into pregnancy, or the sixteenth week. The great reversal came with Pope Pius IX in 1869. He assumed ensoulment at conception, and by 1917 church canon law had been revised, dropping the prior distinction it had upheld between “animated” and “inanimated” fetuses. Pius’s position has been maintained by the Roman Catholic Church ever since.