"Gus" wrote in message
oups.com...

Well, biblical scholars mostly place Moses's life around 1200 - 1500 BC
or
so, and both physical and herbal (medicinal) methods for inducing
abortion
were recorded from before the time of Hippocrates. He wrote of it
himself.
So it's been around for a long time. It seems likely that it's been with
us
since Moses's time.

--
Ed Huntress

Finding abortion in the bible is like finding it in the constitution.
You have to look through the "vapor". g

Yeah. They don't seem to have thought much about it.

Tracing the historical record of religious positions on abortion is a really
interesting exercise, BTW. It's been back-and-forth, back-and-forth, for
millenia. At the time the US Constitution was signed, the English common law
and the Catholic Church both had almost identical doctrines (no abortion
after "quickening" under common law; no abortion after "ensoulment" in the
Catholic Church, both of which occurred some time in what we now call the
second trimester). Other churches were mostly mute on the subject in modern
times, until the 1820s. And it didn't become a big religious cause until the
1840s. The Catholic Church didn't reverse St. Thomas Aquinas's "delayed
ensoulment" doctrine until 1869.

All of which leads one to wonder what the drafters and ratifiers of the
Constitution would have thought about laws that would outlaw abortion, in
the 1780s. I wonder if they thought it was within the powers of Congress to
say anything about it at all.

--
Ed Huntress