Home › Forums › Decaffeinated Coffee › Why are republicans pro-life? › Reply To: Why are republicans pro-life?
Abortion for non-Jews is prohibited in the discussion of the Noachide laws in Sanhedrin Chapter 7. It even carries a death penalty and some have used that to claim that that makes abortion equivalent to murder or even actual murder. But that sugya also provides for a death penalty for petty theft and nobody is going to claim that petty theft is murder. That sugya also states unequivocably that there is nothing permitted to Jews that is prohibited to non-Jews, so it isn’t that abortion is murder for one and not the other — it is just that the penalties can differ.
The Roman Catholic Church considers all abortions, even to save the life of the mother, to be murder, and it has managed to prohibit absolutely all abortions in several countries. Pregnant women have been dying as a result.
This is NOT a theoretical problem. The most recent data in the US indicate that 2% of known pregnancies in the US end as an ectopic pregnancy which is a potentially life-threatening condition for the mother (and must end with the death of the embryo).