Word: fetus
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Opposition to abortion is one of the clearest and oldest moral preachings of the Roman Catholic Church; it dates back to the 1st century. The destruction of the fetus, the church teaches, is a morally indefensible attack on human life. The only exception is "indirect abortion," or abortion as an incidental byproduct of a necessary attempt to save the mother's life. Ectopic pregnancy and cancer of the uterus are grounds for indirect abortion. Rape and incest are not exceptions, because the fetus conceived has the same right to life as any other fetus...
...general respect for all human life, but it does not depend exclusively on the belief that a separate human being appears at the instant of conception. The teaching is that precisely because no one knows when the soul enters the body (or in secular terms, when the fetus becomes a person), the baby-to-be should be given the benefit of the doubt and be fully protected. One blunt analogy: no one would think it morally correct to heave a grenade into a room that is probably empty but just might have a human being in it, so why destroy...
Some dissenters within the church, however, have zeroed in on this element of doubt. For these Catholics, including a few theologians, the primary questions are: When is a fetus a person, and how do we know it? The implication, that there may be a brief period during which abortion is licit, is not new in the church, though it has been a minor refrain in Catholic theology and explicitly rejected many times by the Vatican. An influential 17th century theologian named Torreblanca taught that before the fetus is animated by the soul, a woman may have an abortion...
...also been associated with a greater risk of miscarriage. One clue to the cause of these effects comes from National Institutes of Health Researcher Anil Mukherjee, who in 1982 showed that in monkeys the equivalent of three to five drinks consumed rapidly temporarily cuts off all circulation to the fetus, suggesting that brain damage may result from oxygen deprivation. A number of human studies have been carried out in an attempt to find out the level of alcohol consumption necessary to put the fetus in jeopardy. A two-year study at Boston University, begun in 1977, divided pregnant women into...
...also the star of a daily 55-minute Romper Room program on Phoenix's KTAR-TV. To quiet her nerves and ensure sleep, Sherri Finkbine took some of the British pills-in the second month of her pregnancy, when the danger that the drug will damage the fetus is greatest. Only then did she learn that what she had been taking was thalidomide...