became safer, the Catholic Church decided to enact laws restricting the practice. For this Church, the fetus became animated (i.e. a living person) at conception. Also, Conservative Judaism, traditional Catholicism and fundamental Protestantism have always prohibited the abortion of an animate fetus. At first glance the question of when life begins appears to be primarily a medical one. Until the 1960s, the American Medical Association (AMA) called abortion a criminal act that ignored the obvious medical fact that fetal life began at conception. However, post war America began to manifest a new moral identity, one that focused on individual rights over personal responsibility and on quality of life over the intrinsic value of life. The relative safety of abortion procedures, combined with this moral cool down caused the AMA to relax its opposition to abortion in 1967 and to entirely abandon it in 1970. In 1967 some states relaxed their abortion laws and, in 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion throughout the land. On January 22 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal for the entire country, subject to some limited provisions....
