n I was made in the secret place." Psalm 139 "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." Jeremiah 1:5 The quotes from the Bible say that God was responsible for creating the person within the foetus (the soul) when it was still forming in the womb and that God already knew what the foetus would be like in every way before it was seen by anyone else. The Pro - Life group uses this to prove that the foetus is a person with a soul, to back up their claims that the unborn should have human rights. The only time that Catholics accept (but not necessarily agree) abortion, is if the life of the mother is in great danger, she is likely to die if the pregnancy continues. They do not however support abortion when the pregnancy is a result of a rape attack. "Abortion should not be permitted for rape because it is wrong to punish a child for the sin of the father." Pro Life Campaign The reason they give states that the child is the innocent result of a vicious attack and it should be killed because it came into the world because its father was evil enough to commit the attack. However this Roman Catholic belief has not always been consistent. It wasnt until the seventeenth century, that ensoulment (the gaining of the soul) was believed to happen at the moment of conception, that Catholics have been taught that abortion is always wrong. This was taught in the oldest Christian document known, written in 70CE, it read: "You shall not kill by abortion the fruit of the womb and you shall not murder the infant already born." What it says, is simply that abortion is as wrong as the killing of a child (infanticide). But St. Augustine (1st century) had declared that the soul was planted in the foetus, by God, on day 46. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) preached that the souls of humans were planted, by God, at day 90 for girls and day 40 for boys. Therefore Catholics had believed that, as long as abortion was carried out before the soul was present in the f...
