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The New Testament says little or nothing of real importance on the subject. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) says stuff along the lines of 'if someone beats a woman so that she miscarries, he must pay her family xyz amount of money/cattle'. Most or all branches of Judaism okay abortion when it is a free (but nonetheless tragic) choice of the woman.
The 'traditional Christian' view is to ignore all the indirect things said about e.g. miscarriages as a result of violence. These folks then claim that abortion is evidently murder, and thus obviously prohibited under the Fifth Commandment. It is, of course, a selective reading and problematic in the face of the evidence of the whole of the Bible.
So the real theological question is where the basis is for this selective and recalcitrant application of the Bible. And the best guess where to look is in the usual place extra-Biblical beliefs tend to come from- the religion(s) of the society in question preceding its Christianization.
It's somewhat difficult to argue what ancient beliefs abortion touches upon. It's only relatively recently (maybe 150-200 years) that it has been something available to the masses as a medical procedure, so the beliefs involved must be tangential but incredibly important.
The people who harbor the anti-abortion dogma most deeply tend, if I have read widely and deeply enough, not to be overwhelmingly of one or the other gender or cluster ethnicly. They partition somewhat by religion and somewhat by denomination. They tend to be traditional if not reactionary in many ways and generally selfidentify as religious rather than by ethnic group. And most of them come from agricultural communities, often at some remove- as townspeople, or second generation from the farm. A lot of them claim to be converts of a sort to anti-abortionism, saying their motivation is disgust at some apparent betrayal of social norms and ethics, or some kind of aesthetic revulsion. I don't feel certain of this, but it seems to me that they tend to come from the sort of backgrounds that people who claim life-long anti-abortion views do. IOW, maybe they're really much the same type of people after all.
Personally, I think the consistent but broad connection to agriculture and religion points to where the view originates. Agricultural societies tend to develop curious, religiously colored, practices and beliefs around the crop cycle and the fertility cycles of the crop plants. These get extended and mingled with what is observed and guessed of animal and human life and fertility cycles. The associated religious practices tend to get lumped together in cultural anthropology and theology as 'fertility cultism'. They tend to have specialized priests and ceremonies and rites. (Our mainstream culture's remnants of it are mostly taken from Celtic Britain- Halloween/Samhain, Thanksgiving, and Easter/Ostar's Day.)
All societies eventually develop some unified conception of fertility, but pre-scientific strongly agricultural societies tend to transfer notions from plant fertility and seed development onto human beings. Soon there is this comparison of woman as the equivalent of a fruit-bearing plant and the pregnancy as the fruit. The problem is the emphasis and value placed on the fruit compared to its provider. The corollary in the abortion debate is a view of the relative importance of the fetus and merely coincidental existance of the mother. For these people so invested abortion is a sacrilege- it clashes with their belief in pregnancy/fertility as an esoteric state in which the meaning of life is fulfilled and the fetus is mediator of the sacred.
A second strand of 'religious' tradition of relevance is the one of Nature worship, in which "unnatural" things, violations of "natural" processes, are things the Gods (of Nature) find sacrilegious. For humans that means all sexuality/conduct/offspring must be normal among conventional human beings and have counterparts in undiseased Nature, and to fend off angering of the Gods all things incompatible with the way They expect it to be are to be regarded as perversions, diseased, and requiring destruction (otherwise the Nature Gods will punish all men for not complying with the Order so ostensibly established and to be obeyed). And that is why followers of the Old Religions believe it is morally right and pragmatically necessary to kill homosexuals, pedophiles, sodomites, adulterers, malformed or unusual infants, disfigured people of certain kinds, the mentally ill, the rabies-infected, witches, or those who act too much like certain kinds of animals, one member of pairs of twins, those with 'the Evil Eye', and so forth. Abortion and abortionists clearly violate the Order of Nature, which is why preventing the former and killing the latter is moral in the extremists' way of misconstruing the world. (That is also why killing, homophobia, and anti-choice seem to run together.) These beliefs and action upon them is emphatically present in Germanic and Celtic culture/religion and well documented. Calvin might be counted as the last high priest of the thing, jamming so much of it into his Christianity it's stunning. (Compare his Five Points to the Angles' and Saxons' theology of Odin and Tyr for some serious amusement.)
Agricultural fertility cultism is a part of the heritage of most ethnic groups in this country- Latinos, Europeans, Africans, Asians. The Natural Order belief system comes to us mostly from the northern half of Europe- and perhaps to some small degree northern Asia (Korea, Japan).
Anyway, that's the best argument I can muster from a limited amount of experiences dealing with anti-choicers. If it's wrong, help me find correct ones.
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