te can prohibit abortion in all cases except those in which it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
Despite these nationwide provisions, there remains a great deal of variability in abortion laws from state to state. It is in the state legislatures, and sometimes in the courts, that the battles over abortion are currently being fought. With this bi.t of legal background in mind, let us now turn our attention to the combatants themselves.
On the right, we have the "Right to life" faction which holds what we will call the conservative view of abortion. There are two main branches of the conservative view: the theological and the secular. The most popular version of the conservative view currently seems to be the theological one, so we will address it first.
The theological argument rests on the premises that God exists, that human beings have souls, and that human beings acquire these souls at the moment of conception. From these premises, the obvious conclusions are that a fertilized ovum is a human being with a soul and, since it is wrong to kill human beings (at least innocent ones), it is wrong to kill a fertilized OVUM. Therefore, abortion is wrong at any stage of pregnancy, quod erat demonstrandum. This is clearly the Roman Catholic position on abortion as it is propounded by Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences in New York. The only possible exception to the church's rule against abortion that Callahan admits is, if the mother will surely die, it is permissible to take an action that will save her life but which will have the regrettable byproduct of taking the innocent life of the fetus. Thus, the main intention of the action would be self-defense rather than murder. This sophistry is questionable, as we will see when we examine this exception more carefully later.
Many Protestants, however, take a somewhat milder view...