> I'm guessing you're Christian, but if you are, you're kind of contradicting yourself. See, whenever a baby is conceived in a womb, they're alive and they have a soul. In Jeremiah, it says, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah 1:5, ". See, you think that it's wrong to kill somebody when they're sentient, but fact is, it's wrong to kill somebody with a soul, and unborn babies most definetly have a soul.

No offense, OneCoolCat, but speaking as a Christian myself and someone who tries to study the Bible seriously, I don't think this is a very good argument. For one thing, the verse doesn't say anything about Jeremiah having a soul; it just says God knew him. And it actually says he knew Jeremiah not only before he was born, but before he was even *conceived*. Does that mean that people have souls before conception? (From one standpoint it does, but preexistence of souls is not a mainstream Christian doctrine, not, from my POV, supported by Scripture, and not, I'm guessing, what you're trying to say.) If God can know the future, though, and has a mind that exists outside of time, it doesn't seem unreasonable that he would know Jeremiah completely as the person he would become before Jeremiah existed in the world, and have plans for his life before his birth or even his conception. But it doesn't really say anything about abortion.

For what it's worth, I think it's wrong to kill things that are sentient. I *also* think it's wrong to kill things that have souls. I think that the definition of having a soul, or at least the best test we have for having a soul, is sentience. That is the main reason we think humans have souls and rocks do not, and plants do not, and animals do not (maybe; that one's harder). That's what "sentient" means, after all; having feelings and self-consciousness, which, to my interpretation, is what a soul is, rather than some abstract indefinable "spirit-stuff" God shoves into the middle of a DNA double-helix. The Bible never out-and-out defines "soul" other than using "breath" as a metaphor for it (which I and probably you don't take literally, since that would mean you'd be pro-choice up to birth, when a baby begins to breathe on its own), but the implication is that a soul is that which makes us the image of God; that means that which gives us sentience, the one thing we have that God has and animals don't.

I will check out the abortion site, but I have looked over pro-life materials many times in the past (I'm a child of a pro-life family and was raised in the pro-life camp) and I have to say that in the course of my researches I've found the Bible, if you read it carefully and within context, has very little to say about abortion; most of the verses used to support the pro-life viewpoint have been violently wrenched from their contexts and interpreted at a very high level. I encourage you to check out the verses yourself and read not just the verses but the verses around them and think about what they're really trying to say. Also check out certain "problem passages" of the Bible for pro-life activists, such as Exodus 21:22-25, or Numbers 5:11-31. I'm not trying to force my opinion down your throat, but just encouraging you to take a look at the other side, if you haven't already done so. Also, check out the link: it's to one of the best sites covering this issue I've found.

Thanks for your attention, and hope to discuss this further in the future!

Ar"trying his best to avoid contradictions in his beliefs"thur