How did evangelical Christianists come to embrace the idea that human life begins at conception? Whence did this dogma originate? According to Fred Clark at Slacktivist website,
http://www.patheos.com/...
it was around the time that McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal, circa 1979. Before then, the accepted Evangelical view was far less rigid, and more humane.
Back in 1979, writing in Billy Graham's magazine Christianity Today, a conservative professor from Dallas Theological Seminary wrote:
"God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul."
Fred Clark adds:
Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.
Selective, highly interpretive readings from the Bible, and inflexible adherence to these quite recent interpretations is characteristic of contemporary Evangelicalism in the USA. Whatever the source might be, for the Christianist war on abortion, it does not come from the Bible. There is nothing particularly Biblical about the fear and loathing of abortion that seems to obsess these neo-conservative people.
Would it be safe to say that women in general would naturally, by choice, absent legal restriction, avoid aborting a fetus, if it were practicable to do so? I think it would, but there are innumerable reasons and circumstances why women sometimes prefer to abort a fetus, rather than to bear a child. This should be obvious to anyone who has any broad experience in the various circumstances that surround the birth of any child, and that can from time to time, make birth inadvisable.There is nothing inherently immoral about abortion, nor is there anything new, or even unusual about it. Women have been aborting fetuses for millenia, in all cultures all over the world, for all kinds of good reasons.
A fetus is not a person, and there is nothing in the Bible that says it is a person. There are no clear points in time to distinguish a fertilized egg from a fetus and a fetus from a person. But by common agreement, and common sense, most of humanity recognizes birth as the most appropriate point at which to recognize and to legally declare personhood.
Of course there's nothing absolute about this convention, because development in nature is smoothly continuous; it isn't divided into the periods and definitions by which we organize it to serve our own needs. But it is a very practical convention, a very humane and compassionate convention, a time-honored convention, to say that personhood begins at birth. It simply makes a lot of sense, on many different levels.
Strict Catholics (followers of that Ratzinger) and Evangelical Christianists who insist otherwise are distinctly a minority of human beings. A very noisy and self-righteous minority, whose primary objective is to force their own particular theology down everyone else's throat. I doubt they care much about fetuses per se, or are filled with compassion for the welfare of zygotes. Rather their unacknowledged intention is to limit the choices available to women in general.