abortion

• common after taboo on childbirth among unmarried

68:6.9Many races learned the tech­nique of abor­tion, and this prac­tice be­came very com­mon af­ter the es­tab­lish­ment of the taboo on child­birth among the un­mar­ried. It was long the cus­tom for a maiden to kill her off­spring, but among more civ­i­lized groups these il­le­git­i­mate chil­dren be­came the wards of the girl’s mother. Many prim­i­tive clans were vir­tu­ally ex­ter­mi­nated by the prac­tice of both abor­tion and in­fan­ti­cide. But re­gard­less of the dic­tates of the mores, very few chil­dren were ever de­stroyed af­ter hav­ing once been suck­led—ma­ter­nal af­fec­tion is too strong.

• child in existence 9 months before it experiences birth

103:2.1Re­li­gion is func­tional in the hu­man mind and has been re­al­ized in ex­pe­ri­ence prior to its ap­pear­ance in hu­man con­scious­ness. A child has been in ex­is­tence about nine months be­fore it ex­pe­ri­ences birth. But the “birth” of re­li­gion is not sud­den; it is rather a grad­ual emer­gence. Nev­er­the­less, sooner or later there is a “birth day.” You do not en­ter the king­dom of heaven un­less you have been “born again”—born of the Spirit. Many spir­i­tual births are ac­com­pa­nied by much an­guish of spirit and marked psy­cho­log­i­cal per­tur­ba­tions, as many phys­i­cal births are char­ac­ter­ized by a “stormy la­bor” and other ab­nor­mal­i­ties of “de­liv­ery.” Other spir­i­tual births are a nat­u­ral and nor­mal growth of the rec­og­ni­tion of su­preme val­ues with an en­hance­ment of spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, al­beit no re­li­gious de­vel­op­ment oc­curs with­out con­scious ef­fort and pos­i­tive and in­di­vid­ual de­ter­mi­na­tions. Re­li­gion is never a pas­sive ex­pe­ri­ence, a neg­a­tive at­ti­tude. What is termed the “birth of re­li­gion” is not di­rectly as­so­ci­ated with so-called con­ver­sion ex­pe­ri­ences which usu­ally char­ac­ter­ize re­li­gious episodes oc­cur­ring later in life as a re­sult of men­tal con­flict, emo­tional re­pres­sion, and tem­per­a­men­tal up­heavals.

• human embryo is transient stage of human life

112:5.4Hu­man be­ings pos­sess iden­tity only in the ma­te­rial sense. Such qual­i­ties of the self are ex­pressed by the ma­te­rial mind as it func­tions in the en­ergy sys­tem of the in­tel­lect. When it is said that man has iden­tity, it is rec­og­nized that he is in pos­ses­sion of a mind cir­cuit which has been placed in sub­or­di­na­tion to the acts and choos­ing of the will of the hu­man per­son­al­ity. But this is a ma­te­rial and purely tem­po­rary man­i­fes­ta­tion, just as the hu­man em­bryo is a tran­sient par­a­sitic stage of hu­man life. Hu­man be­ings, from a cos­mic per­spec­tive, are born, live, and die in a rel­a­tive in­stant of time; they are not en­dur­ing. But mor­tal per­son­al­ity, through its own choos­ing, pos­sesses the power of trans­fer­ring its seat of iden­tity from the pass­ing ma­te­rial-in­tel­lect sys­tem to the higher mor­ontia-soul sys­tem which, in as­so­ci­a­tion with the Thought Ad­juster, is cre­ated as a new ve­hi­cle for per­son­al­ity man­i­fes­ta­tion.