Jewish Perspectives
the acceptance of the Augustinian doctrine in Roman Catholic and much of (western) Protestant Christianities, the strict prohibition against abortion is perfectly consistent:
It must accordingly be said that when Catholics reputedly decide to "let the mother die" rather than allow an abortion, they are not at all being cruel, merely consistent with a logical concern. The mother has been presumably baptized as an infant; let her die and "go to her reward." But let the child be brought to term and baptized and saved from perdition. So sincere is this concern that theologians at the Sorbonne in the nineteenth century invented a baptismal syringe, wherewith to baptize a fetus in utero in the event of a spontaneous abortion, a miscarriage. [ftn. 10: St. Fulgentius, De Fide 27, cited by E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. I, pp. 416-17. On the use of the Syringe in baptism, see H. W. Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors (New York, 1929), p. 4.] (84)
[John T. Noonan, representing the Catholic perspective in these materials, insists that Christian opposition to abortion has nothing to do with ensoulment or concerns regarding infant baptism.]
As with the debate over ensoulment, the debate over original sin remains a debate within Christian communities. Judaism preserves the earlier Jewish and pre-Augustinian understanding of the Garden story as a story about individual sinfulness - sinfulness which can be atoned for and overcome by individuals. Judaism thereby squarely rejects the Augustinian teaching - that the soul emplaced in the fetus is already diseased with a sinful nature inherited by all human beings. Accordingly, the especially Catholic sense of urgency regarding the baptism of the fetus otherwise condemned is
...a concern that the Jewish community cannot share. Having no such concept of original sin, we recite daily in our prayers something that comes directly from the Talmud: "My God, the soul with which thou hast endowed me is pure." We inherit a pure soul, which becomes contaminated only by our own misdeeds. By that token, early abortion would send a fetus to heaven in a state of pristine purity! (84)