The second of those articles is grossly misinformed. Implantation is not simply the start of nourishment: it very litterally triggers major chemical changes that otherwise would not happen. Indeed, many fertilized eggs naturally do not implant: if god designed reproductive system, and the death of a fertilized egg is terrible, why design it so that implantation naturally fails at a high rate (by some measures more than half the time)- the egg failing to implant, and hence never growing into a fetus?
Further, it misses the point of the twinning objection, perhaps merely to mislead people.
This objection is not directly in favor of why it is okay to kill these cells, but rather knocks down the concept of a fertilized egg being sacred because it has “a” soul.
Clearly, if it can develop into two, or twenty, or an infinate number of babies, it cannot have, in a simple sense, “a” soul. So if it is wrong to kill it, the reason must lie elsewhere.
This is also interesting:
—A number of ancient societies opposed abortion,[ii] but the ancient Hebrew society had the clearest reasons for doing so because of its foundations in the Scriptures.—
This passage is interesting for the reason that it does a very good job at concealing a very problematic fact: the idea that Hebrews were opposed to abortion is nothing more than supposition based on their reading of Scripture and assumptions as to what unmentioned conduct is verboten. We have no historical data on the abortion practices of Hebrews at all.
The passage is also significant in that it references other societies opposed to abortion, without delving in. Fact was, all of these instances involved either abortions post-quickening (as arbitrary as we know now that line to be) or, if pre-quickening, were considered wrong not because of murder, but because women were preventing their husbands from having children.
The major unspoken problem in all these cases is that all ancient peoples knew was that, sometime after sex (visible signs not showing up for at soonest a few weeks), a woman’s body started to change, and eventually a baby grows in her belly. At some point later, it began to move.
Ideas like “the moment of conception” had no meaning to people back then, most of whom thought simply that a man’s seed grew inside a woman like a seed grows in soil (like with plants, there is no special “moment”).
So the claim that the “moment of conception” was always important is nonsense. The problem here is that we supposedly have an all-knowing god with a strong moral imperative to inform his charges that causing a womb to be evacuated anytime after conception (but before quickening) was akin to murder. Because unless they were told, people couldn’t, and didn’t know that! But, despite MILLENIA of supposed communication with god, no one was EVER told about this supposed great evil, this holocaust.
So the problem is that “thou shalt not kill” was NOT enough to let ancient peoples know that all abortion was wrong. They didn’t know that it was killing at all, as long as it happened prior to quickening. And, for some reason, God only started to counsel people about “the moment of conception” AFTER science discovered egg sperm and the rest of it.