Latter-day Saint leaders, even when they believed the spirit entered the body at “quickening,” did not believe abortion prior to such was permissible:
During the founding
years of Mormonism, U.S. states largely followed English common law permitting
abortion prior to quickening (the mother’s experience of fetal movement within
her womb), while criminal sanctions could be imposed for abortions post-quickening
(24). This gradualist approach was radically altered by the latter part of the
19th century. The profession professionalization of medicine, exemplified by
the establishment of the American Medical Association, aimed to ensure safer
medical procedures for childbirth in the context of high neonatal and maternal
mortality. The professionalizing of medicine and medicalization of pregnancy
coincided with various cultural, philosophical, and religious paternalistic
controls over women’s reproductive lives (Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body:
A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction [Boston: Beacon Press, 2001]). Advancing
medical knowledge about fetal development also increased religious interest in
the moral status of unborn human life, as illustrated by a radical departure
from seventeen centuries of Roman Catholic teaching in an 1869 declaration of
Pope Pius IX that ensoulment occurred at conception, meaning that any direct
abortion was the moral equivalent of homicide (Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Abortion:
Roman Catholic Perspectives,” in Bioethics, 4th ed., vol. 1, ed. Bruce
Jennings [New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014], 37-41). By the end o the 19th
century, the common-law approach to abortion had been supplanted by restrictive
laws on abortion in all U.S. states, with provisions for legal pregnancy
termination limited primarily to a moral threat to the mother from continuing
the pregnancy.
Early LDS teaching on
abortion reflected this prohibitionist approach. 19th-century leaders portrayed
abortion as a form of “murder” and a sin of “shedding innocent blood” for which
there was no forgiveness. In contrast to Catholicism, LDS condemnation of
abortion was formulated in the absence of definitive teaching on the timing of
the union of the enlivening spirit with the developing physical body . . . (Courtney
S. Campbell, Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics [New York: Oxford
University Press, 2021], 194-95, emphasis added)
The Latter-day Saint belief in “Free
Agency” does not mean one can support Pro-Choice/intrinsically evil movements/procedures
Given the continual ecclesiastical
criticism of legalized elective abortion in the wake of the Roe decision
, the LDS Church issued a rather remarkable statement in the context of a 1991
Utah legislative proposal to narrow the range of legally permissible abortion.
While condemning “the devastating practice of abortion for personal or social
convenience,” the statement maintained the church “as an institution has not
favored or opposed specific legislative proposals or public demonstrations
concerning abortion.” LDS members were encouraged to “let their voices be heard
in appropriate and legal ways that will evidence their belief in the
sacredness of life” (Lester E. Bush, Jr., Health and Medicine Among
the Latter-day Saints: Science, Sense, and Scripture [New York: Crossroad,
1993], 165). (Ibid., 200, emphasis added)
