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<Home> <Bioethics> <Obstetrics and Gynaecology> <Conclusion>
ConclusionIn Islamic jurisprudence there is a rule called 'Sadel-al-Zara'ea" which means the anticipation of evil by closing the doors leading to it. A long chain leading to evil is better broken at its first link. A basic criterion of "ijtihad", that is the reasoning process to deduce a religious ruling in situations not specifically mentioned in the Quran or Hadith, is a full knowledge of social circumstances and the near and far reaching implications of the question under consideration. Perhaps the question of abortion is not a difficult case since the religious evidence against it is overwhelming. However, for the sake of the minority of contemporary scholars who permitted abortion before ensoulment or before aquiring human form, this lengthy display of the various dimensions of the abortion issue is quite worthwhile. I
would like to report a personal experience that is not without significance
to the subject. That was when I was once asked to mend the rift
between a couple and their eighteen year old son. They were a Muslim
family and as I reminded the young man with the Islamic injunctions on
the Muslim towards his parents, the young man retorted "I owe them
nothing doctor and it was by a stroke of luck that I escaped murder at
their hands. When they married they decided to have two kids only,
and they aborted the five others who were conceived after my sister and
myself. Had I not been the second, and if I happened to be number
three or four or five or six or seven, they would have killed me as they
did the others"! |