When Is Abortion Permitted?

ll jurists are agreed that if the pregnant woman suffers a medical condition incompatible with pregnancy and the medical opinion is that continuation of pregnancy poses a real threat on her, then abortion is permissible. Jurisprudence considers that the mother is the root and the fetus is the offshoot, and if their welfares are irreconcilable then the fetus has to be sacrificed in order to save the mother. These medical indications have become quite rare in modern medical practice. Some old jurists were even more rigorous and sould not approve of any excuse for aborting a fetus of one hundred and twenty days of gestational age or more. When faced with the argument that abortion then might be necessary to save the mother's life, they answer back that it is against he jurisprudence to save one individual by killing another. To them the life of the existing fetus is a palpable reality, whereas the alleged feared death of the mother if not aborted is merely an expectation (Ibn-Abdeen of the Hanafi school quoted in Encyclopaedia of Jurisprudence, Kuwait, Part 2/57). Such a restrictive argument has not been adopted by the other old or contemporary scholars, for if the mother died her fetus would also die in any way because of her death.