Abortion Abortion Few debates in our society generate as much heat and as little light as the debate about abortion. Harmlessness is seen as a cardinal virtue. Buddhism takes this farther than most religious traditions by extending it to animal life. Certainly one can find extreme situations when the ethical principle must be bent in practice, such as the eradication of malarial mosquitoes, but the tradition is cautious about any such concessions to utilitarianism.
Abortion is undeniably the taking of life.
The debate centers on the issue as to whether the life in question can be considered human. Buddhism like most religions, says most emphatically that it is. The Buddhist teaching has it that consciousness first arises at the moment of conception, and that consciousness, shaped by karmic influences from past lives, is a critical, and indeed formative, component of the new organism from that moment on. The opposite view is only supportable if one reduces human existence to the strictly mechanical, denying any spiritual dimension to the human experience. If a human life is nothing beyond strictly biological processes, then it has no intrinsic worth above and beyond those processes.