Академия Корана:Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān/Abortion
| Sachedina, Abdulaziz, "Abortion" in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: J. D. McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC. |
The premature expulsion of a fetus. Classical Muslim jurists applied a number of terms to abortion, including ijhāḍ, isqāṭ, ṭarḥ, ilqāʾ and imlāṣ. The Qurʾān makes no reference to abortion as the term is commonly understood, although it upholds the sanctity of human life in general (e.g. q 5:32) and forbids the killing of children (q 17:31) and female infants (q 81:8-9) in particular (see children; infanticide; murder). The restrictive view of abortion commonly held by jurists was based on the general qurʾānic interdiction of unlawfully taking human life.
The qurʾānic descriptions of the development of the human embryo (see biology as the creation and stages of life) led scholars to differentiate between an initial soulless and unformed biological entity and the human being into which it developed: «We created man from an extraction of clay (q.v.), then we set him as a drop (nuṭfa) [of sperm] in a safe lodging. Then we created from the drop a clot of blood (ʿalaqa, see blood and blood clot); then we created from the clot a small piece of tissue (muḍgha), subsequently creating from the tissue bones and covering the bones in flesh; and then we produced it as another creature» (q 23:12-14). With the exception of the reference to creation from "an extraction of clay, " which was believed to apply only to the special case of the first man, Adam, this passage was held to represent the normal development of the human fetus. Some scholars interpreted «and then we produced it as another creature» as indicating that the infant was given a soul some time after conception (Qurṭubī, Jāmiʿ, xii, 5-14; Rāzī, Tafsīr, xxiii, 84-7; Ṭabarsī, Majmaʿ, vii, 101; Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Mīzān, xv, 20-4). Well-known ḥadīth, recorded in both Sunnī and Shīʿī collections, provided further justification for this view. Some of these set the duration of the first three stages of the fetus, namely drop, clot and tissue, at forty days each. After the completion of this cycle, God dispatched an angel to breathe the soul (rūḥ) into the fetus at which point its fate on earth and in the hereafter was ordained (Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, K. al-Qadar; Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, K. al-Qadar; al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī, Wasāʾil, K. al-Diyāt, no. 35652).
For this reason, all Muslim jurists forbade abortion after the fetus had been in the womb for 120 days, although the legal schools and individual scholars differed over the permissibility of abortion before this point (Qurṭubī, Jāmiʿ, xii, 8; Nawawī, Sharḥ, xvi, 191). The majority of the members of the Mālikī law school prohibited abortion at any time on the basis that once conception took place the fetus was destined for animation. Some individual Mālikīs and the majority of the adherents of the other legal schools did allow abortions, but they disagreed over whether the period of permissibility extended forty, eighty or 120 days after conception. These thresholds determined whether a person who caused a woman to miscarry or a woman who caused herself to abort, either deliberately or through negligence, was liable for the full compensation stipulated for the killing of a human being (diya kāmila, see blood money) or a lesser penalty. In practice, the status of the expelled fetus was determined by examining its apparent state of development, i.e. whether it was «formed» or "unformed, " a distinction having its roots in the other qurʾānic account of fetal development (q 22:5).
The justification for an abortion most commonly cited in the classical legal literature was the threat posed to a nursing infant by the cessation of the flow of its mother’s milk due to another pregnancy. In the case of a pregnancy which threatened the mother’s life, a majority of jurists gave priority to preserving the life of the fetus, if it was believed that it had already acquired a soul (Ibn ʿĀbidīn, Ḥāshiya, i, 602; vi, 591; al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, ii, 53; Ibn Rajab, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm, 46). More recently, some thinkers have come to advocate saving the mother’s life in such cases. Rape and incest have also been recognized as suitable justifications for abortion.
See also
Bibliography
- Primary
- Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ
- al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, 4 vols., Cairo 1312/1894
- al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī, Wasāʾil al-Shīʿa, ed. Muḥammad al-Rāzī, 20 vols., Beirut 1389/1969
- Ibn ʿĀbidīn, Ḥāshiya
- Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, ed. Ṭ.M. al-Zaynī et al., 10 vols., Cairo 1968-70
- Ibn Rajab, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥikam, Cairo 1970
- Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ
- Nawawī, Sharḥ
- Qurṭubī, Jāmiʿ
- Rāzī, Tafsīr
- Ṭabarsī, Majmaʿ
- Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Mīzān
- Secondary
- M.A. Anees, Islam and biological futures, London 1989, 164-87
- M.ʿA. al-Barr, Khalq al-insān bayna l-ṭibb wa-l-Qurʾān, Jeddah 199510
- A.F.M. Ebrahim, Abortion, birth control and surrogate parenting. An Islamic perspective, Indianapolis 1991
- M.S. Makdur, Sterilization and abortion from the point of view of Islam, in I.R. Nazer et al. (eds.), Islam and family planning, 2 vols., Beirut 1972, ii, 263-85 (extensive references)
- B.F. Musallam, Sex and society in Islam. Birth control before the nineteenth century, Cambridge 1983, 53-9