is abortion sin or murder?

[Terry]

Last night i had a serious conversation with my husband about coverting to orthodoxy, and we started talking about some of the rules, and he said, you do know dont you that in the orthodox religion they dont consider abortion murder, just a sin? and i told him, no thats no true, you can only have an abortion if you've been raped, incest, or giving birth will cause harm to the mother, other than that it is murder.

if there are any priests, deacons, anybody leaders of the church that can answer this question for him, it would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance,

terry

[尼古拉前执事]

Dear Terry,

With today's techology, I cannot think of a situation where a pregnancy would ever kill the mother, especially when babies are being born via c-section as early as after 4 months of gestation and tubal preganancies can now often, with surgery, have the baby implanted in the uterus, so I personally could never excuse abortion.

Yes abortion is a sin. It is the sin of murder. To me, it is not any less murder based how who the biological father is either.

BTW you might want to change the 2 options in your poll I was not clear what each answer meant.

[GOCPriestMark]

Abortion is murder according to the 2nd and 8th Canons of St. Basil the Great which is also confirmed by the 91st canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. St. Basil though, does not prescribe lifetime excommunication, as for murder, but "to admit them, [both the woman and the abortionist], at the end of the moderate period of ten years, without specifying a definite time, but adjusting the cure to the manner of penitence".

It doesn't matter how the life in the womb came to be there, removing that life is murder.