Okay, lets see if I can dumb this down some more...
In womb- alive in the sense that it has a soul but has not started life outside the womb. It doesn't have a proper body yet, it still developing... (depending on the stage of pregnancy).
I wasn't giving my personally opinion, this is what the scholars mention.
Another example, in Islam, when someone is murdered, the persons family has the option of accepting blood money from the murderer, or having him sentenced to death.
If they it is an unborn baby that was killed, the blood money t be paid is
less than the blood money to be paid on a person who already born, because there is no guarantee that the baby was going to be alive, it was not yet fully developed.
Just because something has a soul, doesn't mean it is alive in the way we understand it. Even dead people have a soul when they are in their grave.. doesn't mean they are alive.
The soul is blown in very early on in the pregnancy, when the babies body is still undeveloped.
So who do you save, living breathing human being walking n two legs, or an undeveloped lump of tissue that might not even be born alive in the first place?
This illustrates the principle I am talking about:
After the third stage, and after four months have passed, it is not permissible to abort the pregnancy unless a group of trustworthy medical specialists decide that keeping the foetus in his mother’s womb will cause her death, and that should only be done after all means of keeping the foetus alive have been exhausted. A concession is made allowing abortion in this case so as to ward off the greater of two evils and to serve the greater of two interests.
http://www.islam-qa.com/index.php?ref=42321&ln=eng
I know this is referring to abortion, but the principle is there.
OK. gotcha. And so taking this back to the origin of the thread. What should a good Muslim in the USA do. In 2008 we will have an election.
There will be candidate A who will promise to get the troops out of Iraq someday, but who knows when. It will take at least a year to pullout. During that time, there could be another 100,000 deaths. Probably 10,000-`15,000 as a result of the USA (this includes probably 1,000-2,000 USA soldiers), and the rest as a result of sectarian violence. Whether that sectarian violence increases or decreases after the USA leaves I'll not try to guess, but you should factor in your own opinion.
The other, candidate B also says that we will get out of Iraq, once it is able to maintain the peace for itself, which you think will actually just exacerbate the problem. This probably means 4 more years of USA involved in the affairs of Iraq. Maybe even more deaths, instead of 100,000 more like 150,000 a year.
However there is another difference between candidate A and candidate B:
Candidate A favors unrestricted access to abortion for women at all phases of her pregnancy and without any reason to cite medical need. Simply put, it is her body and her right to choose. The life of the unborn child is inconsequential. With candidate A, expect 1.2 million unborn children to die from abortion in the year to come. Possibly more, for some recently determined illegal abortions would be made legal again. So we return to 1.6 milllion babies killed in a year.
Candidate B favors babies having a chance at life. Now, not all babies will make it to term and there would still be abortions for medical necessity; no mother's life would be put in danger. But if the laws that one once are enacted then the number of deaths would be more like 120,000 a year. (And btw that is a very high number compared to reality.)
So you have Candidate A -- anti-war, pro-Abortion
100,000 Iraqi deaths
1,000 USA solider deaths
1,200,000 unborn children aborted (less than 10% for medical reasons) (yearly)
1,301,000 Total deaths worldwide in one year.
And a grand total of 4,901,000 deaths over the next four years for which elected.
And you have Candidate B -- pro-babies, pro-war
150,000 Iraqi deaths (annually)
2,000 USA soldier deaths (annually)
120,000 unborn children aborted for medical necessity (annually)
272,000 Total deaths worldwide in one year.
And a grand total of 1,088,000 deaths over the next four years for which elected.
And before anyone starts to argue speculation. Of course it is. It all is. We don't know that any of these babies would have lived. We don't know even know that that many women would get pregnant. Of course we don't. But we don't know that any more people will die in Iraq either. But we know that this is the way things have been going in the past, and unless things change radically in the world, we can expect more deaths in Iraq, more women pregnant, and more babies killed by abotions that would otherwise have lived to be healthy and born to healthy mothers.