Abortion and the Bible

I'm a cisgendered man, I've never had an abortion, nor will I ever. But I am a Christian and have studied the Bible and ancient Palestinian culture.

In Genesis 38:24, Judah finds out his daughter-in-law is pregnant from being a prostitute, and orders her killed immediately, with no thought of waiting for the birth of the "innocent baby".

Exodus 21:22-25 outlines the penalty for making a woman have a miscarriage, and the only punishment is for whatever damage was done to the woman.

Numbers 5 has instructions to the priests on how to induce a miscarriage in an adulterous wife, the only passage in the Bible clearly about abortion.

Numerous passages in the Bible have God ordering the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child of a nation, which would certainly include killing pregnant women.

Despite the fact that Jews believed in the first century (and still do to this day) that a fetus does not have a soul until it draws its first breath of air, and therefore abortion (which was certainly around in the first century, including what we call "late-term" abortion") is not murder, Jesus never bothered to correct this doctrine, even though he actually took time in the Sermon on the Mount to say that calling someone a fool was the equivalent of murder.

Anti-abortion Christians love to quote Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." They claim that the fact God knew Jeremiah before birth proves that life begins at conception, but God is omniscient; he knew Jeremiah, you, and me all before he even created the world, as Ephesians 1:4 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:" shows. Does this mean life begins "before the foundation of the world"? That would be nonsense. Show me a place in the Bible where God "knows" a fetus that is miscarried, stillborn, or aborted, and I'll buy that logic, but *spoiler alert* you won't find that in the Bible.

All that said, I actually want to see abortion rates go down, because I don't believe abortion is healthy for the pregnant woman, and I see it as a sign of society in decline when abortion rates are high. But make abortion illegal, and women just get illegal abortions. Take away the causes of abortion, and abortion goes away on its own. As a society, we need to fight poverty, have solid sex education in all schools, supply the public with cheap or free contraception, give everyone affordable medical care (especially during pregnancy!), have cheap child care and early childhood education, and take rape more seriously as a crime. THOSE are the things that will stop abortion, so when will so-called "pro-life" activists petition the government for those things?