Recently, Trump decided to try to appeal to pro-life voters by claiming there should be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. He then recanted his statement, explaining that only doctors who perform the procedure should be punished and that women were someone victims of abortion as well.

Trump’s rash statements on punishing women (and/or doctors, unless he recants that too) sound oddly like something from a grim medieval story, but are serious threats when you consider the fact that a mass shooting occurred in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Center less than a year ago.

Regardless, there’s a surprising amount of history to the abortion controversy that most of us don’t know about. It’s not uncommon for many people to claim that they are pro-life because they that life begins at conception, so therefore abortion is the killing of an unborn baby. However, the idea of immaculate conception didn’t come into play in the Catholic church until 1854 when it was coined by Pope Pius IX. Until then, abortion prior to a certain day into a pregnancy (for example, typically before the 40th day), was not considered murder because of the concept of delayed hominization. Delayed hominization was preached by people such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that a soul cannot live in an unformed body, and so, therefore, abortion before a certain point in time in which the fetus is deemed “formed” and therefore “has a soul”, was not considered to be immoral.

I’m not interested in telling any pro-life person that they are “wrong.” A major issue with the abortion controversy is that while we know that when a person’s

heart stops and they aren’t breathing, they’ve died, and therefore their life has ended. However, the concept of when life truly “begins” is much more elusive and harder to adequately define. Whether you find abortion immoral or not, none of us can deny the role that religion has played into helping shape the abortion controversy into what it is today, and our ideas of what it means to be "pro-life" or "pro-choice".