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In his book Rethinking Life & Death, Peter Singer considers several traditional views on killing and concludes that they have serious problems. One of the views he considers is that we should never kill an innocent person. He applies the traditional view to abortion and rejects the consequences.

Second Old Commandment:

Never intentionally take innocent life

….We have already seen how far this can be taken, in the Roman Catholic Church's teaching that it is wrong to kill a fetus, even if that would be the only way to prevent both the pregnant woman and the fetus dying. For those who take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions, this doctrine is absurd. It is horrifying to think that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century it was probably responsible for the preventable and agonizing deaths of an unknown number of women in Roman Catholic hospitals or at the hands of devout Roman Catholic doctors and midwives….For an ethic that combines an exceptionless prohibition on taking innocent human life with the doctrine that the fetus is an innocent human being, however, there could be no other course of action.

Reference: Peter Singer, Rethinking Life & Death, p. 192.