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Hinduism Is Prolife on Abortion
Prolife Means Pro Every Life
Hinduism Is Prolife on Abortion



According to Nine Beliefs of Hinduism, a tract published by the Himalayan Academy of San Francisco: “Hindus believe that all life is sacred, to be loved and revered, and therefore practice ahimsa, or nonviolence.” All life is sacred because all creatures are manifestations of the Supreme Being.

The Hindu practice of nonviolence is connected to a belief in reincarnation: the repeated re-embodiment of souls in different species of life. The karma generated in one’s present life determines whether one enjoys a higher or suffers a lower existence in the next reincarnation. Dr. T. K. Venkateswaran, a Hindu leader in the Parliament of the World’s Religions, writes that karma is “the moral and physical law of cause and effect by which each individual creates one’s own future destiny.” Hinduism teaches that there are 8,400,000 species of life, beginning with the microbes, rising through the fish, plants, insects, reptiles, birds, and animals to the humans and gods. According to their desires, living entities perpetually take birth in these species. These transmigrations are directed by the mind propelling the soul to newer and newer bodies. As Dr. Venkateswaran notes, “All souls are evolving and progressing towards union with God….The individual soul reincarnates, evolving through many births and deaths, until all the karmic results, good and bad, are resolved.” (2)



In modern times, India’s greatest apostle of nonviolence, Mohandas Gandhi, has written: “It seems to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.” (5) The international periodical Hinduism Today acknowledges: “Across the board, Hindu religious leaders perceive abortion at any stage of fetal development as killing (some say murder)…and as an act that has serious karmic repercussions.” For example, Swami Kamalatmananda of the Ramakrishna Monastery in Madras, India, has said: “No human being has the right to destroy the fetus. If having a baby is economically and socially problematic, one can very well take precautions to avoid such unwanted birth rather than killing the baby. Precaution is better than destruction.” (6)

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is India’s greatest scholar, philosopher, cultural ambassador, author, and spiritual leader. His teachings on the subject of abortion are very clear:


Elsewhere Srila Prabhupada has written:

You are killing innocent cows and other animals–nature will take revenge. Just wait. As soon as the time is right, nature will gather all these rascals and slaughter them. Finished. They’ll fight among themselves. It is going on. Why? This is nature’s law. Tit for tat. You have killed. Now you kill yourselves.

They are sending animals to the slaughterhouse, and now they’ll create their own slaughterhouse….This is nature’s law. It’s not necessary that you be sent to the ordinary slaughterhouse. You’ll make a slaughterhouse at home. You’ll kill your own child–abortion. This is nature’s law.




At present, people generally unite only for sensual pleasure, and children are often considered a regrettable accident….Abortion being accepted as standard practice, people conveniently forget that life begins at conception, by using such euphemisms as “tissue” when referring to the fetus. Although subconsciously they know that they are killing the baby in the womb, they prefer to say they are “terminating the pregnancy,” or “removing the tissue” so they may feel free of the guilt for murder, thus deluding themselves psychologically…they cannot escape the punishment for murder given by the laws of karma, and …in their next lives they will have to suffer the misery of repeatedly being aborted. (9)


It is important to note here that the karmic repercussions of abortion, grave though they may be, are not “punishments” in the sense of being the personal vengeance of a wrathful, judgmental God. They are simply the consequences of violating a natural law–whether that law is violated out of ignorance, fear, or whatever other possible motive. These spiritual leaders are not intending to act as agents of such a God, but to help people become more mindful and compassionate in their behavior, and to promote the evolution of all the souls that may be harmed through an abortion–the child’s, the mother’s, the father’s, the abortion provider’s.

Prolife Means Pro Every Life

One need not be a Hindu or even share the Hindu belief in reincarnation to conclude that the practice of ahimsa towards all is the only way to stop the cycle of killing that surrounds abortion. As Dr. Venkateswaran comments: “No particular religion, including Hinduism, teaches the only, exclusive way to God and salvation. All authentic, genuine paths and traditions lead to the One God and are facets of love and light.” (10) The non-Hindu Marjorie Spiegel, author of The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, writes: “All oppression and violence is intimately and ultimately linked, and to think that we can end prejudice and violence to one group without ending prejudice and violence to another is utter folly.” (11)




Insisting that human life begins at conception, the anti-abortion movement seeks to shock us into the awareness that abortion means killing–killing a human being rather than an animal, a bird, an insect, or a fish. Thus although the movement calls itself “prolife,” it is really pro-human-life. Its fudging with the terms life and human life reveals a disturbing assumption: that nonhuman life is somehow not actually life at all, or, if it is, then it is somehow not as “sacred” as human life and therefore not worth protecting….If the prolife movement can become part of a broader struggle to recognize the sacredness of all life…then undoubtedly it will gain great success.(12)

According to Hinduism’s most sacred scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita (5:18), “the humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater.” (In the traditional Indian caste system, Brahmins are considered the highest group of humans, while “dog-eaters” are a group of humans deemed so inferior that they are placed outside the caste system.) (13) Social ills such as racism, sexism, nationalism, caste-ism, and speciesism arise because souls falsely identify with their temporary bodies. On the spiritual platform, all are equal. (Compare this to the Christian teaching: “In Christ there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free” [Colossians 3:11].) Prolife feminism is compatible with such a theology. Srila Prabhupada explains: “Material bodies are dresses; they are the shirt and coat of the living entity. To be either a woman or a man involves only one’s bodily dress.” (14) The Supreme Being is both beyond gender and equally manifested in people of both genders.


Hinduism, like other religions, has been misused to justify the oppression of women. But properly understood, it is a challenge to sexism as well as to the oppression of the unborn. Indeed, some Hindus have noted the karmic link between the oppression of already-born women and girls and the oppression of the unborn–especially in their objections to the tremendous economic and social pressures upon Indian women to marry and to bear sons instead of daughters. Sons are preferred in large part because a bride’s family is traditionally expected to pay a dowry to the groom’s family, and women have few or no options for economic support other than marriage. As in many other countries, female infanticide has been practiced in India for centuries. When amniocentesis became available in the 1970s, it became possible to practice female infanticide before delivery as well as after.

Many families have sought prenatal diagnosis–sometimes with every pregnancy– with the intent of aborting any fetuses who turn out to be female. According to a 1994 estimate, one million female fetuses a year were aborted in India alone. Poor families especially have been vulnerable to the widespread advertising slogan for prenatal diagnosis: “Spend 500 Rupees Now, Save Five Lakhs Later.” (A lakh is equal to 100,000 rupees.) This slogan plays directly on the fear of economic catastrophe that the prospect of paying a daughter’s dowry has often generated. (15) One woman tearfully explained why she succumbed to this fear and aborted her baby girl, even though she felt that “each child is sent by God.” Her husband, she said, “has a right to a son” and she feared “my husband will divorce me and take a new wife who will give him sons,” thereby abandoning her to economic ruin. (16)

Sabapathy Siva, a physician, asks :


The practice of sex-selective abortion has even proved directly harmful to girls who have survived past infancy. Dr. Vibhudi Patel tells the true story of sex selection’s impact upon one family–a story which, sadly, has had its counterparts throughout India.



“For those Hindus who are not aware of the [soul-evolutionary] truths, it is our responsibility to advise them not to undertake abortion,” says V. R. Kandasubramaniam, an elderly scholar from the Sister Nivedita Academy in Madras. (21) Female feticide is a powerful example of how abortion–like any other violence to sentient beings–proves that an injury to one is indeed an injury to all. Hinduism compellingly explains why this is so, but one need not be Hindu to also conclude that abortion generates bad karma which harms the whole web of life.


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