walkingdork said:
some dude in the bible shot one off (ejaculated) into the ground and was immediately put to death by God for wasting his seed.
Not exactly. You're thinking of the story of Onan and Tamar. So, Judah (one of the brothers of Joseph, the kid with the colorful coat) had a few sons, the oldest two were Er and Onan. Er married a woman named Tamar, God decided Er was kind of an asshole, so he stuck him down. Unfortunately, Er hadn't sired any offspring to carry on his lineage. So, as was the custom it was now his younger brother Onan's duty to have sex with Er's widow and impregnate her for his brother. The resulting child would be considered Er's offspring and would inherit his stuff. So, Onan does his duty and sleeps with his sister-in-law, but he doesn't like the idea that the resulting kid isn't going to be his, so he pulls out before coming and ejaculates on the ground. God get's mad that he refused to carry out his duty, and strikes him dead.
So many people misuse this story to make it about masturbation or birth control. It had nothing to do with him "wasting his seed", it had to do with his attitude and his refusal to fulfill his duties and do what Judah told him to do.
Story get's even more crazy when Judah gets drunk, sleep with his daughter-in-law, forgets about it, get's outraged when he discovers she is pregnant (obviously through promiscuity as she is not remarried), and then ends up feeling all sheepish when she pulls out a few items her lover left behind which he identifies as his own belongings. Even the best and most smuttiest of soap operas can't roll with this stuff.
Prior to discovering he was the one who screwed and impregnated his own daughter-in-law, Judah ordered Tamar to be burned to death, indwelling future human inside her and all.
A far more interesting bit pertaining to abortion is found in Exodus:
Exodus 21:22-25
When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that she has a miscarriage but no other injury occurs, then the guilty party will be fined what the woman's husband demands, as negotiated with the judges. If there is further injury, then you will give a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a bruise for a bruise, a wound for a wound.
Apparently God doesn't (or at least didn't under the Old Covenant) equate the death of a fetus with that of a human either. The death of the unborn baby is treated here like a civil dispute, the same sort of charge that would be made for the loss of property or livestock, not the loss of a human life.