Bible Verses Suggesting That Killing Fetuses Is Not Murder

At Daylight Atheism.

Most interesting passages:

Exodus 21:22 says that if men fight and injure a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, the guilty party is merely fined, but if the woman dies, the responsible person is also put to death.

and

The Book of Numbers, starting in verse 3:15, tells of a census God ordered Moses to carry out among the Israelites. Pregnant women are not counted as two people. In fact, this verse specifically says that even children less than a month old weren't counted! This shouldn't be surprising; a tribal society with a high rate of infant mortality could scarcely afford to invest large amounts of resources into newborns, until they had passed a point where they were more likely to survive. But this brutal necessity hardly fits with the "pro-family" mindset that the modern religious right claims to derive from the Bible.

Numbers 5 also contains the infamous "law of jealousy", where a man who suspects his wife of being unfaithful can take her to the priests and force her to drink "bitter water". This potion appears to be some form of abortifacient, because if the woman has been unfaithful, the text says that it will cause her to have a "miscarrying womb" (according to the NIV translation).