> And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

One summary often presented is as follows: 'Thus we can see that if the baby is lost, it does not require a death sentence -- it is not considered murder. But if the woman is lost, it is considered murder and is punished by death.'

But this exegesis overlooks the distinction between accidental manslaughter and intentional murder. When the offending man was striking the woman, was he trying to kill the baby? Of course not -- for most of the 9 months of pregnancy he would have no sure sign that a baby was there, and even after that in the heat of a fight is hardly going to have the rational capability to take on such a distinction.

And even if he did, chances are he wasn't aiming for the baby anyway. It's akin to an accident where someone intends one thing but tragically causes another. In biblical law, an accidental death never earns the death penalty. On the other hand, the woman was quite visible and there was no such excuse for a direct, fatal strike against her. Any struggle that affects the woman to the point of inflicting serious fatal injury falls under a different category of culpability. Accidental deaths would also be covered by cities of refuge in the Deuteronomic code (Dt. 19).

Commenting on the Septuagint version of the biblical reference to this event in Exodus 21:22-23, the Alexandrian-Jewish philosopher Philo at the beginning of the Current Era declared that the attacker of a pregnant woman must die if the fruit he caused to be lost was already 'shaped and all the limbs had their proper qualities, for that which answers to this description is a human being . . . like a statue lying in a studio requiring nothing more than to be conveyed outside.' Christians have historically affirmed the sanctity of unborn life based on broader biblical theology and early Patristic consensus.