Don and Alanabit, thank you, both, for those excellent and informative postings.

McGrath, while "parasities" might be as abhorrent to you as "lil' shits" at least the former is more accurate, though I don't particularly care for the term, either. Also, "human being" to me implies viable outside the mother's womb. Until then it is a foetus. Splitting hairs, again, perhaps, but it's the way I feel about it.

LH hit upon this a slight bit without particulars. There is one org. I know which conducted esoteric experiments during live births which showed the soul, i.e. silver chord with spirit attached, so to speak, entered the body of a newborn upon their first breath, i.e. the Breath of Life. Somewhere in the Bible there is reference which taken metaphysically relates to this, but I cannot remember the exact phrase, etc.

I personally believe we choose our parents long before we become a newborn and that we may *hang around* within and without the mother's body during the gestational period. If an abortion is warranted for some reason, I believe the soul has a choice of moving on to a different incarnation with perhaps better timing. It's all bound up in past lives, karma, connections of souls, learning from experiences, etc., in my own personal belief system.

kat