"Of all the church fathers, it is Augustine (354-430) who speaks most frequently of abortion and presents the most detailed discussions of the nature and status of the fetus. This is a fruit of his lifelong concern and theological wrestlings with the questions of the origin of the soul, and when and how the fetus received a soul. He discusses a variety of solutions: (1) the soul is pre-existent (2) the soul is created by god at the moment of conception; (3) like the body, the soul comes from the parents; (4) the soul is infused at a particular stage in the development of the fetus. As I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, he never found a satisfactory solution to this question. He frequently makes a distinction between the unformed and the formed fetus; the latter term refers to the fetus which has received a soul. We find one example of this distinction in the treatise ‘’De Nuptiis et Concupiscientia’’, when Augustine condemns sexual intercourse detached from reproduction: “At times this lust-filled cruelty or cruel lust goes far that it even procured drugs to cause sterility, and if they are not effective, it somehow extinguishes and destroys within the womb the fetus already conceived, desiring that its own offspring perish before it begins to live. Or, if it was living in the womb, it desires that it be killed before it is born. Naturally, this distinction presupposed that the fetus receives a soul at one particular stage in its development; the consequence of this idea, which he shares with Jerome, is that only the abortion of a formed fetus that has a soul can be classified as murder. This becomes clear in the ‘’Questiones in Heptateuchum’’ 2.80, where Augustine refers to the Septuagint version of Exodus 21:2 and following and argues that the abortion of an unformed fetus is not murder, since one cannot say whether it already has a soul at that stage. Although the abortion even of an unformed fetus is morally reprehensible, the punishment for this act is limited to a fine. On the question whether the embryo is to be define as a part of the mother’’s body, Augustine breaks with Stoic thinking and Roman law, which affirmed that this was not the case."