I just had to point something out. While the official doctrine of the LDS church is pretty silent on the matter, the implied teaching is that the spirit enters the body at around the time of conception. For this reason, it is assumed that, the church highly discourages abortion at any point in a pregnancy. This reasoning would be in line with a belief that the aborted fetus represents a spirit child of God that is having their life on earth terminated prematurely - which is why we would assume having an abortion is considered a sin. Aside from the obvious defect with the idea that any person aborting a fetus, or not, could potentially be thwarting the will of God, the question in my mind is; does an unborn fetus represent a living soul, or child of God, or not? If it does, then it would make sense that pregnancy would be a very important event regardless of whether or not a baby is born.
Additionally, when we consider the importance placed by the church on keeping records of God's children born into the church, we should find that the church would emphasize the importance of retaining a record of all children conceived but not ever living to be born as needed to be sealed to parents. However, this is not the case. The only time a record of a child is created in the records of the church (so that they can have their work of the sealing ordinance done in the temple - obviously, only sealings to parents are performed for children under 8, instead of all of the other saving ordinances, because we are taught that children under 8 are automatically saved in the Celestial kingdom) is when a baby is born and it takes at least one breath (or not stillborn).
Why the disparity of treatment for these children who are miscarried or stillborn? Are they just not as important as those that take a breath outside the womb? Why doesn't the church keep a record of them, let alone attempt to seal these children to parents?
The church cannot say it is because it is inconvenient to keep or find such records since it expects people to go to great lengths to extract family records which surely represents a very large inconvenience to those performing family history traces.
I just feel sad for all those poor spirit children who will be orphaned in the eternities because no record was kept for them and no work was performed for them to be sealed to their parents. Poor little ones indeed. I hope the church fixes this policy soon.
Guidelines that exclude stillborn children from family history and temple work is found on LDS.org here (under heading:
"Determining What Ordinances to Perform").
