Preliminary Jewish Abortion Research

I am curious as to what Iron Age and Bronze Age Jews believed about when life began.  The closest that I have been able to normally find is Rabbinic Judaism.  Christianity jumped on the Aristotle band wagon embracing the quickening.  A couple of ignorant thoughts:

• Obviously, they would have no idea about modern reproduction.  Cells were not discovered until 1655.   Sperm was not discovered until 1677.  The egg was not discovered until 1827.  The idea that human life begins when egg meets sperm originated in 1843.  Before the microscope there would have been no way for anyone to know that life originated outside the womb.  When sperm was discovered, they thought that life may have originated with the sperm[3].  
• Once sperm meets egg the cell divides and eventually it becomes a blastocyst that implants in the uterus.  Without a microscope, one could not know about implantation.  The modern pregnancy test allowed us to know about many more pregnancies that would be miscarried.
•  The earliest indicator of pregnancy was the missed period.  The earliest indicator of life was the first movement.  Movement post-Aristotle was thought of as life and it may have seemed suitable to confer on this the quickening.
• Judaism did not grow in a vacuum and since it encountered Hellenism, it had to deal with the quickening.  What did pre-Hellenistic Jews believe?

Abortion


Jewish law not only permits, but in some circumstances requires abortion. Where the mother's life is in jeopardy because of the unborn child, abortion is mandatory. 

An unborn child has the status of "potential human life" until the majority of the body has emerged from the mother. Potential human life is valuable, and may not be terminated casually, but it does not have as much value as a life in existence. The Talmud makes no bones about this: it says quite bluntly that if the fetus threatens the life of the mother, you cut it up within her body and remove it limb by limb if necessary, because its life is not as valuable as hers. But once the greater part of the body has emerged, you cannot take its life to save the mother's, because you cannot choose between one human life and another.[1]

Here are the outer limits of the Jewish positions on abortion: 1) Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism the fetus isn't a legal person until it's born, so abortion can't be murder. (This isn't even as different from Catholicism as it seems. The Catholic Church itself didn't insist that life began at conception until 1869. Before that, the Church tolerated abortions through the 40th day of pregnancy.) 2) The fetus, although perhaps not a legal person, is a potential one with a limited number of legal rights (such as the ability to inherit property in certain cases), so abortion is like murder, even if it isn't exactly the same thing... 

...The one thing everybody agrees about, whether abortion resembles murder or not, is that in the case of a threat to the mother's life, Jewish law requires you to save her rather than the fetus. (Catholics save the fetus, on the grounds that the mother bas been baptized and will go to heaven, whereas the fetus has not and is condemned to limbo, if not to hell. Jews don't worry as much about the afterlife.)... 

...Rabbis also offer a dizzying menu of views about how early or late into a pregnancy the procedure can be performed, ranging from only up to 40 days after conception to up to the beginning of the third term. (If the birthing process seems likely to be fatal for the mother, you can remove the fetus at the very last moment--until the head crowns, at which point the fetus becomes a person with a soul and a full legal identity.) These debates derive from different verses than the ones cited above. In one such verse, the fetus is deemed to be little more than water until quickening (in the ancient world, 40 days after insemination).[2]