Did Augustine really say that?
I’d guess it is related to the “quickening”.
There were not the tools then that we have know
and I’m reasonable sure present knowledge would have affected his belief.
It's only in the last few centuries that scientific investigations have revealed how human conception and early embryonic development occur. In the days of St. Hildegard of Bingen, IIRC, the leading scientists thought that the father's semen caused the blood in the mother's womb to "curdle," and that the "curd" thus formed increased in size as more "curds" stuck to it, until after a period of time it was "animated" and became a living human embryo.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek proposed that fertilization occurs when the sperm enters the egg, but this could not actually be observed for another 100 years because of the quality of microscopes which were available.
The church has always rightly taught that every living human being, even prenatally, has a soul, and the sanctity of his or her life must be recognized. This is the doctrinal point, which has been constant.
But prior to being able to see the actual fertilization of an ovum by a sperm cell --- I think this was first observed in the mid-19th Century --- people were necessarily unsure about when or how that life began. This is the scientific point, about which there were various opinions until the observation of fertilization, and later, the discovery of DNA.
By the way, the church taught even in the very earliest times that abortion is murder. In the Didache (The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles) the first manual of doctrine, liturgical laws and morals written somewhere between the the years of 50 and 80 AD we find the moral prohibition, "You shall not kill by abortion the fruit of the womb and you shall not murder the infant already born."
The Church forbade the destruction of the "fruit of the womb" even if the embryo was not "formed" and was still being made from (as they supposed) the blood of the mother:
"For us [Christians], murder is once and for all forbidden; so even the child in womb, while yet the Mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful for us to destroy." - Tertullian, 197 AD, Apologeticus. That's about as clear as it could possibly be. And I am double dang sure and morally certain that Augustine agreed.