The purpose of this article is to resource just such a robust Christian response by revisiting the historical record of the church’s encounter with the practice of abortion and by re-presenting the culture of life for which these believers faithfully contended.

The issue of abortion is never far out of the news. This perennial discussion provides believers with regular opportunity to articulate our convictions as well meaningfully engage those with different convictions. Certain opinions, such the claim that the right to “terminate one’s pregnancy” is “fundamental to one’s humanity” published in America’s paper of record, may sadden us but are no longer surprising.^[1] They are immediately recognizable as a distortion, and indeed a rejection, of the biblical anthropology which roots our humanity in the imago Dei.

But what of arguments in favor of abortion that lay claim to the history of the church itself? This approach can be both surprising and, for believers unfamiliar with the convictions of their forebears in the faith, even disorienting. Christiana Forrester, founder and director of Christian Democrats of America, attempted to formulate such an argument in the Huffington Post. Forrester advanced the claim that, “for hundreds of years Christians weren’t concerned about abortion.” In fact, she continued, there is “a lack of interest in the topic in early Christian teaching.” She concluded that because “there is little to no mention of abortion as a topic of great alarm,” from the Old Testament through to modern history, there is therefore “no case to be made for a definitive Christian stance throughout history on the spiritual or moral aspects of abortion.”^[2]

Forrester’s wholesale revision of the historical record –– suggesting that Christians first began to care about abortion after Roe v. Wade –– smuggled in a payload of lying implications. She used her claim first to deny pro-life arguments any biblical and historical legitimacy, then to diminish the moral significance of abortion, placing it well beneath the mandate to excise xenophobia and alleviate poverty, and finally to reduce resistance to abortion to the level of political pragmatism.^[3] Most troubling, for the purposes of this article, Forrester’s claim that her conclusions “simply bring the biblical and historical record to light,” forfeited the very sources contemporary Christians so desperately need in order to formulate and practice a biblically faithful, relationally sensitive, historically informed response to the cluster of issues surrounding abortion.

The purpose of this article is to resource just such a robust Christian response by revisiting the historical record of the church’s encounter with the practice of abortion and by re-presenting the culture of life for which these believers faithfully contended. In order to be helpful as well as brief, this study focuses on the period beginning with the death of the last Apostle (c.90 ad) and extending for roughly three hundred years thereafter. Leaders in these earliest centuries of Christianity regularly faced — and articulated a univocal response to — the practice of abortion amid the moral decadence of the Roman empire.^[4] As we observe the way the believing community mingled the radiant warmth of divine grace toward those who were hurting together with an unflinching conviction regarding the image of the God in the life of the unborn, we can be encouraged and equipped in our own labors to contend for a culture of life.

A Culture of Death: Abortion in the Greek and Roman World

Michael Gorman opens his seminal book, Abortion and the Early Church, with words that may suprise some: “abortion was not at all uncommon two thousand years ago.” The prevalence of this practice meant that “early Christians were forced to develop both an appropriate attitude to their culture’s practice and a standard for life within the Christian community.”^[5] Before turning to examine the different aspects of the Christian response to abortion, this first section considers the cultural context in which Christianity emerged and distinguished itself as a growing religion within the Roman empire. This engagement with the Græco-Roman world must be brief, but it should be sufficient to reveal that a broad tolerance of abortion did in fact exist, along with the more common practice of exposing unwanted newborns. Furthermore, where cultural mores did come to discourage abortion as unlawful or illegitimate, the reasoning behind this pagan resistance was very different than the motivation guiding the Christian response.^[6]

Greek medical practice largely opposed abortion. The Oath of Hippocrates, dating from the fifth-century BC, includes an explicit promise not to perform an abortion; “I swear…I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.”^[7] This rejection owed largely to the fact that the poisons prescribed were dangerous to the life of the mother, and therefore in violation of the same oath to “keep them from harm.” The surgical procedures used for abortion were likewise horrifically dangerous to the mother;therefore, exposure of newborns became the preferred method for controlling the quantity and quality of the population in the family or polis.^[8] Many doctors, however — including Hippocrates himself it seems — were willing to perform abortions and “women who wanted abortions, for whatever reason, had a great variety of means available to them.”^[9] In fact, leading Greek philosophers such as Plato (428–348bc) and Aristotle (384–322bc) endorsed abortion in cases where the child would threaten the welfare of the state. This endorsement was in keeping with their subjection of all individual rights to the good of the community. In Plato’s case, it came in spite of his conviction, against Aristotle, that life began at conception.^[10]

Roman attitudes toward abortion were a similar mixture. Legally, abortion was viewed as a violation of the patria potestas. Children were vital to the security both of the community and family line. The father of a Roman household held the future of his family, and therefore the lives of those under his roof, in his hand. This power meant that a woman who sought an abortion apart from her husband’s consent could face severe repercussions, including fines, divorce, and even exile.^[11] In the Twelve Tables, Roman law also provided that husbands who pressured their wives to abort without cause were to be censured in view of the danger abortion posed to the woman. Actual penalties were not set, however, and these legal injunctions did not translate to the protection of children inside or outside of the womb. Furthermore, the Twelve Tables extended the authority to the paterfamilias to expose or abort any infant he deemed unsupportable. Such an action was not considered murder since Roman law did not recognize the fetus as a person, but only as part of the mother, and even newborn children were not considered a part of the family until they were formally acknowledged by the father as his child. According to a Roman euphemism, to abort or expose was simply “the refusal to admit to society.”^[12] By the time of Christ’s birth, abortion was widespread and had reached the point of being practiced, despite its dangers, as a personal convenience.^[13] Significantly, even where poets, philosophers, or politicians came to decry the practice of abortion, their motive for such a stand derived from a desire to maintain the rights of the father, or the future population of the empire. This perspective was strikingly different from the explicitly theological convictions on which Christians would take their stand for life.^[14]

Read More