"Life begins at conception" is NOT a recent innovation

[Amazing Rando]

You may hear the claim bandied about from time to time by fervent abortion proponants that the belief that life begins at conception is a recent innovation, something that people didn't believe more than a few generations ago.

Well that claim is complete and utter crap. This quote from Tertullian's treatise On the Soul (De Anima in Latin), is from the second decade of the third century, and though written during his Montanist phase, nonetheless exhibits the early Christian orthodoxy found in other writers. He writes,

On the Soul, 27.3

Now we believe that life begins at conception, since we hold that the soul begins to exist at that time; for where life is, there must be a soul.

© source where applicable

So let it hereby be known that the claim that "life begins at conception" is no recent innovation, but is nearly as old as the church itself.

[Abelard]

Good post.

[Faramir]

IIRC abortion is also prohibited in the Didache (1st or 2nd century)

[Gideon Brown]

So let it hereby be known that the claim that "life begins at conception" is no recent innovation

Similarly, the fact that abortion is a grave moral evil was well known to ancient physicians.

Do you know why doctors no longer recite the Hippocratic Oath? Mostly because it contains a line that says 'I will prescribe a woman no abortive remedy'. Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C.) knew abortion for what it was as well as we do.

[Amazing Rando]

IIRC abortion is also prohibited in the Didache (1st or 2nd century)

Yes, as well as Tertullian's Apology chapter 9; Minicius Felix's Octavian, chapter 30; Athenagoras' Plea for Christians chapter 35. (I've researched this a bit.)

[Amazing Rando]

Similarly, the fact that abortion is a grave moral evil was well known to ancient physicians.

Do you know why doctors no longer recite the Hippocratic Oath? Mostly because it contains a line that says 'I will prescribe a woman no abortive remedy'. Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C.) knew abortion for what it was as well as we do.

For an excellent overview of attitudes toward abortion in antiquity, I suggest Michael Gorman's Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World .

Gorman did the legwork for that little book while he was a student of Bruce Metzger's at Princeton Theological Seminary. Metzger wrote a forward to it. It's only about 120 pages total, but provides an absolutely superb summary of the all the issues and nuances of the history of abortion in the Greco-Roman world.

[Gideon Brown]

For an excellent overview of attitudes toward abortion in antiquity, I suggest Michael Gorman's Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World .

Gorman did the legwork for that little book while he was a student of Bruce Metzger's at Princeton Theological Seminary. Metzger wrote a forward to it. It's only about 120 pages total, but provides an absolutely superb summary of the all the issues and nuances of the history of abortion in the Greco-Roman world.

I'd be very, very interested in reading that. Unfortunately, I won't have time, but it may get bought and then added to my pile of 'I'd like to read, someday...'.

[Amazing Rando]

It's real real short!

[Gideon Brown]

Does that mean 'real, real cheap', too?

[Amazing Rando]

You know, I may as well post this because it's relevant. This is the rough draft of a section of a paper I'm currently working on about the ethics of the early church. Here's what I've got on abortion-


II. Abortion and Infanticide
The first topic at hand is the practice of killing unwanted children. Michael Gorman’s excellent survey on the topic of abortion in antiquity(7) catalogues the frequency and high degree of legitimacy and cultural sanction given to it by the Greco-Roman world in the first several centuries C.E. As it had been for the Greeks, the killing of unwanted or deformed infants (whether in the womb or after birth) was commonplace in Roman society. It was practiced for both reasons of population control (primarily among the poor), but also for cosmetic reasons among the rich who often wanted to preserve their “sex appeal.”(8) Infants were commonly subject to the practice of exposure, in which they were simply abandoned on a rural mountainside to die.(9) Abortions of unborn infants were carried out almost as frequently, using a number of mechanical or chemical means.(10) In Greek and Roman law, all rights, including the right to life, “were subservient to the welfare of the state (or the family, the religion, or the race) and had to be sacrificed if the best interests of the state demanded it.”(11) Roman law, especially as codified in the Twelve Tables, recognized the father of the family, the paterfamilias, as head of household. For the paterfamilias, “his slaves, wife, and children were all ‘taken in hand,’ mancipia, to him, and he had the power of life and death, jus vitae necisque, over them all. The paterfamilias could kill, mutilate and sell people like posessions.”(12) Against such a backdrop, the slaughter of Bethlehem’s boys as ordered by Rome’s puppet king Herod (Matthew 2:16) is not such an inscrutably large leap. Gorman’s comments aptly sum up the moral situation throughout the empire at the time of Jesus:

"When Octavian (later called Caesar Augustus) appeared on the political scene, the Roman Republic was in disastrous moral and economic straits. The practice of abortion, which had reached an unprecedented height in the first century B.C., remained at a high rate throughout that century and the next."(13)


In stark contrast to this culture of disposability, the early Christians asserted that the God-given inviolability of human life forbid them from taking the life of a child, either while still in the womb, or after birth. This prohibition is present from the very earliest strata of postcanonical Christian tradition to well beyond the “church peace” of Constantine. First, from the late first-century discipleship manual known as the Didache, or “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations,” we find a categorical prohibition of abortion and infanticide included as part of the “way of life” section: “A further commandment of the Teaching: Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not practice pederasty; do not fornicate; do not steal; do not deal in magic; do not practice sorcery; do not kill a fetus by abortion, or commit infanticide” (Didache 2.1-2)(14) Similarly, the Didache includes among those who follow the “way of death” “murderers of children, destroyers of God's image” (5.2) which must, by the document’s chiastic structure, be understood as the antithesis of the command in chapter 2.

Such an explicit command was necessary because of the prevalence acceptability of abortions and infant exposures in that era. The Christian character Octavian, in Minicius Felix’s early third-century dialogue of the same name, was one of many apologists who responded to the common charge leveled against Christians by their pagan critics that Christians kill and eat their offspring in their secretive worship services. “And in fact,” he retorts, “it is a practice of yours, I observe, to expose your very own children to birds and wild beasts, or at times to smother and strangle them- a pitiful way to die; and there are women who swallow drugs to stifle in their own womb the beginnings of a man to be- committing infanticide before they give birth to their infant” (Octavius, 30). In another apologetic passage addressed to the emperor Marcus Aurelius refuting the pagan charge that Christians kill children, Athenagoras replies with a blistering demonstration of the consistency of the Christian pro-life ethic:

Athenagoras, Embassy for Christians, 35

Again, we call it murder and say it will be accountable to God if women use instruments to procure abortion: how shall we be called murderers ourselves? The same man cannot regard that which a woman carries in her womb as a living creature, and therefore as an object of value to God, and then go about to slay the creature that has come forth to the light of day. The same man cannot forbid the exposure of children, equating such exposure with child murder, and then slay a child that has found one to bring it up. No, we are always consistent, everywhere the same, obedient to our rule and not masters of it.

© source where applicable

The great second century apologist Justin Martyr likewise reflects the Christian condemnation of this practice, saying that “we have been taught that to expose newly born infants is the work of wicked people” (First Apology, 27), while Clement of Alexandria laments that “women who resort to some sort of deadly abortion drug kill not only the embryo but, along with it, human kindness” (Christ the Educator, 2.10).

Some of the arguments church leaders advanced against the practice of abortion in those early years sound remarkably similar to arguments used by the abortion foes in modern America. For example, Tertullian treatise on the soul contains a striking assertion, which, although it was one of his last works, written during his Montanist phase, nonetheless exhibits the early church orthodoxy which can be observed in other writers of his day as well. “Now we believe,” he writes, “that life begins at conception, since we hold that the soul begins to exist at that time; for where life is, there must be a soul” (On the Soul, 27.3). How frequently do we hear the phrase “life begins at conception” bandied about in contemporary debates about abortion? Far from being a recent innovation in the culture wars, this claim is nearly as ancient as the church itself. Building off this assumption of ensoulment at conception, Lactantius, too, protests vigorously against abortion: “Let no one, then, think that it is to be conceded even, that newly born children may be done away with, an especially great impiety! God breathes souls into them for life, not for death. Yet men, lest they stain their hands with that which is a crime, deny light not given by them to souls still fresh and simple… These are without any question criminal and unjust” (Divine Institutes, 6:20). And Origen, in his eighth book responding to the pagan critic Celsus, insists that when Christians marry, God “certainly requires us to bring up the offspring and not to destroy the children given by providence” (Against Celsus 8.55). Finally, Tertullian’s brilliant Apology, among his earlier works, contains a powerful indictment of another argument employed by abortion proponents- both today and in Tertullian’s day- that the aborted fetus is only a “potential human.”

Tertullian, Apology, 9

But with us, murder is forbidden once for all. We are not permitted to destroy even the fetus in the womb, as long as blood is still being drawn to form a human being. To prevent the birth of a child is a quicker way to murder. It makes no difference whether one destroys a soul already born or interferes with its coming to birth. It is a human being and one who is to be a man, for the whole fruit is already present in the seed.

© source where applicable

Indeed, from the evidence we have observed here, the early church spoke with univocal passion and conviction that the abortion of a baby in the womb or the killing of one who had already been born were nothing short of murder. The two practices we now tend to separate based on our sensitivity to our brothers and sisters with “pro-choice” leanings, were indistinguishable to our Christian forbearers who resoundingly rejected child-killing, either in its prenatal or postnatal forms. Indeed as Richard Hays has remarked, “the recent shift in some branches of liberal Protestantism to advocacy for abortion rights is a major departure from the church’s historic teaching.”(15) The voices of the early saints convict us in our moral laxity and unfaithfulness to Christ.
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7. Abortion & The Early Church: Christian, Jewish, and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1982).
8. Gorman, 15.
9. Greek dramatist Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex relates the story of a tragic hero who had been left to die of exposure as an infant. Few in Sophocles’ audience would have batted an eyelash at the morality of this common cultural practice.
10. The various herbal compounds and recipes which had been discovered to be abortifacient by Greco-Roman physicians were generally called “poisons” throughout the ancient literature (See Gorman, 15). It seems quite plain that they realized they were killing a human being, they just didn’t care.
11. Gorman, 23.
12. Ibid.
13. Gorman, 26.
14. The “Two Ways” section of the Didache is closely mirrored in the Epistle of Barnabas, where a nearly identical prohibition of abortion and infanticide is present in chapter 19.
15. The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 453.

[MarcusAndreas]

Didache 2:3
You shall not murder a child by abortion.

That book was in the Bible Constantine ordered, along with the Shepherd of Hermas.

I think I'll petition the Catholic Church to get them books in the Bible.

[JonLanceBarker]

Didache 2:3
You shall not murder a child by abortion.

That book was in the Bible Constantine ordered, along with the Shepherd of Hermas.

I think I'll petition the Catholic Church to get them books in the Bible.

Darn that Council of Trent, eh?

[One Bad Pig]

Canon XCI of Trullo:

Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the fœtus, are subjected to the penalty of murder.

[One Bad Pig]

Didache 2:3
You shall not murder a child by abortion.

That book was in the Bible Constantine ordered, along with the Shepherd of Hermas.

Very doubtful.