Sacred Gift of Life Sunday
January 20, 2008, is the Sunday that precedes the 35th anniversary of the tragic Supreme Court Decision of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. This Supreme Court decision overturned all moral and logical reasoning that most citizens of our society held and practiced. Since 1973, over 43 million lives have been aborted. Approximately 93% of the women who have had abortions cited they did so for social reasons (i.e. unready for responsibility, can’t afford the baby, concern over how baby would change her life, etc) as opposed to issues regarding the mother’s health, the baby’s health, rape or incest. These few facts are very alarming for us as Orthodox Christians who hold all life as sacred and holy.
The teens of our archdiocese are very concerned about this issue and desire to do whatever is in their ability to help bring about change that leads to godliness and holiness. The members of the North American Council (NAC) of SOYO, with the blessing of His Eminence Metropolitan Philip, are leading our Archdiocese in observing Sunday, January 20, 2008, as the “Sacred Gift of Life Sunday: Protecting the Life of the Unborn”. Our teens, as part of the celebration of January as Orthodox Education Month, are furthering their education, understanding and commitment regarding the Orthodox Church’s teaching on the sacred gift of life and abortion. In turn, they are helping to bring a greater awareness to the faithful of our parishes and throughout their local communities.
The teens are mailing to every Antiochian Archdiocese parish a packet of resource materials including a bulletin insert, an article written by Christopher Shadid, the NAC SOYO President, that is a synopsis of related issues discussed in Fr John Breck's book, God With Us: Critical Issues in Christian Life and Faith, and a Feedback Form. The article by Chris Shadid will provide our teens with a starting point for discussion on these important issues. There are a number of other resources which have links to them below.
Local Teen SOYO chapters and High School Christian Education classes are encouraged to check out our resources page for materials. Some of the materials include a case study on abortion and the sacred gift of life that was developed by Dr. H. Tristram Engelhardt, an Orthodox Christian and leading Bio-Ethicist. The teens, under the leadership of the pastors and advisors, will have the material necessary to have discussions and further their belief and commitment to the sacred gift of life.
Please join our teens as we recognized the sacred gift of life on Sunday, January 20, 2008 throughout the parishes of the Antiochian Archdiocese.
Resources for Sacred Gift of Life Sunday: Protecting the Life of the Unborn
Suggested Reading for Further Study on Abortion
Breck, John; God with Us: Critical Issues in Christian Life and Faith; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood; 2003.
Breck, John; The Sacred Gift of Life; Orthodox Christianity and Bioethics; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood; 1998.
Harakas, Stanley S.; Contemporary Moral Issues Facing the Orthodox Christian; pp. 82-87; Light and Life Publishing, Minneapolis; 1982.
Harakas, Stanley S. & Pehanich, Edward; What the Orthodox Church Says About Abortion; Light and Life Publishing, Minneapolis; 1986.
Kowalcyzk, John; Orthodox View of Abortion; Light and Life Publishing, Minneapolis; 1977.
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A Case Study on Abortion
Case Study on Abortion
From a work in progress:
Remaining Orthodox in a Heterodox World: Facing the Moral Challenges of Post-Modernity*
By: H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Brian Christopher Partridge, and Susan G. Engelhardt © 2005
A note from the V. Rev. Dr. Joseph F. Purpura, Chairman of the Department of Youth Ministry and the Very Rev. Anthony Yazge, NAC Teen SOYO Spiritual Advisor
Teens are encouraged to share this case study within their youth group and to discuss the questions listed at the end of the case.
Pastors are encouraged to join our teens and help them discuss this issue after they have read the case study and answered the questions as a group. Typically the questions are explored in small groups of 3-5 teens, with all teens coming together after small group discussion to share what each group discussed. After small group sharing time, it would be good for Pastors to be available to help answer questions and illuminate discussion with an Orthodox Perspective on the Sanctity of Life.
Case Study
Paige: “Theodora, my sister Peyton won’t have to have an abortion. Isn’t that wonderful?!”
Theodora: “Paige, why would Peyton ever have to have an abortion?”
Paige: “Oh, Theodora, don’t you remember my sister? She’s the real successful one in my family. She’s the famous lawyer. She has finally made senior partner in the famous law firm of Brutus, Nasty, and Short. However, it took until she was 39, so she and her husband only decided to have a child when she was 40. The risk of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome was really high, so they did the responsible thing. She had an amniocentesis to make sure the fetus wasn’t defective.”
Theodora: “So, Paige, you’re telling me that if your sister Peyton had had a child with Down’s Syndrome, she would have aborted it and killed it?”
Paige: “Naturally, Theodora, it’s the only sensible and responsible thing to do. If they had had a child with serious handicaps, that would have really hurt their life-style and their important careers. You can’t just go ahead and do the important things you are aiming at if you have a child with problems.”
Theodora: “Does that give you a right to kill the child in the womb?”
Paige: “Oh, come on. It’s not a child until it’s born.”
Theodora: “So tell me what the big difference is between being a child for nine months in the womb and being born? From conception to birth, the baby grows. Anywhere you draw the line is arbitrary. Would your sister have killed her child, had it developed a serious disease the week after its birth, leading to handicaps?”
Paige: “I don’t know about all that. I just know that it’s the responsible thing to use abortion so that you can go on with your life, your career, and your plans. Without abortion, think how many of the career plans of women would really have been derailed.”
Theodora: “Why would that be the case?”
Paige: “You know, Theodora. What would happen if you got pregnant during college? You would never finish college.”
Theodora: “I am committed to not having sex until I marry, so I really think that’s not a likely problem for me. What you are telling me is that if people are not going to be chaste until they marry, then the women who have sex with men who are not willing to marry them or whom they are not willing to marry may be tempted to kill the child in their womb. What you are telling me is that one sin leads to another, that things go from bad to worse. What you are telling is that one irresponsibility leads to another.”
Paige: “Oh, Theodora, grow up! We’re in the 21st century. Your view is positively medieval. Are you afraid that the fetus has a soul? Who knows when a soul comes into a fetus?”
Theodora: “Rest assured, Paige, my view is older than the Middle Ages. I know God exists. I am an Orthodox Christian. I also know that we as Christians know that abortion separates us from God, and, as St. Basil the Great said, we are not interested in hair-splitting about how old the fetus is or when it has a soul or doesn’t have a soul – any of that stuff.”
Paige: “How do you know that it all makes sense?”
Theodora: “We know, because our way of life produces saints. We have experience as to what ways of life make people not just good but holy.”
Paige: “What do you mean, holy?”
Theodora: “Paige, I mean living so one can come in union with God. That’s what life is all about.”
Paige: “Huh?!”
Theodora: “I know that’s hard to think about when you first start. It seems that the most important thing, at least according to our culture, is to be rich, famous, and powerful. We are young now and think we will live forever. But that’s a lie.”
Paige: “What do you mean?”
Theodora: “What Christianity is about is teaching us to be concerned with being responsible in a way that counts for eternity.”
The following questions are to be discussed in small groups of 3-5 people. Each small group will then share their discussion and group responses with the larger group. The group leader should facilitate further discussion and help teens come to a deeper understanding of the Orthodox Church’s Teaching on the Sanctity of Life.
Discussion Questions
1. Has our contemporary culture turned morality on its head, so that it becomes responsible to consider killing one’s child in the womb?
2. Has this temptation become widespread because our secular society accepted sexually irresponsible ways of living, so that abortion has become a part of an established sinful way of life?
3. Is the Christian understanding of responsibility radically different from that of the secular culture?
4. What will you need to do in order to live as a responsible Christian?
5. Have you thought of the ways in which you might have accepted secular values without having noticed it?
6. Can one understand what responsibility means apart from recognizing God and our responsibilities to Him?
7. If we are beings created to love and worship God forever, can we even begin to make adequate sense of our lives without recognizing God and our obligations to Him?
* This booklet developed out of a presentation, “Moral and Ethical Issues Confronting Orthodox Teens,” made at Antiochian Village, Pennsylvania, November 20, 1999.
Writings from the Fathers on the Sacred Gift of Life
They marry, as do all others; they beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring (literally: “cast away fetuses”). – Letter to Diognetus (2nd century)
You shall not slay the child by abortions. – The Didache (1st century)
You shall not destroy your conceptions before they are brought forth, nor kill them after they are born. – Letter of Barnabas (c. 70)
As for woman who destroy embryos professionally, and those who give or take poisons with the object of aborting babies and dropping them prematurely, we prescribed the rule that they be treated as public penitents up to five or even three years at most. –
St. John the Faster (fl. 580, Canon XXI)
Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Indeed, it is something worse than murder, and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed, but prevents its formation. What then? Do you condemn the gifts of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing? Do you make the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the women who are given to you for procreation of offspring to perpetuate killing? -
St John Chrysostom (345-407)
A woman who aborts deliberately is liable to trial as a murderess. This is not a precise assertion of some figurative and inexpressible conception that passes current among us. For here there is involved the question of providing justice for the infant to be born, but also for the woman who has plotted against her own self. For in most cases the women die in the course of such operations. But besides this, there is to be noted the fact that the destruction of the embryo constitutes another murder, at least in the opinion of those who dare to do their things. It behooves us, however, not to extend their confessions to the extreme limit of death, but to admit them at the end of the moderate period of ten years, without specifying a definite time, but adjusting the cure to the manner of penitence. – St Basil the Great (Canon 2) (c. 330-79)
The life in the womb may not be destroyed. – Tertullian (c. 223)
We acknowledge, therefore, that life begins with conception, because we contend that the soul begins at conception. Life begins when the soul begins. – Tertullian (c. 223)
As for women who furnish drugs for the purpose of procuring abortions, and those who take fetus-killing poisons, they are made subject to the penalty for murderers. – Sixth Ecumenical Council, Canon 91 (681)
Regarding women who become prostitutes and kill their babies, and who make it their business to concoct abortives, the former rule barred them for life from communion, and they are left without recourse. But, having found a more philanthropic alternative, we have fixed the penalty at ten years, in accordance with the fixed degrees. – Council of
Ancyra , Canon 21 (314)
The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. The hair-splitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us. In this case, it is not only the being about to be born who is victimized, but the woman in her attack upon herself; because the woman who makes such attempts in most cases dies. The destruction of the embryo is an additional crime, a second murder, at all events is we regard it as done with intent. The punishment, however, of these women should not be for life, but for the term of ten years. – St Basil the Great (+ 379)
Women who were reputed to be believers began to take drugs to render themselves sterile, and to expel what was conceived, since they did not want to have a child. See then into what great impiety that lawless one (Callistus, the Emperor) has fallen, by teaching both adultery and murder at the same time. – St Hippolytus of
Rome (c. 170-236)
Fascinating Story of Life Before Birth
Conception:
The moment of conception is the beginning of a new human being. All of the genetic information necessary to build our body and our brain is present at this moment. Nothing will be added to this unique individual from the moment of conception except food and nourishment.
First Month:
In the next four weeks, this tiny, yet distinct embryo which has implanted itself on the uterine wall, will be developing its own eyes, spinal cord, nervous system, liver and stomach. The heart began beating at 18 days and has set the rhythm of life for this preborn baby.
Six Weeks:
The baby, a plump little being over a half inch long, with short arms and legs, floats in her amniotic sac, well moored by the umbilical cord. Though she weighs only 1/30 of an ounce, she has all the internal organs of an adult in various stages of development.
Two Months:
At eight weeks, she is just over an inch long and everything is present that is found in a full-term baby. The completed skeleton begins to change from cartilage to real bone for this “young one” (the Latin translation is “fetus”) and brain waves can now be detected.
Three Months:
The little person floating buoyantly in the amniotic fluid is now more than 2-1/2 inches long. She can make a tiny fist, get hiccups, wake and sleep.
Four Months:
The fourth month is marked by rapid growth with the baby weighing one-half pound or more. Now external events – especially touch and noises – will reach the baby and provoke reaction.
Five Months:
At 20 weeks, she curls as her mother moves, and stretches when the mother rests. She can make and impressively hard fist, and her punches and kicks are plainly felt by her mother. Some unborn children are calm in the womb, others are more active.
Seven Months:
From the seventh month until term she increases in length from 13 to 20 inches and nearly triples in weight. She experiences the four senses of vision, hearing, taste and touch. This little person now has only to await the miracle of birth.
Abortion: An Orthodox Statement
ABORTION
An Orthodox Statement
By V. Rev. Timothy Baclig
Abortion means the intentional removal of an embryo or fetus from the womb of a pregnant woman as a result of chemical agents or surgical procedure. The Orthodox Church has always opposed the practice of abortion and condemnations have been recorded in the writings of Church Fathers from apostolic times. In the second Century, Tertullian (2c.) stated that “prevention of birth is precipitation of murder; it does not matter whether one takes away a life when formed, or drive it away while forming. He also is a man who is about to be one. Even every fruit already exists in its seed” (Apology 9). St. Basil the Great (4c.) who also wrote on the subject, addresses abortion as premeditated murder. He writes in canons 2 and 8: “She who purposely destroys the fetus shall suffer the punishment of murder.” He goes on to elaborate that there is no distinction between a fetus that is formed or unformed. The earliest Synodal decision on abortion was the 63rd canon of the Synod of Elvira in . The Synod restricts the Holy Eucharist from women guilty of abortion until on their deathbed. The 21st canon of the regional Synod of Ankara (314 AD) decreed that offenders be given a penance of abstinence from Holy Communion for a long period of time and be permitted to attend the Divine Liturgy in contrition and only from the exterior of the church. Abortion is clearly condemned as murder, and consenting pregnant mothers and abortionists as murderers in Canon 91 of the Quinisext Ecumenical Council. In practice, it must be noted that the Orthodox Church has been compassionate to mothers whose lives were jeopardized without an abortion. St. Gregory of Nyssa (4c.) formulated a theory based on the principle that an organism is given life and grows from the moment of its existence. The mind of the Church on the subject of abortion, it must be noted, is rooted in an understanding which is implicit in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and celebrated within the full context of the liturgical life of the Church. The Feasts which bring focus to the subject include: the Conception of St. John the Baptist (Sept. 24), of the Holy Virgin Mother of God (Dec. 8), and of our Lord Himself (Mar. 25). Among the references of scripture the Psalmist records: “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).
In conclusion, it can be said that: human beings are first conceived, receive life at inception, develop and grow as persons created in the image and likeness of God.
For further reading see: Breck, John; The Sacred Gift of Life; Orthodox Christianity and Bioethics; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood; 1998.
Abortion and the Early Church
Abortion and the Early Church
by Michael J. Gorman
Contemporary Christians neglect the teachings of the Church Fathers on key moral and theological issues to their own peril. The earliest specific written references to abortion in Christian literature are those in the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas. The Didache combines a code of Christian morality with a manual of church life and order, while the Epistle of Barnabas is a more theological tract on Christian life and thought. While both of these probably date from the early second century, they most likely drew on Christian sources which had their origins in the late first century.
Both these writings also contain a section based on a Jewish oral and written tradition known as the “Two Ways.” This tradition contrasts the two ways of Life or Light and Death or Darkness. Athanasius notes that it was used extensively in the early church, either as a separate document or as part of the Didache, especially for the training of catechumens and new converts.
The Didache maintains that there is a great difference between these two ways. In an exposition of the second great commandment (”Love your neighbor as yourself”) as part of the Way of Life, the author makes a list of “thou shalt not” statements obviously modeled on, and in part quoting, the Decalogue of the Septuagint. The list of prohibitions includes murder, adultery, sodomy, fornication, theft, the use of magic and aphrodisiacs, infanticide and abortion. Literally, it declares: “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion.” Similarly, the Epistle of Barnabas, in its practical section on the Way of Light, repeats the same words in a list of “thou shalt (not)” statements including, just before the abortion prohibition, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor more than thy own life.” The fetus is seen, not as a part of its mother, but as a neighbor. Abortion is rejected as contrary to other-centered neighbor love.
On the other hand, the Way of Death, according to the Didache, is full of cursing, murders, adulteries, idolatries, robberies and hypocrisies. It is also filled with people who are “murderers of children,” an echo of the prohibition against abortion (though it may also refer to infanticide), and “corrupters of God’s creatures,” rendered as abortuantes in a third century Latin version, reflecting knowledge of the use of the Greek term phthoreus for abortionists. The Epistle of Barnabas uses the same two phrases in its description of the way of “death eternal with punishment.” In both writings the immediate context includes both personal vices and more socially oriented evils such as turning away the needy and oppressing the afflicted.
Both texts regard abortion as murder and provide an ethical context within which abortion should be viewed. “Thou shalt not abort” becomes a sub-commandment of the commandment not to murder. It has a status almost on a par with the Decalogue itself. Use of the commandment form provides a succinct continuation of the Jewish condemnation of deliberate abortion. There is no formed/unformed distinction, no elaboration. Abortion is presented also as an offense against humanity, a defiance of the second great commandment — “Love thy neighbor” — which the Epistle of Barnabas has expanded to say “more than thyself.” Furthermore, abortion is depicted not only as a sin like sexual immorality, but as an evil no less severe and social in scope than oppression of the poor and needy and no less dishonorable than the use of poisons.
The Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas were extremely important in two other respects. First, the widespread use of their “Two Ways” teachings among early Christians assured the disseminating of their position on abortion. Second, later writings appropriated the murder definition, the commandment form, the elevation of the status of the fetus and the context of personal and social evils found in these two early works.
Contemporary with or just after these earliest documents was the Apocalypse of Peter, the most important of the noncanonical apocalypses. It was held in great esteem by the early church and was given canonical status by Clement of Alexandria and by the oldest list of the New Testament canon, the Muratorian Fragment, although it was rejected from the canon in the fourth century. Probably under the influence of oriental and Orphic-Pythagorean eschatology, the author of this apocalypse paints a graphic portrait of hell’s population, which includes this scene:
And near that place I saw another gorge in which the discharge and excrement of the tortured ran down and became like a lake. And there sat women, and the discharge came up to their throats… And these were those who produced children outside marriage and who procured abortions.
Such texts are important for their powerful presentation of the destiny of aborters and the aborted. It is evident that this picture is drawn, even with apocalyptic imagination, from deep ethical and emotional convictions. The theological basis for the entire text must be seen as an understanding of abortion as the culpable murder of a human being. Unborn children are viewed as living beings destined for immortality, and both men and women responsible for aborting them are guilty and worthy of eternal punishment. Methodius of Olympus and Clement of Alexandria were later inspired by this apocalyptic perspective.
Clement of Alexandria (ca 150 — ca 215), in his Prophetic Eclogues, quotes an anonymous writer of the mid-second century, perhaps a Christian Platonist, who argues that the fetus has a soul and is a living person. His argument is based on the idea that angels place the soul in the womb at the time of conception and the new embryo has a soul immediately. The main significance of this text, however, is not in its philosophical and theological speculation but in its connection of questions about the life of the fetus to the New Testament. Clement records that this writer’s proofs that the embryo is alive are the references in Luke 1 to John the Baptist and Jesus in their mothers’ wombs. He makes particular use of Luke 1:41: “And when Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb.” Though the writer focuses on the Baptist and does not even mention abortion, he laid the groundwork for subsequent theological links between abortion and the Incarnation.
In his own writings Clement brought both theology and ethics face to face with contemporary pagan society. In The Tutor (Paedagogus), written about 190-200, Clement addresses Christians concerning the goal of virtue to which the Logos, their tutor, could bring them. In book two, he pictures Alexandrian life in detail in order to warn Christians not to participate in all its luxury and vice and to provide them with a substitute moral code, calling them to extend the Christian spirit throughout the city. In the context of Christian marriage, the goal of which in Clement’s opinion is procreation, he writes:
Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, in order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the matter completely dead, abort at the same time their human feelings.
Clement continues the main themes of the Christian community:
Abortion is killing human life that is under God’s care, design and providence.
That he considered the unborn to be a human being is clear from the clause “if we do not kill” and is also implicit elsewhere in his thoughts on childbirth and the immortality of the soul. Clement was greatly influenced by the Stoics, but his concern for the child itself goes beyond the Stoic concern for doing what is right and in accord with nature. Clement’s own personal and sensitive contribution to the Christian position can be seen in his last clause, where he speaks of the aborting of human feeling.
The Apologists
In the ancient world, the new Christian faith had two unavoidable tasks: self-definition and self-defense. Though these two needs were intimately intertwined, the writers we have just examined were concerned principally with self-definition. There was also a need for self-defense, for giving an explanation of and justification for Christian beliefs and practices. As the Christian faith encountered the world around it, there were natural tensions and conflicts due both to real differences and to mutual misunderstandings. The group of Fathers known as the Apologists arose to answer the pagan criticisms of their religion.
Athenagoras (mid to late second century), the ablest of the Greek apologists for Christianity, addressed the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Lucius Aurelius Commodus in 177. Athenagoras was concerned to answer three frequent charges made against Christianity — atheism, incest and cannibalism — and thus to uphold Christian belief and moral standards. To the charge of cannibalism, stemming from a misunderstanding of the Eucharist, Athenagoras responded that cannibalism implied murder and that Christians would not even watch a murder, for example, a gladiator fight, much less perform one. His defense continues:
What reason would we have to commit murder when we say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God? For the same person would not regard the fetus in the womb as a living thing and therefore an object of God’s care [and then kill it]… But we are altogether consistent in our conduct. We obey reason and do not override it.
[Athenagoras, Legatio 35]
If Athenagoras’ position were not the accepted Christian attitude, his argument would lose all its force. The three important elements in the Christian position appear already in explicit form in this late second century document: abortion is considered murder; the guilty must give account to God; the fetus is a living being, the object of God’s care. Athenagoras’s contribution is to set the issue of abortion in an argument for Christian practice based on the Christian view of the sanctity of life. He writes that Christians have renounced murder in all its forms — mentioning the common Roman practices of gladiator contests, animal fights, exposure and abortion — in order to avoid becoming polluted and defiled. It is this absolute abhorrence of bloodshed in any form which drives them away from even looking at practices such as gladiator fights and criminal executions. This view stood in stark contrast to the prevailing Roman lifestyle.
The most eloquent apologist in the West was Tertullian (ca 160-ca 240), who ranks second only to Augustine for his Latin contributions to the church. His most important work is the Apology, written in 197 and directed to governors of Roman provinces and to the emperor Septimus Severus. Like Athenagoras in the East, Tertullian sought to defend Christianity against charges of immorality, atheism and treason. In refuting accusations of secret crimes (chapters 7-9), he dismisses as a rumor the charge that “we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it.” Later, to strengthen his case, he adds:
That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will show that in part openly, in part secretly, practices prevail among you which have led you perhaps to credit similar things about us.
After citing mythological and historical cases of child sacrifice and exposure in the Greco-Roman world, Tertullian writes:
In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.
His comparison of the seed and the fruit conveys with imagination the universal Christian concern for life. It also has a parallel, probably independent but coming from the same ethical roots, in Philo’s comparison of the embryo to a statue ready to be removed from the artist’s studio.
Tertullian reveals that the basis of the early Christian position on abortion was the commandment not to murder. Like earlier Christian writers, he considers the fetus a human being, though still dependent on the mother. Speaking for the Christian community, he consequently condemns abortion as “speedier” homicide. For Tertullian, dependence on the mother did not mean, as it did for pagan thought and for Jewish and Roman law, that the fetus is merely a part of the mother. In another work he appeals to the mother — not to the father, the philosophers or Roman law — to make the pronouncement about a fetus’s status:
In this matter the best teacher, judge, and witness is the sex that is concerned with birth. I call on you, mothers, whether you are now pregnant or have already borne children; let women who are barren and men keep silence! We are looking for the truth about the nature of woman; we are examining the reality of your pains. Tell us: Do you feel any stirring of life within you in the fetus? Does your groin tremble, your sides shake, your whole stomach throb as the burden you carry changes its position? Are not these moments a source of joy and assurance that the child within you is alive and playful? Should his restlessness subside, would you not be immediately concerned for him?
[De anima 25. 3.]
Writing in about 210-13, in this essay Tertullian attempts to refute all the misunderstandings of the soul which he perceived in pagans and Christians alike. Among these were ideas of the pre-existence of the soul, God’s creation of the individual soul at conception, and the infusion of the soul after birth. Tertullian had a notion of the soul as material and argues throughout chapters 23 to 37 that the act of procreation produces both soul and body and that life, therefore, begins at conception. He adduces arguments from medicine, logic and Scripture — including references to Luke 1:41 and 46 and to Jeremiah 1:5:
They [John and Jesus] were both alive while still in the womb. Elizabeth rejoiced as the infant leaped in her womb; Mary glorifies the Lord because Christ within inspired her. Each mother recognizes her child and each is known by her child who is alive, being not merely souls but also spirits.
He continues:
Thus, you read the word of God, spoken to Jeremias: “Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee.” If God forms us in the womb, He also breathes on us as He did in the beginning: “And God formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.” Nor could God have known man in the womb unless he were a whole man. “And before thou camest forth from the womb, I sanctified thee.” Was it, then, a dead body at that stage? Surely it was not, for “God is the God of the living and not the dead.”
Tertullian is the first Christian to make the explicit connection between these biblical passages and the issue of abortion. Though his main purpose is to prove his particular view of the soul, one of the motives for so doing is to criticize the practice of abortion and to show that even therapeutic abortion is the taking of a human life. For Tertullian, the witness of the Incarnation and of Scripture is to the humanity of the fetus.
Minucius Felix was the only third-century apologist which the West produced. His Octavius (ca 200-225), written in Rome in a period of persecution, is in the form of a Ciceronian dialogue in which a lawyer mediates between a proponent of Christianity and a proponent of paganism, the latter eventually being converted. After demonstrating the falsehood and immorality of paganism, the Christian addresses himself to the charge that Christian initiations take place by slaughtering a baby. His answer parallels Tertullian’s Apology. He protests that no one could kill a “tender and so tiny” baby, and that whoever thinks someone could do such a deed must be capable of it himself. Minucius Felix proceeds to accuse the pagans of infanticide and abortion:
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 the infant.
The Latin word translated “infanticide” is parricidium, the Roman legal word for intentional killing, especially of a relative. Abortion, of course, was not considered parricide in Roman law; Minucius opposes his culture’s legal view of abortion. His subsequent assertion that Christians do not procure abortions is necessarily apologetic, but it must have been an accurate generalization of Christian practice to have been of any value to his defense of Christianity.
Abortion in the Church
Although all Christian writers opposed abortion, pagan influence on the church was unavoidable, and abortion was not unknown among “so-called Christians” (the term is Origen’s). The situation was recognized as a serious problem by Origen, Hippolytus and Cyprian.
While the apologists praised Christians’ refusal to imitate pagan practice, Hippolytus (ca 170-ca 236) was aware of subtle Roman influence on the church and of the church’s failure to criticize that influence. Pope Callistus himself approved of a Roman law allowing concubine marriages, even though such marriages often resulted in unwanted pregnancies. Sometime after 222 Hippolytus wrote about the effect of Callistus’s laxity:
Women, reputed believers, began to resort to drugs for producing sterility, and to gird themselves round, so to expel what was being conceived on account of their not wishing to have a child either by a slave or by any paltry fellow, for the sake of their family and excessive wealth. Behold, into how great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time!
[Refutation of All Heresies (Philosophumena) 9.7]
In the face of growing immorality, especially among wealthier believing women, Hippolytus continued to hold forth the orthodox belief that abortion is murder.
Similarly, for Cyprian (ca 200/210-258), orthodox belief and practice were closely related. This popular writer was not at all surprised to learn that Novatian was not only schismatic but also immoral, abusing widows, orphans, his, father and even his wife:
The womb of his wife was smitten by a blow of his heel; and in the miscarriage that soon followed, the offspring was brought forth, the fruit of a father’s murder. And now he dares to condemn the hands of those who sacrifice, when he himself is more guilty in his feet, by which the son, who was about to be born, was slain?
[Cyprian, Letter 52.2, numbered 48 in some editions]
The theme of guilt and judgment reappears in apocalyptic texts of the third century. Methodius of Olympus alludes to unnamed “inspired writings,” probably the second-century Apocalypse of Peter, which promise life to infant victims of abortion and infanticide, and judgment before Christ to the aborters:
Wherefore have we received it handed down in Scriptures inspired by God that children who are born before their time, even if they be the offspring of adultery, are delivered to care-taking angels . . . How could they have confidently summoned their parents before the judgment seat of Christ to bring a charge against them, saying, “Thou, O Lord, didst not grudgingly deny us the light that is common [to all], but these have exposed us to death, despising thy commandment.”
While the text may refer only to infanticide, a widespread practice among the Romans, the phrase “born before their time” was an idiom for abortion. A theology embodying a high view of life is present in this passage: life is under God’s will and providence from its inception and that are we responsible for the care of life “before the judgment seat of Christ.”
The author is Dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to many articles on abortion, he is the author of two forthcoming books, The Elements of Exegesis (Hendrickson) and a work on St. Paul’s spirituality (Eerdmans). This is a shortened version of a chapter in Abortion and the EarlyChurch. Citations have been removed in most cases. Originally published by InterVarsity Press and Paulist Press in 1982, Gorman’s book has been reissued by Wipf & Stock, 150 W. Broadway, Eugene, Oregon97401. The book is available at a reduced price directly from the author for $8.50 including shipping within the US ($10 outside the US with a check drawn on a US bank). Send a check made out to Michael Gorman at the Ecumenical Institute of Theology, 5400 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, MD21210.
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