Was the early Christian Church against abortion?

Factual Questions
21

OTTOMH Onan’s real crime was trying to cheat the Lord in a real estate deal. Onan’s brother dies without an heir. G-d says to Onan ’ You are going to have sex with your dead brother’s wife. She will have a son. But the son will be your brother’s heir and not yours.’ Onan says okay, but pulls out and ‘spills his seed on the ground’. The Lord knowing that Onan damn well knew what He meant, smites Onan. I maintain that had Onan just said ‘nope. I’m not doing it’ he would have lived. Look at all the trouble Jonah goes through not to obey the Lord. But rather than being honest with G-d, Onan tries to cheat Him AND gets himself the pleasure of sex without actually doing what the Lord wanted.

Re The Ordeal Of Bitter Herbs

The books of Jewish folklore I’ve read have the woman dying in horrible, graphic manner. Whether this is the original meaning, I cannot say.

22

That is certainly the recent Orthodox interpretation of that passage. I don’t buy it. But I am not an expert.

23

Onan was punished for refusing to provide his dead brother’s wife with a child who would have been raised in the deceased brother’s name and, very importantly, would have inherited from him; which would have prevented the inheritance from going to Onan.

The story really has nothing to do with birth control in any other context.

– or, kinda, what DocCathode said.

24

Yeah, that was a a joke. Onan is about cheating the Lord. And Sodam and Gomorrah were punished for being inhospitable to guests.

25

This post doesn’t seem to address the earlier posts. It quotes something that had already been discussed above, where the claim was that the translation with “abortion” seems to be a more modern reading. And it ignores the distinction being made between abortion before and after the quickening. We all know early Christians condemned the latter. But did they condemn the former?

It’s going to be really hard to argue against abortion at a time when it would take weeks to know if you were even pregnant, and in which the society in which they were a part of consumed abortifacients in large numbers, yet none of what they treated as scripture ever condemned that practice.

And, yes, what @puzzlegal describes very much sounds like a ritual abortion to me, too. The Torah texts are not shy about mentioning death, so I think they’d explicitly mention if death were the result. And thigh very much is a common euphemism for the reproductive organs at the time period. And the contrast is that she will be able to bear children if she passes the test, suggesting she won’t be able to if she fails.

The NIV apparently includes the miscarry translation directly:

*Numbers 5:27-28 (NIV)

If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. [28] If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.

Of course, that’s only evidence that modern scholars interpret it that way. But it’s telling that this is allowed even in the NIV, which specifically brings in translators of various denominations, including those who believe abortion is a sin. If even those see the “miscarry” translation as more accurate, without even a footnote to argue a different translation, that suggests this idea is pretty well accepted by scholars.

Granted, I do not believe the NIV has Orthodox Jewish translators.

26

Specifically by trying to rape two angels.:wink:

27

This is an important distinction. And I think both of the citations I mentioned support the idea that the writers of the Bible viewed abortion as a bad thing that wasn’t killing a person. In the one, a man who inadvertently killed fetus had to pay compensation to the father. In the other, losing the fetus is a punishment for the mother. And modern Jews note that the very first commandment God gave to Adam and Eve was “be fruitful and multiply”. I think the Jews and their Christian spiritual descendants have always been pro-procreation.

This is also a good point, although I’m not sure the OP was claiming that the early church wouldn’t be anti-abortion BECAUSE it had a lot of female leaders.

I have no idea where I read this, but several years back a read a somewhat scholarly book about the role of women historically in Islam. And one of the vignettes was about a man who bought a slave, and had sex with her (which was legal and legitimate to both of them) but then he was dismayed when she became pregnant, because the law said that if she bore him a child he had to marry her, and couldn’t re-sell her. But he couldn’t make her have an abortion right away, because they were on an ocean voyage or something. And by the time they were in a place where he could obtain an abortion for her, the baby had quickened, so abortion was no longer legal. And ultimately, the judge ruled that he had to marry the slave, and wasn’t allowed to sell her for the profit he had intended when he bought her.

The author presented this as an example of the rights of women in society. But I have to think that having your owner force you to have an abortion so he doesn’t have to support you sounds pretty shitty. Abortion can certainly be used against women.

28

I’m possibly a little late; I see that several good points have been mentioned by other people. I was doing some research. I thought that it might be interesting for people to see some of the actual quotes.

Some of the earliest surviving Christian writing is rather dense, and can take 2 or 3 read-throughs to fully grasp it; how much of that is due to translations issues, I have no idea.

1st quote:
“Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born.”
The Epistle of Barnabas, chap. 19 (from Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1)
From the Introductory Note–
“The writer of this Epistle is supposed to have been an Alexandrian Jew of the times of Trajan and Hadrian.”

2nd quote:
“Who does not reckon among the things of greatest interest the contests of gladiators and wild beasts, especially those which are given by you? But we, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles. How, then, when we do not even look on, lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death? And when we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it.”
A Plea for the Christians, chap. 35, by Athenagoras (AD133-190) Note: Athenagoras addressed this book to the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Anoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus.
(from Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 2)

3rd quote:
“How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul formed together at one and the same time? Or does one of them precede the other in natural formation? We indeed maintain that both are conceived, and formed, and perfectly simultaneously, as well as born together; and that not a moment’s interval occurs in their conception, so that, a prior place can be assigned to either. Judge, in fact, of the incidents of man’s earliest existence by those which occur to him at the very last. As death is defined to be nothing else than the separation of body and soul, life, which is the opposite of death, is susceptible of no other definition than the conjunction of body and soul. If the severance happens at one and the same time to both substances by means of death, so the law of their combination ought to assure us that it occurs simultaneously to the two substances by means of life. Now we allow that life begins with conception, because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does.”
A Treatise on the Soul, chap. 27, by Tertullian (155-225/240)
(from Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3)

4th quote:
“And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; at another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death. There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels, and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some parts of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed. . . . To us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide; and so much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our food.
The Octavius, chap. 30 by Minucius Felix (died c.250)
(from Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 4)
Note: “parricide” is the killing of a close relative.

5th quote:
“And the hearers of Callistus being delighted with his tenets, continue with him, thus mocking both themselves as well as many others , and crowds of these dupes stream together into his school. Wherefore also his pupils are multiplied, and they plume themselves upon the crowds (attending the school) for the sake of pleasures which Christ did not permit. But in contempt of Him, they place restraint on the commission of no sin, alleging that they pardon those who acquiesce (in Callistus’ opinions). For even also he permitted females, if they were unwedded, and burned with passion at an age at all events unbecoming, or if they were not disposed to overturn their own dignity through a legal marriage, that they might have whomsoever they would choose as a bedfellow, whether a slave or free, and that a woman , though not legally married, might consider such a companion as a husband. Whence 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!”
The Refutation of all Heresies, Book IX, chap. 7 by Hippolytus (170-236)
(from Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5)
From the Contents of Book IX–
“And how Callistus, intermingling the heresy of Cleomenes, the disciple of Noetus, with that of Theodotus, constructed another more novel heresy, and what sort the life of this (heretic) was.”
In other words, Hippolytus is describing a certain heretic named Callistus, and how his teachings and practices differed from the early Christians.

29

As a separate matter, I though I might respond to this.

The early Christians faced persecution, up to and including death, precisely BECAUSE of their beliefs. For example, many of them were executed because they refused to worship the Emperor as a god.

Therefore, many of the earliest writers (Justin Martyr is the best known, but far from the only one) went to great lengths to explain and defend their beliefs. Some of the writers grounded their arguments in the Bible; some compared and contrasted Christian beliefs to the teachings of the pagan philosophers; some defended their faith from pagan attacks; some simply tried to convince others of the rightness and correctness of the Christian beliefs.

In short, we know a rather great deal what the very early Christians believed on a wide variety of topics.

30

Well, there seems to be a fair bit of textual support for the interpretation that women in ancient Rome sometimes deliberately tried to induce abortions even in the face of male disapproval. Here’s a sample from the poet Ovid’s Amores:

The author of that article continues:

So although it may not be possible to say whether Roman women saw abortion as “liberating” per se, it seems undeniable that many of them voluntarily attempted it because they considered it preferable to continued pregnancy and childbirth, at least.

I think it’s more “projecting” to imagine that modern mandatory abortion policies have parallels in antiquity. I don’t know of any ancient society that attempted such hazardous procedures on fertile young women against their will. Abortion procedures existed because women themselves wanted to terminate their pregnancies.

31

I’ll buy this:

But this seems a bit of a stretch:

Wouldn’t it be fairer to say that abortion procedures existed because people wanted to terminate women’s preganancies? Sometimes the person wanting that was the woman herself; sometimes someone else.

You say that you “don’t know of any ancient society that attempted such hazardous procedures on fertile young women against their will”, but further up the page puzzlegal discusses a case of a female slave made pregnant by her master who wishes an abortion to be performed but is frustrated by circumstances and by the rules about when abortions can and cannot be performed; in that case it doesn’t appear that the woman had any agency at all, and I don’t have any difficulty in accepting that such a lack of agency could have been commonplace though, I agree, not universal.

Perhaps the takeaway is that, as regards the social status of women, the salient point is not whether or when abortion is legal, but who gets to make and enforce decisions about women’s sexuality, fertility and reproduction. Even where a woman does choose to have an abortion - a hazardous procedure, remember, in the ancient world - it’s not necessarily a given that this is an unconstrained choice; she may make the choice because of the attitudes of others towards her, and the way she will be treated if she does not.

Which means that, regarding the point made by in the OP, it’s not a given that women in the ancient world saw increased opportunties to risk their lives and health in order to avert mistreatment from the men who controlled or, in some cases, owned them as the key to liberation. We know that the early Christian church seems to have been disproportionately attractive to women. I don’t think we explain this by saying that it must have had a more relaxed attitude to abortion than is commonly supposed because, frankly, evidence for that is lacking and, even if it were true, that wouldn’t give Christianity a competitive edge in a society where abortion was already permitted and practised. A more plausible explanation is that Christianity promoted the status and agency of women in other ways, it seems to me.

32

-snip-

Opposing the standard practice of infanticide could cause more women to chose abortion to avoid needing to chose infanticide (which arguably the Bible is sort of OK with at times, with God rescuing the ones that He wants to)

33

I’m quite familiar with the New Testament and the parables and admonishments of Jesus. I can’t recall ever reading anything pertaining to abortion per se.

We must remember, however, that human populations at that time were very low compared to the billions we have now. Having children was very important and considered one of a woman’s most important duties. I can’t see how abortion wouldn’t have been frowned upon for that reason alone.

34

Thanks. I think this answers the OP. I stand corrected.

35

As I understand it, the early Christian writers (e.g., Tertullian, Augustine) are focused on the idea of “ensoulment” which may or may not take place around the 40 day mark (and possible later for females). They’re not talking about quickening, which comes later (and is, I think, a distinction that Thomas Aquinas and Gratian adopt – and is broadly consistent with the Islamic 120 day formulation). But, as I understand the writing, both Tertullian and Augustine clearly condemned abortion before the quickening.

36

That ordeal is really a mystery, and is hotly debated by Talmud scholars.

37

Quite possibly, yes, but remember, the early Christian leaders all decided that the Didache was bogus and not part of canon. Same with The Revelation of Peter (c. 150 CE).

So even if the Didache condemned abortion here, that sheds no light at all on how the Church viewed abortion.

But of course the ancients were against abortion, and for a very good reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with “pro-Life” or when Life starts. Even herbal abortifacients were quite dangerous. They were deadly poisons if the wrong dose was given or the taker had some health issue that the herbalist had no concept of. The Romans called them "poisoners’ and they had the death penalty. Indeed often a abortion was murder- as the mother died.

Note that today we dont use any of that crap (yes, one of the herbs is possibly extinct, but similar herbs in that family were also used, plus many others)- because they arent safe nor effective.

So the main reason the ancients were against abortion was safety. Same with several contraception herbs.

I dont remember many discussions in the ancient church of when Life began.

38

Do note, none of this was accepted as canon.

Yes, nothing at all in the NT or canon, one mysterious part in the OT, which does seems like some sort of abortion?

39

This was an issue clear up into the 19th or 20th century. It took quite a while for abortion to become safer on average than continuing the pregnancy.

The question isn’t whether populations of that time seem low to us now. The question is how many children a particular family or group could support at the time. Attempting to raise more children than that endangers both the children already existing and the women who might otherwise produce children at a later time when they can be fed. Societies generally had ways of discouraging excess children as well as ways of encouraging the production of enough children.

40

Remember guys, note that of all those early Christian writings that condemn or seem to condemn abortion - none of them made it into canon.

If the early church was so dead set against abortion, why not include one of them?

Of course Roman law was anti-abortion for safety reasons- among others. So perhaps the early Church saw no reason to include it.