Abortion: What Christians Don't Know
Facts Hidden From Christians For 2000 Years
By John Maris ©2024
Adultery and divorce are commonly practiced by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, yet there is considerable condemnation for both in the Old and New Testament. Conversely, abortion is not forbidden anywhere in the scriptures, nor is it ever mentioned. Yet Christians, and some Jewish and Muslim groups added laws to condemn or prevent abortion. Not only are fornication, adultery and divorce common, they are rarely condemned. What did Jesus think; was he for or against abortion?
Jesus ended the law covenant given to the Jews through Moses and was careful not to add new laws. He gave only two: love God and love neighbor. A new Christian ethic of personal enlightenment guided by an inner force called “Holy Spirit” was confirmed by the Apostle Paul. Personal contact with God through Jesus was to guide individuals using a trained conscience. Paul said no one was allowed to add new laws but each congregation could choose to make rules of morality, leadership, and practice. No Christian then believed their own laws or rules should become a mandate for a worldly government.
The History of Abortion
Women through time have used abortion. Hunter-gatherers saw nature and conflicts ending pregnancy. They faced huge, rapacious predators and intense competition for resources. Stresses often ended fetal life. Women died during childbirth. When no caretaker could sustain a newborn, they were killed or left to die. Events that ended fetal life could enable the survival of destitute families moving daily. Drought, famine and a lack of protein also ended countless pregnancies. By the time villages and city-building began 14,000 years ago, plants that could be eaten to bring abortion would have become known. We have textual proof plants were used for abortion from ancient Egypt during the 2nd millennium BC.
The most common reason the early Egyptians practiced abortion using plant extracts may have been adultery. Married women were forbidden divorce. If a dalliance caused a pregnancy, women faced death by execution. Only keeping the affair secret and ending the pregnancy insured the woman's survival. Cheating men were sometimes ostracized and made outcasts or slaves. Women who were found out could be beaten to death or sold into perpetual servitude and slavery. Husbands, fathers and family members can still demand abortion in some cultures, due to financial hardship or religious belief.
The Jews and Muslims followed the Old Testament guidance in the case of accidental fetal injury or death. If someone injured a pregnant woman and she lost an unborn baby, the offender could be put to death. Most cultures prized children and protected pregnant women assiduously. In ancient times this was crucial since children insured survival. There was no social security. Only healthy, productive offspring guaranteed care of the elderly. We have evidence Neanderthals honored and protected grandparents. This could only happen with sufficient birthing that later supported the aged.
The death penalty for injuring a pregnant woman who then miscarried was considered important because an unborn child could end up being the difference between life and death in the future of the mother, father and siblings. In time, a lost or unborn child could end an entire family's existence.
Opposition to Abortion
Artificial methods provoking abortion were painful and dangerous. Hippocrates urged women to avoid available methods. There was also a psychological impact that varied from person to person that could be extremely damaging. The family has always been the core of a healthy society. The most prosperous nations encouraged large, strong families protected by strict laws. God was also the foundation for the most successful nations from the earliest civilizations through the present. From the first cuneiform writings there is always God, a priesthood, and religion at the center of prosperous nations such as Egypt and the earliest great powers in Mesopotamia. Family values always included God, a positive and productive business and social life, and children working alongside the parents. They were taught to understand the economic, legal and governmental system within which a family grew and operated.
Did Early Christians and Jews Have Abortions?
Unfortunately war, plague, famine, drought and death destroyed countless cities and families. Women with children often lost husbands to war. Widows were alone raising three or more young children and suddenly the mother found that before her husband was killed, she was impregnated again. Now she would have to work in the fields for food; hunting and farming long hours. It was rigorous and often life threatening. They could not risk their little ones. They could not sacrifice them for a new birth. They did practice abortion. Jews were especially likely to use abortion during their slavery in Egypt.
From the very first written text 5,500 years ago, no script signified any rule or law about abortion. No civilization ever assigned citizen's rights to the unborn. Any claim that such rights existed superseding maternal rights is false. Never has such a right been noted. Never aborting and protecting the unborn has been considered sacrosanct to most women in most cultures, but it was never mandatory, enforced by a state. The cultural hegemony and laws to define and order birthing options is fairly recent.
Buddhists believe all living things are sacred but there is no prohibition against killing for survival. There is also no imposition of sanctions for a woman who ends her unborn child's life, though such a choice is extremely rare for women, whether religious or not in most societies today and throughout history.
Some bristle at the notion that the unborn are not called “people, humans, life, or sacred” by the state, but such has not been seen in history. Not only due to practical limits, but a majority believe no other person or state should be able to impose this kind of intimate, personal bodily intrusion. Most nations and governments have encouraged birthing and large families with incentives and extra privileges.
Having an abortion does not imply a woman is anti-child or anti-family and many have abortions when young and later begin a family. Since some women and children will continue to seek abortions and because abortion can be dangerous, most accept the need for medical care and supervision. Some want medicines and surgery withheld. Some demand that abortion for any reason must be actively forbidden by the state so any practitioner that performs abortion or writes a prescription for an abortion pill must be punished. Such punishment would then have to be the same for any pharmacist that fills an abortion prescription, or midwife that advises women on birthing choices. The web of complicity can grow larger and larger.
Certain groups go even farther insisting any form of birth control including a condom or birth control pill should also be banned and never sold. This was the decision of the first Catholic Church (c. 250). Some still believe in this exact same, strict statute: sex is for procreation only. According to certain advocates, sanctions should be counseling, community service or something more extreme for using any device, pill or method that prevents pregnancy. All sexual activity must be intended to produce children.
Abortion and the Soul
Around 540 BC, a leading Greek scholar, teacher and writer Pythagoras argued for an ethereal soul that entered the body at conception. Pythagoras believed the soul animated the body. This has been repeated by religious people who say all human “life” has a soul and is sacred. Ending unborn life is therefore murder. They oppose any allowances, exceptions or forbearance.
Aristotle also argued that a “soul” animated human beings in the womb. He believed that a soul was a being from another realm that could enter the pregnant woman's womb at any time during pregnancy. Others such as Pythagoras said no. He was convinced the soul entered the woman at conception. There was back-and-forth among the religious and non-religious about the unborn, but no state that we know of ever took on the question, or established a written rule or law against abortion.
The First Abortion Ban
St. Augustine is considered the father of the Catholic Church. He wrote a list of rules for monks. Rules for monks was a euphemism for rules for everyone. Rules such as no bathing, unless ordered by a doctor, was a ruse, as only clergy were doctors. Their most common remedy was bleeding the sick. St. Augustine all but ended bathing 'unless you absolutely had to,' once a year. It may have started as a ban of public bathing since nudity became a sin, unless married. Church rationale gradually changed to all 'bathing is unhealthy.' No doubt the spread of plague, disease, miscarriage and the early, increased mortality that followed was the result of this belief. Regardless, it endured for over 1500 years.
St. Augustine changed his mind about conception. The Church had already banned all local remedies intended to end a pregnancy. St. Augustine was uncertain about when a soul entered the unborn, but finally asserted that life began at conception. Therefore sex could only be for those married by the Church. Sex within marriage for pleasure, was then also forbidden. Despite this, the Church never clarified any sanction for abortion. As Augustine grew in power at the end of the 4th C, his writings on sex, contraception, and abortion became official Church law.
As the Church grew in power establishing itself as the supreme state throughout Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, their Holy Roman Empire dictated all thought and views on morality. For 2000 years many of those concepts have held fast. We see that the majority opinion on abortion mostly hails from one man: St. Augustine of Hippo, Africa.
St. Augustine demanded harsh correction of Christians in countless non-Catholic sects. He also condemned Jews, Muslims, Donatists, Arianists and other Catholics to physical punishment. He believed sex was the portal through which all sin entered the world. He sought a prohibition of all sex not intended for procreation. (See: The Catholic Church and Contraception, Part I Vincent Ryan Ruggiero 1/23/22).
St. Augustine has continued to be the most influential Catholic in their 2000 year history and has even had a major impact on non-Catholic Christians. Christians do not know that St. Augustine actually wrote explicitly of his belief in the physical persecution of non-believers in direct conflict with Jesus Christ.
The adamant opposition to any Christian who did not agree with the doctrinal positions of the Catholic Church began early with the primary founders of the Church such as Irenaeus in the 2nd C. Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies. This treatise forcefully condemned Christians such as the Marcionites for thinking they could approach God directly through Jesus Christ instead of using the Church as the mediator. Tertullian famously created the seven deadly sins which established the larger Catholic sect of Christians as far more structured and rule driven than other, non-aligned groups.
The Church had begun to teach that Bishops were ordained by God to speak for God, just as Jesus had. Bishops became the mediators, or substitutes for Christ and most Catholics accepted this dogma. They began relying on Church rituals for guidance.
When a case against a rebel, non-believer, or wayward Christian presented, the person was shown to be lagging in several areas. Dutiful family, friends, neighbors and others then came forward to confess and give their own damaging testimony about the accused person's transgressions (such as abortion or wanton lustiness), which proved the accused was demon possessed, morally unclean or apostate.
Dozens of implements of torture were used for confession, correction, and death. They are displayed in various museums all over the world. Burning alive was a common punishment for those such as Joan of Arc who pleaded innocent but were accused of demon possession and heresy. Joan of Arc suffered brutal interrogation and rape. Heresy or opposition to Church doctrine was a sign of the anti-Christ.
Benedictine rules against smiling, talking, starting a business or making a profit, were only for monks and the poor. Because the Pope needed armies for crusades, inquisitions, conquest and defense, a Noble class was needed. Lands the Church had or wanted required warriors. This meant an elite, upper class group of Nobles that became the aristocrats of the Dark and Middle Ages could do as they pleased. The Church granted them titles and land and they gathered armies to fight, kill and convert the enemy.
The poor became poorer, suffocated by the demands of the Nobles they paid for their ramshackle dwellings and farms. This type of rule lasted well after Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517, as even the Protestants mostly kept the strict proclamations against sex, abortion potions and methods. There were no non-sectarian schools or books so superstitions, gossip, fear, and guilt were life's daily lessons. Only ideas taught by the Church regarding science, biology and history were part of everyday knowledge until the Pope sanctioned the mid-Atlantic slave trade. Once wealth and properity began to return in Europe, liberalization followed.
Present Day Ethics
Some have adjusted to accept weeks after conception when the egg is fertilized, to be the beginning of human life. But most Christians still believe it is the moment of conception. “Life” remains undefined and ambiguous, human but not a citizen, a person but not a whole person, partially conscious but not fully conscious or formed. But still endowed with unalienable rights, sacred and holy for many believers.
With or without scriptural, religious or state law, women who were Catholics, Protestants and others used abortion secretly for centuries. It is mostly thought to be a choice that is personal and cultural. For many women their decisions are guided by individual conscience, morals and ethics.
Catholic influence was minor in the new America because Catholics remained in Europe during the American revolution. Most were loyal to the Church and the King. There was no sanction in America, and punishment for abortion soon disappeared. So it remains today a cultural construct created by the original Catholic Church and endorsed by some religious groups and individuals using a variety of scriptural and personal rationales. The rise of hegemony and insistence on state action is recent.
Why do some accept the notion that their beliefs about abortion must be adhered to by all? It is simply a sensitivity to the actual experience of giving birth to a child as a sacred physical event. It is elevated to another level. Advocates truly believe those who abort are killing a child of God or the potential for something good that could come into the world. They believe they have the right to make laws of conscience for others, and proselytize and organize to urge or enforce their beliefs.
Rarely discussed are the millions of women who were never meant to become mothers. Countless sufferers and predators alike have attested to this. Many births have resulted in the most heinous abuse and depravity. Parents who do not want or deserve children but feel morally compelled to have and raise them, do a great disservice to humanity. The record and testimony of adoptees is filled with abuse, chronic despair and lifelong pain. Some are not grateful their lives were saved. Others reconcile the reasons they were given up for adoption or cast away and enjoy productive and happy lives.
Final Thoughts
For my first 24 years I was given daily Bible lessons. I read the entire Bible many times and gave countless talks, lectures and sermons. I proselytized for decades using the Old and New Testament.
Despite being instructed within an institution of higher Christian learning and memorizing 1000s of scriptures, I never understood the battle over abortion. Anyone of us can choose to give our life to save another's. Anyone of us can choose to take a life to save our own. Both judgments fall within the bounds of ethics, morality and religious belief. Therefore, it follows that women who believe their own personal survival is threatened psychologically or physically by having a child can have an abortion.
There is also the matter of faith. What kind of faith do believers have if they insist every “body” on this plane of existence is sacred? At least within the Christian belief system, this world or physical body is not what we are supposed to live for, or worship. So we can ask this question: What would Jesus say?
“Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body.” “Do not store up treasures on earth... but heaven.”
--- Matthew 10:28 and Matthew 6:19-21.
To the woman who wants to end the life of an unborn child there is only the rule of conscience. To the Christian onlooker; no one is supposed to judge another's choice when no commandment or law exists.
-End
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