Was Jesus Pro-Abortion?

By Mark Davis © 10/10/24

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 some Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups have added laws to condemn or prevent abortion. Not only are fornication, adultery and divorce common, they are rarely condemned.

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 via 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 believed personal rules were applicable to the state; forcing one's personal conscience on all.

Women throughout time have used abortion often. Early hunter-gatherers recognized certain vigorous activities ended pregnancy. Huge, rapacious carnivores threatened, and struggles brought termination. Pressures that ended fetal life were crucial to the survival of a small tribe. Drought, famine and a lack of protein ended countless pregnancies. By the time villages and city-building began about 14,000 years ago, plant combinations that eliminated pregnancy were no doubt discovered and used. Written confirmation of concoctions used to end pregnancy exist in the 2^nd millennium B.C. from ancient Egypt.

The Roots of Abortion

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 couple's survival. Husbands, fathers and family members can demand abortion in some cultures, due to financial hardship, religion, or culture.

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 was put to death. Most cultures prized children and protected pregnant women assiduously. In ancient times it was far more crucial since children insured their 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 and offspring supporting aged relatives.

The death penalty for injuring a pregnant woman who then miscarried was considered viable because an unborn child could end up being the difference between life and death in the mother's future. A lost child or unborn baby could end an entire family's future.

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 and the most prosperous nations encouraged large, healthy families protected by strict laws. God was the foundation for the most successful nations from the earliest civilizations through the present. From the very first cuneiform writings there is always God, a priesthood, and religion at the center of prosperous nations such as Egypt and the earliest powers in Mesopotamia. Family values always included a positive and productive business and social life where the children were working alongside the parents being trained for the legal system a family operated under.

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 life threatening. They could not risk their little ones. They could not sacrifice them for a new birth. They did abort.

From the very first written text 5,300 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 superceding female rights, is false. Never has any such right been known. Mandatory female birthing is not a natural law or longstanding religious principle. The cultural hatred for certain choices only females can make is invented and 100% cultural.

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.

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. The majority believe no other person or state should be able to impose this kind of mandate.

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 women will always seek abortions and abortion can be dangerous, most doctors accept the need to regulate and supervise. Others maintain that all medicines and surgery should be withheld and some demand that abortion for any reason must be actively forbidden by the state. 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. That is a very large number of people.

A few go even farther. Any form of birth control including a condom or birth control pill should also be banned and never sold anywhere. This was also the decision of the first Catholic Church. Some still believe in this exact same, strict rule. Sex is for procreation only. According to them, sanctions could be harsh reproval or something more extreme.

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. The soul animated the body. This is repeated by many religious people from all faiths. Therefore, all human “life” is sacred and sancrosanct. To end the unborn life is murder. They oppose any allowance. But they have read no such command from any ancient religious text. They demand nonetheless.

Aristotle argued that there was such a thing as a “soul” that animated human beings in the womb. He argued that a soul was a being from another realm that could enter the pregnant woman's womb at any time during her pregnancy. Others such as Pythagoras said no. He was convinced the soul entered the woman at conception. There was some back and forth among the religious and non-religious about the unborn but no state ever took on the question or tried to establish any law based on one position or the other.

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 like no bathing unless ordered by a doctor was a kind of 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 against public bathing since nudity became a sin, unless married. Church rationale altered to “bathing is unhealthy.” There is no doubt the great amount of plague, disease, miscarriage and shortened lives that followed were the result of this belief. Regardless, it endured for over 1000 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.

When a case against a rebel, non-believer, or wayward Christian presented, the person was shown to be lagging in several ways and dutiful family, neighbors and relatives 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 items fill museums all over the world displaying implements of torture (for confession), punishment, or death. Burning at the stake was common for refusal to confess obvious sin, demon possession, apostasy or ideas that were in opposition to Church doctrine (a sign of the anti-Christ).

But, alas, even the Benedictine rules against smiling, talking, starting a business or making a profit, only applied to the poor. Virtuosity ended with the impoverished because the Pope needed armies for crusades, inquisitions, conquest and defense. Lands the Church had or wanted required warriors to defend or defeat. This required an elite, upper class group of nobles that became the aristocrats of the Dark and Middle Ages.

The Church had to grant them titles and land to lure them to gather armies and fight, kill and convert the enemy. The poor became sicker and poorer and then were suffocated by the demands of the nobles they paid for their ramshackle dwellings and farms. This type of rulership lasted well after Martin Luther published his 95 thesis in 1517, as even the Protestants mostly kept the strict proclamations against abortion potions and methods. There were no non-sectarian schools or books so conception still began life for many.

Present Day Ethics

Today, some have liberalized to accept a few weeks after conception when the egg is fertilized. This can be said to be the beginning of human life, instead of the moment of conception. Yet, despite all of the above Church history and abortion sanctions, there has not been an explicit state sanction that specifically identified a punishment for abortion. So it remains being a purely cultural construct created by the original Catholic Church and endorsed by religious groups using a variety of scriptural and personal rationales.

Why do so many people cling to 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. They 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 all.

Rarely discussed are the millions of women who were never made to become mothers. Countless murderers and rapists have attested to this. Those 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 some adoptees is filled with abuse, chronic despair and lifelong pain. Many are actually not grateful or thankful. But others reconcile themselves to reasons they were given up and cast away and go on to lead healthy, 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. 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 survival is threatened by having a child can abort.

With no ancient, written, unimpeachable law against abortion, it is wrong to make a new law based on a personal, or religious view. 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 I ask again: Was Jesus pro or anti-abortion?

“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, he would say yes. And, to the woman who wanted to carry the unborn life through delivery and birth, yes.

-End