The Christian church from the outset condemned abortion. Christianity’s earliest disciplinary rule book, the Didache (probably written for a Syrian Christian community, perhaps as early as 60 c.e., in which case it would antedate the surviving Gospel texts) specifically forbade Christians to procure the abortion of a fetus. Other early collections of rules for Christians from the second century prohibited the production, supply, or use of abortifacient potions because, as John Noonan translated it, one of them declared, “The fetus in the womb is not an animal and it is God’s providence that he exist.”
Christian opposition to abortion was scarcely unique. Causing a pregnant woman to miscarry was punishable as a serious offense according to the Mosaic Law (Exodus 23:22—25), as well as later rabbinical authorities. Many pagan writers, likewise, strongly disapproved of abortion. The Hippocratic oath, as it has come down to us, forbade physicians to administer certain kinds of abortifacient drugs. Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) deemed that abortion “before sense and life have begun” was morally acceptable, but after that point was wrong. Of course, some disagreed. Socrates (469-399 b.c.e.), for one, according to Plato (c. 429-397 b.c.e.), thought of abortion as a routine method to prevent births that seemed unwanted or unwise for any number of reasons. Still, Socrates, as he himself admitted, was a gadfly, and was put to death for impiety.
Roman jurists and lawmakers, perhaps influenced by Stoic views on the subject, adopted much the same approach as the writer of Exodus. The Aquilian Law (early third century b.c.e.) provided a civil remedy against the person who induced an involuntary abortion. Jurists also treated abortion as a crime. Cicero (106-43 b.c.e.) maintained that death was an appropriate penalty for a woman who procured an abortion against the will of the father of the fetus. Classical jurists, pagans every one, agreed that abortion was a heinous crime, but were inclined to substitute exile for execution, at least if the offender were a member of the social elite and the mother survived the experience.
Prohibitions of abortion by Christian theology and canon law seem unexceptional against this background. Canon 21 of the Council of Ancyra (314 m.e.) forbade abortion, and early medieval compilers often included this decree in their collections of canon law. The Decretum of Gratian (originally composed c. 1140), which became the leading canon law textbook of the high and later Middle Ages, included statements from numerous other authorities on the subject. One of them bluntly declared that abortion at any stage of pregnancy was a form of homicide, although others distinguished between early term and late term abortions. Abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, before the soul was infused into the fetus, according to these authorities, was not homicide, although abortion after ensoulment had occurred and the fetus had assumed human form was murder.
The teaching that abortion constituted a form of homicide was reaffirmed by the Decretals of Gregory IX, a compilation of additional canons not found in Gratian’s book and promulgated by the pope in 1234. One topic in this collection reiterated the proposition that abortion was tantamount to murder, whereas another added the qualification that this was true only if the aborted fetus had been viable at the time of the miscarriage.
The teachings found in Gratian’s Decretum and the Decretals of Gregory IX remained the basic law of the Roman Catholic Church until 1917, when Pope Benedict XV (1854-1922) promulgated the Codex juris canonici, a restatement of the church’s canon law. Although the new code did not explicitly label abortion as homicide, it treated the topic in a title that dealt with that subject and subjected all those who procured or participated in the act of abortion to excommunication, the most severe penalty available to the twentieth-century church. The code applied this penalty flatly to all involved and made no distinctions about the stage of pregnancy at which the abortion took place. The new code of canon law, promulgated in 1983 by Pope John Paul II (1920-), repeated the earlier prohibition and penalty in substantially similar terms. John Paul II subsequently reiterated the teaching in greater detail in 1995 in his encyclical letter, Evangelium vitae.
