Quickening was believed to be the time the soul entered the body—the time when human life began. But when did this occur? One of the issues in any discussion of abortion or child-bearing is that of when life begins. Neither ancient nor medieval people believed that the soul originated with conception. A male con-ceptus was not an ensouled being according to Hippocrates until after thirty days; Aristotle held that it was forty days.The Greeks believed that the conceptus of the female was thinner than that of the male, took longer to coagulate and was not ensouled until after eighty or ninety days. The male fetus began to move at three months; the female, at four.Thus, though the fetus could be viewed as being alive earlier, it was alive in the same sense that a vegetable was. Jewish tradition followed this same reasoning and thus, although Exodus 21:22—23 provides for fines for damage to the fetus, this only happens if the fetus is determined to be alive, that is, after movement.
Even then, the fetus was never more than potentially human and was regarded as part of the mother until its birth. This interpretation meant that abortion, at least in the early phases of pregnancy, was not the moral problem for the ancient peoples within the Greek tradition that it became for twenty-first century Americans. This classical view continued in the medieval world, and one of the major writers, Albertus Magnus, believed, as did Aristotle, that the embryo or fetus developed like other animals until a time when it came to be connected with the Divine Intellect, or God. It was at this time that the soul entered the body. This separate existence was necessary because, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the soul was created by God and was not created by the act of conceptus, but entered only at a later date. Thus, though the Christian church condemned abortion, there was always a question of whether all abortion was condemned or that which took place only after the soul had entered the body. Roman law, as preserved in the Justinian code in the sixth century of the modern era and compiled long after Christianity had become the legal religion of the Empire, did not regard abortion before forty days as a crime.
Popularly the entrance of the soul was believed to be marked by quickening. A fetus that was spontaneously or otherwise aborted before the soul entered the body would have no soul, and no soul could have perished because a soul cannot exist without a body. Technically then, early abortion in the medieval period was tolerated but not sanctioned. This ambivalence continued to exist among Catholic Christians, with one interruption, until the nineteenth century. The interruption occurred in 1588 when Pope Sextus V by a bull, Effraenatum, declared all abortions murder regardless of when they took place and required excommunication for those involved. Less than three years later, however, his successor, Pope Gregory XIV revoked the penalties on the grounds that the edict had not had the hoped-for effect, and the old system was reestablished. The major change came under
Pope Pius IX, who in 1869 declared that ensoulment began at conception. In a sense the pope was trying to establish consistency because in 1865 he had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, who he decreed had been free from all stain of original sin “from the first moment of conception.”
It is also possible that the pope was reacting against the growing use of contraceptives, particularly in France, and to new developments in biology. Gradually secular laws in England and in the United States also began to change.
