How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

The impending demise of safe, legal abortion in the United States

As this article from The New York Times explains, thirteen states already have trigger bans that will prohibit abortion in all or most cases either the instant the court officially announces its verdict or shortly thereafter. Five additional states still have abortion bans on the books that they enacted before Roe v. Wade that they could begin enforcing again as soon as the court announces its verdict, but only three of these states are likely to do so. At least twelve additional states with Republican-controlled legislatures, including my home state of Indiana, are likely to ban or heavily restrict abortion as well.

In total, The New York Times estimates that, within a matter of only a few weeks or months after the court announces its decision, abortion will most likely be completely illegal or at least heavily restricted in twenty-eight states, which encompass most of the South and Midwest. Abortion will most likely remain legal in twenty-two states, at least for the next few years.

It is extremely likely, however, that the Supreme Court will issue a verdict sometime in the next couple of years stating that personhood begins at conception; that the embryo or fetus, as a person, has an inherent right to live that is protected by the U.S. Constitution; and that it therefore violates the U.S. Constitution for states to allow abortion.

When the court announces this verdict, any abortion at any stage of gestation will become illegal in every U.S. state and territory, including even states in which Democrats control the majority in both houses of the state legislature and the governorship. In vitro fertilization (IVF) will most likely also become illegal when the court issues this ruling. Emergency contraception (EC), also known as Plan B, may become illegal as well.

The rulings of the current Supreme Court on abortion will most likely remain settled law for the next generation at least. The conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—who were all recently appointed by President Trump—are all young enough that they could potentially remain on the court for the next thirty to forty years. Even Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the two oldest conservative justices, could potentially remain on the court for the next ten to fifteen years and, by timing their retirements strategically, they may be able to ensure that they are replaced by young, conservative justices who will remain on the court for even longer.

All this is in spite of the fact that a poll conducted by Monmouth University in May 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court’s initial draft majority ruling was leaked, found that, currently, 57% of Americans say that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade and 64% of Americans say that abortion should either always be legal without any restrictions whatsoever or that it should generally be legal with some restrictions. The poll found that the majority of every single demographic group surveyed said that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade and that abortion should generally be legal.

Alas, what the majority of Americans want is of little consequence. Anti-choice conservatives have spent the past fifty years fighting tooth and nail with everything they have to stack the Supreme Court for this express purpose. Now they have utterly triumphed—and they are about to get everything they have wanted for so very long.

ABOVE: Photograph showing all the current justices of the Supreme Court. Back row (from left to right): Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett. Front row (from left to right): Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.

A disclaimer concerning my own stance on abortion

Those readers who know anything about me or my politics will, I suspect, be thoroughly unsurprised to learn that I personally strongly support the position that a pregnant person does have an inherent right to choose whether or not to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb and that this right should be protected under the U.S. Constitution.

In this post, however, I have no intention to argue for my perspective or try to convince others to support abortion rights. I doubt that there is anything I could say that could change anyone’s mind on this issue, especially when it is as clear as it is now that my position has absolutely politically lost. Instead, my sole intention in this post is to give an account of the views on abortion that existed in the ancient world.

I make absolutely no claim of being “objective” or “neutral”; on the contrary, I think it is inevitable that my own perspective will influence how I view the historical evidence and how I interpret the evidence. Nonetheless, persuading anyone to support any particular stance on current policy is not my goal in this particular post. Instead, I seek merely to educate people about the ancient past.

A note regarding terminology

Before I discuss the history of attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, I must clarify a few important points of terminology. Firstly, when I use the term “abortion,” I mean any deliberate, conscious attempt by any of various possible means to terminate a pregnancy, regardless of whether such an attempt is effective.

Secondly, while it is common for both ancient and modern sources to refer to all pregnant people who might seek an abortion as “women,” this term does not accurately reflect the full spectrum of people who might be pregnant who might seek an abortion. For one thing, adolescent girls who are not yet adults have frequently become pregnant and sought abortions and it would be highly misleading to characterize such girls as “women” when they are much younger than anything we might designate the age of maturity.

Additionally, as I have argued in a previous post, people with wombs who can become pregnant who are not women (including people whom twenty-first-century people might describe as transmasculine, nonbinary, otherwise gender variant, etc.) have existed since at least the beginning of recorded history and are attested in ancient sources.

For these reasons, in this post, although I will quote and paraphrase sources that refer to all pregnant people who might seek or attempt abortions as “women,” I myself will generally try to use the term “pregnant people” or “pregnant person.” This is not an attempt to “erase” women. After all, pregnant women are very much included in the category of “pregnant people.” Instead, this is merely an attempt to use language that accurately reflects the fact that diverse kinds of people have historically become pregnant and sought abortions.

General attitudes toward abortion in the ancient world

A variety of methods of abortion existed in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. Most of these methods were clearly aimed to induce the deliberate miscarriage of an embryo during the early stages of pregnancy. No method of abortion that existed in the premodern world was both safe and reliable; all methods either carried serious risks to the life and health of the pregnant person seeking the abortion or were not consistently effective.

Some of the most common ancient methods included deliberately consuming substances that can be deadly in large quantities, such as hellebore, common rue, and pennyroyal; inserting such substances directly into the vagina using a pessary; taking emmenagogues, diuretics, and/or enemas; engaging in strenuous physical activity; fasting; bloodletting; pouring hot water over the abdomen; and regularly keeping the abdomen tightly bound. By at least the late first century CE, a form of dilation and evacuation also existed, but this could be extremely dangerous and was generally only performed as a last resort to save the pregnant person’s life.

The American scholar of Classical Greek history and literature Konstantinos Kapparis argues in his book Abortion in the Ancient World, published in 2002 by Duckworth Academic, that there was never any consensus or even fixed attitude in the ancient Mediterranean world about when the fetus acquires personhood or about whether it was moral or immoral for a pregnant person to have an abortion.

He argues that the men who made the laws in antiquity were generally not well aware that abortion was even happening, because pregnant people who had abortions usually kept them secret, and men in power generally did not see abortion as a major threat to the patriarchal social order of the time. As a result of this, there is no evidence that any political entity ever issued and enforced a law prohibiting or restricting abortion until at least the third century CE. Ancient Mediterranean societies tolerated abortion not necessarily because the people in those societies widely approved of it, but rather because there was simply no pressure for them to not tolerate it.

ABOVE: Photographs from Wikimedia Commons of hellebore (left), common rue (center), and pennyroyal (right)—all plants that can be deadly if consumed in large enough quantities that were widely used to induce abortions in the premodern world

Abortion in the ancient Near East

The earliest surviving source to mention intentionally induced abortion is the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus dating to sometime around 1550 BCE or thereabouts. Abortions seem to have generally been legal and socially acceptable throughout the ancient Near East. The only mention of intentional abortion induced by a pregnant person on themself in any ancient Near Eastern law code occurs in the Code of the Assyrians, a law code of the Middle Assyrian Empire that is attested in tablets dating to the eleventh century BCE, but probably has origins dating back to the fifteenth century BCE. The law code states in Tablet A, law 53, as rendered in this online translation:

“If a woman aborts her own unborn child, and she has been charged and convicted, she is to be impaled and not buried. If she died during the abortion, she is (still) to be impaled and not buried. If some woman hid her when she had the abortion, and did not report it to the king . . .”

At first, this law may sound extremely brutal. Ancient Near Eastern law codes of this kind, however, were generally rhetorical/propagandistic texts that were more about conveying what their authors considered important social values than about describing enforceable laws that were actually applicable to the real world. As a result, these texts frequently prescribe harsh and brutal punishments that were never actually meant to be enforced for rhetorical reasons.

Since there is no external record of any person in the ancient Near East actually being punished for inducing an abortion on themself, this law should therefore not be interpreted as indicating that a person who aborted a fetus in the Middle Assyrian Empire would have been literally impaled and denied burial, but rather as merely a strong rhetorical condemnation of abortion.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a relief carving from the palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (ruled 745 – 727 BCE) at Kalhu depicting Neo-Assyrian forces impaling three enemy men on pikes

Abortion in the Hebrew Bible

None of the various works that are now included in the Hebrew Bible ever mentions anything about intentional abortion, but one passage—found in the Book of Exodus 21:22–25—does describe the legal repercussions if someone strikes a pregnant person and causes them to have a miscarriage. This passage is part of the Covenant Code (i.e., the second set of laws that the God of Israel gives to Moses atop Mount Sinai in the Book of Exodus 20:22–23:19).

Critical scholars debate the source and date of the Covenant Code. Those scholars who subscribe to the traditional Wellhausen documentary hypothesis that was almost universally accepted among Biblical scholars throughout most of the twentieth century typically hold that the Covenant Code comes from the Elohist Source (E), which they hold was most likely composed in the northern kingdom of Israel sometime in the late ninth century BCE.

Those scholars who reject the traditional Wellhausen documentary hypothesis, such as John Van Seters, typically hold that E is stylistically and theologically indistinguishable from the Yahwistic Source (J) and that these two are probably the same source or same group of sources, most likely produced either during the Babylonian captivity (lasted c. 597 – c. 539 BCE) or during the Achaemenid Period (lasted c. 539 – 332 BCE).

In any case, the passage reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

This passage is relevant to abortion because it prescribes a lesser penalty (a fine) if the person who struck the pregnant person merely kills the unborn fetus, but a more severe penalty (corporal or capital punishment) if the person injures or kills the pregnant person. In other words, according to this passage, the life of the unborn fetus is not equivalent to the life of a born human.

Another passage in the Hebrew Bible that people sometimes discuss in the context of abortion occurs in the Book of Numbers 5:11–31. This passage is generally agreed to come from the Priestly Source (P) and most likely dates either to the Babylonian captivity (lasted c. 597 – c. 539 BCE) or the Achaemenid Period (lasted c. 539 – 332 BCE).

The passage in question states that, if a man suspects that his wife has been unfaithful, then he should hand her over to a kōhēn (i.e., a priest) and the kōhēn shall put the woman through an ordeal in which he will force her to drink a cursed potion made from water and dust that is described as the “water of bitterness.” Numbers 5:27–28 describes two different possible outcomes of the ordeal, depending on whether or not the woman has been unfaithful. The text reads, as translated in the NRSV:

“When he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has been unfaithful to her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall discharge, her uterus drop, and the woman shall become an execration among her people. But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be immune and be able to conceive children.”

Some people have interpreted the unfavorable outcome in this ordeal as a spontaneous abortion. This, however, is almost certainly a misreading of the text. For one thing, the text never says anything at all about the sotah (i.e., the woman who undergoes the ordeal of bitter water) being pregnant.

In fact, as Dan McClellan, a professional scholar who has a PhD in religious studies from the University of Exeter and whose academic specialty is in the Hebrew Bible, points out in this video he posted on TikTok, the earliest Jewish commentators on this passage felt the need to debate whether the ordeal could also be performed on a woman who was pregnant, which indicates that it was generally assumed in antiquity that the sotah in the passage as it occurs in Numbers is not pregnant.

On top of this, as McClellan also points out, elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern literature, the idea of a woman’s womb discharging and her uterus dropping is associated with infertility. Since the favorable outcome of the ordeal is that the woman will conceive and give birth to a child (in the future tense), it makes the most sense to interpret the unfavorable outcome as being that she will become infertile—not that she will suffer an abortion or miscarriage. This passage therefore most likely has nothing to do with abortion.

ABOVE: Engraved illustration by the Dutch engraver Matthijs Pool (1676 – 1740), depicting a sotah undergoing the trial of bitter water as described in the Book of Numbers 5:11–31

The legality and social acceptability of abortion in ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, abortion was generally legal and socially permissible. As Kapparis argues in his book Abortion in the Ancient World (in the section “Was abortion a crime in the eyes of the law?” found on pages 174–185) and as Laura Pepe argues in her speech “Abortion in Ancient Greece,” presented at the Nineteenth Symposion of Greek and Hellenistic Law at Harvard University in 2013, there was certainly no law against abortion in Classical Athens and there is no evidence that there was ever any law against it in any Greek polis.

The widespread legality and permissibility of abortion in ancient Greece is not surprising, considering that, as I have discussed in several previous posts, including this one from May 2019 and this one from September 2019, it was generally legal, socially permissible, and relatively common for Greek parents to dispose of unwanted infants within a few days after they were born by abandoning the newborn someplace to die on its own. This practice is known somewhat euphemistically as “exposure.”

Although exposure is basically a form of infanticide, the ancient Greeks and Romans considered it more acceptable than just outright directly killing a newborn. If someone in ancient Greece or Rome took a newborn baby and personally stabbed it to death, this would have been considered an appalling crime. If they abandoned the newborn someplace to die, on the other hand, then the baby at least theoretically had some chance that it might survive and, if it died, the person who abandoned it could say that it was simply the gods’ will.

ABOVE: Detail from a mid-fifth-century BCE Attic red-figure amphora painting of the shepherd Phorbas carrying the infant Oidipous, whose parents, the king and queen of Thebes, had ordered a servant to leave in the wilderness to die of exposure

Of course, Greek husbands always had absolute legal authority over their wives’ bodies. Thus, it was expected that a married woman would only seek an abortion with her husband’s permission. If a husband found out that his wife had had an abortion without his permission, he could take legal actions to punish her.

Several fragments of a now-lost court speech attributed to the Athenian logographer, or speechwriter, Lysias (lived c. 445 – c. 380 BCE) titled On the Abortion have been preserved through quotation and paraphrase by later authors. Kapparis reconstructs the background of the speech based on the surviving fragments in Abortion in the Ancient World on pages 185–193.

As Kapparis reconstructs the scenario, sometime in the early fourth century BCE, an Athenian woman (whose name is not known) was pregnant by her husband or former husband, a man named Antigenes, and intentionally aborted the fetus without his consent. Antigenes was apparently furious at her doing this without his consent and wanted to prosecute her.

There were, however, as I have mentioned, no laws in Athens at the time prohibiting or restricting abortion. Antigenes therefore tried to prosecute his wife or ex-wife for murder, arguing that the fetus she aborted was a human being with legal personhood. Antigenes hired a logographer, who may or may not have been Lysias, to write a speech for him to deliver at the trial prosecuting his wife or ex-wife and the logographer in turn wrote On the Abortion. Sadly, as is usually the case for ancient court trials, the outcome of the case is unknown.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue by the French sculptor Jean Dedieu (lived c. 1645 – 1727) showing what he imagined the Athenian logographer Lysias, the supposed author of the lost speech On the Abortion, might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Ancient Greek religion and abortion

Ancient Greek religion generally viewed abortion as merely a normal event that might happen in the life of a person with a womb. Greek religious purity laws seem to have generally deemed a person ritually impure after having an abortion, but these same laws typically also considered a person ritually impure in other situations like after menstruating, after having sex, after having an unintended miscarriage, after giving birth, and after having been in the presence of a corpse. Religious purity laws also invariably assume that a person will eventually become ritually pure again after all these events.

The religious purity laws of the Greek polis of Kyrene, dating to between c. 331 and c. 326 BCE, have been preserved through an inscription (SEG 9.72). These laws state that a woman who aborts or miscarries an unformed embryo is ritually polluted to the same degree as though she had given birth, but a woman who aborts or miscarries a fully formed fetus is ritually polluted as though she had been in the presence of another person’s death. The law makes no distinction between an accidental miscarriage and an induced abortion.

An inscription from the Greek island of Delos dating to the second or first century BCE (LSS 54) states regulations for who is allowed to enter the temple of Apollon on the island. The inscription says that someone who has had sex with a woman must wait three days to become ritually pure before they may enter the temple, a woman who has given birth must wait seven days before she can enter, and a woman who has had her period must wait nine days, and a woman who has had an abortion must wait forty days.

One especially interesting source is an inscription (SIG 3.148) from the town of Lindos on the island of Rhodes dating to the second century CE that regulates which people need to wait how long to become ritually pure before they can enter the sanctuary. The inscription says that a woman must wait forty days to become ritually pure after having an abortion, which is the same amount of time it says that a person must wait after the death of a close relative. It also lists as other causes of ritual impurity: eating cheese, eating goat meat, and eating lentils. (It says that a person must wait one day to become ritually pure again after eating cheese, three days after eating goat meat, and three again after eating lentils.)

Thus, Greek religion seems to have regarded having an abortion as a cause of greater ritual impurity than, say, having sex or eating cheese, but still a relatively normal event in the life of a person with a womb that they could eventually become ritually pure again afterward. (By contrast, people who had committed murder were thought to remain ritually impure for the rests of their lives and their bodies were thought to remain polluted even after their deaths.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing what remains of the Great Temple of Apollon (i.e., the Temple of the Delians) on the island of Delos

Plato and Aristotle on abortion

The major Greek philosophers who wrote about abortion did not believe that women should have any control whatsoever over their own bodies, but they were still huge fans of abortion. In fact, they held that the state should force women to undergo abortions under some circumstances as a means of controlling the population.

The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE), in his Republic 5.460e–461c, portrays his teacher Socrates as arguing that, in the ideal state, women should only bear children when they are between the ages of twenty and forty and men should only sire children when they are between the ages of thirty and fifty-five. He says that both men and women who are past the legal age of reproduction should be allowed to have sex with anyone they want, except for close relatives, and that there should be a legal requirement that any fetus conceived by a person past the reproductive age be aborted before it is born if possible, so that it never even sees the light of day. He portrays Socrates as arguing in the Republic 461b–c, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“But when, I take it, the men and the women have passed the age of lawful procreation, we shall leave the men free to form such relations with whomsoever they please, except daughter and mother and their direct descendants and ascendants, and likewise the women, save with son and father, and so on, first admonishing them preferably not even to bring to light anything whatever thus conceived, but if they are unable to prevent a birth to dispose of it on the understanding that we cannot rear such an offspring.”

Similarly, Plato’s student Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) argues in his Politics 7.1335b that, in the ideal state, there should be a legal limit on the number of children a couple can produce and, if the couple has sex and the wife becomes pregnant with a child beyond the number she is legally allowed be bear, then she should be required to abort the embryo or fetus. He writes, as translated by H. Rackham:

“As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit fixed to the procreation of offspring, and if any people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practised on it before it has developed sensation and life; for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.”

Notice that Aristotle says that whether an abortion is legal should depend on whether the embryo or fetus “has sensation” and “is alive.” By this, Aristotle seems to mean that it is acceptable to abort an embryo or fetus as long as it is before the “quickening” (i.e., the first time the pregnant person feels the fetus stirring in their womb, usually after about fifteen to twenty weeks of pregnancy).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portrait head of the Athenian philosopher Plato (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the philosopher Aristotle, both of whom held that the state should force women to undergo abortions as a means of population control

Abortion and the Hippokratic Oath

Hippokrates of Kos (lived c. 460 – c. 370 BCE) was an ancient Greek physician who is credited with having founded a medical tradition that remained dominant in the Greek and Roman cultural spheres for the rest of antiquity and later became dominant throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, with its dominance surviving in the western world well into the modern era.

As I previously discussed in this post from August 2019 about the Hippokratic Oath, almost nothing is known about Hippokrates as a historical figure. A large number of medical treatises attributed to him have survived, but modern scholars agree that these treatises cannot possibly have all been written by the same author, since they differ drastically in style and medical approach. It is not possible to identify any of the surviving treatises as having conclusively been written by the historical Hippokrates. Nonetheless, the surviving medical writings attributed to Hippokrates have much to say about abortion.

The most famous surviving work attributed to Hippokrates is the Hippokratic Oath, which is written in the form of an oath for a physician to swear. Contrary to popular belief, physicians today are not generally required to swear the Hippokratic Oath in order to practice medicine, nor is it likely that physicians were generally required to swear the oath in antiquity; instead, the oath functions more as a general statement of what its author considered fundamental principles of medical ethics.

Scholars continue to debate whether the oath reflects opinions that were mainstream among physicians in the Greek world at the time or opinions that were outside the medical mainstream. Many believe that the oath displays influence from the Pythagorean ethical tradition, which was very much a fringe perspective in the ancient Greek world.

The oath seems to take the unusual and extreme stance that the physician should always be a preserver of life and never a destroyer of it under any circumstances. This stance is most evident in a line which explicitly forbids the physician from giving any “deadly medicine” to a patient who asks for it, telling a patient how to make a “deadly medicine,” or giving a woman a pessary to induce an abortion. Here is the line in Greek:

“οὐ δώσω δὲ οὐδὲ φάρμακον οὐδενὶ αἰτηθεὶς θανάσιμον, οὐδὲ ὑφηγήσομαι συμβουλίην τοιήνδε: ὁμοίως δὲ οὐδὲ γυναικὶ πεσσὸν φθόριον δώσω.”

This means, in my own translation:

“I will not, having been asked, give anyone deadly medicine, nor will I disseminate that sort of advice; and, similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary that will induce an abortion.”

Although the wording is ambiguous, most scholars generally agree that the prohibition against giving a patient “deadly medicine” or telling a patient how to make such “deadly medicine” is intended as a prohibition against assisted suicide.

The reason why we can be fairly sure of this is because the oath only prohibits physicians from doing actions that were legal that the author of the oath viewed as unethical; it does not need to prohibit the physician from doing things that were illegal, since it goes without saying that the physician is supposed to obey the law. If a physician were to give a patient “deadly medicine” at the request of someone other than the patient, then he would be a murderer. If he gave the patient “deadly medicine” for them to use on someone else, then he would be an accomplice to murder. Both of these acts would be illegal.

The only possibility that remains is that the oath is forbidding the physician from giving a “deadly medicine” or instructions on how to make a “deadly medicine” to a patient who is asking for either of these things in order to kill themself. In ancient Greece, killing oneself was considered tragic, but it was not considered a crime, nor was it a crime for a physician to assist a patient in killing themself. It therefore makes sense that this is what the oath is forbidding.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble bust dating to the first century CE intended to represent the Greek physician Hippokrates of Kos

As for the second part of the line, it is not entirely clear whether this statement is meant to prohibit any physician from providing any kind of abortion under any circumstances. The oath only explicitly forbids the physician from providing a woman with an abortive pessary, which is just one of the many different methods of abortion that existed in the ancient world. It is therefore unclear whether the oath prohibits the physician from providing a pregnant person with another kind of abortion. The prohibition might be motivated by a belief that pessaries are uniquely dangerous or immoral for some reason, rather than by a belief that all abortions are categorically immoral.

The Roman medical writer Scribonius Largus in his Compositiones 5.20–23, which he wrote in around the year 47 CE, interprets the Hippokratic Oath as prohibiting all forms of abortion. The later Greek medical writer Soranos of Ephesos, though, who flourished in around the late first and/or early second centuries CE, says in his Gynecology 1.60 that there were a wide range of different interpretations of the oath. He says that some physicians interpreted it as prohibiting all abortions entirely, some interpreted it as prohibiting the use of medicines to induce abortion but not prohibiting “mechanical” methods such as strenuous exercise, and some interpreted it as only prohibiting pessaries specifically and not any other kind of abortion.

Kapparis argues in Abortion in the Ancient World (on pages 66–76) that the author of the Hippokratic Oath most likely intended to prohibit abortion entirely. In support of this, he notes that the prohibition against abortive pessaries occurs in context immediately after the prohibition against assisted suicide and argues that it therefore makes sense to see the two prohibitions as both prohibiting actions that the author of the oath viewed as destructive of human life.

Nonetheless, Kapparis argues that the oath’s ambiguous wording, which may well be intentional, allowed ancient physicians who followed the oath to justify giving other kinds of abortions to women who were especially desperate or whose lives would be in danger for various reasons if they continued the pregnancy.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2547, dating to the third century CE, bearing a portion of the text of the Hippokratic Oath, which forbids doctors who follow it from giving a woman an abortive pessary

Abortion described in the Hippokratic treatise On the Nature of the Child

Leaving the Hippokratic Oath aside, ancient Greek and Roman medical texts, including other works in the Hippokratic medical tradition specifically, are full of all kinds of descriptions of various methods that were thought to induce an abortion. The most famous example of this comes from a Greek medical treatise written by an anonymous author titled On the Nature of the Child, which is traditionally attributed to Hippokrates and is included in the Hippokratic Corpus.

In chapter 13 of this work, the author describes how an enslaved woman who was owned by one of his female relatives came to him. He says that she told him that it had been six days since she had had sex with a man, that the “seed” (i.e., the man’s semen) had not run out of her vagina afterward as it normally did, and that she wanted him to advise her how to expel the “seed” so that she would not become pregnant. He advised her to repeatedly jump up and down while kicking her buttocks. He says that, when she did this, the “seed” fell out of her vagina. The author describes the event as follows in the original Greek:

“καὶ ἐγὼ ἀκούσας ἐκελευσάμην αὐτὴν πρὸς πυγὴν πηδῆσαι, καὶ ἑπτά τοι ἤδη ἐπεπήδητο, καὶ ἡ γονὴ κατερρύη ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν, καὶ ψόφος ἐγένετο, κἀκείνη ἰδοῦσα ἐθεῆτο καὶ ἐθαύμασεν.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And I, hearing this, instructed her to jump up and down, kicking her heels against her buttocks, and, indeed, when she jumped seven times, the seed flowed out onto the ground, and it made a sound, the woman, seeing it, gazed at it and marveled.”

Later ancient sources prescribe this same method of preventing or terminating a pregnancy, calling it “the Lakedaimonian leap.”

Unfortunately, the story as the author of On the Nature of the Child tells it does not really make sense in light of modern biology. We now know that whether or not a person with a womb becomes pregnant after having penile-vaginal intercourse has nothing to do with whether the semen runs out of their vagina after sex and instead has with their ovulatory cycle.

Modern scholars usually interpret the case described in On the Nature of the Child as one of a pregnant woman successfully inducing the miscarriage of a six-day-old embryo through strenuous physical exertion. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it is clearly a case involving some kind of attempt at what twenty-first-century people would consider contraception or abortion.

An anomalous Hellenistic inscription describing rules for a household cult in Philadelphia in Lydia

At some point in the late second or first century BCE, a man named Dionysios founded a household cult in the Hellenistic city of Philadelphia in the region of Lydia in western Asia Minor. A long inscription in the Greek language describing the rules of behavior for members of the cult has survived and remains a puzzle for scholars of Hellenistic religion.

The inscription begins by declaring that Zeus himself revealed the rules of behavior that it describes to Dionysios through a dream. It concludes by invoking the Phrygian deity Agdistis (who was commonly equated with the goddess Kybele) to inspire members of the cult to follow the rules outlined in the text.

This inscription is highly anomalous because it describes rules of sexual ethics that are very different from—and, indeed, much stricter than—what was considered normative in the Greek world. Among other things, the inscription is unique as the only surviving pre-Christian religious text in the Greek language that explicitly, permanently prohibits any person who has ever had any involvement with an abortion or the use of contraception from entering a place of religious worship. The crucial part of the text reads as follows (in Kapparis’s translation, from Abortion in the Ancient World, pages 214–215):

“Men and women, free and slaves, upon entering this sanctuary must swear by all gods that they have never known anything insidious against a man or woman, or an evil drug that could be used against people, and that they neither know nor employ evil incantations, or philtres [i.e., love potions], or abortifacient drugs, or contraceptives, or anything else which could result in the killing of a child, and that they do not employ such items, or give advice, or relate information about them to anyone, and that they will be benevolent towards this sanctuary depriving it of nothing.”

Kapparis argues that the author of this inscription had read the Hippokratic Oath and included the prohibition against using or disseminating information about abortion and contraceptives as a result of direct influence from the oath. Lynn E. Roller posits a different interpretation in her book In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, published by the University of California Press in 1999, on pages 194–196 and 253–254. She argues that the inscription is more heavily influenced by Phrygian, rather than Greek, ethical precepts and that this is the reason why the rules seem so different from anything that is attested elsewhere in Greek sources.

Whatever the case may be, the rules inscription for Dionysios’s household cult represents a unique example of a pre-Christian religious text in the Greek language that absolutely condemns both abortion and contraception.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Phrygian statue of the deity Agdistis/Kybele dating to the middle of the sixth century BCE, now held in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara

Shifting attitudes toward demographics and abortion under the Roman Empire

Kapparis observes that, from the first century BCE onward, mainstream Greek and Roman attitudes toward abortion seem to have grown increasingly hostile. He attempts to explain this in terms of changing attitudes toward demographics.

He argues that Greek city-states of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Periods generally did not take active measures to encourage high birth rates and did not see low birth rates as a threat. On the contrary, Greek city-states seem to have generally thought that a citizen body could become unmanageable if it grew too large and that it was therefore better to restrict the number of citizens to keep the population manageable.

Kapparis argues, though, that, as the Roman Empire spread its control throughout the Mediterranean, Romans felt insecure in their newfound position of dominance. They continually feared that decadence and a low birth rate at home would leave them vulnerable to either rebellion by their conquered subjects or attack from the outside.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the territories of the Roman Empire during the reign of the emperor Augustus

Partly in response to this apprehension, the founding emperor of the Roman Principate, Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE), instigated sweeping and aggressive policies to curb what he viewed as sexual immorality, to encourage men (especially those of the senatorial class) to marry, and to encourage married couples to produce as many legitimate offspring (especially sons) as possible.

Most famously, Augustus instituted a special privilege known as the ius trium liberorum, or “right of three children,” which held that a freeborn woman who had given birth to at least three children by her lawfully wedded husband or a freedwoman who had given birth to at least four children was no longer subject to male guardianship, could legally act as an independent person, and could also inherit property that otherwise would have gone to her sons. The privilege also applied to men who had sired at least three children by their lawfully wedded wives, allowing them to claim exemption from duties of public service that were otherwise required.

The Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 CE) records in his Life of Augustus 46 that, when Augustus traveled through the districts of Rome, he awarded money to every married couple who could boast that they had legitimate offspring—a thousand sesterces for each child. Meanwhile, Augustus sought to punish men who remained unmarried after the age of thirty-eight by requiring them to pay an additional annual tax that no one else had to pay, prohibiting them from receiving any inheritance, and prohibiting them from attending public games and spectacles.

Kapparis argues that, as having a high birth rate became seen as increasingly important, people increasingly began to view contraception and abortion as threats to the social order and therefore regarded them with increasing hostility. The Roman sources that speak of contraception and abortion from this period onward become increasingly antagonistic, in sharp contrast to the earlier Greek sources. He also notes the observation that the requirements for a Greek woman to become ritually pure after an abortion seem to have grown more severe over the course of Roman rule, as the waiting periods for purification grew longer and longer.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Augustus of Prima Porta, a famous Roman marble statue of the emperor Augustus dated to the first century CE

The elegies on abortion in Ovid’s Amores

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is best known today in English as “Ovid,” wrote a work titled Amores, which he originally completed in 16 BCE, but later substantially revised. The work consists of a series of elegiac poems written from the perspective of a male speaker describing his affairs with a woman named Corinna. The work contains a couple of elegies that pertain to abortion.

In the Amores 2.13, the speaker of the poem castigates Corinna, believing that he himself impregnated her and that she secretly attempted to abort the fetus on her own without telling him. The abortion evidently went horribly wrong and he says that she now lies on the brink of death as a result. He goes on to pray to the goddess Isis to save Corinna and help her to recover. He concludes the poem by urging Corinna that, if she recovers, she should never attempt an abortion again.

In the next elegy, Amores 2.14, the speaker, addressing Corinna, launches on a full-on tirade against abortion and the women who practice it. He declares, as translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien:

“What good does it do for girls to be exempt from combat, free
from all the dangers that our soldiers face,
if they will suffer self-inflicted wounds far from the front lines,
and blindly brandish arms against their own
bodies? The woman who first took aim at her helpless fetus
should have died by her own javelin.
Can it be possible that, simply to avoid a few stretch-marks,
you’d make your womb a bloody battleground?
What if our forebears had forborne to bear? Without willing mothers
the world would be unpopulated—again
someone would have to seed the empty earth with flung stones.
Priam’s palace wouldn’t have been sacked
if sea-goddess Thetis had refused to shoulder (so to speak) her load;
if Ilia, her belly swollen big,
had terminated her twins in utero, who would have founded
the City that was bound to rule the world [i.e., Rome]?
If Venus, in her audacity, had aborted fetal Aeneas,
the Caesars never would have graced our land.
Even you (though you were meant to be born a beauty) would have died
if your mother had attempted what you’ve tried.
I myself (though personally I plan to die of love) would not
have seen the light of day, had mother killed me.
Let the swelling grapes grow sweet and purple on the vine,
leave the unripe apple on the tree.
All things will come to fruition in their season; let grow
what has been planted; a life is worth the wait.
How can you pierce your own flesh with weapons, feed deadly toxins
to babies still unborn? The world condemns
the woman of Colchis [i.e., Medea], spattered with the blood of her young sons,
and mourns for Procne’s victim, poor Itys.
Horrible mothers! But at least a kind of dreadful logic moved them
to spill, from their sons’ throats, their husbands’ blood—
Tell me, in your case, where’s the Tereus or Iason that could compel you
to move your outraged hand against yourself?
The fierce Armenian tigress in her lair, the savage lioness
show more consideration for their young.
What wild animals won’t do, young ladies will—but often
the girl who tries it kills herself as well.
She dies, and is carried out to the pyre, her hair all loose,
and everyone who sees cries, ‘Serves her right!’
What am I saying? Let my words be carried off by the winds,
let all ill omens vanish—let her live,
benevolent gods, let just this one sin go unpunished—but
let her have it, if she tries again.”

In this passage, one can doubtlessly recognize many similarities to present-day anti-abortion rhetoric. For instance, the speaker refers to fetuses as “babies” and he contemplates with horror the possibility that great men of the past might have been aborted in the womb before they had a chance to accomplish the things they accomplished. At the same time, though, you will notice that the speaker’s first and last concern is for the life and health of the pregnant person, rather than the life of the fetus.

Scholars debate how to interpret this poem. Some think that the views the speaker expresses reflect Ovid’s own honest opinion on abortion. Others think the poem is meant as a satire of Augustus and his attempts to legislate morality. In either case, the poem reflects the growing hostility toward abortion during the early Principate.

ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1731 in Leipzig, showing what the illustrator imagined Ovid might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)

Musonius Rufus on contraception, abortion, and deliberate childlessness

The Roman Stoic philosopher and orator Gaius Musonius Rufus (lived c. 20 – after c. 101 CE) forcefully denounces contraception, abortion, and deliberate childlessness in his Discourse 15 (entitled “Should Every Child that Is Born Be Raised?”), asserting that citizens must produce as many legitimate offspring as possible for society to flourish. He writes (in Kapparis’s translation, from Abortion in the Ancient World, pages 149–150):

“The legislators, whose main task is to seek and consider what is good for the city and what is bad, what benefits and what harms the common cause, unanimously considered the large size of individual families to be most beneficial for the cities, while they believed that population reduction is most harmful. They perceived childlessness, or small numbers of children to be harmful, while they thought that having many children was beneficial.”

“For that reason, they forbade women to have abortions, and imposed penalties upon those who disobeyed. And while they forbade contraception and deliberate childlessness, on the other hand they set up privileges for men and women who had many children, and made childlessness unattractive. So, do we not commit an unjust and illegal act, if our laws go against the wishes of those divine men who were loved by the gods, for it is considered to be good and beneficial to follow them?”

Kapparis notes that, although Musonius tries to portray his opinion as reflecting the view of ancient lawgivers, he is unable to cite any specific law or specific lawgiver that banned abortion or contraception, because such laws simply did not exist. Musonius is engaging in a form of false archaism, appealing to an imaginary past to bolster his present argument.

Christianity and abortion in the first century CE

Christians in antiquity generally disapproved of abortion. We should not doubt that many Christians were earnestly convinced that abortion was morally wrong. Nonetheless, a major motivating factor for them to oppose it was surely the fact that it was a practice that was relatively widespread among followers of traditional religions in the Roman Empire that was already starting to come under increased criticism on moral grounds by the time Christianity came onto the scene. In a functionalist sense, by vocally disapproving of abortion, Christians could portray themselves as more righteous than the so-called “pagans” who comprised the dominant culture that surrounded them.

Additionally, it is important to note that abortion was not even close to being the huge issue for early Christians that it is for so many traditionalist Catholics and Evangelical Protestants today. Early Christians generally seem to have prioritized other concerns.

None of the works that are now included in the New Testament make any explicit mention of abortion. The only surviving early Christian text that might date to the first century CE that even mentions abortion is the Didache, an ancient church order, which most scholars believe was written in the late first century CE, around the same time as the canonical gospels. The Didache, section two, includes a long list of various sins that Christians should not commit, in apparently descending order of severity:

“οὐ φονεύσεις, οὐ μοιχεύσεις, οὐ παιδοφθορήσεις, οὐ πορνεύσεις, οὐ κλέψεις, οὐ μαγεύσεις, οὐ φαρμακεύσεις, οὐ φονεύσεις τ́κνον ἐν φθορᾷ, οὐδὲ γεννηθὲν ἀποκτενεῖς, οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις τὰ τοῦ πλησίον, οὐκ ἐπιορκήσεις, οὐ ψευδομαρτυρήσεις, οὐ κακολογήσεις, οὐ μνησικακήσεις.”

This means, in my own translation:

“You will not murder. You will not commit adultery. You will not sexually exploit adolescent boys. You will not have illicit sex. You will not steal. You will not practice magic. You will not use drugs or poisons for occult purposes. You will not murder a child in an abortion, nor will you kill what is begotten. You will not covet the things of your neighbor. You will not swear falsely. You will not testify falsely in court. You will not speak evilly. You will not bear grudges.”

On this list, having an abortion seems to rank slightly less severe than φαρμακεία (i.e., using drugs or poisons for occult purposes) and slightly more severe than coveting one’s neighbor’s possessions.

The Didache also seems to make a noteworthy distinction between a late-term abortion in which a person terminates a well-developed fetus (which it describes as “murdering a child in an abortion”) and an early abortion in which a person terminates a relatively undeveloped embryo (which it describes as “killing what is begotten”). The text seems to rate the former a greater sin than the latter. It describes a well-developed fetus as a “child” and the act of killing it as “murder.” Meanwhile, it describes an undeveloped embryo as a thing that has “been begotten” but is not yet a “child” and the act of terminating it a form of “killing” but apparently not yet a form of “murder.”

ABOVE: Christian encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, depicting the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus with a saint and an angel flanking them on either side, dating to the sixth century CE

Athenagoras of Athens on abortion in his Plea for the Christians

The early Christian philosopher and apologist Athenagoras of Alexandria (lived c. 133 – c. 190 CE) wrote a work titled A Plea for the Christians in the year 177 CE, which is rhetorically addressed to Marcus Aurelius, who was the reigning Roman emperor at the time, and his son Commodus. In the work, Athenagoras seeks to refute various canards about Christians that were in widespread circulation in the Roman Empire at the time.

One of the most widely believed canards about early Christians among pagan Greeks and Romans was that the initiation ceremony to become a Christian involved the initiate being forced to stab and kill a human infant covered in spelt. Then, supposedly, the Christians would carve up the infant, eat its flesh, and drink its blood. This story most likely arose because pagans heard Christians talking about eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus and assumed that Christians were literally murdering babies and cannibalizing them.

In order to refute this accusation of baby-killing and cannibalism, Athenagoras rather cleverly turns the charge around, not only arguing that Christians are not murderers, but also that pagan Greeks and Romans partake in many deplorable practices that Christians regard as essentially murder. First, he singles out the Roman gladiatorial games, denouncing them as murderous. Then, he proceeds to deplore the Greek and Roman practices of abortion and infant exposure. He writes in A Plea for the Christians 35, as translated by Cyril C. Richardson:

“Since this is our character, what person of sound judgment would say that we are murderers? . . . Who among our accusers is not eager to witness contests of gladiators and wild beasts, especially those organized by you [i.e., the emperor, Marcus Aurelius]? But we see little difference between watching a man being put to death and killing him. So we have given up such spectacles. How can we commit murder when we will not look at it, lest we should contract the stain of guilt?”

“What reason would we have to commit murder when we say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God? For the same person would not regard the fetus in the womb as a living thing and therefore an object of God’s care, and at the same time slay it, once it had come to life. Nor would he refuse to expose infants, on the ground that those who expose them are murderers of children, and at the same time do away with the child he has reared. But we are altogether consistent in our conduct. We obey reason and do not override it.”

It would be easy for someone to read this passage and naïvely assume that all early Christians must have despised abortion, but it is worth noting that, given the context in which Athenagoras was writing, he had rhetorical incentive to portray Christians as much more united in condemning abortion than they possibly really were.

It is also worth noting that Athenagoras contradicts himself in the same sentence about when “life” begins. First he describes the fetus as “a living thing,” but then, immediately afterward, he refers to the birth of an infant as it “coming to life.” He also misleadingly conflates the fetus being “alive” with it having moral personhood.

ABOVE: Detail of a Roman mosaic from the Via Casilina just outside the city of Rome dating to the early fourth century CE, depicting gladiators killing each other

Tertullianus of Carthage on ensoulment and abortion

The church fathers did not fully agree on when an embryo or fetus becomes a person. Tertullianus of Carthage (lived c. 155 – c. 220 CE) argues in his Treatise on the Soul, chapters 25–27, that the soul and the body are formed at exactly the same moment, which he maintains occurs at conception. He cites the fact that pregnant women can feel the fetus stirring in their wombs as supposed evidence that the fetus is a human being, apparently not realizing that these stirrings are only felt later in the pregnancy and that a fetus merely being able to move does not necessarily imply that it has personhood. He writes in chapter 25, as translated by Peter Holmes:

“But how much more is there for them to blush at, when in the end they have the women to refute them, instead of commending them. Now, in such a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness, as the sex itself which is so intimately concerned.”

“Give us your testimony, then, ye mothers, whether yet pregnant, or after delivery (let barren women and men keep silence),—the truth of your own nature is in question, the reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided. (Tell us, then,) whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force other than your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire womb throbs, and the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its position?”

Tertullianus goes on in the same chapter to further attempt to support his argument by giving a detailed description of how, in some cases of partial birth gone wrong in which the fully grown infant is in the wrong position, is not likely to survive the birthing process, and is likely to kill the pregnant person as well, ancient surgeons were forced to perform a medically necessary last-minute abortion using the dilation and evacuation method in order to save the pregnant person’s life. Tertullianus sees the fact that such unborn infants aborted at the last moment could be killed as evidence that they must have had souls from the beginning. He writes:

“But sometimes by a cruel necessity, while yet in the womb, an infant is put to death, when lying awry in the orifice of the womb he impedes parturition, and kills his mother, if he is not to die himself. Accordingly, among surgeons’ tools there is a certain instrument, which is formed with a nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all, and keeping it open; it is further furnished with an annular blade, by means of which the limbs within the womb are dissected with anxious but unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted or covered hook, wherewith the entire fœtus is extracted by a violent delivery.”

“There is also (another instrument in the shape of) a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: they give it, from its infanticide function, the name of ἐμβρυοσφάκτης, the slayer of the infant, which was of course alive.”

“Such apparatus was possessed both by Hippocrates, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus, that dissector of even adults, and the milder Soranus himself, who all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured alive.”

Tertullianus regards these medically necessary late-term abortions with horror and seems to question whether they are indeed medically necessary, perhaps believing that it would be better to let both the pregnant person and the child die naturally, rather than kill the child to save the pregnant person.

ABOVE: Early modern illustration showing what the artist imagined the early Christian apologist Tertullianus might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Abortion in Rabbinic Judaism

While Christian Church Fathers like Athenagoras and Tertullianus denounced abortion as a form of murder, Rabbinic Judaism went in a somewhat different direction. The Jewish rabbi Yehūḏā ha-Nāsīʾ (lived c. 135 – c. 217 CE), who was a contemporary of both Athenagoras and Tertullianus, dedicated much of his life to compiling and editing a work known as the Mishnah, which is the earliest surviving written compilation of Oral Torah.

The Mishnah is mostly written in Mishnaic Hebrew and contains the opinions of various prominent Rabbinic sages who lived in the first and second centuries CE. These sages are known as Tannaim, which means “teachers.” The Mishnah, along with the collection of interpretations and analyses of it known as the Gemara, now comprises part of the Babylonian Talmud, which is the foundational text for all varieties of modern Rabbinic Judaism.

The Mishnah explicitly states that the fetus is not a nefesh (i.e., a human being with a soul) at any point during pregnancy and that it does not acquire personhood until the moment of birth, when it first breathes air. In accordance with this teaching, the Mishnah holds (and all modern varieties of Rabbinic Judaism agree) that abortion is not just an option, but a necessity, if the life of the pregnant person is in danger, because the actual life of the pregnant person inherently takes priority over the merely potential life of the fetus.

The Mishnaic tractate Ohalot 7:6 declares (as translated by Rabbi David M. Feldman in his paper “Abortion: The Jewish View” on page 803):

“If a woman has [life-threatening] difficulty in childbirth, the embryo within her should be dismembered limb by limb, because her life takes precedence over its life. Once its head (or its greater part) has emerged, it may not be touched, for we do not set aside one life for another.”

Beyond this, most modern varieties of Rabbinic Judaism generally prohibit or discourage abortion, except in cases of “great need.” Different sects of Judaism take stricter or looser interpretations of what exactly “great need” encompasses. Orthodox Judaism takes the strictest interpretation, which holds that abortion is only acceptable if the life or health of the pregnant person is in danger, while Reform Judaism takes a looser definition and is more-or-less pro-choice.

The very first anti-abortion law

Despite the existence of strong opposition to abortion among early Christians, Christians were ultimately not responsible for the first law restricting abortion. Instead, it was the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193 – 211 CE) and his eldest son Caracalla, whom he appointed as his co-emperor in 198 CE. The father-son pair ruled jointly until Severus named his younger son Geta as a co-ruler as well in 209 CE.

Septimius Severus and Caracalla were both pagans. In fact, during their joint reign, some of their provincial governors persecuted Christians. Most famously, in around 203 CE, Hilarianus, the governor of the Roman province of Africa, imprisoned and then executed a group of six Christians, which included the noblewoman Vibia Perpetua, her enslaved handmaid Felicitas, three free men named Saturninus, Secundulus, and Saturus and one enslaved man named Revocatus.

Perpetua kept a diary during her time in prison. Another Christian redacted this diary and added a description of how Perpetua, Felicitas, and the other Christians they were imprisoned with suffered martyrdom. This redacted version of her diary has survived to the present day and is considered one of the most important surviving early Christian martyr narratives.

It also happens that, at some point during their joint reign, Septimius Severus and Caracalla issued the very first decree in the recorded history of the Near East and Mediterranean restricting or banning abortion that we know was actually meant to be enforced. (As I mentioned earlier, the Code of the Assyrians prohibited abortion over a millennium before Septimius Severus and Caracalla were born, but most scholars think that the Code of the Assyrians was intended more a work of rhetoric/propaganda than a code of actual laws that were meant to enforced.)

A summary of the ruling written by the jurist Aelius Marcianus, who flourished during Caracalla’s solo reign after the death of his father, which lasted 211 – 217 CE, is preserved in the Digesta, a collection of Roman legal texts compiled under the order of the emperor Justinian between 530 and 533 CE. Aelius Marcianus’s summary (in the Digesta 47.11.4) reads as follows (in Kapparis’s translation, from Abortion in the Ancient World, page 182):

“The divine Severus and Antoninus [i.e., Caracalla] have ruled in response to an enquiry that the woman who deliberately procured an abortion is to be temporarily exiled by the governor; because it would seem intolerable if she could defraud her husband of children with impunity.”

Kapparis interprets this ruling as outright prohibiting all abortions throughout the Roman Empire, but I think it is much more likely that this law specifically only prohibits a pregnant woman who is currently married to a man from seeking an abortion without the permission of her husband. The ruling is expressly meant to ensure that husbands have absolute control over their wives’ bodies. If an unmarried woman had an abortion or a married woman had an abortion with her husband’s permission, then this ruling would not apply.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of Septimius Severus (right) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of Caracalla (left). Both of these busts, like all ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, would have originally been painted.

Epiphanios of Salamis’s account of the so-called “Borborites”

Interestingly, not all ancient Christians were opposed to abortion. In fact, one group of early Christians who existed in Egypt and some other parts of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE are reported to have believed that abortion was not only morally justified, but, in fact, a literal sacrament. Proto-orthodox authors universally denounce these Christians as heretics and refer to them using pejorative names such as “Borborites”—which comes from the Greek word βόρβορος (bórboros), meaning “mud” or “filth”—and “Phibionites.”

Sadly, no works written by any Borborite author have survived to the present day; everything that modern scholars know about them comes exclusively from works written by proto-orthodox writers attacking them as heretics. The most detailed surviving source on the Borborites is a lengthy account of their supposed teachings written by the proto-orthodox anti-heretical polemicist Epiphanios of Salamis (lived c. 310 – c. 403 CE) in his Panarion 26, which he most likely wrote in around the year 377 CE.

Epiphanios’s account is highly polemical and it almost certainly greatly misrepresents the Borborites’ actual beliefs and practices in order to portray them in the worst and most disgusting possible way. Nonetheless, he claims that he has first-hand knowledge of the Borborites’ teachings and practices, because, when he was a young man, some Borborite women tried to seduce him and convert him to their sect. He writes in his Panarion 26.17.4 and 8–9, as translated by Frank Williams:

“For I happened on this sect myself, beloved, and was actually taught these things in person, out of the mouths of people who really undertook them. Not only did women under this delusion offer me this line of talk, and divulge this sort of thing to me. With impudent boldness moreover, they even tried to seduce me themselves—like that murderous, villainous Egyptian wife of the chief cook—because they wanted me in my youth.”

[ . . . ]

“Now the women who taught this dirty myth were very lovely in their outward appearance but in their wicked minds they had all the devil’s ugliness. But the merciful God rescued me from their wickedness, so that after reading their books, understanding their real intent and not being carried away with it, and after escaping without taking the bait, I lost no time reporting them to the bishops who were there, and finding out which ones were hidden in the church. Thus they were expelled from the city, about 80 persons, and the city was cleared of their tare-like, thorny growth.”

The Borborites are among the various early Christian sects that modern scholars have labelled “Gnostic.” They believed that the god who created the material world is not the God of Jesus, but rather an inferior, malevolent deity known as the δημιουργός (dēmiourgós), or “demiurge.” They held that the material world is evil because it is full of sin and suffering and took a strong anti-natalist stance, maintaining that it is inherently evil and sinful to produce offspring, because doing so causes more souls to become trapped in this evil material reality.

Unlike other Gnostics who rejected procreation, however, Epiphanios claims that the Borborites did not regard sex as inherently sinful; instead, they only regarded sex as sinful if it resulted in the production of a child and regarded non-procreative sex as a sacrament. One of the ways they supposedly ensured that their sex was always non-procreative was by always aborting the fetus anytime one of their women accidentally became pregnant. Epiphanios writes in his Panarion 26.4.5–5.6, in Williams’s translation:

“For after having made love with the passion of fornication in addition, to lift their blasphemy up to heaven, the woman and man receive the man’s emission on their own hands. And they stand with their eyes raised heavenward but the filth on their hands and pray, if you please—the ones they call Stratiotics and Gnostics—and offer that stuff on their hands to the true Father of all, and say, ‘We offer thee this gift, the body of Christ.’”

“And then they eat it partaking of their own dirt, and say, ‘This is the body of Christ; and this is the Pascha, because of which our bodies suffer and are compelled to acknowledge the passion of Christ.’ And so with the woman’s emission when she happens to be having her period—they likewise take the unclean menstrual blood they gather from her, and eat it in common. And ‘This,’ they say, ‘is the blood of Christ.’ And so, when they read, ‘I saw a tree bearing twelve manner of fruits every year, and he said unto me, “This is the tree of life,’” in apocryphal writings, they interpret this allegorically of the menstrual flux.”

“But although they have sex with each other they renounce procreation. It is for enjoyment, not procreation, that they eagerly pursue seduction, since the devil is mocking people like these, and making fun of the creature fashioned by God. They come to climax but absorb the seeds of their dirt, not by implanting them for procreation, but by eating the dirty stuff themselves. But even though one of them should accidentally implant the seed of his natural emission prematurely and the woman becomes pregnant, listen to a more dreadful thing that such people venture to do.”

“They extract the foetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this herd of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers. And now, after this cannibalism, they pray to God and say, ‘We were not mocked by the archon of lust, but have gathered the brother’s blunder up!’ And this, if you please, is their idea of the ‘perfect Passover.’”

I personally think it is extremely unlikely that the Borborites really had depraved orgies in which they consumed semen and menstrual blood as sacraments and ate aborted human fetuses, since these are the exact same kinds of stories that ancient authors tell time and again about any religious group they want to portray as evil or debauched. Indeed, Greek and Roman pagans told many very similar stories about proto-orthodox Christians themselves.

If we ignore the salacious elements, though, we will notice that there is actually a coherent theology here—one which sees abortion as not just morally acceptable, but a moral imperative.

ABOVE: Fresco at the Gracanica monastery, near Lipljan, Kosovo, depicting how the artist imagined the early Christian anti-heretical polemicist Epiphanios of Salamis might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Augustinus of Hippo on ensoulment and abortion

Ultimately, the Borborites and their anti-natalist theology did not win out in the battle of ideas. They seem to have been a relatively small, marginal sect from the very beginning and, when Constantine I (ruled 306 – 337 CE) began giving institutional support to Christianity, he leant his support to the already much larger and more powerful the proto-orthodox faction, who vociferously condemned the Borborites as heretics.

Nonetheless, proto-orthodox Christian theologians continued to debate at what point the fetus acquires a soul and becomes a person. The Christian philosopher, theologian, and apologist Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE), who was a younger contemporary of Epiphanios and who is considered one of the “Church Fathers,” endorsed Aristotle’s distinction between embryos or fetuses that are in the early stages of development and fetuses that are in the later stages of development and are more fully formed.

Augustinus holds that “formed” fetuses in the later stages of development do indeed have souls, but he expresses uncertainty whether “unformed” embryos or fetuses in the early stages of development have souls or not. His inclination seems to have been that ensoulment does not happen at conception, but rather at some point later while the fetus is in the womb before birth. He writes in his Enchiridion on Hope, Faith, and Love 23.85–86, as translated by Albert C. Outler:

“Once this fact is established, then, first of all, comes the question about abortive fetuses, which are indeed ‘born’ in the mother’s womb, but are never so that they could be ‘reborn.’ For, if we say that there is a resurrection for them, then we can agree that at least as much is true of fetuses that are fully formed. But, with regard to undeveloped fetuses, who would not more readily think that they perish, like seeds that did not germinate?”

“But who, then, would dare to deny—though he would not dare to affirm it either—that in the resurrection day what is lacking in the forms of things will be filled out? Thus, the perfection which time would have accomplished will not be lacking, any more than the blemishes wrought by time will still be present. Nature, then, will be cheated of nothing apt and fitting which time’s passage would have brought, nor will anything remain disfigured by anything adverse and contrary which time has wrought. But what is not yet a whole will become whole, just as what has been disfigured will be restored to its full figure.”

“On this score, a corollary question may be most carefully discussed by the most learned men, and still I do not know that any man can answer it, namely: When does a human being begin to live in the womb? Is there some form of hidden life, not yet apparent in the motions of a living thing? To deny, for example, that those fetuses ever lived at all which are cut away limb by limb and cast out of the wombs of pregnant women, lest the mothers die also if the fetuses were left there dead, would seem much too rash. But, in any case, once a man begins to live, it is thereafter possible for him to die. And, once dead, wheresoever death overtook him, I cannot find the basis on which he would not have a share in the resurrection of the dead.”

Augustinus does, however, condemn early abortions, apparently regarding them not as murder, but rather a form of sexual depravity akin to contraception, which he also regarded as sinful and immoral. He writes in his De Nube Concupiscentia 1.17, as translated by Peter Holmes, Robert Ernest Wallace, and Benjamin B. Warfield:

“Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born.”

Western Christian theologians continued to debate the controversy over whether ensoulment happens at conception or at some point later in gestation throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.

The Roman Catholic Church has always maintained that abortion is always a sin, but, even today, it still does not have an official position on when ensoulment happens. The current position of the Catholic Church is that humans cannot know for certain when ensoulment happens and probability cannot be used as a metric when there is any possibility that a person might kill another person if they are wrong. Therefore, the church maintains that believers must assume that ensoulment occurs at the earliest possible time—which, in their view, is conception—for the purpose of deciding whether or not abortion is a sin.

This dogma is very carefully formulated to allow the church in the present day to oppose abortion at any stage of pregnancy, while also allowing prominent theologians such as Augustinus who doubted that ensoulment happens at conception to not be considered heretics.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the Lateran dating to the sixth century CE, probably intended to represent the early Christian theologian Augustinus of Hippo

Conclusion

What I have said here explains how Christians initially came to oppose abortion, but it does not explain how abortion became such a huge and important issue for anti-choice Christians in the United States in the present day. The fact of the matter is that, for ancient, medieval, and early modern Christians, abortion wasn’t really a major issue. Even Tertullianus, whose passages condemning abortion I have quoted at length, was far, far more concerned about the pernicious heretical theology of Marcionism than he ever was about abortion. (He wrote an entire polemical treatise spanning five books titled Adversus Marcionem, or Against Marcion, that is entirely devoted to attacking Marcionism.)

I may write an article about the history of legal and social attitudes toward abortion in the United States some day, but I am less of an expert when it comes to modern history than I am when it comes to ancient history. For now, I would highly recommend that anyone who is interested in this subject should read r/AskHistorians’ “Megathread: Abortion in America,” which summarizes the history of abortion in the U.S. expertly and succinctly.