Abortion and the Christian Tradition

A Pro-Choice Theological Ethic

Margaret D. Kamitsuka

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611649734
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

Abortion remains the most contested political issue in American life. Poll results have remained surprisingly constant over the years, with roughly equal numbers supporting and opposing it. A common perception is that abortion is contrary to Christian teaching and values. While some have challenged that perception, few have attempted a comprehensive critique and constructive counterargument on Christian ethical and theological grounds.Margaret Kamitsuka begins with a careful examination of the churchs biblical and historical record, refuting the assumption that Christianity has always condemned abortion or that it considered personhood as beginning at the moment of conception. She then offers carefully crafted ethical arguments about the pregnant womans authority to make reproductive decisions and builds a theological rationale for seeing abortion as something other than a sin.

PART 1

Critique of Pro-life Arguments

1

The History of Abortion:
Neither Univocal nor Absolute

Current pro-life literature paints a history of the church’s supposedly unyielding condemnation of abortion and univocal view of the sanctity of fetal life. John Noonan’s famous phrase from the early 1970s about abortion being “an almost absolute value” in the church’s history is still cited by scholars today.¹ Professor of New Testament Michael Gorman’s Abortion and the Early Church, which has wide influence in pro-life circles, also presents the early church as consolidating an overwhelmingly anti-abortion stance.² Roman Catholic bioethicist David Jones, in his The Soul of the Embryo, concludes that despite ongoing debates on some theological and philosophical issues, “the Christian understanding remained unchanged in its essentials from the time of Christ to the mid twentieth century”—namely, “an enduring desire to protect the human embryo.”³ These scholars trace a litany of anti-abortion statements beginning as early as the end of the first century CE, in documents like the Didache: “You shall not slay the child by abortions.”⁴ Noonan lists a thread of similar anti-abortion pronouncements that continue in subsequent centuries, concluding that these condemnations were “so uniformly expressed” that they “took the form of legislation.”⁵ The habit of including a list of anti-abortion statements from historical church leaders, such as the ones Noonan, Gorman, and D. Jones quote, is now so ubiquitous in popular pro-life writings that historical names like Tertullian and Basil of Caesarea, hitherto unknown to ordinary Christians, are now regularly discussed.⁶

These scholars’ erudition notwithstanding, their accounts oversimplify the historical record. They obscure the complex, varied, and contested ways the church historically tried to address not only the idea of abortion but also actual instances of women with unwanted pregnancies attempting an abortion. Current historical scholarship, more attentive to cultural, political, and theological complexities of the historical source material, paints a different picture, which is neither univocal nor absolute—especially when one can get a glimpse of the real lives of Christian women from the distant past and why they turned to abortion. No one disputes that the church pronounced early and long that abortion is a moral evil and that the women who attempted or succeeded with an abortion are sinners; however, these pronouncements are just the tip of the iceberg. The historical particularities of the church’s abortion discourses and the diverse range of theological viewpoints on abortion and fetal life can only be seen by an approach that eschews a predetermined ecclesial standpoint and is open to see that the church bequeathed some fragments of compassionate pastoral guidance amid its problematic perspectives on women and sexuality.

This chapter provides a glimpse into a counternarrative about abortion views in church history, based on historical source material that indicates not univocal condemnation but a range of opinions on issues surrounding abortion among early and medieval church authorities. What should be the penance for a poor woman who aborts? If a father commits incest and then impels his daughter to take an abortive potion, who is guilty and of what crime? If a monk causes a miscarriage by violence, how should he be punished? Is aborting an unformed fetus a homicide? The church did not have one answer to these and many other dilemmas regarding fetal demise. My objective is not only to complicate today’s pro-life claims about the church’s anti-abortion stance but, more importantly, to show how the pro-life push to embed a myth of historical unanimity actually masks the little one can glean about how moral deliberation in the church transpired, when magisterial pronouncements came uneasily face-to-face with the real reproductive struggles of women and families. The fits and starts of how the church tried to address reproductive realities is, I argue, the crucial history lesson to learn as a basis for understanding the extent to which those ancient and medieval pronouncements should—or should not—be authoritative for Christians today.⁷ Moreover, the glimpses one can find of compassion toward women’s reproductive challenges bolster the claim that a pro-choice stance is not cut off from the historical Christian tradition.

Initial critiques of Noonan came in the early 1980s from feminist ethicist Beverly Harrison, who insisted that all historical condemnations of abortion need to be contextualized in light of the church’s arguably deeply rooted androcentrism, sexism, and antisexuality bias, which are still timely critiques. In addition, pro-life historical claims can be challenged by newer scholarship in two areas: studies comparing attitudes toward abortion in medieval penitential manuals and medieval legal canons, which call into question the pro-life preference of the latter over the former; and research into how Greco-Roman medical knowledge influenced the early church fathers, which belies pro-life claims that Christianity repudiated all so-called pagan attitudes toward therapeutic abortion.

EARLY FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF SEXISM AND ANTISEXUALITY

Pro-choice feminist scholars in religion writing in the 1980s insisted that historical church documents, laws, and theological texts cannot be taken at face value; rather, pronouncements about abortion and fetal life must be contextualized in light of the church’s overall sexism and its antisexuality bias. Harrison emphasizes the importance of not only including social history with doctrinal history but also including a feminist liberation theological perspective that exposes how “Christianity has functioned structurally or institutionally as part of the social system of male supremacy.”⁸ Once these contextualizing and ideological analyses are done, one can see that the supposedly almost absolute anti-abortion stance in the church was more a factor of condemning contraception, nonprocreative sex, and women’s sexual sins and only distantly a factor of “a clarified moral evaluation of fetal life.”⁹ Many of these arguments have been exhaustively made by feminist Christian writers.¹⁰ I summarize them here briefly.

Harrison charges that Noonan uses a questionable historical methodology whereby he converts the church’s anti-abortion statements into a pro-natalist position. That is, he takes the church’s condemnation of abortion and assumes that the theological and moral motivation was to protect innocent unborn human life. Harrison contests this approach to the historical sources, arguing, “I find no evidence until the modern period that compassion for the presumed ‘child’ in the womb was a generating source of Christian moral opposition to abortion.”¹¹ Harrison’s claim that concern for innocent fetuses was not the church’s central concern is supported by a number of historical points: the church could not come to consensus on the issue of when fetal ensoulment happened;¹² the assumption that infants were born with original sin (and hence were not inherently innocent) became widespread especially under the influence of Reformation teachings;¹³ when church leaders had the authority and the means to enforce civil penalties for abortion, they did not seem inclined to do so (as in Calvin’s Geneva).¹⁴ Harrison’s point is not to identify when, in history, a modern notion of children as innocent or sacred beings emerged; rather, her focus is to expose the myopia that causes pro-life historians to mistake past anti-abortion invectives for “a positive valuation of fetal life.”¹⁵ In addition to the historical evidence that points away from pro-natalism, two issues rise prominently to the surface in Christian history, which delegitimize many of the church’s anti-abortion pronouncements: sexism and an antisexuality bias.

Sexism

That the early church morphed from pockets of relatively egalitarian, Spirit-inspired, missionary-oriented communities into more gender-stratified and hierarchical structures of a state religion has been well argued by a number of feminist historians and biblical scholars.¹⁶ Whether or not those claims hold up under scrutiny, few would deny the impact and pervasiveness of patriarchy in the historical church. As Rosemary Ruether has so crisply stated the issue, “Roman Catholic Christianity has a problem with women. This problem is deeply rooted in its history, in its assumptions about gender and sexuality.”¹⁷ There is a stream of rigorist and sexist Christian preaching in the early church that pronounced women to be the “Devil’s gateway.”¹⁸ Some church leaders demanded that women not consecrated to virginity accept procreativity and that even contraceptive acts were, in essence, a kind of homicide. As Bishop Caesarius of Arles pronounced, “As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, . . . damned by eternal death in hell.”¹⁹ The Reformation may have brought a change in views on the spiritual primacy of the celibate vocation, but the Reformers did not dislodge male privilege or views that linked sexuality with sin and women with sexual temptation.²⁰ Thus, church condemnations of women who abort must be seen against the backdrop of patriarchy, sexism, gender dualism, and even misogyny. Despite the apocalyptic, gnostic, or pro-celibacy viewpoints in the early church, which offered women avenues for a spiritual vocation outside of marriage, marriage was institutionally solidified into a patriarchal form where women’s reproductive life was supposed to come under the authority of her husband, as ordained by Scripture.

Feminist historiography claims to have unearthed a persistent thread of gynocentric culture related to women’s reproductive lives so that “even when men controlled the treatment of illnesses, women oversaw fertility control, pregnancy, prenatal care, and the birth process, and the transmission of procreative wisdom . . . integral to women’s culture.”²¹ This wisdom included knowledge of pregnancy prevention and herbal or other abortifacient methods to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. That these methods were probably largely ineffective or even dangerous makes the advent of modern safe methods of contraception and abortion an all the more welcome “breakthrough.”²² I tend to be skeptical of claims about “a ‘golden age’ in which women practiced medicine and shared knowledge about their bodies freely with each other.”²³ Whatever the case may be, the notion that, somewhere, women might be helping other women with reproductive matters apart from male supervision elicited anxieties and suspicions among male church authorities, especially because of suspicions of sorcery (as we will see below).

Antisexuality

Most historians agree that early church writings at best exhibit a high degree of ambivalence about sexuality, and at worst show outright pleasure-phobic attitudes directed especially toward women’s sexuality. As Harrison argues, “Nearly all extant early Christian objections to abortion . . . either directly condemn wanton women . . . or denounce the triad of adulterous, pleasure-oriented sex, contraception, and abortion.”²⁴ While pro-life historians today would like to construe the church’s historical anti-abortion statements as pro-natalist and pro-family, the church from its origins actually manifested a de...