Early Church and abortion

[horselvr]

This is what I was told concerning abortion by a minister. I thought the Catholic Church was always against abortion. Anyway this is what I was told: "Karen, throughout most of the Church’s history, the dominant understanding of abortion was that ending the life of a fetus before the time of “quickening,” (when the fetus began to move), was not a homicidal act as it was at the time of quickening that a fetus was “ensouled” by God. abortion before the time of quickening was considered a sin, but it was a sin because it was a denial of God’s command to multiply. This was the understanding of most theologians, theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas among many others held and taught.

With the invention of the microscope when the process of insemination could be observed, it came to be understood that each human sperm cell contained a whole human being or “homoculus.” And thus a whole human being was present in the very moment of fertilization. Eventually the idea of an homoculus was dropped but the perception that multi-celled organism as a fully human creature and having the same dignity as a conscious fetus, conscious and active because its nervous system had begun to function, was then affirmed. While this understanding that a zygot has the same human worth as a fetus with a functioning nervous system was not an entirely new idea, it was not until 1869 that all attempts to abort the result of a conception was formally condemned as a homicidal act.

According to recent poles, about 60% of practicing Catholics are in agreement with the current teaching." So, my question is—is all this true?

 

[kapp19]

The standard text on this is Fr. Connery’s… “Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective” - he goes quite deep.

But of course, microbiology is a “young” science.

On the other hand, the unequivocal condemnation of abortion is absolutely not a novelty of 1869… At all. It’s in the Didache for crying out loud. Elivira and Ankyra are other early sources… with extremely harsh canonical penalties legislated there.

 

[stpurl]

No. I’ll take the charitable view that it is a misunderstanding due to the minister’s incomplete understanding. He most likely read (probably on an antiCatholic website) some of the documentation which was cherry picked and out of context to make it look as if all this was true. These are the same people who point to ‘The Bible was chained to keep it from being read by Catholics” as something that existed from all time instead of noting that until the printing press, a Bible had to be hand copied and that since so few people were literate to begin with and couldn’t read anyway, and since it took so LONG and cost so MUCH to copy just one bible, that it was worth in today’s money thousands of dollars and if just left around would be stolen and sold for that money. So yes, for a period of time in some areas where there was danger of theft, a Bible would be chained, but it would certainly be read to the people.

I’m just pointing this out because it’s the same kind of thing. People did not know how babies were conceived. And until a woman felt quickening, which could be around 3 to 5 months or so in the pregnancy, a woman couldn’t be sure she was pregnant at all. Poor nutrition and hard work often meant a woman did not have regular periods so a period of even 3-4 months of amenorrhea (lack of a period) did not necessarily indicate pregnancy either.

BUT that did not mean that abortion prior to ‘quickening’ was not viewed as wrong. It was. From the get go.

Just as today when there is a false understanding of personhood in the US, when a pregnant woman is injured and the child within dies, it is not viewed as ‘manslaughter’ in many, many cases the way it would be if the infant had been just born and was injured and died. Catholics do and have recognized that the child ‘in utero’ is a person just as much as the child who is born.

 

[Anesti33]

Uh, pretty much the same as what @horselvr said, which I take to be a fairly accurate summation of things. Not bad if it’s from a non-Catholic perspective.

 

[mythbuster1]

True but misleading. The Church has always condemned contraception as a sin against chastity. While there were disagreements about whether an abortion constituted contraception or homicide, there was never a dispute that it was mortally sinful throughout the whole pregnancy.