The Abortion Debate

For over 5,000 years, honest people have been debating when human life starts, with opinions ranging from conception to puberty. Unfortunately, the resulting politicization of abortion tends to polarize the issues. One side claims that all abortions are murder, while the other side says that abortions nothing but a private matter involving a woman'sdominion over her own body. The more indefensible and extreme these positions become, the more currency they acquire in the media.

Pro-choice advocates contend that human rights do not begin until birth. Pro-life advocates claim that human rights are acquired at conception. Some pro-choice advocates would have us believe that it is no worse to abort an 8-month-old fetus than a 2-week-old one. Some pro-life advocates would have us believe that it is no worse to kill a 2-year-old child than to abort a 2-week-old fetus.

Both sides trivialize the issue by avoiding discussion of the fetus in the context of pregnancy. They both ignore the remarkable changes that take place throughout the course of pregnancy. They both ignore the interest that society itself has in the pregnancy. One side acts as if pregnancy is only of interest to God and society. The other side acts if pregnancy is only of interest to the pregnant woman. Pregnancy not only makes society but also establishes the social nature of our species in general and of the individual in particular.

Finally, both sides ignore the social character of rights and obligations. Rights are fundamentally social artifacts, created by the agreements between members of a society as rules for conducting everyday life. While we talk about universal and inalienable rights, they become universal and inalienable only to the extent that we regard them as such. They were not always so. Rights are not embedded in situations or things, they are negotiated and accepted as working agreements between people.

Because no society has unlimited resources, nothing is more important than balancing demand with resources. No society can survive without control of reproduction. Deep in the heart of the abortion debate is the need of society to establish a balance between resources and demand. The unsolved question is how the modern nation-state can reconcile the rights guaranteed to citizens with the need to control reproduction.

The Biology of Reproductive Control

One feature of the abortion debate is the refusal of both sides to discuss population control. To say abortion is a private affair is like saying that society has no stake in the control of reproduction and the critical need to balance resources with demand.

For individuals as well as groups, controlling reproduction is as important as promoting it. The tension resulting from this opposition reflect similar tensions in biological models. Our neurons, for example, have inhibitory as well as stimulating functions, which prevent our system from being overwhelmed by the massive amount of incoming information it must process at any moment.

Similar inhibitory processes are at work in the reproductive mechanisms of all species, which depend for survival on the balance between resources and population. Nature offers countless examples of the way in which different species observe the basic mandate to both foster and limit reproduction. When rabbits become too crowded in their warrens, the bodies of females absorb their fetuses. When an area becomes too populated with deer, the rate of hepatitis increases with the effect of reducing mating. Seed-eating birds respond to a scarcity in seeds by laying claim to larger and larger territories. As a result, fewer birds can lay claim to a territory and fewer are able to mate.

Every species tends to maximize its utilization of its environment by balancing reproduction with resources. In human beings, the balancing mechanisms are very sophisticated, combining biological, historical, and cultural responses, some of them conscious and intentional, most of them powerfully and deeply subconscious, rooted in the requirements of life itself.

Reproductive Control in Extended-Family Societies

While the earliest human societies were limited by starvation, natural castastophes, predation, and war, there is no doubt that, as they achieved stability and success, they instinctively but perhaps consciously took steps to limit reproduction.

The history of Judaism can be viewed as a part of a concerted effort by societies world wide to replace human sacrifice with mongamy as a means of reproductive control. The most successful social mechanism for managing population was (and remains) the set of rules imposed by the local community on courtship and marriage. The ancestors of us all were members extended families. A product of thousands of years of trial-and-error evolution, the extended family overcame was a superior organization that overcome enormous obstacles to human survival. Because of constant scarcity and the ever-present threat of famine, extended families reacted quickly and instinctively to resource dangers and developed a variety of methods for doing so.

In the extended family, everyone is related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Living persons, however, do not define the limits of such a society. The extended family or genos (Greek for "lineage") embraces both individuals and the means of subsistence. The extended family extends backwards and forwards in time as well as horizontally in space to include the land it occupies. Most important, ritual and religious beliefs tie together these values and strongly support reproductive norms.

In extended-family societies, sexual behavior is not considered an individual's right but a method of organizing the ownership of property, a suitable amount of which is deemed necessary for raising a family. A man cannot marry before he has become established, either through inheritance or his own wealth. A woman cannot marry without the required dowry. Where marriages are not arranged, the selection of a mate is carefully supervised by the family. Most extended-family societies consider having a child outside of marriage very scandalous.

Extended-family societies do not allow everyone to marry. In societies that practiced primogeniture, the first son, who inherited all the family's property, started life with a decided reproductive advantage over his younger brothers. In older societies, younger sons became sacred judges, dancers, singers, artists, warriors, or tenders of children. In medieval Europe, younger sons who chose not to work in the community went off to join the church, the military, or the university, all of which forbade marriage. Only the most ambitious were able to mass enough property to start their own family. Unmarried daughters who volunteered to go to into the convent were praised for their sacrifice.

Extended-family societies employed a number of other techniques for the control of reproduction, including war, abortion, contraception, prostitution, homosexuality, infanticide, child abuse, the murder or suicide of widows, clitorectomy, coitus interruptus, penile subincision, postpartum sex taboos, celibacy, virginity, ritual abstinence, and a widespread belief in the finite and interchangeable nature of a man's blood and semen. Even though some of these techniques seem brutal and primitive to us, there is no doubt about their effectiveness in contributing to the success of extended families as the predominant form of social organization for most of our history on this earth.

Organized as extended families, our ancestors successfully explored and colonized the inhabitable areas of the world by the 13th century A.D. They were also responsible for inventing the most important features of modern civilization: agriculture, animal husbandry, irrigation, plumbing, language, writing, money, transportation, schools, navigation, trade, smelting, surgery, medicine, law, and the great majority of the arts and crafts we practice today.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of extended family societies was their ability to live within the resources of their own environment, an achievement that has so far eluded the modern nation state.

The Greek-and-Roman City States

The democracy promoted by both the Greeks and Romans aimed at bringing extended-family tribes under the laws of the city-state, a development known as synoecism. This process inevitably weakened the ancient traditions and laws governing reproduction. Authorities realized new measures were required to create the surplus of population necessary for waging war and engaged in radical plans of social engineering. Aristotle proposed that it was necessary to reduce the family to its smallest reproductive units, two parents living alone under one roof with their own children, giving support of the city-state to the nuclear family.

The Greeks and later the Romans passed legislation aimed at redistributing the land for the benefit of the nuclear family and allowing all persons to marry. The establishment of these laws caused an immediate and often disastrous increase in population.

The new laws were not easily enforced. Beginning in the second century A.D., growing scarcity caused by population growth accelerated the trend towards smaller families in spite of the pro-natalist policies of the state. Families resorted to greater use of abortion, infanticide, contraception, and para-sexual activities such as prostitution and homosexual behaviors. It was during this crisis of reproduction that Christianity was born.

Early Christianity

Christianity emerged as part of a very old and violent society, one in which the moral and legal climate was dominated by the patriae potestas, the absolute right of the paterfamilias (head of the household) over the lives of his wife, slaves, and children. The Romans took pride in laws that gave the paterfamilias a degree of authority unmatched in any other society. The laws governing the patriae potestas remained on the books in European societies well up into the 17th century, when the father still had the right to kill even grown sons for certain crimes.

The early teaching of Christianity on abortion was anything but trivial. The early Christians inherited from Judaism a long-standing battle with the widespread practice of infanticide. What Christianity brought to that battle was a new theological insight into on the solidarity of the fetus with the rest of human kind. The Christians' love of life and hatred of bloodshed of any kind was in marked contrast with the violence and disregard for human life around them. Christians throughout the Empire not only suffered fierce persecution, but they also were witness to savage wars and massacres, gladiator fights, innumerable public executions, infanticide, and exposure of infants.

The teachings of Jesus strongly rejected the way of bloodshed and required instead a life based on nonviolence and justice. Most important was a new definition of the neighbor that included all human beings. All distinctions between people, slaves and free, men and women, Gentiles and Jews, the poor and the powerful, adult and child, were abolished by Jesus' commandment to love all and reject violence.

Captured by the belief in that God took human life in the womb of Mary, the Christians from the earliest days held that the human fetus and the child enjoy the same rights to life as the adult, that the fetus is a separate entity from the mother, and that every life is the unique creation of God. The early Christian opposition to abortion was rooted in its opposition to all forms of violence, including capital punishment and war.

Although the prohibition against abortion goes back to the earliest days of the Christianity, the question of what constitutes abortion — when does the fetus acquires moral standing—has long been a subject of theological debate. The effort to build a moral code on rational grounds is peculiarly characteristic of Christian theology, which considers that no moral command, except those involving ritual, stands only on divine fiat or revelation. Catholic and Muslim moralists of the Middle Ages appealled to natural law and had an immense interest in studying the rational basis for the duty commanded by God.

During the first three centuries of Christianity, there were no laws prohibiting abortion, and penances for the act varied considerably from one area to another, depending on local practices. During the next 300 years, Christian theologians debated when life began. Some theologians, (traducinists) held on to the ancient belief that the semen was the formal cause of life, which began at conception. Other theologians (animationists, who followed Aristotle) believed that each life was created by a special act of God who formed or animated the fetus (apta materia) some time after conception. Aristotle taught that males were formed 40 days after conception, females 80 days. Christian theologians settled on the time of quickening, when the mother first feels the movement of the fetus in her uterus.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine mobilized the church's resources and leadership in his efforts to establish control of reproduction. Christianity not only became the state religion, but also an arm of the state, with the bishops serving as civil administrators. Much of Chistian teaching was compromised from that date on by the needs of the empire.

Influenced by Gnostic and neoplatonic philosophies, the church responded to the widespread practices of infanticide, abortion, and the sexual abuse of children by demonizing the sexuality of women and children. The state's need to populating the army with bodies fit in with the church's new agenda of populating heaven with souls.

The cure for female sexuality was marriage and childbearing. The cure for the "waywardness" of children was baptism and continuous beatings. Church authorities supported capital punishment for homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide and prohibited all forms of sexuality except marital intercourse.

These harsh laws had two effects. The first was to weaken the solidarity of the extended family and provide the state with more direct authority over the individual. The second was to put a new emphasis on the sexual relationship of the man and wife to the detriment of the relationship of mother and child, which many extended-family societies held in higher esteem.

Reproductive Control in the Middle Ages

The barbarian invasions, beginning in the 4th century, interrupted the spread of synoecism and Roman Law, with the result that Europe emerged from the Dark Ages several centuries later with the extended family largely intact. It was a civilization that enjoyed a remarkably boisterous and primitive freedom. The state as we know it hardly existed.

Though violent and primitive by our standards, medieval society was rooted in a profound sense of community rooted in the democratic traditions of European tribes. It was a multinational community of extended families that spanned the continent, without distinctions of class, race, and nationality.

Life was lived pretty much in the open, with most business conducted in the streets. The boorish rural population was given to riotous amusements and lived as they pleased, free from the constraints we would expect of a Catholic society. The growing influence of the church on everyday life was yet to come.

The church made its first move to gain control of reproduction in the 12th century, with the Decrees of Gratian, the first codification of church law. These decrees adopted the animist view of abortion, which did not criminalize abortion of an unformed fetus. The decrees, however, did not define the time at which formation took place, allowing confessors and their penitents considerable leeway.

The Decrees of Gratian dealt a mortal blow to the family's control of reproduction by establishing the consent of the contracting parties as the formal element, "the outward sign" of the sacrament of marriage.

To the chagrin of parents, girls as young as twelve and boys as young as sixteen were able to escape parental authority and get married just by living together. If a man seduced and impregnated a woman with the promise of marriage, church law considered them de facto married.

It took another 300 years for the church to solidify its control of reproduction. In 1563, the Council of Trent enacted the requirements that marriage must be witnessed by a priest to be formalized and that the banns of marriage had to be publicized three times in advance. The church's prohibitions of marriage within several degrees of consanguinity was another attack on the family's control of reproduction.

Such legal developments further contributed to the internalization of sexual behaviors and also to the self-awareness of the individual. One obvious effect was the emergence of romantic love in the Middle Ages as the basis for marriage.

Changes in Christian asceticism reflected in the modern devotion promoted by Gerson, Alphonsus Ligouri, Thomas a Kempis, and John Wesley in the 15th Century focussed on the rectitude of emotional states rather than external behavior as the basis of morality. This further contributed to the concept of individual autonomy that eventually led to the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The first universal prohibition of all abortion took place in 1588 when Pope Sixtus V attached excommunication to all abortions. This law was quickly set aside by Pope Gregory XIV in 1591, who felt it was too harsh in view of the unresolved debate on animation. Gregory's law, under which abortion of the unformed fetus was a sin but not a crime, stayed in effect until 1869, when Pope Pius IX restored the law of Pope Sixtus V. Thus, between the 12th and the 19th century (except for one 3-year period) the church had no penalties against abortion during the first 40 days of pregnancy.

Because of the dangers of abortion, infanticide became the preferred method of controlling family size in Europe. Killing babies by murder or neglect enabled parents to weed out less desirable offspring (read "daughters"). The sacrifice of all but the first daughter born to a family was traditional in many parts of Europe, contributing to a disproportionate ratio of males to females in Europe (as high as 162 to 100).

Laws against infanticide were enforced quite selectively. Married couples and the wet nurses to whom they entrusted their children often engaged in systematic elimination of unwanted children through a number of subterfuges that avoided the punishments of law.

Families throughout civilized Europe made frequent use of a balia (wet nurse) whenever they could afford her. The balia played a crucial role in controlling population because of her immunity against prosecution for infanticide. After having conveniently disposing of her own infants, the balia could take in the infants of others for needed cash. Because of gross neglect and ignorance, her charges rarely survived.

Why would parents knowingly consign their infants to such a fate? The moral standing of infants was low in most places, and rates of infant mortality were high even when babies were raised at home. It was not unusual for European mothers and nurses both to consider infants and children generally as creatures of the devil, serpents. Mothers and father resenting the inconvenience of child care gladly put out infants for care by others.

While parents and wet-nurses could engage in covert infanticide with immunity, the situation of the unmarried woman was quite different. Because of the shame and public penance attached to having a child outside of marriage, women often preferred to risk the punishments attached to infanticide, which included decapitation, torture, burning, impaling, hanging, and sacking (putting the woman in a sack and drowning her in a nearby lake or river), considered the most appropriate punishment. Clergy, religious, officials, townspeople, and children gathered by the water's edge to witness the execution, while choirs sang the De Profundis and other appropriate psalms. The ceremony took a better part of the day as the law required the bodies left in the water for six to eight hours.

Refinements of sacking required condemned women to sew themselves into their own sacks and stuffing animals such as monkeys, roosters, and vipers into the sack with them. The sacking of women was a common event in European communities from the middle ages to the 18th century. Parish records document the executions of thousands of women for this offense.

Frederick the Great of Prussia, on the day of his coronation in 1740, abrogated the harshest laws against women, including the ecclesiastical penance that drove many women to infanticide. An enlightened reformer, he saw how unmarried women were being used as the scapegoat for the crimes against children committed by the rest of society. Frederick adroitly attributed the high rates of infanticide to the ancient laws of patrimony which "attaches infamy to clandestine children." A dead woman, he observed, cannot redeem herself.

The horrors inflicted upon European women during the period from the Middle Ages to the 19th century were but a shadow of the terror and torture inflicted upon children. The children who survived primitive standards of sanitation and hygiene (they were often raised with farm animals) had to face abuse of every kind. Those who survived the their balia's "care" and returned home were not raised by parents but most often by servants whose abuse often led to physical and mental deformities that plagued European societies of the day.

Even the most enlightened parents frequently beat their children and tightly bound the limbs of infants to ensure they would grow straight. In Cologne, it was recorded that parents could hire professionals to beat their children if the parents were not up to it. Medical records indicate that sexual intercourse with children was quite widespread in both Europe and America right up to the 19th century. Children did not achieve moral standing until they were put out, at the age of five or six, to work and live with another family or in the mansion of the local baron.

The Modern Nation State

The arrival of the modern nation state in the 17th century caused a new breakdown of traditional controls and a horrifying crisis of reproduction. The endless wars in Europe, the expansion of capitalism, and a sudden increase in population forced millions of peasants to leave the land and migrate to the cities to find work. Single women living in hovels and working in factories felt they had no choice but to abandon their babies.

Young mothers dropped their new-born down privies, abandoned them on dung heaps and church doorsteps, or gave them to wet nurses who killed them with drugs and wanton neglect. If you were murdered in England during the 18th century, chances were 4 out of 5 that you were a child under two. As soon as officials began enforcing the laws against infanticide, there was a sharp rise in abandoned infants.

The response of authorities the epidemic of infanticide and abandonment was to set up state-run foundling homes. Some of the new foundling homes had turnstiles which encouraged mothers to anonymously deposit their unwanted babies. It was a service for which there was an unlimited demand. The yearly admissions in one hospital, St. Vincent de Paul in Paris, went from 3,150 in 1740 to 131,000 in 1859.

Unfortunately, the chances of an infant surviving in these institutions were next to nothing. The best-run foundling homes were giant warehouses where infants suffered and died in the most miserable circumstances. As late as 1915, a report on children's institutions in ten different cities in the U.S. made the staggering disclosure that in all but one institution, every child under two had died. Medical researchers later attributed the high mortality rate in these institutions to the simple lack of maternal affection. Without that contact, babies simply turn their faces to the wall and refuse to take nutrition.

The foundling homes became so crowded that some of them began farming their charges out to wet nurses. Mothers soon discovered this new procedure and began to deposit their babies in the foundling homes. Then, through third parties they retrieved their own children and collected the nurse's allotment.

Alarmed by the sudden rise in the admittances caused by this subterfuge, officials in France appointed a commission to investigate. In its report, the commission recommended replacing the system of foundling homes by a system of paying mothers to raise their babies at home, giving birth to the modern welfare system. The new strategy, aided by advances in hygiene, contraception, sanitation, and medicine, eventually lowered the European rates of infant mortality.

Beginning in the last century, doctors developed a special, mother's branch of hygiene and preventive medicine aimed at improving the health of children. This development resulted in a new alliance between doctors and working-class mothers. The new relationship was remarkably effective in lowering infant mortality and producing healthy children. But it also had unexpected effects on the status of working women. It gave them medical support in their impoverished condition. Along with universal education and increased access to contraceptives and abortion, it helped to weaken the authority of fathers; and it laid the groundwork for today's feminist movement.

Reforms in medicine, hygiene, sanitation, and education slowly led to the discovery of childhood as a special stage of life responsive to the care and respect of others. Beginning in the 17th century, the Christian Brothers and other religious organizations based their educational reforms on a psychology that recognized the developmental needs of childhood. These highly successful educational reforms gradually improved the care of children at home, with the eventual elimination of infant binding and child beating as standard childhood fare.

During the period between 1600 and 1800, physicians began challenging the authority of the church, the theory of delayed animation, and the laws that allowed early abortions. Their increasing influence (and the threat of an emerging feminism) eventually resulted in the criminalization of all abortions in the 19th century.

In 1803, the Parliament in England made all abortions a crime. The U.S. in 1800 had no laws against abortion whatsoever. Connecticut was the first to enact a law against some kinds of abortion in 1821. Massachusetts, in 1846, passed the first law prohibiting abortions and making no distinction between a formed and unformed fetus. By 1965, all 50 states had laws prohibiting all abortions.

History strongly suggests that the criminalization of abortion in our society during this century and the subsequent efforts to legalize it (culminating in the Roe vs. Wade decision) are both the results of the state's need to assert a new command of reproductive control, usurping the authority of family and religion. What we see in the history of reproductive control is the completion of the transfer of control from the extended family to the state.

The rise of the modern nation state has been characterised by the decrease in the authority of the family. It is not just that government agencies that intrude upon the lives of families but that we as citizens empower those agencies to interfere. When we concern ourselves about the well-being of our neighbors, whether they live across the street or across the country, we are acting as members of the state and extending its authority into the lives of the families of others and our own. Those who often protest the loudest about the breakdown of family and morals are often the first to authorize new legislation to do something about it, unwittingly increasing the power of the state and weaking that of the family.

The next section takes up the issue of whether the issue of abortion will ever be settled as long as it is construed in the framework of individuals rights. The question comes down to, "Who owns the fetus, the family or the state?"

© 1996 William H. DuBay

The Abortion Debate Part II
The Abortion Debate Introduction

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